What a huge and diverse country this is!

All this flying around is showing me what a large and diverse country Argentina is,

Until this month, the only part of Argentina I’d spent any time in was far southern: around Calafate and Fitzroy (on the mainland, just over the border from Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park) and on the island of Tierra del Fuego. Down there, I go to know the damp coigue forest, the mountains and glaiciers, and th windswept pampa.

I flew up from Patagonia yesterday, getting some great views of the Andes between Santiago and Buenos Aires - very rugged and unpopulated, and surprisingly dry and unvegetated for such a temperate climate. The Andes here are very narrow, and the rest of the flight passed over a huge expanse of very flat and dry pampa.

This morning I caught a regional flight nortwestward. It started heading up the Rio de la Plata which, at the city of Buenos Aires, is said to the be the largest estuary in the world (32 km wide here according to my taxi driver). For an hour my flight headed upriver over an amazing landscape that seemed to be a massive swamp bisected by innumerable meandering river channels. There was cloud cover for the last half-hour of the flight before we touched down for a quick stop in Catamarca, a broad and flat river valley edged by crenulated cliffs with heavily vegetated incised valleys.

Then our plane was off again to La RIoja, where I disembarked to a flat and dry landscape planted with olive trees and grapes. Unusually for this region, there was a low overcast and a fine drizzle falling (this February has seen record-setting rainfall in many parts of Argentina). A 270 km drive (with thanks to the folks from Tourism La Rioja for my transport) through semi-desert took me to increasingly higher and more rugged country, finally ending up here at the very comfortable Hotel Pircas Negras in the small town of Villa Unión (alt. just over 1000 m), our race headquarters for the next 4 days.