November 7, 2025
El Bolson to Cholila
Even though I was up at 06.30, it is midday when I'm rolling. The internet is a wonderful thing and the hours slip away so quickly when your writing this. I didn't spend the whole morning online, though. I did some top-up food shopping at La Anomina, which requires a longish walk into town and back. And I walked around the hostel's large garden with its range of trees from the native Lenga to a Sycamore and a Beech. There is a couple of Tero Tero (Southern Lapwing) briskly walking in the grass, while the hostel dog looks on and keeps its distance.
The road south is busy and its lucky there is a wide gravel shoulder to ride upon. There are numerous hostels, cabins and camping-sites filling the spaces between the tree cover of the valley. Then further where the road climbs to a plateau, there are cheaply built houses with tin roofs in small plots, thin tree cover with blue and pink lupin lining every fence.
Soon an impressive deep valley opens up on the left and a sharp downhill follows to a small settlement called El Hoya. A kind of mini El Bolson with fruit growing in the imediate area around. Here, the time being 13.30, I stop at place doing take-away empanadas and buy 5 for lunch sat at a table outside.
A good part of the afternoon onward from La Hoya is spent climbing with a deep valley below on the right, passing another place called Epuyen, beyond which the countryside became more arid with bare scrubby hills. The road plateaus and Route 40 swings left while road 71 the way I plan going continues straight on.
There was little traffic on 71, so I rode on the tarmac road. There wasn't much of a shoulder anyway. By now I'm feeling parched as I hadn't drank anything since that lunchstop in La Hoya and it was now 18 hrs, so arriving at the gateway to a pine plantation, I pull in and leant the Kona against the fence to the side of the gate and boil up water for mate. I sat for a while resting, but didn't realise how long I'd been sitting until I checked the time while packing up to leave and saw that it was almost 19 hrs; a whole hour and it was still a way to go to anywhere with less than a couple of hours to nightfall.
I continued pass the end of the pine plantation on either side, opening up to fenced pasture, with a estancia and a large area looking like a dry lake bed dotted wirh red cattle to the left of the road. I could have at this point wild camped behind shrubs between the road and the fence, but there wasn't much of a view and besides, its nice to talk to people at the end of the day.
I press on pass another estancia farmhouse on a hillside backed by a stand of tall popular trees and over the hill to descend to a flat plain with the old cabin of Butch Cassidy on the right and a bit further a new road swings left to the village of Cholila, where I knew there is a hostel.
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I arrive at the hostel, a nice wood cabin in a large garden. The owner didn't do card payment so I had to pay 18 dollar, or £13.68 for a dorm bed, but as I'm the only person here it might as well be a room price. Back in the village centre I find a small restuarant with green interior and matching table cloths where I'd grill chicken and chips with a glass of red wine for £18.
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