We had breakfast in our apartment using up the last milk, cereal and the second pomegranate we had been given at hotel Barcelona a few days back. We had changed plans slightly after recommendations from our host Alicia to go and see the cathedral in La Plata. We wanted to get close to Buenos Aires so that we only had a short distance to get through Buenos Aires and to our hotel close to the harbour on Sunday but had not planned to go to La Plata which was 384km from Junin but decided to do a very long ride in order to see the cathedral and the town of La Plata. We had booked a hotel with a parking garage and secure parking right in the centre of town next to the cathedral for one night.

We tried to leave by 11:00 am but I had misplaced my motorcycle key 🙁 and after turning everything inside out, I eventually remembered which pocket I had put it in 😂 – so we ended up leaving later than planned and google suggested it would take 4.5 hours. It was a sunny warm day and we rode the first 120km through more of the straight roads of the pampas through agricultural areas, wetlands with lots of bird life and more Maguari storks (Ciconia maguari) and more abandoned wrecked cars on the sides of the road. We fuelled up, charged my phone and had cold drinks and ice cream and took a picture of a Citroen 2CV 😉, before continuing the next 160km. More straight roads with slow farming vehicles to overtake and some very fast moving cars that overtook us going way faster than the speed limit of 110km/hr. At the next petrol stop, a group of local male riders arrived and they admired our bikes and Andrew had a good chat with them while I charged my phone inside the restaurant. I had to run outside to photobomb the picture they took 😉😂 – very friendly people in this part of Argentina🤗 We then had another 103km to go and that took almost two hours through some slow parts with lots of traffic lights snd crazy local traffic with small scooters and motorcycles mostly without lights and nobody wearing helmets passing on both sides between traffic at fast speed often with 2-3 people on the scooters. We somehow made it on dark to the city centre and to our hotel. We parked on the driveway and I went to reception – they gave us instructions to get into the parking garage – we rode onto a lift platform which went down two levels and we had to reverse our bikes off the platform and into a parking spot. We then checked into our room, got things off the bikes, got changed, made a reservation on the 12th floor for dinner and walked to the church and main plaza to take pictures of the amazing cathedral and the municipal palace. The cathedral was not open to go inside and we returned to our hotel and had dinner on the roof top terrace restaurant. We celebrated that we made it there through crazy traffic and that we had now travelled over 11,000km and Andrew’s bike ticked over 50,000 km – that is a lot of saddle sore on a stock standard DR seat 👍🤗🏍🏍