Highway 60 To Fiambalà

I had a conversation with Julia about Instagram travel. I liked roadside picnic’s Instagram photos before I met them.

Instagram is the way overlanders keep in touch which is more Layne’s department than mine as I enjoy my own page and struggle with social media. If you follow overlanders online you will end up seeing the same photos of the same places on all the accounts. And everything is always fantastic. Except these guys who go off on their own and give us leads in places no one else has checked out. I was pleased to meet them when we finally did in Chile. And in a few weeks they ship back to Seattle from Chile. Oh well. 

All this to say our idyllic wild camp was crap. The weather was horrid with Scotch mist falling and making everything moist. Underfoot we had a positive plague of prickly burrs which didn’t stick to you but made walking painful even in thin soles shoes. Rusty was walking in tip toe anywhere there was grass or plants on the sand. What a pain. 

It looked Instagram worthy I guess. And it is on iOverlander where I reported our findings without holding back. But let me tell you not every day in the road or in a van is unbounded joy. This Easter morning was one of the less joyful. 

We said goodbye to Konstantin and Julia with plans to meet later. They have to do papers for their cats to enter Chile and went south to try to get them done Monday in the nearest big town. We’re hoping they will cross the border with us but if not we plan to meet them on the beach 

Wednesday got back on Ruta 40 south to try to get up Fiambalá in time to relax for the afternoon. The green bit is the road we’ve driven, the orange is Easter Sunday on the road and dotted orange is where we want to go. 

I wonder sometimes if our journey is a bit too un-dramatic. It’s just driving around but for us we get to see places we have never seen before, vast tracts of desert in Western Argentina I’d never heard of, but we travel largely without drama, no corruption either. All those stories of being treated as an ATM by officials seeking bribes has never happened to us. I hope this journey shows it’s no more dangerous here than there. We look at Google Maps and iOverlander and figure where we want to go, no bandits anymore than you’d expect on I-95 up the east coast. 

If you are intent on avoiding police check points Easter Sunday is a great day to drive. We passed lots and only one was staffed and she waved us through. They do that mostly but when they do stop us a quick look at my Florida driver’s license and  we’re on our way. No big deal. 

The light under black clouds was terrible and I fear my shutter was set a bit slow so some fuzz has crept in and it annoys me. Belen means Bethlehem in Spanish. 

I figure it was poor enough it could pass for the more famous one in Palestine.  

Northern Argentina is a remarkable desert and poverty is everywhere with attendant motorcycles, street dogs, loose cattle and donkeys and goats. Personally the donkeys look like mules to me, they’re that big and mules are a cross between a horse and a donkey.  

High quality asphalt on historic Ruta 40. As usual. 

Argentina isn’t doing road maintenance anymore so the roads that are good are good and the ones that aren’t will remain bad for the foreseeable. 

The government is run by an economist whose drive to operate in the black has cut govern contracts, employees and work so because we’re travelers we notice the piteous state of the roads. 

Ruta 40 varies between excellent to scene g and awful as well as occasional random stretches of gravel. And streets in towns and cities are even worse. They make me miss Chile and its smooth asphalt. 

Did I mention the social poverty? Leg of goat anyone?

People that can afford cats don’t ride utility motorcycles and scooters. 

Street dogs are better looked after than you might think. Only Mexico are dogs starved but in northern Argentina they don’t look as well looked after as in the prosperous south. 

This is a town street in Fiambalá, our destination. 

We passed through a village called London. And no it did not resemble cities I’ve seen by that name in Canada or Britain. 

There is a lot of adobe in this desert. 



No road work means this sort of nonsense may be in your path: 

I have no idea what this scenario was, below, but I had to drive on the left to get past it. As you do in Argentina. 

This desert scenery is worth the drive. 

Konstantin and Julia are going south to La Rioja on Highway 40 but we were turning north on Highway 60 to Fiambalá, and our ultimate destination is Paso San Francisco one of the strangest border crossings between these two countries and we’ve crossed lots of them.  

Paso San Francisco is 300 miles long with no services so we are going to take some extra gas just in case. The pass is 15,800 feet high and is mostly paved though forty odd miles are said to be gravel in Chile. It’s autumn so it’s going to cold up there. And the big issue: it’s only open Tuesdays and Fridays and Rusty’s permit expires on Thursday so we have to get it done next Tuesday. 

Ruta 60 through the desert. More Arizona. 









Layne stopped to check out a tourist booth while I walked Rusty. 



We arrived around 3:30 Sunday afternoon under a weak sun in about 70 degrees.



