Drive to Barriloche – singinwhale.com

Ruta Nacional 40 (“Ruta Cuarenta“)

Ruta Cuarenta is the Argentinian equivalent of the American Route 66. Along the way uncountable motorbike groups have left their emblem stickers on the different road signs and you can buy merchandise carrying the markings for this iconic road. And what a road it is.

The Ruta 40 winds itself through the outskirts of the Andes all the way from the very north to almost the very south just shy of Ushuaia. The section that I drove on to Barriloche was a very scenic drive with a different view waiting behind each turn.

The parts of the drive that I explicitly saved. (~7 min)

Mendoza

Mendoza is one of the largest cities in Argentina but on this visit I only visited a café and began sorting my dashcam videos. I quickly realized that it was not really feasible to upload the entire dashcam footage. It is just too much data. 3 days of driving result in more than 60 GBs of data. There is no way I can store all of that or even upload all of that. From then on I used the save button on the webcam to save specific sections of the drive.

A “submarino” with orange juice and a cheesecake in Mendoza

Just outside Mendoza I drove to a nearby fishing lake that had a campsite and prepared dinner. My stove has two stovetops and I have a grill plate that I can put over both of them to create a large hot surface for grilling meat. In Chile I bought a piece of meat from the supermarket – in hindsight, I think it was from the specialty section because the meat was basically half a meter long. I think it was a whole muscle from a cow. I had to cut it into pieces in order to eat it. But boy was it delicious. I had to grill all pieces at once but I only managed to eat 2 of the 3. The last one I put into the fridge and ate it cold with some bread the next day.

The super long meat on the grill. Imagine these as one long strip.

I let the stray dogs who were roaming around the campsite “clean” the grill for me.

Malargüe

I asked the attendant at the gas station if there were any laundries in the town.

In Malargue I set out to do my laundry for the first time. That turned out to be quite hard because it was the early afternoon and in Argentina everything shuts down after 14:00 for the Siesta. Only after roughly 17:00 do they open back up again (and then almost until midnight). This is usually to avoid the heat during summer but for me it is always quite annoying because I want to be out while it is light outside. Driving in the dark is very tiring for me. To kill the time I went to the last café in town that was still open but even that one closed at 15:00.
The laundry place opens at 16:00 so I went to the nearest park and busied myself with my python script that stitched together all the dashcam videos (they are all saved in 1min long pieces).

I got myself a smoothie at the café.

Across the road there were a bunch of people queued up at the bank, Uli had told me that in Argentina people receive their pension on a daily basis (also people can retire very early) which is why at noon there is a queue at the bank every day to withdraw their money for the day.

After I had dropped off my laundry I wanted to get a haircut but the barber shop was not opened yet (and did not specify opening times). So I hovered around the area – bought some nice “Malbec” whine and vegetables along the way – until at last I asked the lady running the shop next door when the barber shop opens. She said she did not know but apparently the guy runs a second shop some blocks away and he might be there. Shaking my head about the lack of information on that on the shop itself I made my way over to the other location and, yes, there they were hard at work.

Even though I did not have an appointment they managed to make space and I got myself a nice haircut.

After this I got dinner at a restaurant and ordered a parilla (a mixed grill platter) but their chef was not very good and everything arrived very well done and not very nicely arranged. Very unremarkable overall. Seems like not all Argentinians are well versed in the art of asado.
Afterwards I continued driving a bit – despite the darkness – and stopped at a side road of RN40 in the middle of nowhere. The best perk of having a bed in your car.

Drinking coffee the next morning.

After a good while of driving my progress was suddenly halted by a huge herd of goats that were driven over the road by a group of gouchos.

Along the way I came across the – or rather A – Rio Grande.

San Junin de los Andes

The campsite even had its own horse. A very efficient way to keep the grass short.

San Junin is at the north end of the Nahuel Huapi National Park – the park that encloses the entire lakes region between the border to Chile, Barriloche and San Junin and then some. It must be one of the biggest national parks of the country. Despite this the town does not have much to offer. After arriving at the campsite I went to explore the town at around 8pm but there wasn’t anything exciting going on. There were some decent restaurants but I did not try them.

The next day I spent some time searching for a lost item in my car for which I turned everything upside down. Sadly, I did not find the lost item. By the time I wanted to leave THEY HAD LOCKED UP THE CAMPSITE! I could not leave. The gate was locked with a chain and padlock and there was no other way off the site. I looked around for a while for any numbers to call and even made an attempt at picking the lock but I was ill equipped for that. So after a very long wait that I spent mostly with playing with the local campsite puppy the guy finally arrived and opened the gate for me.

The cute little puppy was very keen on biting everything that moved. The bites were more like little nibbles though.

The next 5 hours I drove the windy mountain roads along the many mountain lakes all the way to Barriloche. It was again quite the scenic drive but I made very slow progress due to the high traffic (there were many tourists about). In a way it felt very much like driving through the Alps. More on that in the next post!