31st January 2015 – El Chalten to Perito Moreno

Today is a transit day to Perito Moreno (the town not the glacier) driving approximately 590 km through the extremely windy desert of Santa Cruz. We traveled on approximately 100 km of good dirt road and it wasn’t too dusty. We needed to keep both hands on the steering wheel to keep the car on the road and the wind noise in the GT was so loud we could hardly hear the music when it was turned up full. We did have the quarter vent windows open for some fresh air as it was quite warm. The weather is starting to warm up as we drive north, it’s back to t-shirts and shorter pants again after rugging up down south.  At one stage we had such a strong tail wind that we were doing 105kph with virtually no throttle. The vacuum gauge is on idle and speedo shows 80mph (it’s not calibrated to the 5 speed box) which is 105kph on the GPS.We had quite a few stops apart from our regular morning tea and lunch stops, blue B had some fuel issues and wasn’t running well. Also we were flagged down by a distressed lady and as it turned out her car had skidded off the road and rolled twice and a passenger was thrown out. We were the first ones on the scene and rendered any assistance we could the language barrier was a problem. Lots of other motorists stopped including a German doctor who took over looking after the injured man. This accident happened in the middle of nowhere about 1 hour from the nearest town so hopefully they got an ambulance to the site. Even though no one had phone service a local was able to make a call to emergency once Michael showed them how!At one of our stops we saw an armadillo trying to cross the road but it got confused with all the cameras pointing at it and ran back into the scrub.We arrived at our hotel just after 6pm after an 8am start so it has been a long day.