Olavarria

4th November 2025

After a great night with friends last night, we were up and ready to go onto the next stage. These first few days travelling across the farmland of Buenos Aires State were not expected to be exciting, and more of a something we have to do to get the the more interesting places further south. However, there is something fascinating about travelling across a completely flat landscape for hour after hour, with nothing but fields with herds of cattle being tended to by Gauchos, the real traditional cowboys of South America. This land is vast, we have been moving across it for two days already and we have another day of the same tomorrow. The beauty of this is that all the land is not cultivated as we would find in Europe, many areas are left wild and this enables the wildlife to thrive. There are multiple types of birds in endless numbers, Capyburas in the roadside wetlands, and deer.

We met with some Gauchos herding the beef, very impressive men in tradition clothing with the famous berets. It was a great experience.

We carried on on some pretty bad roads, these are used by heavy trucks and not repaired so they feature a high ridge line than runs down the centre of the road. On a motorbike, these can surprise you when you least expect it as they can throw you to the left or the right with a large wobble.. usually followed by an expletive in the headset !

Around lunchtime we found a roadside stand selling hot beef in bread, so we stopped to partake. This was not your usual roadside burger van, but beef from a local farm grilled and served in bread with chimichurri. both of us were very made up with our truck stop lunch.

Carrying on we arrived into the town of Oliviarra, this town is the center of the local agriculture industry as well as being important in terms of limestone mining and cement production.

Lodging in this town was somewhat sparce but we found a motor racing theme hotel, and I got the Ayrton Senna Suite ! Very basic but covered in photos and murals of Senna. Tim , we think , got the honeymoon suite as he had a massive waterbed, we can only imagine whats gone on in that room, so he has his first experience of using his silk travel sheet.. so as not to touch anything.

We found a place to eat something and drink a beer, but the waiter told us there was a storm coming and as he said it, the sky turned very black, we made a hasty retreat to the hotel before all hell broke loose and the water came and flooded all the streets with wind enough to blow our balcony furniture away. It also dropped the temperatures by 10c almost instantly.