Valle Hermoso

I awoke the next morning feeling surprisingly chipper, despite the amount of alcohol I had consumed the day before. I guess a solid 14 hours’ sleep had worked wonders. Lee, on the other hand, had gone to bed later and also drunk some beers. He was feeling much worse for wear and spent most of the day sitting in his chair looking somewhat green.

After leaving the bodega, we had driven up into the foothills of the mountains a short way and the increase in altitude had resulted in a more pleasant temperature. The night had been cool and the hot sun the following day was made tolerable by the cooler air temperatures. While Lee suffered in his chair, I went for a nice afternoon stroll down the valley. We decided to stay one more night before heading a little further south.

We had planned to go back to Mendoza after our trip to the bodega, but our friends were in the area in their new 4x4 monster and we hadn’t seen them for over a year. They were staying in Valle Hermoso, a few hours south of us. We decided it was the perfect time to meet up and the following day we set off.

This is also the time to mention that we had just noticed the engine was smoking. As we drove to the bodega the previous day, I happened to glance in the wing mirror and saw a small cloud of blue smoke behind us. We hadn’t seen it again since though and I had taken my mind off it with copious amounts of wine. Now we set about leaving our small river spot and heading back down into the heat of the valley below.

The road to get here had been a slow and winding affair climbing up through the small towns, but now that we headed out directly to the main road it was a smooth, straight and quick descent, naturally meaning we used the engine to brake us as we went down, until we arrived in the town of Pareditas.

Our friends had told us that the road into the valley was no worse than the Laguna route and asked that we bring with us five bottles of wine. We planned to stay out there around a week or so, camping by the lake with them. Up until the last section it was supposedly a straight and boring drive, or at least it would have been if we had not now confirmed that our engine had a serious problem. As we pulled over outside Atomo supermarket to stock up on the required wine, I noticed that oil was dripping from the exhaust pipes. It seemed that our valve stem seals/piston rings were definitely leaking and we also bought some more oil here to top up what we had clearly lost.

Despite this being rather a downer, the engine was still running and driving well so we decided to continue on. It seemed that if we avoided engine braking then the issue wasn’t so bad and, as the road would now be a climb upwards into the mountains again, we hoped we wouldn’t burn too much. Not only was the engine burning oil, we also had a pretty good leak coming from the clutch.

Sensible people would have probably turned back, headed to a garage or at least a larger town, but us, we ploughed on towards the mountain road. We stopped in a nearby fuel station to top up and I once again bought some more oil after noticing the puddle we were leaving on the forecourt. Then we kept on driving and ignoring all our problems as we headed into the ski resort village of Las Leñas. Now out of season, we drove in the brilliant sun past lines of bare snow poles and into the completely closed-down town. After Las Leñas, the nice tarmac road stopped. Now we began to climb on a dirt track that zig-zagged sharply up the mountain, crossing small lumpy streams and turning into a single-file dirt track.

It didn’t take long for the engine to overheat and we had to pull over many times to let her cool as the ascent was mainly in first gear. Our oil level was probably still not high enough either, which undoubtedly didn’t help. Slowly, we crawled our way up, hoping that soon the air temperatures would cool and make the ascent easier.

Eventually the road levelled out and the air cooled. The last section we climbed steadily upwards, with views of the mountains opening up on all sides. Finally we reached the mirador, which marked the highest point of the drive. From here we looked out at the stunning valley below and then at the road that would take us there. Ascents are always about managing the engine temperature, now it was all about managing the brakes. With our new engine problem, we also needed to limit engine braking.

It was a steep descent. The road in places was dusty and slippery and in others gouged away by water that had poured down. It was rough and steep. We crawled down slowly, wondering just how we would get back up again. It seemed to take forever, but eventually, with the brakes still intact, it began to level out and we were down into the valley. We had made it all this way without any real incident, so it was particularly annoying that I managed to hit a huge rock on the final hundred metres and snapped our newly welded step clean off.

We pulled up next to our friends, somewhat stressed.

“You said it was an easy drive!” we accused them without even saying hello.

