We made breakfast in the room and I finally managed a long overdue video chat with my son and his wife – young people are so busy and hard to get a hold of 😂 and then had to rush to get out of the place by 11:00am. At the first intersection turning left back onto the main road, we stopped at a red traffic light. A scooter with a guy snd a school aged child on it, came flying past us and ran the red traffic light turning left across two lanes of traffic and looking back at us as to question why we idiots stopped at a red traffic light 😳😂. We rode through town and fuelled up and rode towards San Gregorio de Polanco where we wanted to camp on the Río Negro for two nights but we had not been able to book a site.

We initially continued North on Ruta 5 and it was cloudy and we could see the rain ahead. We passed several slow logging trucks with double trailers. It started sprinkling and we pulled over and put our wet weather jackets on and continued. The rain showers caught us several times but it did not last long before the sun came out between the clouds. We turned East onto Ruta 43 and this smaller road was in perfect condition with great bitumen and nice open corners. We saw large plantations of very straight tall tees and piles of tree trunks and areas of freshly planted trees – I later looked it up and they were indeed Australian eucalypts (Eucalyptus grandis) that are farmed here by a Finnish company – I found a very interesting YouTube documentary on this for those interested in science and land exploitation which is worth watching and will tell you what that big facility was we saw in Paso de los Toros 😉👍

https://youtu.be/_cndkF7bX3M

When we arrived at the campground which was in a pine forest, we chose a nice spot and realised that the toilets and showers were locked for the season but a bit of a walk away was a public toilet that was open and clean but no toilet seats in the female toilets 😂.

We talked to other people at the campground and were told it was feee to camp 👍🏕️🤗. We set up our tent near a table and electricity outlet on a tree – and the power was on and the flood lights came on at night. We took some sunset pictures and then waited out the thunderstorm and rain in our tent. When it was dark and time for dinner, we realised that our gas cartridge was almost empty 🥺 so we decided to go for dinner at the local restaurant and we had locally caught catfish which was very tasty and we drank most of a bottle of Chilean Carmenere red wine (we had first heard about this wine in Traiguén). We settled into our cozy tent and listened to the frog concert – there were at least 2 different frog species calling including the Montevideo Tree Frog (Boana pulchella) and the Dwarf Tree Frog (Dendropsophus nanus).

The next morning, we had a video call with Andrew’s family and then after breakfast, Andrew had some stomach pains and we started to go for a walk along the North-Eastern side of the peninsula which is also called the golden peninsula, but we stopped and had a lie down on the blanket for a while and Andrew decided to go back to the tent. I wanted to explore and walk to the end of the peninsula and headed that way with my binoculars and blanket with me hoping I would find a spot to go for a swim and relax on the beach in the sun. The South-West side was very windy with gusts up to 40km/hr so I walked on the North-East side past some cows grazing and saw lots of birds including Great egrets (Ardea alba egretta), Black necked swans (Cygnus melancoryphus), spot-winged pigeons (Patagioenas maculosa), monk parakeets (Myiopsitta monachus), buff- necked ibis (Theristicus caudatus), and Southern lapwings (Vanellus chilensis).

I had almost made it to the end of the peninsula, when I saw sand being blown over the dunes from the other side of the island – I decided to take a short cut across the dunes to the other side and look for a suitable spot to swim. I had just made it up to almost the crest of the dune, far enough that I had a view over to the other side, when I felt intense pain on my left heel- thinking that there may be an ant or something biting me, I stopped trying to take my sandal off when an even worse pain started on the other heel – almost panicking thinking that I may be standing in some ant nest and being attacked by insects and not thinking clearly from the intense pain, I looked at my sandals and saw them completely covered in black wooden “bindis” – so it was plants not insects attacking me 😂 – what a relief 😂 – so I tried to pull the two that had gone between the fabric of the sandals deep into my feet out without shifting my feet in the deep sand and getting any more into my feet – I got one out but it got stuck in my fingers and the spines broke off staying behind in my index finger and thumb- I stood up to assess the situation I had gotten myself into as I needed to walk back the stretch I came from, through the sand covered in these plants😳 – there were more on the other side and no path and no good spot for a swim and the wind was howling so strong it was hard to stand up- I took some pictures, put the picnic blanket down and stood on it and pulled out the other bindi from my other heel and it bled quite a bit – then I carefully tried to remove all bindis from each shoe – got more stuck in my fingers but continued until all were removed. Then I put the shoes back on, and put the blanket in front of me, walked two steps, tried to find a spot in the sand to stand without any bindis to retrieve the blanket and continue putting the blanket down to walk on, but as I picked the blanket up the wind was so strong, I could not get it back on the ground and it was covered in bindis, so I walked on my tippy toes trying to avoid any further spikes in my shoes and feet until I was out of that section and back on the grass. Then I walked a bit further out of the wind and assessed the injuries, cleaned all bindis off the shoes again and then tried to get all bindis off the blanket – there were hundreds of them on both sides – I tried to flick them off with a wooden stick and tore several holes in the blanket 🥺🙁 so removing them one by one with my fingers was the only way to go – it took quite a while and I ended up a few more getting stuck in my fingers but I eventually had all of them out of the blanket and folded it up to carry it under my arm and made my way back – I crossed the peninsula to the windy side through a pine forest still hoping for a swimming spot and walked in 4- wheel drive tracks in deep sand for a while then crossed back to a track in the middle of the peninsula, walked past the second camping ground that was empty and shut for the winter season and continued on the middle section until I reached a fence which I could not get over🥺 – I had to backtrack and cross to the calm side of the peninsula and after the fence got back to the middle track only to be stopped by another fence which I climbed through and then continued the very last section on the sandy beach on the windy side in the late afternoon sun – I walked in the river which had white caps and the cold water was soothing on my injured feet after the initial stinging. 😉😂

I returned to the tent and according to my phone, I had hiked 10km and I needed to get out of the freezing wind and had a rest before we went back to the same restaurant for dinner. I put antiseptic cream on my feet and looked up what those prickly plants were – they are called Puncture Vine or Abrojo (Tribulus terrestris) and I also read up on first aid for how to deal with wounds from them – done all of the wrong things 😂 like use sterile tweezers to remove (not pick with your fingers and get more spikes under your skin 😂), keep wound clean (not walk in sand and wash in dirty Río negro 😂) bandage and seek medical attention – I put disinfectant cream and dirty socks on over night and finished the red wine in the tent 👍😉 and slept through the intense wind storm reaching 60km/hr and temperatures plummeting to zero degrees 🥶🏕️