San Antonio de Arecco

We stayed a second night at 35 pesos, to recover. We felt it important to get our confidence back after the first aborted attempt at getting out of Buenos Aires. However, Capilla Del Senor was not much better. No signposts, no road numbers. We had three goes at getting out. We stopped to ask a goucho. He was very nice but I did have difficulty understanding all that Spanish. He told us to avoid the Ruta 8 for its terrible traffic and sent us to another road back at the town.
We couldn;'t find that road so cycled back to the campsite to ask the man there. He directed us via the train station, which we found.

a different goucho we met in Amaicha

Cycling through th town itself we kept running into small packs of dogs. One pack was made up of about 7 or so, who were lepaing after us. I splashed one with water from my water bottle, which shocked him into backing off. The others were now not so keen to chase us.

(nmp)

We carried on to the road and found it was a dirt track that had become sticky mud, thanks to last night's heavy rain. Definitely no good on bicycle tyres, so we turned around. The dogs had completely changed their tune. I waved my water bottle around and their body language became "no trouble, no trouble" as they cowered under a parked truck.

The road was hot, it was the long way around to avoid that 'tierra' road and the goucho had been right: Ruta 8 was a nightmare. A long, straight road with no shoulder and cars/trucks skimming past at over 100km/h. Never have I been overtaken so closely at such speeds. Hair raising.

We got into San Antonio de Arecco, soaked through. We found a tourist information office and the lady there was great. She spoke clearly and slowly so I understood her Spanish and she gave us a lot of her time. She suggested we take the Ruta 9, saying it's not like a European Autopista. It has a big shoulder where buses stop to pick up passengers. We were still a bit sceptical as to how viable Ruta 9 will be. The small town had a WiFi cafe where we googled information on Ruta 9. Licuado Banana is my new favourite drink.

campsite at San Antonio de Arecco