We had late breakfast and caught up with Gerry and exchanged WhatsApp details before he rode off towards Mendoza. We finished packing up and putting everything on the bikes and we left by 11:30am. It was overcast and cloudy at first with some dark clouds near the mountains but it was sunny and blue skies to the east which we were heading towards. We expected straight roads through very flat Steppe and initially that was exactly what we rode through but we later passed a salt lake (Lago Salinas del Diamante) with orange and pink colours and then crossed an unexpected mountainous region with nicely coloured rock formations (Cuesta de los Terneros) before descending into a fertile valley. And probably the biggest surprise of all was that in the middle of absolutely nowhere was a restaurant (The Parada El Sosneado) and it had a purple life sized Milka cow in the front yard 😂👍 We fuelled up just outside of San Rafael and had lunch and removed some layers as the temperature had reached 27 degrees before continuing the remaining one hour drive to our hotel in General Alvear. We arrived snd had to ring the bell to be let into the hotel by the owner who did not speak English and was a chain smoker – the entire hotel stank from cigarette smoke but there was a big no smoking sign in the room 😂. We parked the bikes in a secure under cover car port and after cooling down in the air conditioned room, we walked through the town and found a parilla restaurant which still had the window decorated with St Patrick’s Day celebration (better than in Chile where most towns and places still had Christmas decorations even after Easter) 😉😂 The decoration inside the restaurant was also interesting – see pictures below 😉👍

On our way back to the hotel, we heard cicadas in the trees for the first time on our trip. The toilet in our hotel room had a hole in the wall where you had to reach in to pull a lever to flush 😂 and we paid a lot more for the tiny room stinking from smoke than the night before 😳😂