We had planned to hitchhike out of Iguazu but, at the last minute, decided to take a bus to Corrientes instead. We would try our luck hitchhiking from there since it had a simple, single-road route heading west all the way to Salta. We had booked a hire car there in two days time, with the plan to joyride around the countryside for seven days… but that’s a story for another blog. For now, let’s stay on-message: it’s time to talk hitchhiking.
Boarding a bus at six in the evening, I introduced myself to a couple of friendly looking gringos. I made a dumb joke or two, and they laughed, so I added them to the category: Possible Friends (I’m easily won over – a bit of ego stroking and you’re in).
After a rough night of “sleep” on the bus, we disembarked at six in the morning, gathered our new friends from the bus (Kori and Jeroen, from Canada and Holland respectively), and headed to a nearby hostel I had looked up on the interwebs the night before. The night manager was less than pleased (but more than displeased) to be torn away from creating fresh material for his dream diary, and soon had booked Kim and I into a dorm room. He also kindly agreed to store bags for the other two for the day (they were catching a connecting bus that evening). So, with all the admin sorted, we headed out into the morning light, dazed and confuddled. In fact, I was so confuddled that I misread the map and instead of taking us to the shore, accidentally led us an hour of walking in the wrong direction, into a poor part of town. Surrounded by slums and holding the map like a proper tourist (upside down), it took us another hour to get back on track, and towards somewhere selling food. Then, sufficiently nourished, we headed towards the river and, believe it or not, I somehow got us lost again, taking us another hour out of our way before eventually finding the waterfront. On the bright side: we didn’t have to worry how we were going to spend the day anymore. After a few drinks on the banks of the massive, disconcertingly named, Paraná river they caught a taxi to their bus and we headed back to the hostel for the night.
Some shots of Corrientes and its plentiful street art:
I’ll mention the hostel briefly because it was an unusual one. Not one person there spoke more than a word or two of English, since all the temporary residents were from other parts of Argentina and Brazil. Their ages fell across a broad spectrum from eighteen through to sixty-five or so. We drank with them for a while, but since our Spanish was still lacking any sort of conversational quality, we soon headed off to bed as the party continued outside. Besides, we decided that this blog was supposed to be about hitchhiking and we had already spent far too long getting to that point without adding any extra material to drag it out even longer.
Just the beginning:
Early the next morning we walked across town with all our stuff and to the main bridge heading west. It was there we decided to begin our ad-hoc journey towards Salta. Easy, right?
Having found what seemed to be a good spot on the side of an on-ramp feeding the main road out of Corrientes, we dumped our bags and whipped out our cardboard sign. I scribbled OUESTE on the unused side, held it out, and we waited. Some nearby homeless windscreen cleaners tried to ask us what we were trying to achieve (we assumed), but communication was impossible – they spoke way too fast and incoherently for our limited Spanish comprehension. Soon they gave up and went back to work, and we resumed our position on the side of the road. An hour passed without a single vehicle stopping, so we decided to move to a different spot, following the advice of a couple of uniformed officers at the nearby police checkpoint. Their advice (or perhaps it was just luck) worked, and within a few minutes we were in a car with a local man and his peacefully napping backseat baby. Excited, we settled in for a ride, but then realised that he was only going across the bridge to a neighbouring town. Oh well. Any distance, when hitchhiking, is better than none.
Something often crosses my mind when standing at the side of a road with my thumb out: what if every driver, no matter the distance they were going, picked you up? You may not get far with each individual ride, but combine them together and you have a recipe for super-efficient travel. I imagine the pattern would look something like this: 1 min waiting; 10 mins driving; 1 min waiting; 20 mins driving; 1 min waiting; etc etc, and before you know it you would have arrived. This hitchhike relay system would work brilliantly! Kim and I came up with a nice addition to Google Maps and other navigation apps (cross-platform) that could alert drivers to nearby hitchhikers (self-identified as such), allowing them to know who they are picking up beforehand based on a profile, including photo, languages spoken, country of origin, etc. This would also allow for greater security, since all drivers and hitchhikers could register the ride in the app, too. But, since that doesn’t exist yet, and we don’t have phones anyway, perhaps a better temporary solution would be to hold up a sign that says:
Please help us get to <insert place here>. Any distance will do!
