The fundamental problem with going to Tierra del Fuego, of course, was that somehow I had to get back from it. This left me in a pickle, as I hate to backtrack – especially considering how punishing Ruta 40 had been to El Jefe’s suspension.

But then I thought – this has been a trip of Extremes. The Highest-Altitude Geyser. The Southernmost City. The Driest Desert. So why not go for a new Extreme? Let’s call it the Dullest Fucking Drive in History.

<rant>
The kindly souls in the Argentinean Highway Department have recognized that tourists and civilians can’t get by on gravel alone, and have built what is by any standard a very impressive, well-maintained, utterly toll-free highway running along the eastern coast of  Patagonia, from Rio Gallegos to up, up and away. This is good.

The bad side is that in doing so, they have somehow managed to create a 2000-km stretch of highway containing absolutely zero of interest. Barren steppes? Check. Grey, industrial oil cities? Check. Cargo containers? Oh, you better believe it. I’ve come up with a general Argentinean Tourism Corollary, which holds that the proportion of Cool Shit (e.g. exotic wildlife, remote mountain villages, national parks full of undisturbed wilderness) is inversely proportional to How Easy It Is To Get There (presence v. absence of asphalt, a second lane, signs, connecting bridges, etc.).

Sure, there are a few outliers, like Iguazu Falls, where overwhelming tourist demand has clearly forced the hand of unwilling civil engineers and the all-powerful Argentinean Highway-Paver’s Union. But otherwise? The Corollary holds: if your car and your ass aren’t suffering, you’re probably not going anywhere particularly worthwhile. In defense of the highway system, there is a lot of – constructive – roadwork going on, including a great deal of paving. It remains to be seen whether this improved access will undermine the above Corollary, or whether the thusly-linked destinations will somehow become much less awesome (e.g., all the tapirs and toucans pack up and move to the top of a glacier somewhere). We’ll wait and see.

But getting back to the point. Do you know how bad this segment of the trip was? I didn’t take a single picture for almost 36h. I’ve been known to take my camera into restaurant bathrooms and doctor’s waiting rooms, for fuck’s sake, and I still couldn’t find anything to photograph between Rio Gallegos and Comodoro Rivadavia, so you just know it had to be dull as dishwater.

CR wasn’t the end of the drive, of course – it’s just that here I was treated to the briefest glimpse of ocean, as a reminder that the world hadn’t been entirely reduced to dry brown shrubbery.

Seriously - this almost brought a tear of joy to my dust-covered eye...

And it also featured an odd celebration of that most unsung of heroes – the oilman.

Having clear-cut North America's forests, Paul Bunyan turned his steely eye toward our southern neighbor's hidden treasure: Black Gold!

But CR was just a waypoint, followed by another 500km of scrub-nestled highway. So I drove… and drove… and drove…

There aren’t really any roadside diners in this part of the world – Shoney’s hasn’t quite caught on down here – so my lunches these days have consisted of whatever the last gas station was selling.

The Ruta 3 Special: Two types of crackers, washed down with a Coke. Now that's livin'!

If you look closely in the above picture, you can also observe the thin layer of roadgrit covering my dashboard, as my truck and its contents (including me) are currently dustier than Tom Joad’s underpants.

I was subjected to additional suffering on this leg through the perfidy of my electronic devices. The cigarette lighter in my truck is busted, so I can’t use my little iPod radio-tuning device, but I was getting by just fine with my headphones. Then they broke, with a mysteriously frayed cable – possibly chewed by dust-mites. So now I’m stuck at the tender mercies of whatever English-language radio I can find when I pass by the far-flung urban areas in these parts, and my standards have FALLEN.

Now I find myself grateful for things that would, in better times, have driven me to hammer a pencil into my ear. (e.g., “Journey marathon? Awesome!”) And I find myself with ample opportunity to muse on things that shouldn’t need to be mused on. For example, did you know that someone, somewhere, for some reason recorded a wussier and more vanilla cover version of “Don’t Dream It’s Over“? I struggled for hours over who perpetrated that and why.  And did “Somebody’s Watching Me” always end with about three minutes of Michael Jackson doing the heavy vocal lifting (including “eee-hee”s) while Rockwell spits out nonsense like “I can’t enjoy my tea”? I don’t remember that – but then again, maybe I was just  too busy being weirded out by the video.

When I caught myself singing along to “Heaven is a Place on Earth”, I knew I’d succumbed to some sort of musical Stockholm Syndrome – identifying with and even developing affection for my tormentors. A line had to be drawn, and thankfully it was right around this time that I once again found myself surrounded with lots of Pretty Shiny Things to distract me. And so, let me move onto happier subjects…
</rant>