The High Desert to Mendoza

We snake our way along Ruta 40 in constant awe of the landscape. 

The forest of tall, blooming cactus reduces to thorny Palo Verde, Mesquite, creosote bush and several species of ground cactus. 

We take a detour to Talampaya National Park. it looked to be a beautiful place of Sandstone canyons, petroglyphs and wind sculptures.  To our sad dismay, the only way into the park is on a concessionaires all-terrain bus. One cannot take a private vehicle nor camp within the park. We move on. 

In a quiet town we find more empty campsites and at one, a young Dutch couple sit at a picnic table. Our first fellow adventures encountered. Marcel and Ilka are about 30 years old and are on a one-year sabbatical. Marcel explained he’s a schoolteacher, and couldn’t get two weeks off around Christmas, but the school administrators would give him one year off. They purchased a four-door Volkswagen truck with a fold out, overland roof tent for €14,000 and shipped it over from Brussels.The campground was closed and we all bade our goodbyes as we each moved south. We promised to see them down the road.

Out of town we found a beautiful campsite in some sculpted sand stone formations. We excitedly began to set up camp and realized immediately we were completely surrounded by small flies that were immune to the 25 Kt. wind.The flies didn’t bite, but they were extraordinarily annoying. We decided to move down the road.  

After driving another hour we began looking for a place to pull off. It was big, expensive country with no traffic, no rural homesites and few places to leave the highway. This is in stark contrast to the public lands of the United States west, where there’s nothing but endless public access into the wilderness areas. We probed several turn-outs, which turned out to be nothing more then highway construction staging areas of past.

One delightful Road went deep into an arroyo. The trail sides were absolutely infested with a small ground cactus that had spines the size of chopsticks. We were able to find a clearing large enough to turn the camper around and set up. The flies were there too, as thick as the last prospective wild camp. I’ll spare further mention by saying right now these little flies were everywhere between Chilecito and San Juan, just north of Mendoza.  We might’ve stayed extra days in this stunning desert wilderness if not for these persistent and irritating flies.  They did not bite, mercifully, and then went away with the wind when the sun went down .  

It is hard to describe the perfect feeling of being alive sipping rich wine, snacking on the fruits, meats snd cheeses of the local land as we watch the sun go down in the Andes. The light playing perfectly on 360° of towering, twisted mountains while watching a thunderstorm in a valley far, far away and a couple thousand meters below us silently flash heat lightning. 

We were wild camping in the Andes off of Rutat 40. A perfect culmination of the dream.