We were pretty happy to leave Necochea, its a typical coastal holiday place but with not many people there it lacked... well, much fun! We also discovered the KTM dealer had moved to Buenos Aires so there wasn't much point hanging out there any longer.After an easy, but bloody hot, days ride west we found another coastal hang out, much smaller this time, Puehen Co. The holiday season for places like this only lasts about 2 months but as we were a bit early we had the only open campsite to ourselves. The owners reckoned they'd have over 1000 people on their site in peak time, sounds hectic and glad we missed that.

We were lucky that the site owners adopted us, the boys helping to get our bbq going one night (with only a lighter and pine cone, much to Jason's chagrin)...

And inviting to us asado with them the next night, Ricardo Sr. providing instructions on how to do it properly...

We also had some fun with the bikes on the beach...

...and did some sun bathing (though I'm still too white to release those photos!)

We had some bloody strange weather too, stinking hot in the day with thunder, lightening and hale stones in the evening. The lack of women to chat up was driving Jason spare though so we set of to Viedma for the HU meet.

As usual with bikers everyone was really friendly but we crossed to the dark side and camped up next to The Beast (www.beastlyadventure.com), a 1976 former UN ambulance converted for overlanding and driven from the UK to Australia then shipped to Buenos Aires by Alexis and Greg. They had everything in the back of The Beast along some great stories and pics of their time in Russia and China so we did well to hang out next to them...

The five nights we spent there passed in a blur of cheap red wine, enterntainment a la Greg, a visit to a seal colony...

...and some great riding on dirt roads.

Big thanks to Oscar, Floppy and Nancy for organising it all, great job guys ;-)

I had a bloody puncture as well which wasn't much fun but there were loads of people to help out and many thanks to Tom who loaned a spare tube I could borrow as, of course, all of my stuff was back at the camp site. I had been meaning to change my front tube to a heavy duty one that I brought from the UK but had been too lazy to do it, wish now that I had. I also wish I had checked the 6 identical pairs of brake pads I bought with me (the shop said they'd do front and rear) as I discovered that they are, in fact, only for the rear!!! I've had to glue part of one of the front pads onto its backing... Apparenly there are a few KTM places in Chilie so I'll be light on the front brake till then only 5000k's or so then!!!)

Its not a problem, I'll just nick Jason's ones while he's not looking, or if worst comes to worst it won't be too difficult to convert it to single disc.

Its been 6 weeks since weve left and I must admit its been quite strange adapting to life on the road. There were a couple of days where I was wondering what the hell I was up to, "come on Pete, get back to real life, get a haircut and real job and stop messing around...". It was great chatting to Lew at the HU meet, he'd had similar trepidations when he first started off but over 2 years later he's loving every minute. Just talking to him made me feel a load better, cheers mate...