Asleep at the Roadhouse(s)

August is a slow time of the year, when I start to think about returning to South America but am not really doing much about it. My wife María Laura, though, has been visiting family in Argentina and, this past weekend, I left the house for the roadhouse—that is, to Marin County’s Rancho Nicasio for the annual outdoor “barbecue on the lawn” performance by Asleep at the Wheel.

Asleep at the Wheel played Rancho Nicasio on Sunday, August 14th

In rural west Marin, but only 35 miles from my home in Oakland, the village of Nicasio feels remote from the rest of the metropolitan Bay Area. At one time, businessmen bargained for cattle and timber here, and Rancho Nicasio is a reminder of the roadhouse hotel—destroyed by fire in 1940—where they once stayed. Though I wouldn’t want to exaggerate the comparison, it also reminds me of the Patagonian roadhouses along Argentina’s legendary RN 40—the counterpart to Route 66 that Asleep always sings about (many other artists, of course, also perform this standard).

Bandleader Ray Benson's memoir

Over the years, my wife has embraced bandleader Ray Benson’s traditional western swing, though the band’s other personnel has changed over time (only Ray remains from the band I first saw at Berkeley’s legendary Longbranch Saloon in 1972). The band’s story is available in Benson’s memoir/autobiography Comin’ Right at Ya, which includes a period of residence in my longtime hometown.

Javier Jury of Ushuaia didn't arrive on his motorbike, but he did get to see Asleep at the Wheel at Rancho Nicasio.

We’ve even taken Argentine friends to enjoy the afternoon, such as my friend Javier Jury of Ushuaia’s Martín Fierro B&B, at the southern end of “La Cuarenta.” Most of the highway’s roadhouses, though, are on the thinly populated stretch between El Calafate (in the south) and the northern Santa Cruz province town of Perito Moreno (to the north)—a section of highway where, when I drove it in the early 1990s, I saw only four vehicles in three days. At that time it was almost entirely gravel, but now it’s nearly completely paved.

Hotel La Leona is probably the most visited of Patagonia's roadhouses.

Again, I don’t want to take the Rancho Nicasio comparison too far. After all, the roadhouses along “La Cuarenta” can’t offer western swing, but they are undergoing something of a renaissance—the riverside Hotel La Leona, for instance, has become a popular stop along the highway from El Calafate to Argentina’s “Trekking Capital” of El Chaltén. Farther north, west of Gobernador Gregores and near the turnoff to Parque Nacional Perito Moreno, the rejuvenated Hotel Las Horquetas is worth a stop or even an overnight.

Closed for many years, Hotel Las Horquetas has reopened to offer accommodations and food on one of the most remote segments of Patagonia's RN40.

Hotel El Olnie, sadly, is now closed.

Farther north, the Hotel El Olnie, now closed, offered the ambience of a place where gauchos once congregated for drinks. The granddaddy of them, all, though, is the Hotel Bajo Caracoles, close to the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Cueva de las Manos. At Bajo Caracoles, lines of southbound buses, cars and motorcycles often queue in hope that the weekly fuel supply will arrive—by the most direct route, it’s several hundred km to the next gas station, at Tres Lagos. Northbound vehicles can usually make it to the town of Perito Moreno.

Hotel Bajo Caracoles is a landmark roadhouse in northern Santa Cruz province.

Patagonia's Parallel Route: a Road-Trip Reminiscence

Patagonia’s a huge region – Argentina’s sector is about the size of Texas and Chile’s is roughly the same as Germany – which means that the region provides almost limitless opportunities for a road trip. I’ve written here often on Chile’s scenic Carretera Austral, but I’ve paid less attention recently to Argentina’s Ruta 40, which parallels the Chilean highway.

Connecting northernmost Argentina’s border with Bolivia to the southernmost tip of its continental territory, facing the open South Atlantic, Ruta 40 is a legendary highway – comparable to Route 66 in the United States. Many US musicians have covered the rhythm and blues standard “Route 66,” but Argentina’s Dylanesque singer-songwriter León Gieco has recorded a series of albums covering the geographical (and musical) distance from La Quiaca (in the north) to Ushuaia (in the south), with assistance from Oscar-winning composer Gustavo Santaolalla. Their musical route strayed from Ruta 40 at times, but always pointed in the right direction.

