On Tuesday 21 Feb, we caught the metro into town to pick up the hire car from Alamo. After about an hour of form filling, we got introduced to the car. It is basically an Astra with aircon with a boot large enough to hold our two huge bags, very similar to cars Dave has owned back in the uk. At the last minute, Dave noticed that one of the front tyres was pretty worn (more of which later).
We drove back to the hotel to collect our bags and as it was now early afternoon, decided to drive only a short distance, about an hour and a half, to a place place called La Plata, to stay overnight. We prebooked a hotel, which turned out to be very nice.
We arrived late afternoon, so had time to walk around; Clare thought it was a lovely place with a beautiful cathedral, which from the outside looked medieval, but was, in fact, started in 1884 and not finished until 1999. We found a bar for a drink and pizza, and where Clare watched an episode of Corrie on Dave's iPhone, well she has missed a few! Strange to be able to watch UK tv so far from home.
On the first full day, we drove the equivalent of London to Edinburgh.
There are no service areas to grab a drink or answer the call of nature, and few trees or bushes close to the road as it stretches across the prairies. During the day, Dave was in need and drove for over an hour scanning the scenery before we came across a suitable area of trees and bushes.
The next morning we re-checked distances and showed that getting as far South as Dave wanted would take at least another four full days of driving similar or greater distances, in far more remote areas. Not only that, but the plan was to cross into Chile and head back North on that side, where the roads on the map didn't look as good or anywhere near as straight.
Hence, continuing South would involve at least ten to twelve days of hard driving, on roads more remote and of lower quality even than those we had seen so far.
The decision about whether to give up on the trip South was not an easy one, because it represented the last vestige of Dave's longstanding fantasy of driving around the world.
The fact is, however, that it quickly becomes a slog to have to sit behind the wheel all day, almost every day. Regardless of past dreams, today's reality is that we'll both have a far more pleasant time if we let them go.
So we decided to drive only around the north of Argentina instead, and to head next to their lake district.
This still involves some considerable distances, the equivalents of London to Berwick-on-Tweed the first day and London to Newcastle-upon-Tyne the next.
In fact, those two days didn't turn out adjacent. We had to break the cross-country trip (from Bahia Blanca to San Carlos de Bariloche) and the most obvious place is Nuequen. However, as we were getting close, Clare spotted a tourist information office for the smaller town next door. This proved to be a very good thing, and we picked a very nice hotel in the middle of Cipolleti. We were recommended a restaurant literally a few yards away, La Nonnina, where we had dinner.
Next morning after breakfast, Dave decided to change the front worn tyre for the spare before we set off on the next leg of our journey. We had only gone about 3 miles when we realised that the spare tyre was dead flat. We were lucky on several counts:
- we were not travelling at speed
- were not in the middle of nowhere
- were still in Neuquen, a fairly big town
Dave pulled over to change the tyre back, in the process dropping the tyre, which bounced back spraining Dave's little finger (ah, bless). Clare was down the busy dual carriageway a bit with her foot on the warning triangle (it would have blown away otherwise).
With the original tyre replaced, we then had the task of finding the Argentinian equivalent of KwikFit. We found one local tyre place (ah, so that's what "Gomeria" means) which was staffed by a lone youth who could not speak English or serve us, but redirected us to go to the centre. Clare spotted a Goodyear sign, where they were most helpful and we got not one new tyre, but two. It turned out that the spare tyre had a slash in the side, which must have been there when we picked up the car.
Photos were taken, as Dave needs to be compensated for the cost of the tyres (£150). However, we both felt relieved that this had not happened hundred of miles from anywhere. By the time we had sorted this out, it was too late to carry on, so we decided to go back to Cipoletti and spend another night. Clare was also pleased that Dave would have a break from driving. We went back to the same hotel, who were somewhat surprised to see us again.
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