We had breakfast after I talked to my Darling daughter who already had sent me a Happy Mother’s Day message 🤗. Breakfast was nice and we ordered eggs and avocado separately.

We lubed our chains and left one of our stickers on the hotel, before heading off to Machagai where we had booked a private holiday house with pool through booking.com. We had to put all the layers on we had accessible as the temperature had dropped to a maximum of 14 degrees and there was a strong cold wind blowing all day. We fuelled up on the outskirts of Itá Ibaté and then road 180 km before fuelling up again and having lunch. We managed to get through the town of Corrientes without being fined for using the main road where motorcycles are apparently not allowed – luckily Bruno from Brazil had told us all about it and following his instructions we avoided the fine. Shortly after crossing the Río Paraná which was very brown we passed the exit to Puerto Tirol which had a violine statue at the town entrance. We were now in the province of Chaco and the roads were in terrible condition – there were large potholes and trucks swerved across the two lanes to avoid them. Two dogs chased me and one almost ran into my front wheel at 100km/hr 😳 Then a large bird of prey took off in front of me and I had to break hard to avoid being hit 🦅 . There were also at least three other times where we had to break hard to avoid a front on collision with cars overtaking. Apart from that it was mostly straight roads through flooded wetlands and we saw Maguari storks (Ciconia maguari), and the “road runner birds” (Red-legged Seriema – Cariama cristata) and herons and many Crested Caracaras (Caracara plancus).

During our lunch break, we checked for messages about the accommodation and had not received anything – we tried their phone number on WhatsApp and messaged to confirm our booking and their address. We also saw two other motorcycles each with two-up arrive- a BMW GS800 and a Honda Africa Twin 1000. There were 3 women and one guy but we did not talk to them. When we arrived at the place where the accommodation was supposed to be there were only furniture stores and we stopped at the side of the road and had a message saying that the accommodation is currently not available – no kidding it did not look it was even built yet 😂 second time something was listed and confirmed on booking.com but was not available. We found another hotel down the road and managed to get a room that looked like it was from the 1950ies with mothball smell and a very mouldy bathroom – but the bikes were parked under cover and we had a bed for the night. There was apparently a restaurant and the wifi was good and the heater worked. We spent the rest of the afternoon trying to find accommodation on booking.com for the next day without any luck🥺

We had dinner at the restaurant and the 4 riders we had seen at the petrol station were also there and asked us to join them on their table for dinner. They were from Paraguay and the woman riding the BMW was Cristi- she spoke English and we exchanged the baton on WRWR 👍🤗 We had a great evening and Cristi’s bike had issues with her ABS sensor and she had decided to return the next day to Paraguay and get her car to continue on the trip with her friends – it was a 800km day for her the next day with very cold temperatures in the morning.