Ive spent the last couple of days making my way north from BA to the "very top" of the country.
It started out as the rather uninspiring agricultural vastness of the Pampas...Its all crops and cattle, and at the moment its the end of summer and that means harvest!
... And everyone is busy driving big trucks laden with grain, or tractors towing machinery, or huge harvesters either in the fields or on the highways as they move from field to field... Actually, the harvesters are quite fun. They are huge multi-moduled boxes with a cockpit on tractor wheels, and you can get them in any colour you want (each colour being specific to a different manufacturer!).
... There was one night there where I camped just outside the front gate of a farm because it was flat and clear and Id run out of daylight (and my lights were not working on the bike). Anyway, Id set up camp and it was now fully dark so I settled in to go to sleep...
But, right on queue: A big tractor rolls up at the gate from the direction of the farm... Its towing a big boxy trailer of some sort, but it just sits there idling in the dark with its lights on, and does nothing... for about half an hour!...
And then a second one shows up and does the same thing?...
But a few minutes later a big double-trailer truck arrives off the highway and a bunch of action then ensues as the trailers power up their built-in augers and disgorge their bellys full of fresh yellow grain into the truck trailers. The whole show was conducted under flood-lights from the big noisy machinery, and it took about an hour to get it all done... And then they all dispersed in the directions they came from and disappeared...
... And again, I was not disturbed or talked to at all! (Its getting to be a bit of a theme!)
Anyway, from the farms all busy with harvest, the country slowly changed to be more livestock based, and what were occasional rows of wind sheltering poplars, it slowly became large blocks of trees... Silviculture!
And lots of it! It seems that they have really "cottoned on" to the idea of growing trees for profit down here in Argentina... And they did it quite a while ago too by the look of it. There are lots and lots of large acreages of well developed tree farms. Id guess at some being fourty or fifty years old and most being about twenty years old. There are large areas of Eucalyptus (at least two or three varieties) and it reminds me of Australia. But there are also lots of Pine trees and a couple of other sorts that I dont recognise too.
And they are actively harvesting some of the older blocks of trees too... It seems that the local economy is quite dependent on "forestry" (that word is usually just a euphemism for logging as far as I can tell!) and rather than just log native forests and do a "token" effort of re-forestation by randomly planting a seedling and leaving the rest to nature while they move on to log some other block of natural mature trees!: Rather, they have really taken action on renewing the resource with these huge lots of trees planted in very neat rows (I guess nature still does most of the work though)... Its good to see in my opinion :)
... Id have to say its the most developed area of Silviculture that I have ever seen!
And then as Ive come even further North, the country has become more hilly and the earth has turned the deepest of rust-reds... They call it locally "Tierra Colorada" (coloured earth) and it really is.
The colour is everywhere... It stains anything that moves over it including the vehicles, the rivers and the road its self... The red of the earth seems all the richer by the contrast of the increasingly green and tropical vegetation and the neatly "mown" rows of bright green hedges from all the tea plantations... Yes they grow tea here and lots of it, to support the local taste for yerber mate... The locals are all "fiends" for it and you barely ever see anyone without one of the little mugs full of the stuff with the little metal filter/straw sticking out of it and a thermos of hot water under their arm (for topping up the liquid in the brew).
Yes, Im back in the "heat and sweat" of tropical travel even though Im not quite officially in the tropics yet.
So, once again Im riding along through hilly green country in the heat...
Headed North!
Im going to go see Iguazu falls before I head back toward the West in the direction I came from :))
