Viedma y Carmen de Patagones

After a very warm night in Bahia Blanca, I took the bus to Viedma and arrived there before 5, re-assembled my bike while talking to an old man in the bus station and went looking for the "Camping Municipal".

As soon as I arrived there, two men in their late 40s approached me and started asking lots of questions and making comments about my equipment and my bike.

They were brothers (or "brothers"....) and were travelling by bicycle too, they told me they were artesans and were selling their ear-rings, bracelets and necklaces wherever they went.

The older one told me he had been travelling for 10 months on his own through Brasil and Uruguay and now he had joined his brother for the high season in Patagonia, they said they were going to cycle to Las Grutas on Boxing Day and asked me if I wanted to joined them.

They would have cycled along the Ruta 3 from Viedma, passing San Antonio del Oeste to arrive in the seaside resort after 190 km on a paved route, stopping at the side of the road to camp.

I asked them about going through the "Camino de la Costa", a much more interesting route along the coast with beatiful beaches and a couple of small villages where to stop for the night, and get water and food, but they said it would have been a stupid thing to do as the road was unpaved.

I seriously thought about joining them, even though it would have meant staying in Viedma for 10 days because it could have been a great adventure to share the journey with two experienced guys who knew what to do and where to go....I mean, these guys were real adventurers, hunting for food with their slingshots (and catching a pigeon....)

The camping was right on the Rio Negro and was cheap, quiet and I soon made friends with everyone there, I spent two days in Viedma, swam in the river, visited the nice centre and the next town of Carmen de Patagones and had lots of parrillas....

Carmen de Patagones is just across the river but belongs to the province of Buenos Aires and is in a different time zone, as I learnt three days after I had been in the province of Rio Negro when a guy told me I should put the clock one hour backwards.