High Plains Drifter

Current location: Cordoba, Argentina

Miles to date: 14,943

I never expected that: Parrots in the desert

There’s a show on some cable channel or other – I think it might be the Discovery Channel – where, using a super slo-motion camera, ordinary events are replayed to the general astonishment of the watching public. The point the programme makers constantly reiterate is that even the most mundane of occurrences look incredibly different when slowed right down.

It’s a bit like ordering a coffee in a restaurant in Argentina. The process is familiar, although slowed down to such an extent it becomes fascinating, unusual even. This is a country where – unless you are behind the wheel of a car – it is definitely unseemly to rush about.

Lunch – usually some kind of slow roasted meat – is taken at a leisurely pace, and is promptly (if that’s the right word) followed by a siesta. And as for dinner, don’t expect to hear the gong much before 11pm. Invited to an asado – a traditional open fire barbecue – I was ready to knaw my own arm off by the time the first course of meat finally put in an appearance sometime just before midnight.

You can see why they like to take their time. This is such a massive country, something like the eight largest in the world, that the mere thought of tracking across its vast open spaces, with its endless skies and its far, far horizons, is enough to make you pull the covers a little closer to your chin and think “later, later”.

Legendarily, Ushuaia in the south of the country is closer to Antarctica than it is to the capital Buenos Aires. Or take the far north west. This is the point where Argentina bumps into Chile and Bolivia, huge salt pans and endless deserts making a mockery of the borders supposedly dividing the countries. Up here there are more llamas than people, and what people there are have a distinctly Andean look about them.

Sitting in a freezing adobe hostel at 4,000 metres, with frozen salt lakes outside and an endless chilly blue sky wrapped over you, the fashion boutiques and coffee houses of chic Buenos Aires don’t even feel like they are part of the same planet let alone the same country.

It is a land of high plains between the two ranges of the Andes, crossing from the world’s driest destert on the Chilean side of the mountains – the Atacama – to the deep red gorges and giant cactus forests on the Argentinian side.

The high plain has little vegetation – just some spikey clumps of grass that look a bit like spinifex – but it’s enough to support a food chain of sorts. More numerous than I’ve ever seen them are the protected vicuñas, small and skittish, like a cross between a deer and a camel. As well as grazing the grass, they also drink from what looks like tiny salt lakes, that is when the sun finally gathers enough strength in the middle of the afternoon to melt the top layer of water.

There is also a kind of fox in the high desert that looks more like a coyote with a brown underside and a dark, black stripe at the top of its coat. Somehow, ducks have found a way to survive on a thimbulfull of water up here and flocks of smaller birds, like sparrows, are constantly swooping over the road in search of God knows what to eat. It’s certainly too cold for insects.

No people can live on this part of the high plain. Agriculture is impossible and it is forbidden to kill and eat the vicuñas. Instead, from San Pedro de Atacama – an outpost of the Mundo Gringo with its internet cafes, tour companies and wholemeal bread – 160 kilometres to the Argentinian border post there is no sign of human habitation except lonely, windblown Ruta 27.

I don’t know what you have to do wrong to find yourself posted to the Argentinian border  but despite the fact it is clearly the Siberia of South America the people who work here are professional, polite and efficient. Getting into the Republica Argentina – as the countless signs, flags and paintings on the road tell you - is very, very straightforward. (Sensibly, the Chileans do all their border paperwork back in San Pedro. It’s weird being allowed free reign of a country having officially checked out but at least it saves a few customs officials from the most mundane posting of their careers.)

The first town in Argentina is Susques. Along its dry, dusty freezing streets it’s hard to see where the desert ends and the town begins. With an altitude more than three times the highest point of the UK – Ben Nevis – this is not a place for rushing about, either. Thankfully there’s nothing to do except put on every item of clothing you own and lie in your refrigerator of a room until it is acceptably late enough (8pm, in my case) to get under the covers and call it a night.

When the sun finally does rise, bringing with it no warmth, you’re reminded why this spectral, haunting landscape will stay with you such a long time. It’s hard to convey a sense of its majesty in mere words, but the effect of rolling along in this huge emptiness, like a tiny parasite crawling along the buttock of some mighty beast, is incredibly calming.

I arrived in Jujuy – no metropolis itself – feeling stunned by the emptiness I’d experienced, and overwhelmed by the traffic, the streets, the people. Luckily I snapped out of it soon enough on discovering that Argentina has not one, but a choice of chains all serving excellent coffee. Being a civilised country, it is usually accompanied by a small biscuit or cake of some kind, and a small glass of sparkling water, the Argentinians betraying their Italian roots.

And so it’s continued. Jujuy to Salta, on the advice of the man who looked after my motorcycle all night, was taken along Ruta 9 through high wooded hills and past lakes. As a counterpoint to the aridity of the desert, this fecundity could not have been sharper. Salta to Tucuman felt like driving in England in a particularly dry autumn, brown leaves burning at the side of the road and the last of the crops in the field just starting to dry out as they wait to be harvested.

And then Santiago del Estero, slightly derided in my guidebook but a place of immense friendliness among its modern grid of streets and some of the best food I’ve had since November. The fresh pasta lunch has won a place on the eating leaderboard to your right, but the selection of treats served up in the central market only did not make it onto the list because I thought it was unreasonable for one town to hog two entries. I might yet change that.

Last, but by no means least, Cordoba. A tough, chilly, windy, six hour ride south across deserts, salt pans, plains and low rolling hills it wears its title of Argentina’s second city lightly, and without the chippy scorn of the capital normally found in second towns.

Most remarkable, for me at least, is that about 300 kilometres north of here I passed a small, simple sign in the desert which read KM 1000. This means I am less than one thousand kilometres from journey’s end at Buenos Aires. In fact, I am going to Rosario tomorrow and this will undoubtedly by my final stop on the road. After 15,000 miles I’ll be calling a halt to this odyssey and resting up in Buenos Aires for a few weeks before returning back to Blighty.

Whatever else happens, I’ll be taking my time over my coffee once I’m in Buenos Aires. After all, there’s no rush, is there?

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