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.