Matt looked slightly awkward while Cinta said, in a kind of no-nonsense way, “Well, you take your camper everywhere, we didn't think you'd have a problem!”

Still, there were no hard feelings. It probably had been an easy drive for them in the monster truck. They probably hadn’t noticed the huge holes in the road with tyres twice the size of ours and a rig with twice the clearance. Poor old Ruby had got us there though. We decided we’d definitely be staying a few days to make it worthwhile and straight away we sat in the remainder of the evening sun and broke out the new wine supply.

In previous years, the lakeside access had been unrestricted. Now, someone had put up a fence and it was no longer possible to access the lake unless you wanted to go and pay a lot of money for the ‘glamping’ site. It was still possible, however, to access the river and so the next day we made the most of the free water access to stock up our supplies and wash all the clothes. In the intense heat of the sun, with a good breeze, everything was dry in what seemed like minutes and we had to be careful not to burn ourselves. We hid in the shade of the side of the vans and for the most part just had a very good catch-up.

This would be the first and last time we would see them for a while no doubt, but I was sure we’d meet again in the future. We both had Ushuaia in our sights for the end of the year. It was nice that we weren’t the only slow people on the trip. Many friends we had made had already left the continent a while ago and so it was worth the detour to come and see some of the only people who were still here since we had first met them back in Panama when we shipped. Like all good friends, things slotted back into place and we chatted easily for hours.

There wasn’t too much else to do here other than enjoy each other’s company after all. However, we did go on a small hike one day, first to a waterfall just down the road and then looping back on ourselves to climb up to one of the highest points on the valley floor.

Up here are several petroglyphs, as well as an outstanding 360-degree panorama of the mountains.

In the backdrop, our two campers were just visible by the lake.

After several quiet nights and gorgeous sunny days, the wine was running out and it was time to head off. We were the first to leave, wanting to give ourselves time to get out of the valley. Instead of attempting the whole drive in one day, we decided we would camp on the road out once the steep climb was done. We topped up our engine coolant, which was running on the low side, before heading off late the next morning.

We turned on Ruby and watched the blue smoke cloud that now appeared every time we started the engine. Something was going to have to be done about that. Then we said a brief goodbye, as we planned to meet up with them the following day in the small town of Malargüe, and Ruby trundled off.

We didn’t make it too far up the hill before the engine temperature began to spike and I began to smell burning engine coolant.

“You did put the coolant cap back on, right?” I asked Lee.

A slight look of panic crossed his face, accompanied by the engine reaching a rather critical temperature. I stopped in the middle of the road in a less-than-ideal place while he went around the back. The coolant tank was boiling over, pouring its contents onto the exhaust, hence the smell. He had indeed forgotten to put the coolant cap on. While I had stopped before it did any damage, it did mean that not only had we lost a significant amount of our coolant, but we now most likely also had an airlock in the engine while we attempted to drive up a pretty tough dirt road. Luckily for him, the coolant cap was still sitting in the engine bay where he had left it and hadn’t fallen out. That would have been a problem on another level.

We topped the system back up with our drinking water and I made it a few metres up the road before the temperature peaked again. Airlock. We were also in the worst position to bleed it, the radiator being higher than the coolant tank on this steep incline. The only thing we could hope for was that the bumpiness of the road would help shift the air. We let it cool and tried again. The temperature spiked, held, then dropped. This is a good sign, normally meaning the air has been forced out and coolant has taken its place, leading to a rapid drop in temperature.

We have had much more persistent airlocks in the past. This definitely wasn’t the time for one of them. Even with the engine now back to where it should have been, the drive up was tough. One bend was so sharp and steep that I ended up having to use the clutch and starter motor to get us round it as the engine simply didn’t have enough power to move us that slowly on such a steep incline. We made it round though, much to the amusement of a line of horseback riders that had been slowly climbing up from the valley. They followed a steep track that simply linked together the end of each hairpin as it rose straight from the valley floor, while we zig-zagged back and forth. We stopped several times to cool the engine and by the time we reached the top, the horses had beaten us to it. Still, I was relieved to have made it out. From now on, it was all downhill.