December 13, 2018 – December 14, 2018
We had read about a restaurant in the town of Villa de Angostura that we wanted to visit, called Tinto Bistro. It is run by the brother of the Queen of Holland (Queen Maxima is originally from Argentina).
The restaurant was great. For starters we had trout wrapped in pastry and a veal and salmon tartar. For our main dish Derek ordered ribeye steak, and I had lamb. We also had beautiful sweet deserts. We also ordered a very nice bottle of Argentinian Syrah red wine from the lower end of a list that topped out in the Cdn$1000s. We’re pretty sure that in Canada, the wine alone would have cost more than the whole meal. This all, after having washed up and put on clean clothes in the camper in our stealth camping spot in a parking lot close to downtown….we do what we can.
The next morning, we were about to leave when a young man approached us, obviously checking out our license plate. “Are you from Alberta?”, he asked, with only a slight hint of an Argentinian accent. As it turns out, he spent something like 10 or 12 winters in a row living and backcountry skiing in the Kootenay Mountains of British Columbia. We talked about the mountains and skiing and about Canada. Then Derek realized that the other Dodge Ram in the parking lot belonged to our new friend (Maximilian). We haven’t seen many Dodges in Argentina, and Maximilian confirmed that they were rare here. We asked him about parts (as we were still having truck problems), and he told us that he imports all his parts from the US or from Canada. In Argentina there is a hefty tax on imported parts, but he had a friend that brings in containers full of equipment for his business, and he was often able to hide his parts in the container and so avoid paying the extra charges. Nice for him, not really any help for us.
Derek told Maximilian about our starting issues. Derek had just that morning read on the internet about the different grades of diesel available in Chile and Argentina. We had been paying for the higher grade diesel, and Derek was suspecting that this low sulphur fuel may actually be contributing to the starting issues. Max agreed, and said that we definitely wanted to be using the lower grade fuel for our older Cummins engine.
We said our goodbyes and headed straight to the gas station where we added a little more than half a tank of the lower grade fuel to our tank. At the fuel station, after filling, the truck still didn’t want to start well….but, the old fuel was probably still in the fuel line, the new fuel not having reached the engine yet. We drove on, both hoping that the different fuel was going to solve the starting issues…..we would see what happened when we prepared to leave our next camp, a lovely spot along a river.