Route 40

The storied Route 40 stretches the entire length of Patagonia in Argentina, running north to south along the eastern side of the Andes. The majority of it is unpaved and in many places it´s too narrow for two vehicles to pass each other. The landscape in this part of Patagonia is remarkable mostly for the vastness of it´s emptiness. I was literally on a bus for two days, rambling over washboard roads and watching the exact same scrub brush passing by like so many dead, dull-green porcupines. Everyone warned me about this trip -- it´s actually faster to take a bus on decent roads all the way the east coast to get to where I´m going -- but it seemed like one of those things that a person should see.

And it is. You get the impression that the land allowed this tiny road to be cut across it the way a heavyweight would offer you one free shot at his chin just before pummelling you. Just because you´re on a road and in a vehicle doesn´t for a second mean you´re in charge.

Two days. Fortunately, there was a pretty fun crew on board and once the cabin fever set in things degenerated into borderline madness. Our overnight stay in a Perrito Moreno (hardly even a town) motel with holes cut in the floorboards for toilets spilled over into the poolhall across the street and lasted much later than it should have, making day two kind of brutal for a slew of folks.

Would write more on this, but have to go catch a bus. Today was a day of tracking down literary ghosts in Esquel, just off Route 40, before heading off to the hippy outpost of El Bolson. I talked an off-duty cabbie into letting me pay him way too much money to drive me out to the cabin where Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid spent a couple years in semi-retirement before returning to a life of crime. Bruce Chatwin writes about this in his Patagonia book. Also went to see "La Trochita," the train Paul Theroux nicknamed "The Old Patagonian Express" in his book of the same name, which chronicles his train trip from Boston to Argentina.

My fantasy football team continues to impress me.

All for now. Gotta catch a bus.