From El Chalten we drove north, which is going to be our main direction for the next months, always north north north. The plan was to go to Perito Moreno NP, which is supposed to have more beautiful mountains, rock paintings and fossils. Our intermediate stop for the night was Gobernador Gregores a very isolated town as it is hours away from any other places. Surprisingly it had a good feel to it, people were doing sports, it was colourful and the information centre was very nice (we might have been the only visitors of the day). The next morning we did a big shop at the supermarket, only to find out we couldn’t pay for our groceries. Despite the Maestro and Visa/Mastercard logos they wouldn’t accept our debit/credit cards. The one bank they have in this province only wanted to give a small amount of money, but at least we could go back to pay for our groceries and we were on our way.

Perito Moreno is at the end of a 90 km dirt road that is off the highway. Not the easiest place to get to, it only receives about 1200 visitors a year. Unknown to us it had just rained a massive amount… We got on the dirt road and it got worse as we went further and in the end we were riding through very soft mud, creating a deep track in the road. The car did amazing though, the tires are aggressive enough to pull through in 2wd, although we switched to 4wd to keep it on the road and to prevent too much wheelspin. When the road became submerged with water and we realised how far we still had to go, we decided to turn back. The reason being that our fuel consumption was large and we thought we might not make it to the next fuel station, which was going to be at Bajo Caracoles.

Once we got back on the main road we stopped to clean the windows and lights and made it to Bajo Caracoles, it was 5pm. We knew the Cave of the Hands, a Unesco World Heritage site was about an hour away, again on bad roads. There was nowhere to stay, so we went for it. We got there in time for the 6pm guided tour, which was just for the two of us. It was an amazing experience. The rock art is the oldest ‘anything’ there is in Argentina, the oldest being about 9500 years old. The paint was made with mud/minerals from the earth and then spray-painted through straws, probably made from bones onto the rocks. I just can’t get my head around the fact that the colour stayed that vibrant for all that time, don’t think modern chemical paint lasts that long! Almost all paintings are from left hands, as they used their right hand to do the spray-painting. These people lived in a cave next to the paintings during the winter and hunted guanacos. In summer they moved northwest to the Los Antiguos area. Their tribe had only about 25 to 30 people.

After taking some great photos, playing with the cat and enjoying the evening light over the canyon it was time to start looking for a place to spend the night. That proved to be difficult. The campsite 70km south of Perito Moreno town was closed and then we couldn’t find the campsite in Perito Moreno town. On top of that it was getting late and because of our banking problems in the Santa Cruz province we only had 50 pesos, which is not enough to even pay for a campsite. Eventually after a very long day we arrived at 11.30 at night at a campsite in Los Antiguos, where we were allowed to stay and didn’t have to pay till the next day. This was only the second time in our trip that we have driven in the dark and it really is going to be something for emergencies only.

The next day we went to a restaurant in Los Antiguos where we know they like to exchange US dollars against black market rates, something that is absolutely necessary to keep it affordable. We had 700 US dollars in cash on us. According to the official rate (which you get if you take money out of the bank machines), this is worth about 3400 pesos. The black market rate is 4900 pesos, so well worth the effort.

From Los Antiguos up north we had a couple uneventful days of driving large distances through boring landscape and a town about every 3 hours. We stayed at a couple horrible campsites, until we struck gold in Trevelin and found a campsite in an old orchard, run by Luis a senior Argentinian and his enthusiastic dog Billy, which hung out with us a lot. Trevelin is a ‘Welsh’ town, so we went for high tea and otherwise we just rested from the driving.

From Trevelin we faced another couple days of driving to get to the next nice area, around El Bolson. We stayed at La Casona del Odile, a hostel set on beautiful grounds with rivers running through it. We met nice people here and took Claire, an English girl, with us to climb Mount Piltriquitron. The name means ‘Hanging from the Clouds’ in Mapuche and is 2260 meters high. We drove up to the car park at 1000 meters and then climbed up, the last hour was very hard, more a scramble up a steep slope than a walk. I don’t have fear of heights, but sitting at the peak was a bit unnerving. High winds and cold and massive straight drops on one side, but amazing views over the whole area, really an ‘on top of the world’ sort of feeling. We didn’t stay too long as we could see bad weather coming in and wanted to make it down a way before it hit.

Otherwise we have visited the artisan market, got the car cleaned professionally to get the caked on mud removed and tried to enjoy the nice hostel. This was a challenge due to a group of loud and obnoxious North American girls dictating the atmosphere in the otherwise nice and tranquilo common areas.

Our next stop is Pucon/Villarica in Chile, where we are going to buy some more US dollars for our exchange scheme and as we have done 10.000 km with the car we hope to get an oil/filter change done there.