←valle de uco | | paso de los piuquenes→ Fri 4 Feb: ManzanoYaretas (24km, 1630m ascent) The Further on, the road crosses the main stream at the Puente el Salto where me make lunch and bask in the sun. We resume riding, passing the Scaravelli refuge at about 3100m. Close to our destination the road forks, with the left turn leading to Yaretas and the Portillo Argentino. The signpost gives 2km for Yaretas; the true distance is 1.4. There is a burnt-out bus on the way. Yaretas is a real, which I suppose means grazing ground. It is a flat meadow beneath an old terminal moraine at 3500m. We set up camp. Notes: the average gradient for the day is in excess of 7%; our average speed 4.8 km/h. We might have been able to arrange for the mules to meet us earlier and carry our luggage from Manzano. The mules appear in the morning as we clear up camp. We hadnt known how many we would get because we hadnt known how many we needed; we left it all to Don Rómulo. We were surprised and delighted by the magnificence of the train which rode in: 6 mules, 2 arrieros (muleteers Ernesto and Roberto) and a small dog with no name. (Tracey reckons that some of the mules were in fact ponies.) We hand the panniers to the arrieros for loading and wait for Don Rómulo to turn up as he has promised. He arrives in a jeep with a companion, perhaps his brother. We are used to muleteers walking with their beasts in the Himalayas, but that is not what happened here. Ernesto and Roberto had mules to ride and mules to carry the huge steaks they dined on and the cartons of wine they washed it down with. They made a cracking pace from the start, and we were never able to keep up with them. Don Rómulo drove to 3800m where the road becomes impassable to motors owing to a small washout. He waited for us there before turning back.
We The The All the way down there are views of the mountains bordering the valley: glaciated volcanoes, rocky buttresses, and even a yellowish conical peak. Near the bottom the path forks. The trail to the left follows the Tunuyán downstream; that to the right crosses a small tributary, climbs a shoulder giving excellent views, and drops down to the Refugio at 2850m. The refuge itself is unmanned but palatial. The furniture is basic but there are iron bedsteads and sponge matresses and food left behind by previous visitors. We make ourselves comfortable and pretend to find our pasta as appetising as the steaks the arrieros are barbecuing. Notes: we left Yaretas at 9.30 and arrived at Real de la Cruz at 17.30. Managing the bikes on the descent was made needlessly difficult by our having a complete set of tools in the panniers. It might have been useful to be able to replace an inner tube, but the rest of the tools could have been taken by the mules. I dont know where the path downstream leads to. Presumably there is some obstacle to following the Tunuyán valley down to the plains, otherwise there would be no need to attack the Portillo Argentino. Maybe it simply crosses the Andes slightly to the south at the Paso de las Nieves Negras. GPS readings
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