After parking our bikes in the hallway of a colonial hostel in the center and making the entire place reek of gasoline, we went out for what we really hoped would be an Argentinian steak. Finally.

“Bien hecho?” The waiter asked.

No. No, obviously not well done.

“Inglesi?”

This apparently means rare. It’s quite telling that to South Americans, the English are the the gold standard in terms of pink meat.

A lot of shit Spanish later we think we’ve communicated Medium Rare to the guy, after he walks away seemingly confident he knows what we want.

Sadly, the steak came back well done. The beef was excellent, I think. Probably. But I’ll never know.

The next day Didier and Alex went out into Salta to get Didier some glasses and to replace our missing tripod. It transpired quite quickly that the Argentinians are not salespeople by nature. A man who had several suitable small tripods in his camera shop refused to sell them because he thought our camera was too heavy. He didn’t advise against buying them, he just flat out refused to take our money. Then the exact same thing happened when Didier told the various opticians he knew his prescription but couldn’t produce any documentation to prove it. Next, everybody went to sleep for 4 hours in the middle of the day and the city stopped. They must have been tired from fighting off all these people who wanted to give them money. I’m not quite sure how Argentina is developed.

That evening we discovered a bit of a gem on the advice of Mathias, the hostel owner. La Casona del Molino is a series of chaotic rooms, courtyards and a garden where a completely overloaded waiting staff serves the hundreds of customers their BBQ meats. Every area has at least one person with a guitar serenading their surroundings from one of the tables. It is very difficult to find anywhere to sit because the place is absolutely packed, even on a Thursday night (past midnight). After finally finding a table I was surprised how quickly the delicious meats appeared out of the cloud of noise around the grill. La Casona was a reminder that even though Argentina has all the white people and flashy BMWs of Europe, we are still very much in South America. Predictably, there was no pink to be seen on any of the meat.

Molino’s Casona

We were at the Southernmost point of our loop but we were also quite a lot more than halfway through our time in South America. I was starting to get a little conscious that we needed to make distance in the next few days to allow space for things to go wrong later on. This meant heading straight up North back to Bolivia through the Gran Chaco, a flat, shrubby, seasonally flooded plain that extends all the way from Salta to the sweltering heat of Santa Cruz, Bolivia. We did a 300km day up to Tartagal, the Argentinian border town with Bolivia. Making distance on these featureless roads is a difficult thing to do on dirt bikes with a pedestrian top speed and very little creature comforts. I was immediately reminded that I had the slowest bike and so spent all my effort trying not to brake more than the others for speed bumps, and following in their draft during overtakes. You don’t realise until you lose it what a safety feature power is on a motorcycle. That said, all three bikes were now starting to sound pretty rough.

That evening in Tartagal we had an animated discussion about whether aliens are likely to have motorcycles, where Didier was wrong and Alex was completely missing the point, and then we went to bed, ready for the border in the morning.

We had been pretty lucky with borders up until this one. Here, however, two Bolivians seemed pretty adamant to find any problem they could to make our lives difficult (except my missing number plate, that was obviously fine). After having a big discussion with a misinformed man about whether it is possible to own a Peruvian bike as a European (which it is), and finally convincing him we own the bikes by bringing up the Peruvian system on their computers, his co-worker decided she wouldn’t let us into Bolivia without Bolivian insurance. As you might imagine, it’s a challenge to get Bolivian insurance before being in Bolivia, but she didn’t seem to care. After a while, a fixer (half of whose brain had been replaced by Coca leaves) told us his friend could get us insurance even though it was Saturday. Didier disappeared with him and all of our passports. An hour or so later, he is back with insurance. The evil Bolivian woman reluctantly gave us our stamps (without even really looking at our insurance) and we were finally in Bolivia again, although it was now raining and dark.

Didier waits for his Coked-up fixer to sort the insurance. He isn’t allowed to leave the car.

Knowing we had to make at least some distance, we pushed on to Villamontes, 90km further on. Our visors had taken a beating over the last two months and their low light performance was questionable. It wasn’t helped by the fact that every oncoming car insisted on flashing their headlights just to make sure we knew they were there. It was not maximum fun, but at least it wasn’t boring. We arrived in Villamontes quickly, where a helpful man allowed us to ride our bikes through his hotel reception and into the courtyard. It was a nice little place, but sadly the showers electrocute you when you use the hot water. That was a bit of a downside.

There was some talk about not being allowed on the road the next day, because of some national no-driving day in Villamontes county. We didn’t think much of it, until we pulled out of the hotel the next morning to find quite a lot of pedestrians on the roads. Almost before we could decide what to do, we were being escorted to the police station by a cop on a commandeered moped. Every vehicle that was passing through the town (on the main highway to Santa Cruz from the south of the country mind you) was given the same treatment. The Police Station was an island in a sea of impounded cars and motorbikes. There goes our early start.