The Romans have invaded Argentina!

6th Dec, Santa Maria to Wild camp Sand dune (47.6M)
Rain overnight lead to a late start as we waited a while for the tent to dry out. It was then a slow and steady ride out of Santa Maria, and through a couple of other villages as we continued to head south on route 40. A rest stop after 2 hours of cycling was doubly welcome. Refueling with food and the discovery that my back brakes had been rubbing, no wonder it felt hard today! I blamed Gareth for sabotague, he was the last one to adjust them!

Onwards more rapidly now, especially with the very dark clouds threatening over our right shoulder. Seeming to hang on the moutains, but every so often we could feel a splatter of rain. Climbing out of the valley we reached an antiplateu at 2000m, completley composed of one very very straight road and desert. Neither of us had any idea from out map that this was to be the case. In hindsight I guess the absence of all villages on the map in this area should have given it away. We were carrying full complement of water (part of the reason the bikes felt so heavy) incase we needed to overnight camp away from civilisation.
So we had one very straight road and one very strong wind blowing continuously striaght at us! Horrible! We managed 5-7mph, taking it in turns on the front 2mins at the time. Very demoralising with vehicles every so often appearing on the horizon and then taking an age to meet us, it was obvious the road was very long!
Eventually, having checked out and disregarded 2 boarded up goat herder huts, we found an area where the sand dunes had got large enough to give us some descent shelter from the wind to pitch our tent.


Our tent truely felt like a safe secure home that night, dry (it did rain and thunder later as well), sheltered from the wind and cosy, only the small amount of sand that found its way into everything to annoy us.