We decided that this morning we would take a slight detour to Cueva De Las Manos a local archeological site with 9000 year old cave paintings. The turn off from Ruto 40 coincided precisely with the end of the Ruta 40 pavement and involved 22 kms of some very rough road to a wind swept parking lot on the cliff tops overlooking the valley of the Rio Pinturos. From the parking lot a very rough walking track led down into the valley and up the other side to the entrance station of the caves. To view the paintings we had to go on a free conducted tour which was fabulous. The guides English was just good enough for us to get some of the facts about the paintings, almost entirely of the human hand, and mostly left hands.

It's hard to imagine people living in this place 10,000 years ago.

The road to and from the parking area gave us an additional treat, we saw many Guanacos and saw from a distance our first Choique or Nandu - an emu/ostrich like flightless bird.

Finally back on Ruta 40 we got to experience a little of the conditions that we have been hearing about from other travelers for 6 months. Ruta 40 is infamous as a long long very rough dirt road that runs the full length of Western Argentina from the Bolivian border. The road was rough with deep corrugations (wash boards), deep piles of gravel between the wheel tracks and dust, dust and more dust. Matters were made worse by the fact that for all of this afternoons travel we paralleled and occasionally crossed a new segment of road being constructed and sealed. But the gravel trucks servicing that effort traveled on the old Ruta 40.