Our second morning together, Ramon and I entered a long stretch of desert that took us to Piedra del Aguila. Along the way we were hosted like family by different ranching families. Many had very little, but what they had they shared with us. When there were no ranches we tied the horses to fence lines and camped.
Every morning we drank warm mate – an Argentine tea made from dried yerba leaves – while the horses grazed on alfalfa. In the evenings when I rode into camp, already set, there was always a place to tie the horses, water waiting in buckets and sizzling meat atop a neatly made fire. Ramon was the best Support driver I could have asked for.
At night we discussed politics, philosophy and women. Obviously we never arrived at any answers. But in the two weeks we shared together in the heart of Patagonia, alone in the middle of nowhere, with only the wind screaming through thorns, we became brothers.
In Villa el Chocon we took an afternoon to visit the Ernesto Bachmann Museum where I discovered that I was riding through a land of giants. This part of Patagonia is one of the world’s richest areas for finding dinosaur bones and fossils. The skeleton of the largest carnivorous dinosaur ever, Giganotosaurus Carolini, was discovered here.
Later, on the shores of Lake Ezequiel Ramos Mexia, we saw the actual tracks left by dinosaurs on their own journeys millions of years ago. It was super inspiring.
When we arrived in Piedra del Aguila we were tired and ready for a much needed break. While we waited for our hosts to arrive at the first gas station in town, I bought two cold beers and we cheered to our journey together. We had travelled 200 kms of hard ground and arrived in tip-top shape. Now it was time to rest the ponies for a day and see what Piedra del Aguila had to offer before continuing south.
