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Ok, so before I start this blog entry I'm just going to apologise to our families, who are not going to like this one at all, and give you the opportunity to opt out of this next page of writing...
So we left Puerto Natales on a bus to Rio Gallegos, in the South of Argentina. Had a little confusion on our border crossing as to why they made us fill out arrival and departure sheets for Argentina, but then didnt stamp them or take the arrival one off us! But it seems to be ok as we've since left Argentina and had no problems! We arrived in Rio Gallegos and stayed the night with a couchsurfer, Rodrigo, who cooked us a huge meal of steak and sugar fried potatoes (my first ever steak, and I have to admit I quite liked it!) and shared several bottles of good Mendozian wine!
We were aware that the bus back up to Buenos Aires was going to be ridiculously expensive, and had been told that its perfectly acceptable and easy enough to hitchhike so we decided to give it a try. After some unsuccessful attempts at the nearby petrol station (everyone was going South!) we were saved by Rodrigo, who drove us to the police checkpoint out of town, where every truck has to stop. now in the knowledge that if we didn't find a ride we'd be stranded in the middle of nowhere we proceeded to ask every truck that stopped 'necesitamos ir a comodoro rivadavia, tu vas a alli?' until eventually someone said he was in fact going there and yes we could join him. Happy that we weren't going to spend the night at the side of the road we jumped into the truck.
The first journey was pretty good, the driver had a fold down bed and a sleeping bit underneath as well so i selpt on the fold down and ben slept underneath while the turcker drove, although I'm pretty sure the fold down bed is only for him when he's stopped, so rolling up and down and flying up everytime we went over a bump, whilst gripping onto the sides of the bed didn't present the best nights sleep of my life! Since we arrived at Comodoro at about 3am and it turned out our trucker was continuing northwards to Trelew, we decided to stick with him (I'm not sure how thrilled he was about this!) and travelled 18 hours in total up to Trelew.
Trelew is an old Welsh colony and in fact all we did there was a ridiculous wild goose chase following a neverending trail of signs to a Welsh tearoom, which turned out to only had one option, an 80 peso high tea, which was ridiculously expensive but as we'd walked 40 minutes to find the place we took it. This had to be the most disappointing tea of our lives, the plates of different cakes looked amazing, but were totally deceiving! What looked like chocolate was dulce con leche, what looked like fruit was wierd jelly stuff, what should have been biscuit was pastry... the lesson learnt was don't eat cakes in South America! We then got the bus to Puerto Madryn, famous for the whales, which we didn't see as they left in mid-december, and only had a not very nice, incredibly windy beach which we managed a couple of hours at.
Our second attempt at hitchhiking started out better, we got a taxi to a service station out of town, and pretty quickly found a guy going to Bahia Blanca, our next stop. This guy didn't have a fold down bed, but still the sleeping space behind the seats, which I took a turn sleeping in, then Ben. It was quite late by now and I was unsuccessfully trying to sleep in the passenger seat. The driver decided he would move our rucksacks from the end of the sleeping space onto the passenger seat and the I should share top and tail with Ben. This space was narrower than a single bed, and we were lying completely stright on our backs with no space. The driver then decided he was going to sleep too and lay across the two seats, next to me. Ben was appily asleep and I was totally freaked out by the driver who kept falling onto me in his sleep! I did not enjoy that one! He dropped us at Bahia Blanca in the morning, telling us he would be going to Buenos Aires that evening and if we gave him a call we could ride with him again.
So we were in a service station outside of Bahia Blanca, where the guide books told us there was nothing to do, with the prospect of paying a lot for a taxi to go into a city where there's nothing to then pay to come back to the service station, or staying in a service station all day... I sent out a plea on couchsurfing, 'anyone want to meet us for a drink' and we were saved by two marines! They picked us up from the station which was 30 minutes drive away, took us back to their flat, let us shower, bought us food for lunch, gave us a pack lunch to take away with us, gave us a driving tour of the city and then took us back to the service station! The kindness of strangers hey!
We tried to get back in touch with our trucker but he didn't know what time he was leaving so we decided just to find someone else, which was our big mistake and lead to the worse part of our trip... The guy was nice, and had a smaller truck, but still a sleeping area behind the seats which I happily slept in until he stopped the truck and told us something in Spanish about him needing to sleep and us going in the back. We weren't really sure what he meant but followed him to the back of the truck where he'd already put our bags... we got in and it was a metal container with a few wooden crates stacked up, we looked back and the trucker was shutting the door and telling us he'd be back in 4 hours, then locked it behind us!
We tried to make a bed on a wooden crate with our towels and sleeping bags but it was ridiculously uncomfotable and as the hours went on it got FREEZING COLD! Also there was no light so it was pitch black apart from our torch! I was curled up into the foetal position after about an hour and me and ben were huddled together to keep warm. When 4 hours passed I was ecstatically happy that we were soon to be let out, but it was not to be. 4 and a half hours passed, 5 hours, I started to imagine everything that could go wrong... what if he has a heart attack in his sl;eep and doesn't let us out? What if he wakes up and forgets we're there and drives off and we get crushed by the wooden crates? What if another truck crashes into us and the truck sets on fire and we die? What if the trucker actually IS trying to kidnap us, or murder us? I start to panic and discover I have a small amount of signal on my phone, but who could I call... and what would I say to them? 'We're in a white truck, somewhere 4 hours away from Bahia Blanca, on a laybay somewhere at the side of route 3....' nah we'd definately had it! 5 and a half hours went by, we looked to see if we had any tools that maybe we cut try and open the doors with... decided a plastic knife wouldn't do the trick! FINALLY, 6 hours later he let us out, I've never been so relieved!
He didn't, however, take us to Buenos Aires like he said, but to a random place 4 hours away, where we then were happy to get on a passing bus we saw, even if we had to pay first class! And although we got off at the wrong Buenos Aires stop ,in a bad part of town we discovered was 15km out of town, we got in a taxi and have never been so happy to arrive at a hostel, safe and alive! We will NOT be hitchhiking again!
- comments
hannah i told you it was a bad idea! i'm glad you didnt get kidnapped
PH LOVE IT
Sachin honestly, while that sounds terrible, you´ve convinced me that its possible to hike from pto madryn to buenos aires. i will be doing so tomorrow afternoon. as a single male, i should be at lesser risk, hopefully!