Saturday, 23rd January, Cordoba: Authentic Argentinian parilla
We drive all day from Simoca to Cordoba. The day is blindingly hot: 39′c. We’re with Ale’ and later British Mike and his girlfriend, Lidy on their rented Transalp cross our paths and we end up in convoy. All good. The driving is long and flat, but the sun shines with gusto and the heat feels Southern European.
Ale’, Mike (Clear) and I have organised to meet up with our biker friend, Sergio. Ale was with him when we met them both in El Alto, outside La Paz, and we all travelled together for a few days on the way out of Bolivia. Sergio, who is an architect in Cordoba, had promised us a true Argentinian parilla (BBQ) at his place.
We arranged to meet Sergio just off the city’s huge periferico so that he could lead us to his house. There he was, leaning against his car, looking so urban, so un-biker, so unlike the man who had left us a week before on his 650, dressed in black bikegear. Here he was a normal person, in his normal car. Virtually unrecognisable.
Allow me to digress for a minute here. When Mike and I knew that we were going to do this trip, we went along to a long distance motorbike talk at the biker hangout, the Ace Cafe in Park Royal, northwest London. We decided to go by car as it was rainy and potentially icy, so turned up in my grandmother’s purple Corolla wearing normal clothes, to be greeted by a SEA of motorbikes and people clad in leather. I have never been so intimidated in my life. I thought we were going to be killed. I felt so out of place, I hated every minute of it. It reminded me of how i felt for 2 years with braces.
But the thing that I didn’t know then that I know now is that bikers are part of the one of the kindest, more community-minded groups that I have ever been lucky enough to be part of. Bikers wave to each other when driving, bikers greet each other in petrol stations, bikers talk to other bikers in restaurants and on the street. Like JOrge in Santa Cruz who saw us on telly and came to find us to invite us to have dinner with 30 bikers who’d love to know our story, bikers love to exchange tales.
Dr Helen Fisher (who is the key to this whole mad adventure of ours – she did the original brainscans with neurologist Dr Lucy Brown) has this theory that there are four types of human beings: explorers, builders, negotiators and directors. She uses that to calculate compatibility in romantic relationships, and one of her findings is that explorers can only date explorers – they have both to have that hunger for new experiences (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Fisher_(anthropologist).
Well, bikers are kind of the same too.
Everyone who has done any kind of distance biking (that can range from a weeklong road trip away to round the world twice, etc) The kind of person who is prepared to drop everything and set off into the horizon is the kind of person who is going to get on well with someone else you is also prepared to do the same. All along the route, we have ended up gathering bikers, becoming part of bigger groups which then disperse as people go their own ways at their own speeds, but friendships are made, advice is given, and it’s generally totally wonderful – an honour even – to be part of this community. They’re not intimidating at all.
That’s just the leather…
So, back to Cordoba. We get to Sergio’s house and he is obviously a man who knows how to parilla. He has two fires going, one is laden will burning hot coals, the other is lower and awaiting action. Which he quickly provides in the form of a mountain of meat. We spend a wonderful evening eating our body weight in meat and generally being smutty in our basic but adequate Spanish.
