Driving from Bariloche to El Chaltén and Perito Moreno you have pass - apart from some beautiful national parks of lakes and mountains - some 700 km of dirt road through the steppe, with only very few villages on the way - and even less filling stations and hotels. The landscape is partly impressively beautiful, partly so amazingly boring that it fascinates you and urges you to stop and listen to the absolute silence, smell the air of pure and apparently virgin nature. Having in mind the amazing distances to the next telephone, you take extra care for your tyres and the entire motorcycle, since it would be rather inconvenient to have to camp hundreds of km away from civilization, not knowing where to get a mechanic and how long this would take. The dirt road is partly in very good shape, so you can go at some 60 to 80 kpm or even more - depending on the risk you are willing to take. However it seems that Argentina is going well - all along the way huge streches of the road are being paved and it won´t take too long until all major roads in Argentine's south are covered by a perfect asphalt layer: The time for the real adventurers is running out...

But still there are some real adventurers - you might call them heroes or just lunatics - people who cover these endless distances on bicicles - fighting hundreds of kilometers meter by meter through rarely changing and mostly uncivilized landscapes, on difficult gravel roads, sometimes with rain and nearly always against strong winds always coming from the wrong direction. I overtook four of them and they did not look very happy nor did they look like willing to have a light conversation. I talked to one of them who had to walk and push his bike due to the strong winds - he was so fed up that he wanted to throw his bike into the ocean when he would arrive in Ushuaia - but he was still able to smile :-) I don't know why they do this but there must be a really strinking reason for punishing oneself so severely.

Leaving the beautiful solitariness of the Patagonian steppe I approached the impressive massif of El Chaltén, the "smoking mountain". The last 100 km on the road to El Chaltén are really impressive - if you are lucky with the weather and the time of day. I was - it was sunny with a few clouds around the mountains and the whole scenery was immersed in the amazing light of the setting sun. Perfect conditions for beautiful pictures. Now it just depends on the photographer :-)

The village of El Chaltén is situated in the Glaciers National Park (Parque Nacional los Glaciares) and is one of the most touristy and most expensive places I have seen in Argentina up to now. Since I arrived lately and did not have the energy to look around a lot, I ended up in a nicely looking but quite expensive hotel with good beds but a very poor quality in detail.

Usually you come here to do some trekking. However this would mean backpacking and spending some nights in refugios or on campgrounds - of which I am no great fan. For camping you need to carry huge backpacks with heavy equipment, which really diminishes the ability to enjoy the landscape. In refugios you have to stay in damp dormitories with several other sweating and snoring people and stinking socks and without oxygen - and you have to do a reservation in advance. Apart from that I was quite pissed off with the contrast between the price and quality levels here, so I left the next day, heading further south, to the famous town of Calafate, with the much more famous Perito Moreno glacier.