A monument to women: 









We’d found a picnic area used to spend a free night as listed on iOverlander. It’s got a clear sky for Starlink, a trash can, some local dogs I fed much to Rusty’s disgust and a toilet so foul I don’t think it counts as a facility. 

It worked for us: no prickles, a flat cement pad to park on and no noise. And Rusty liked it. 

Merry Christmas From Tolhuin

Merry Christmas first of all. By the time you see this we will have been hanging around around Ushuaia for a while so there will be photos and stories about the end of the world as they like to call it down here. But that will be tomorrow after this holiday which as I write we plan to spend in the wilderness wild camping. Owing to our direct journey south through Chile people we have traveled with are still zig zagging through Argentina and Chile up north while others have finished their sabbaticals and are returning to Europe. Courtney and Andrew whom we last met in Punta Arenas are shipping their Jeep to the Netherlands soon. We Americans are alone at the end of the world. 

We awoke from our wild camp outside Rio Bravo to find an actual Argentine gaucho (cowboy) training his horses outside our home. Walking the unbroken horses in circles while teaching them to obey his commands. 

Then he rode off, as did we. 

Part of Ruta Nacional 3 runs along the Atlantic here. 

Most overlanders ignore Argentina’s Atlantic Coast but we plan to drive much of it on our way north along Route 3 before crossing the famous plains crammed pampas back to Andes and the Chilean border. That will be later. 

Tierra Del Fuego is mostly flat or rolling prairie. It’s about summer now so there is sunshine but also lots of ice cold wind. Out of the wind it’s quite pleasant even with temperatures in the mid fifties but in the wind your digits freeze and hats gloves and wind proof jackets are mandatory. 

The highway isn’t quite as good as the perfect roads of Chile but the potholes aren’t so many and can be avoided and we can travel at 50 miles per hour without stress. 

The winds mostly from the west have been quite intense and I can feel GANNET2 yielding to the gusts, which have been up to 40mph.

The cell signal cones and goes but it’s never very strong except right inside towns so we are glad to have Starlink packed ready to deploy if we need it. Gas stations have showed up in each community and there are more villages here than in Chile but every time the fudge goes below three quarters we fill up.  

Headwinds can increase fuel consumption and if a gas station were to run out this isn’t where you want to be driving on fumes. It is desolate out here and there aren’t even any electrical lines or power poles. 

We got stopped by the Gendarmeria Nacional at the checkpoint before the town of Tolhuin, and in keeping with all the other trove countries we have visited they were cheerful and friendly and did a quick check of GANNET2’s Temporary Import Permit and my Florida driver’s license which is a novelty of course and we were quickly on our way. We have yet to meet a cop on the take but there is still time I suppose. 

There seem to be more towns and villages in Argentina’s narrow strip of Tierra Del Fuego than across Chile’s huge chunk of the island and Tolhuin is a small town about an hour and a half north of Ushuaia. 

We decided to stop here because it has a laundry with good reputation and a campground with hot showers. What more do you need after several nights of wild camping? 

A bakery perhaps? Hmm…

There is a library dedicated to the Falkland Islands, still a point of contention around here. 

I’ll express my thoughts on that subject later. We have considered flying to the Falklands for a visit but you can only fly from Punta Arenas in Chile, Britains ally in the war fought forty years ago. And we’d have to leave Rusty in doggie daycare for a week and you can imagine how I feel about that. 

Argentina is said to make the best empanadas in Latin America and they weren’t bad at all for lunch. Because yes indeed, Tolhuin has a few excellent bakeries. 

It’s an okay town with the services we need but nothing to write home about. 

He explored it enough to put him in a coma my gradually aging dog. It was time to go camping. 

A dirt road… sigh… but only a few miles. Check out the rolling wooded hills in the distance. 

You can rent a space for your tent with a fire ring and you might get a teepee with an electric light inside. 

An innovation the indigenous people didn’t enjoy. Rusty used them to escape any sudden showers. 

They call them kawi (kah-wee) around here. 

The communal kitchen was a bit too informal for us. 

The views are special  while the decor is eccentric. 

This lake called Fagnano curls around the mountains like a fjord into Chile but is cut off from salt water by a spit of land. 

We took a spot by a kawi for shelter from the wind.  

The reason we were here wasn’t the decor or the views but the abundant hot water in the shower. It looks funky but it worked really well. 

This is as wintery a Christmas as we have spent in a very long time. But here at 54 degrees south latitude it’s easy to mistake summer for winter. 

Best wishes for a peaceful holiday season.