I have driven most (but not quite all) of Ruta 40, most memorably in in 1991, when my wife, a friend and I took four days in southern Patagonia to cover the distance between El Calafate and the more northerly town of Perito Moreno on what was then a precarious gravel road – though now it’s an almost entirely paved parallel to its Chilean counterpart. In a rattling 1969 Peugeot panel truck (pictured below) I got from my father-in-law, we covered some 500-plus kilometers in four days and saw a total of three other vehicles. En route, our transmission lost first and fourth gears, so we made most of the trip in second and third (eventually we were able to repair it in Bariloche).

Unlike the forested Chilean route, the Argentine side consists mostly of scrubby steppes which, however, in the words of Charles Darwin, were notable for “the free scope given to the imagination.” Many times I’ve crossed the “Big Sky Country” of Montana, but this was even “Bigger Sky Country.”

But there were individual sights to remember. One was a westward detour to the splendid isolation of Parque Nacional Perito Moreno (pictured above, not to be confused with the Perito Moreno Glacier), where we were the only visitors on the eastern front range of the Andes. Another was the desolate settlement of Bajo Caracoles, still home to the only gas station along the route and a landmark roadhouse hotel. Then there was the Cueva de las Manos - now a UNESCO World Heritage Site - for pre-Columbian paintings of human hands, wildlife and even abstract designs in the canyon of the Río de las Pinturas (pictured below).

In the ensuing years, I’ve driven this segment and more at least another dozen times. The road and its services are constantly improving – guest ranches and even restaurants are more common – but it’s the vast landscape that brings me back to an area that, to paraphrase Darwin, has taken “so firm a hold on my memory.”

There is also public transportation, at least in summer, from El Calafate and El Chaltén north to Los Antiguos (and beyond to Bariloche), with Chaltén Travel and Taqsa. At those destinations, and at several other locations, it’s possible to cross the border and continue the road trip on the Chilean side.

Adios, Telken

Over the past twenty years, I have driven Argentine Patagonia’s legendary Ruta 40 (“La Cuarenta”) about a dozen times, but until this week, I’ve always done so from south to north. Last week, though, I entered the country at Los Antiguos and drove south from the town of Perito Moreno to El Calafate, where I am presently staying with my cousin Elisa Rodríguez (a guide at Parque Nacional Los Glaciares) and her husband Sebastián Bruni (also a guide here and beyond the region).

La Cuarenta has changed dramatically over those two decades - when I first drove the route in 1991, with my wife María Laura and our friend Bruce Caplan, we took four days to cover the roughly 600 km (or perhaps I should say the rough 600 km, as it was all rocks and gravel) from El Calafate. We made detours to destinations such as Parque Nacional Perito Moreno and, in the course of the trip, we saw a grand total of three other vehicles.

Almost half the route is paved now, and work is proceeding quickly, and not so quickly, almost everywhere else. In the interim, there are washboard detours and one segment near Estancia La Angostura that will continue to provide a taste of the original as La Cuarenta is rerouted east to pass through Gobernador Gregores, which has gasoline and other services, including hotels and restaurants. In fact, despite the increased traffic - I saw hundreds of buses, cars and motorcycles, and a few bicycles en route - there seem to be fewer services on the original route than in past years.

Over the many years I’ve traveled throughout the region, one of the highlights has always been an overnight at Estancia Telken, a poplar-sheltered sheep ranch roughly midway between Perito Moreno and the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Cueva de las Manos. My hosts there have always been Coco and Petty Nauta, descendents of Dutch and New Zealand immigrants respectively, who also welcomed tourists to the ranch - in fact, they even welcomed backpackers and cyclists, for whom they set aside a grassy campground with an enclosed kitchen and hot showers.

It was the guests in the main house and adjacent cabañas, though, who got the real family treatment - evening meals were a communal celebration that recalled the days when it would never have occurred to Patagonian ranchers to ask any visitor for payment. Rather, you felt that they simply enjoyed having guests and you felt like their invitee.

