Salta - Cafayate (Sept 17-21)

Salta was a pleasant city and we stayed 3 nights to get all the necessary things done- i.e washing clothes, blogging, bike maintenance, money exchange.




































I came across this bent rim along the road. I guess you could say it is 'cactus'.


And so is this wheel. This is Jude's Velocity rear rim with a nasty crack in the sidewall which I discovered this morning in the campground at Cafayate. I had 2 of these rims fail in Peru last year- same problem sidewall cracks. No more to say on this...
I will take a bus early tomorrow morning for Salta to have a new rim built for Jude's rear wheel. Hope I can find correct sized spokes for the Rohloff hub.

Postscript: I found a large bike warehouse in Salta and found an Argentinian-made rim with 32 holes and the same circumference as the Velocity Aeroheat. So, it was just a simple matter of replacing the rim without changing spokes. They had better quality rims (eg Mavic) but I wouldn´t be able to find DTSwiss spokes for the different size rim. I took it to a bike mechanic and he rebuilt the wheel for 18 pesos (or A$5), only waited an hour and he did a great job. It seems to be holding up OK and this route along Ruta 40 doesn´t have many dirt sections. When we cross over to Chile and La Carretera Austral we´ll hit a bit more...but our tough and rough ripio roads are behind us (famous last words!)