Hitching is easy and takes you places! Seriously!
Trip Start
Aug 26, 2005
1
24
126
Trip End
May 26, 2008
Carmen de Patagonia (Viedma),
Argentina
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Today, we have achieved just shy of 700kms hitching! We scored 2 separate rides. The first was very cruisy, sitting cramped in the back of some beaten up old car, drinking Maté (a traditional Argentinian drink) and listening to music, 400kms worth. Then we were dumped in the middle of nowhere and it started raining. We found a gas station and began begging everyone who turned up, asking for a ride North. 2 hours of pleading and we were sitting in a car with a madman heading to our destination for the night, a tiny Colonial town called ´Carmen de Patagonia´. It was very similar to Colonia in Uruguay, with cobbled streets and a very laid back, beachy feel, except this palce had no beach, just a big river running through it.
Sounds ok doesnt it? Unfortunately just like Colonia, there wasnt all that much to do. Eating ice cream took up most of our time. Insanely good and so friggin cheap. 2 or 3 massive cones a day saw us survive the hot days. We checked out 3 rubbish museums and saw a few of the first Argentinian flags, but not much more. We did manage to get yelled at by the Navy, who found us wandering around their gounds and shooed us out. We ran straight into an icecream shop.
Carmen de Patagonia was the first town established in Argentina, so it had a fair bit of history.
An all you can eat buffet and a late night in a club with a few bottles of wine saw us stay a day longer than we wanted and the day after we thought we would try our luck with the hitching thing again.
We caught a cab for 2 pesos to the main road out of town. And waited and waited and waited. A few hours passed, then the police came. Luckily they encouraged us and setup a road block, right where we were standing, stopping every car leaving town and asking details etc from the drivers. We thought this would be our lucky break as every car was stopped for us. We didnt even have to put out our thumbs! But after 5 hours running around asking eveyone for a lift, we retired in absolute failure. Sunburnt, winburnt and exhausted from a tough day on the side of the road. We returned to town and caught a bus to our next stop, a few hundred ks north.
