The long road to Salta

The day started with us receiving a little gift from our hosts in Jujuy, which will from now on ride with me, decorating the front of my bike. 🎁

Our destination for today was Salta, the largest town around here and the regional capital. When researching possible routes there were 3 options:
1. Shorter but with more than 1500m of climbing, and following a busy highway
2. A longer route along main roads with less climbing
3. A "bicycle route" planned by Openstreetmaps and avoiding highways.

The last option looked the best to us, and after double checking that it followed the small but "official" ruta provincial 26 we were sure it would be well ridable.
So we set off, the 20km following paved roads.

When we turned off the paved main road onto the ruta provincial it soon dawned on us that the next 20 km on this road would be anything bit a piece of cake.
The road was supposed to run in parallel to a half dried out river bed but instead the tracks meandered right through were the river was supposed to be, sometimes disappearing completely, leaving us rumbling over the stoney riverbed.
In many places we had to cross little streams, some of them being quite long or deep or both.

Heat (27°C+), humidity and challenging terrain had us going at maybe 9kph and free roaming bulls eyeing us suspiciously made us slow down even more when passing the countless kettle heards.

Every now and then there were kettle gates, but it was not until we were 10km in that we found the first locked gate...we had 2 options: turning around and go all the way back to the main road, or take all our luggage off and pass the bikes over the gate...
Of course we went for the latter, hoping it would be just this one gate that is closed...Going back is never really an option.

We encountered one more closed gate along the riverbed before the path took a sudden turn taking us up into a pine forest! That's not what I expected to see.
2 km before we were supposed to be back on a small, windy paved road the 3rd closed gate appeared. Bigger that the others before and quite the challenge to pass over, but we made it.

The rest of the way was a mix of nice paved mountain roads, riverbeds - this time with considerably more water to push through - and stoney/gravely provincial roads.

Eventhough it was a very tiring day I absolutely loved the offroad section. I think for the next trip I will need to change to a Mountainbike though, to make the offroad bits even more enjoyable 😅

We arrived in Salta late in the afternoon, soaked through from sweat and riverwater and covered in what felt like multiple centimetres of dust and dirt, and checked into our fancy AirBnB (for 8€ p.P. 🤯 - loving those argentinian prices) ready to spent a couple of rest days in the city.

What was planned as a 2 day stopover turned into 5 days of bike repairs, fancy food and lazyness 🤷‍♀️

🚴‍♀️Distance cycled: 94 km
🪨 Percentage unpaved: 30 %
💦 Number of river crossings: 10+
🔐 Locked gates climbed: 3
🚨 Time spent trespassing: ❓️
👟 Time spent riding with wet shoes: 80%
🐂 Bullfights avoided: 100 😨 Czytaj więcej