The Death Of Don Quixote

In only 10 minutes of drowned-rats impressions on the roadside we got a lift to Benito Juarez with a nice old trucker called Juan.

More guesswork Spanish with the help of Kev's dictionary meant we were proficient in family-talk - brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews and children.

Our next ride was unforgettable - Luka was driving an impossibly old red Mercedes truck pulling two empty livestock caravans.

The windscreen was chipped, cracked and coming loose to a degree I've only seen in Africa.

He was a young guy, but a proper country-bumpkin type, with a big-bellied laugh and a distinct lack of self-preservation.

As we crawled down the road at only seventy k.p.h. the cab veered wildly as he was gesticulating, pointing out roadside crops and brewing mate. (Mate is a herbal infusion with hot water very popular across Argentina and surrounds.)

He had a dash-mounted boiler, with a water reservoir for non-stop mate drinking, which took much more of his attention than driving.

The trailers bounced around as they fell off the tarmac onto the dirt verges, then tipped violently as Luka dodged oncoming traffic whose lane we were in.

I was glad there were no cattle back there.

Against all odds we made it to A.G. Chaves alive, and had learnt the Spanish for a few cereal crops and livestock on the way too.

After walking through town without catching a ride we found a nice little roadside wood to camp in - and finding no kindling to start off a fire used the damp pages of what was left of Kev's copy of Don Quixote, which I'm reliably informed is the first modern, canonical novel.

We went to sleep surrounded by small glow-worms blinking in the long grass.

Saturday, December 1, 2012

After a lazy morning spent trying to dry everything (still from the storm previously) it took a good few hours getting an unremarkable lift to Tres Arroyos with Jorge.

It was a long, drawn out town and took a long time to get to a reasonable hitching place on the southern exit.

There were barely any trucks passing, but plenty of pick-ups with loads of room - we cursed them and surmised that they must all be driven solely by xenophobic, inbred hicks.

We cooked up some rice in our tin cans (by this time it had become obvious that our usual camp-spots had enough standing wood to save us burning alcohol and just use the tin-can windbreak as a "hobo stove") and slept among some beautiful smelling strange nutty-fruity things in the grass all around us, with minimal pestering from local dogs.

Sunday, December 2, 2012

After a surprisingly long time in the morning (I'd already boiled water to make coffee which we didn't have) we realised our whole food bag had been liberated by some kind of stealth-tactic, dead-of-night spy-animal, which was confusing as the most common pest, street dogs, are very unsubtle.

As soon as we got  to the road our fortunes turned, and before we'd put our bags down Nestor had stopped his Nissan dual-cab pick-up and we were on the road in record time.

He wasn't at all xenophobic, or visibly inbred, or even remotely hick-ish - in fact he was my favourite lift so far, he spoke audibly and politely and was keen to talk about the practical and cultural differences of our homelands.

He was going all the way to Neuquen (are there many palindromic place names?) which was 750 km and would have been a monster chunk of our trip, but our plan had been to skirt more of the east coast before heading west inland - this plan turned out to be stupid for more than one reason, but at the time we had no way to know.

The Road

After a cushty, but far too easy week in Bs. As. we got a bus to Canuelas, the nearest town we could see to the south outside the city.

Canuelas was a dusty, quiet town and we tried walking south straight out of town to hit the main road - which turned out A Bad Plan.

We walked for three hours with our heavy bags in the baking sun along dirt tracks with no shade to finally meet the main road.

Our first hitch-hiking spot wasn't a great one - traffic on the main road was going fast and there wasn't much joining at our junction, but after only 8 minutes (we had to time it due to a number of conflicting 5-peso-bet's placed on it) a little black Renault Clio came screeching to a halt just past us.

It felt great. There is disbelief, excitement, and intrepidation all in a mixed up instant, contrasted against the entire boredom of watching meaningless, boring traffic without respite or hope.

This is a feeling unique to hitch-hiking - with the simple gesture of an upturned thumb a complete stranger decided to give up a little of their time and petrol for nothing in return except a small amount of companionship.

