Mon 30th April. Somehow haven't had time to write for the first two days. Left Buenos Aires on Saturday in the pouring rain, 330miles to santa fe. Rain for the first 280miles of motorway - yum. Thankfully our kit held out fantastically well, with the exception of lou's gloves where the "waterproof" label turned out to be purely ornamental. Worked our way into the city of Sante Fe following some very soggy notes, but thankfully bumped into Angelica (our german fellow globebuster) on a roundabout, and trailed her mercilessly until she led us to the hotel.

Day two was the biggy. 425miles up to Termas de Rio Hondo, across the pampas. Somewhat predictably after a whole day of rain we had thick fog to get us going, which was interesting. 90minutes of dual carriageway myopia, with intermittent visor clearing every five seconds. Amazingly we all survived until the mist cleared and the rest of the day across the pampas was conducted in bright sunshine, testing peoples speedos against the gps. Tito faired badly, over reading by 8% at speed.

Day three. Last night in Argentina. Just the 340 miles today, from the hot springs of termas de rio hondo, up to tilcara at 2500m in the foothills of the Andes. Stunning ride, nice long stretches with big empty roads and fantastic scenery of rolling green hills with the Andes slowly rising behind. Quite a bit of group riding today which was nice albeit inadvertent.
Managed to hit the faff button this morning (my fault unsurprisingly) and were last away from the hotel. An interesting location on the edge of a sizeable lake, with spa-fed pool and a motley collection of shrivelled but determined pensioners loitering around the hot water ingress. The evenings entertainment owed more to benny hill than broadway, and had me explaining the joy of Butlins to our puzzled american co-biker.

We left the next morning in the mist, which was much less persistent than yesterday's and could almost have been described as pleasant, but for the occasional risk of death by oncoming truck. Thankfully the local police seemed to be concerned about this, and made up for it by setting up checkpoints, that seemed to have captured our fellow bikers quite efficiently. We were waved through three in quick succession while they were dealing with the others, eventually though we ran out of decoys and got stopped ourselves, albeit briefly, which gave the rest of the group time to catch up.

Eventually we left the traffic and roadblocks behind as we wended our way up into the hills, and reached tilcara just as the sun was starting to touch the hills. Tilcara is a unesco site, and quite unspoiled, unlike ourselves who were booked into a wonderful little hacienda in the middle of town. Otherwise, you could easily have mistaken the unspoiled tranquility for a one-horse cowboy town, where the horse looked as if it had been bullied by llamas at an early age. Tomorrow we cross into Bolivia - proper altitude, dispatchers of butch & sundance, colourfully clothed people in very small bowler hats etc. Should be fun!