Ruta 12, Chubut: Where cowboys and Indians join for High Tea

This is just a story. A story of how cowboys and Indians nearly ended up at high tea.
This is a story, but one embedded in unimaginable landscapes and the beautiful reality of tea time.

Have you ever heard of Gaiman? I suppose not. I hadn’t.
It’s a tiny little town, a village maybe? In the northeast of Patagonia, hiding in the Chubut Province of Argentina, and the main centre of the Welsh settlement in the country.
More importantly, they have high tea.
And not that wishy-washy kind of high tea, oh no, the proper type for ladies and lads.
Or motorcycle travellers, like us.
And cowboys and Indians, apparently.

How the hell did I get all this mixed up?
Well, that’s a rather good question. It has everything to do with Ruta 12, a little outside Gaiman. Three hundred and twenty-three kilometres to the east, to be exact, but in Argentinian Patagonia, you quickly realise how relative distance is.

Once you turn right, leaving the main road, the wild west appears on the horizon. Bouldery canyons. Yellow grass. No trees. Sand dunes. And cowboys galloping alongside their herd of horses.
We chose this road as a shortcut from high tea to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s cabin, but this was not at all what we were expecting.

This is the kind of landscape where you half expect to spot ox wagons trailed by Indians, where bow and arrow are still king, and the horse remains man’s best friend.

People living here have energy throughout the day, but at night the world turns pitch-black — like in the olden days.
I suppose you’re thinking of solar energy, right?
Oh no, baby. It’s the town’s diesel generator that keeps everything going day after day. It even pumps up the water that flows from the taps. Sometimes it dies for days on end, throwing people back in time hundreds of years — to a time when people had to work for every tiny thing they had in life.

The Indians roaming the plains here might only roam in spirit, but the cowboys most certainly are real.
In the evening, a herd of horses gallops into the settlement of Cerro Condor, cowboys with whips in hand trailing behind. The air is dusty, yet refreshingly clean. People are peaceful.

Once the diesel generator seizes, nights are utterly silent. Not the city kind of silent, but the kind that echoes in your ears, broken only by the crickets’ song.

This is the wild west for you.
And maybe it hasn’t changed much throughout time at all.
The foreign and the rich get their delicious high tea, while the poor get hard work in an endlessly beautiful landscape the rich will never truly understand.