The longest days on the Ruta 40 are not always the ones with the most kilometres. Today is measured differently — by the deepening quiet of the steppe, by the slow disappearance of the last structures on the horizon, and by the particular sensation of arriving somewhere so remote that the word "town" barely applies. By late afternoon you will be on the shore of a lake that almost nobody visits and almost everyone who does remembers for the rest of their lives.
North on the 40
The day begins at 9:00 am from Gobernador Gregores, fuelling at the YPF before heading out — the next confirmed fuel is Bajo Caracoles, some 230 kilometres north, and the one after that is further still. The Ruta 40 leaving Gregores is fully paved and arrow-straight, running across the meseta with little to interrupt the eye: coirón grass, basalt outcrops, the occasional guanaco pausing at the road's edge before deciding, at the last moment, to hold its ground. The plateau landscape is vast in the way that only the Patagonian interior manages — not dramatic, exactly, but so uniformly immense that it becomes a kind of pressure. The wind is a constant companion. Choiques pick their way through the scrub alongside the road; condors work the thermals above the escarpments to the west. This is the road that, for most of the twentieth century, existed only as gravel, and even now, freshly paved, it carries the character of a crossing rather than a route.