It helps renew your faith in humanity, promotes cultural exchange and also IT'S FREE!

It turned out though once we were in the car that neither me or Kevin speak Spanish. In the twenty minute journey we did manage to figure out the guys name was Jerve and he worked on a tractor in Canuelas but lived in San Miguel del Monte, where he was taking us.

We walked to the far end of town to the last service station and treated ourselves to an alfajore (a chocolate coated triple-layered treat of soft biscuit and caramel) and scoped out a nice camp spot in a sparse wood behind the services.

I had what has become my usual travel-setup of a (waterproof) bivy bag and small tarp, while kevin had his (not waterproof) sleeping bag and open-top silk hammock.

Usefully in Bs. As. Kevin had cursed our journey by scoffing at the entire concept of rain, even going to the lengths of placing a 5-peso-bet that we wouldn't see rain before we reached Chile, sealing our fate.

Once we'd road-tested the alcohol stove I built from two beer cans in Faylin's house we spent the rest of the evening dissuading wild dogs from eating all of our belongings.

Fate had decided for Kev to lose his bet in formidable style and the mother of all storms descended on us.

It did mean I could stop clapping, growling, lunging, barking and throwing stones at the dogs, but Kevin was getting very wet.

I gave him my tarp - he could keep the worst off himself and semi cover his bags, while I zipped over my face in the bivy and tried to limit ingress through the zip.

It was pretty miserable, and we didn't get a lot of sleep but it was nothing a hot coffee and an alfajore or two in the morning couldn't fix.

Buenos Aires

I landed in Buenos Aires without any hassle, and once they had me fingerprinted and face-recognised I found Kevin waiting for me with a baggage trolley and a hug.

After an over-priced celebratory airport beer we got a coach into town and had an over-priced celebratory bus station chicken lunch and started trying to figure out where our couch-surfing host Faylin lived.

On the way we were trying to second-guess the numbering system and Kev made me shake on a stupid bet about how many blocks we were from Faylin's house. And the '5-peso-bet' was born.

We couldn't have asked for a better host, Faylin lived with two great Colombianos and over the week we stayed there we met loads of their friends, went out drinking and dancing, had days out in the park, entangled each other in many ridiculous 5-peso-bet's, and, most importantly "Got Our Shit Together".

I should explain a little - I met Kevin 15 months before in Nimes in the south of France for only 2 days, where, while drunk, he said he needed an accomplice in a daring adventure across South America in the footsteps of Ernesto "Che" Guevara 60 years before.

This was all I knew, except for another evening in Nimes the following summer (I had gone to visit Kev to see if he was still "in") where Kevin told a pretty girl in a bar that I was to be the star in his next film. Classy wing-man manoeuvre I thought. Very classy.

Well, Kev had turned up in Bs. As. with a Macbook, two professional cameras, a selection of microphones and a stack of DV tapes and memory cards. Apparently it was more than a great wing-man line.

But, we still had no actual idea what we were really doing here, where to go or how.

One day in Bs. As. was especially inspiring - we'd found out about a small hardware store which had become an impromptu Che museum, and had inherited the artefacts left by the real (long-closed) museum.

The owner, Eladio spent an hour talking to me about the attitude and achievements of Che, and had a true passion for the man and a firm belief that if everyone was a bit more like Che, the world would be a better place.

"Just ask yourself, what would Che do?" became the quote of the day.

Che and Alberto had started their journey going south in Argentina, before crossing the Andes mountains for Chile, and an Argentine friend of Kevins had told him of a paradisiacal village on a lake nestled in the Patagonian Andes near the Chilean border and given him the name and address of a family friend there - We had a goal.

Restrictive import taxes and border controls meant that we couldn't buy motorbikes in Argentina as I'd have liked to, but we heard some great tales of hitch-hiking through La Pampa and the semi-arid desert of Central and Southern Argentina from Faylin and her friends - We had a method.

Our Shit Was Together.