After another few hours on the road, the hills subsided and we entered a long flat plain dominated by Grande Saltas, a huge salt flat through which the lonely two lane highway cut.
We stopped for lunch at an abandoned, post-apocalyptic road house.
The wind whipped across the flats bringing with it clouds of salt and dust. Seeking shelter from the gale behind the remaining walls of the shop kiosk, we ate sandwiches and oranges, trying desperately to keep the flying grit out of each mouthful.
A giant aerial was tethered to the concrete platform on which we parked and the anchors creaked as the wind swayed the gantries above us. Two old buses and a non-descript car rusted slowly in the lot, stripped of anything useful and we all took turns to create our own Sunday colour supplement shots of the barren, forbidding scene as small twisters arched across the horizon and the occasional lorry rumbled past in a cloud of dust.
Hours later, we stopped again for a pee break and ice cream. Shay sat down with his statutory shot of Espresso and most of the rest of us stretched our legs and milled round the dusty gravel parking lot, chatting and eating familiar looking ice-pops with unfamiliar names
Taffe De Valle - or Taffy de Faffy as Dave had taken to calling it - was high and we started the long climb as the afternoon was drawing in. We rounded the mountain lake on the far side of which TDV sits, passing a herd of 500 wild horses cropping on the sparse upland grasses as we went.
We arrived as the light was fading and rushed in the increasing chill to get the tents up and the food on the go in the covered BBQ area. Dogs soon began to circle, led by a tiny pair of genetically engineered Chihuahua-Doberman crosses who cowed the larger dogs with their aggression.
Hot chicken and vegetable stew arrived in short order as the cook crew worked double time and Dave warded off the chill in the meantime with regular doses of an Argentinian species of hooch called Kishasa (198% proof) that burned the throat but warmed from the inside.
Four ponies wandered the camp site searching vainly for something to eat in the high altitude winter dust-bowl that passed for a paddock.
The perils of sharing a cooler box with 20 other people soon became apparent as bottle labelling went by the wayside and in the Kishasa fuelled frenzy that followed Dave’s liberal sprinklings, a mild turf war broke out between the denizens of the Green and Blue Eski.
It wasn’t helped by Ivan’s fateful decision to buy and label beer a few days back before changing his mind and returning it to the shop’s fridge, only for it to be purchased by someone else and relabelled with some amateurish crossings out that lead to accusations of label tampering.
Ever even-handed, Dave resolved the situation by anaesthetising the whole group with more Kishasa and despite the cold we slept well, warmed to the cockles by Argentina’s finest.
The tramp blindness in the morning was a small price to pay.
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