Unfortunately, as they aged, Coco and Petty finally acknowledged they couldn’t continue the strenuous task of running a ranch, and sold the property two years ago to a family from Comodoro Rivadavia. Still active, the Nautas retain a smaller property just outside Perito Moreno, but they are no longer innkeepers.

After two seasons as absentee proprietors, Telken’s purchasers finally decided it should be a simple sheep ranch rather than a roadside inn - one of few along this newly paved segment of La Cuarenta. There are other estancias alongside the highway, but none of them can match Telken’s hospitality, and the sign still standing along the highway is a reminder of what’s been lost.

La Cuarenta: Argentina's Top Road Trip

From the Bolivian border near La Quiaca to its southern terminus near Río Gallegos, Ruta Nacional 40 is Argentina’s great unfinished interior highway. Some segments of “La Cuarenta,” in the central Cuyo provinces, are smoothly paved, while others in the Andean northwest are rough and rugged. None of those, though, enjoys the notoriety of the segment between the El Calafate junction and the town of Perito Moreno, on the cusp between the Patagonian steppe and the icy southern Andes.

Roughly parallel to Chile’s Carretera Austral, it may not be Argentina’s loneliest road - some of the dead-end routes that spin off it seem simply abandoned. But for Argentines and foreigners alike, it’s become the standard for adventurous driving and cycling, thanks to its secluded Andean lakes, isolated estancias (guest ranches), plentiful wildlife, and rare sights like the pre-Columbian rock art of Cueva de las Manos (Cave of Hands, pictured above). Even the advent of (infrequent) public transportation has not diminished its mystique.

As late as the early 1990s, it was possible to drive the southernmost stretch without seeing any other vehicles, and services were almost nil. Since then, traffic has not exactly burgeoned, but the summer season sees a small but steady procession of motorists, motorcyclists, and bicyclists. A selective bunch, at least, have absorbed Darwin’s insight that the appeal of the bleak Patagonian plains was “the free scope given to the imagination.”

It’s clearly not for everyone, though, and a trip up or down La Cuarenta requires planning. With accommodations and supplies few and far between, bicyclists and motorcyclists must carry tents and cold-weather gear, even in midsummer, and plenty of food. Detailed maps, like the Automóvil Club Argentino’s newest regional sheets, are essential. Preferably, automobiles should carry at least two spare tires.

Also carry extra fuel - between El Calafate and Perito Moreno, the only dependable supplies are at El Chaltén (a 90-km detour), Tres Lagos, Gobernador Gregores (a 70-km detour), and Bajo Caracoles (pictured here, it sometimes runs out). Some tourist estancias will sell gasoline to their clients or in an emergency, but don’t count on it.

Road hazards are numerous. Bicyclists and motorcyclists must contend with powerful Patagonian winds that can knock them down in an instant, and deep gravel adds to the danger. Even high-clearance vehicles are vulnerable to flipping on loose gravel, especially when braking suddenly, and 50-knot gusts make things worse. Though four-wheel drive is not essential, some drivers prefer it to avoid fishtailing on gravel.

Chipped, cracked, and even shattered windshields are par for the course on RN 40 and other graveled roads. Normally, rental-car insurance policies do not cover such damage, and replacements are expensive in Argentina (though fairly cheap in Punta Arenas, Chile). Approaching vehicles usually brake to minimize the possibility of such damage, but some drivers find they need to play chicken to slow down an onrushing pickup truck or SUV.

The big news is that within a few years, thanks to former Santa Cruz governor (later Argentine president) Néstor Kirchner, this segment of RN 40 will be entirely paved and may be rerouted to pass through Gobernador Gregores. Hearing that RN 40 will be paved evokes enough nostalgia for a tango, but there will remain plenty of unpaved gravel roads.

If driving or cycling doesn’t appeal to you, but you still want to see the loneliest highway, summer bus and minivan services now connect El Calafate and El Chaltén, at the south end, with Perito Moreno and Los Antiguos at the north end of the province, and with Bariloche. Unfortunately, the four-day overland safaris from Bariloche to El Calafate that used to overnight in Río Mayo (Chubut), Estancia Los Toldos (for Cueva de las Manos), and Estancia Menelik (for visits to Parque Nacional Perito Moreno, pictured here) have been suspended, at least for this season.