Disembarking from our first brief ride and collecting our bags from the boot (trunk), we bid farewell to the lovely guy who picked us up (after posing for a selfie – his request, his camera) and resumed our position on a new road. Almost immediately a huge crowd of locals stopped all traffic and paraded past, carrying religious symbols, following a truck laden with a huge diorama of what I can only assume was a representation of Jesus and Mary. (SEE PIC). They passed, and the police who had been helping control the traffic moved off, allowing business to resume. I assume it was a funeral parade of some sort (common around these parts), but didn’t have opportunity to think on it for long – our second ride wasn’t going to catch itself.
A little further:
Another hour passed before a car pulled into the verge – a grumpy-faced middle-aged woman who, despite initial impressions, was quite interesting to talk to, and very interested in us, started quizzing us about all sorts: where were we from?; where had we travelled?; Why were we hitchhiking?; etc. After a while fielding these sorts of questions and returning fire, the conversation died out, and something occurred to me – I had no idea how far she was taking us. I asked her if she had a map (consulting our little yellow dictionary for advice on how to word the question). That was a mistake. She didn’t have one and, for the next hour, kept offering to stop somewhere so we could get one. I explained that it wasn’t important, but she was too nice to let up. I had only been interested to take a gander if she happened to keep one in the glove box. I changed the subject several times, but she just kept steering the conversation back to the map. When she finally said that it was time to drop us off, I was actually kind of relieved. I vowed not to mention maps to future drivers.
We had only made it another hour along the road. Sure, we were chipping away at the journey, but when the total trip is about ten hours of driving, one hour just doesn’t seem like much of a chunk. And now we were truly distanced from civilisation, standing at a bus stop next to a road between towns – without a single building in sight. Another guy was waiting for a ride too, and within minutes he was somehow picked up. We clearly just didn’t look local enough for this game… but then I was proven wrong when a car pulled over to offer us a ride, too.
That’s better. Sort of:
Diego was a portly fellow with a big smile. He spoke almost no English, which in itself made him an amazing person for going to the effort of clearing out the back seat to make room for our stuff. Out on the road, we chatted in broken Spanish, sharing stories, and laughing at stupid jokes.* Time passed quickly and easily, but that changed when a police checkpoint appeared up ahead, and the officer was waving us over. Time slowed. We had seen plenty of checkpoints from the elevated windows of many buses, but they had never pulled us over. We had heard this was a good thing. Without saying anything, Diego took a hundred peso note from his wallet and placed it (in plain sight) on one of those little trays near the handbrake. He glanced towards me in the passenger seat and gave me a look that said “I’m putting it there so the policeman can see it in case it comes to that. You guys just sit there and don’t say too much, and we should be okay.” He was a man who could give very specific looks. The policeman arrived at the driver’s window, shot Kim and I some suspicious looks, and extracted Diego from the car, taking him around back where he opened the boot. I had heard stories of police planting drugs in order to claim a bribe, so I quickly got out to join them. There was a little searching and some patting down, but not much else. Perhaps the policeman had planned on planting something, but realised we were too savvy for that kind of trick… or maybe he was just doing his job**. Either way, we were soon on our way without incident.
We continued past countless tiny towns which all fronted onto the main road with a thin strip of green lawn. Centred on these grassy lawns, surrounded by colourful flags and immaculate brick terraces, was a grandiose statue representing a saint (or something similar). This, we figured, was their way of advertising their little cluster of homes to any passing drivers willing to throw them a glance. To help draw the eye of passers-by, contained on every grassy town-front was also a children’s playground and a whole array of exercise equipment, all in seemingly constant use. What better place to play or exercise than next to a dusty main road? (don’t answer that – it’s rhetorical) Each town was like a home – its green front verge hugging only one side of the road. And on the other side of the road? Very little except a lone bus stop and a few miscellaneous farms. Mot unusual.
Soon we pulled into one of these towns, Sáenz Peña, so Diego could drop something off at a friend’s house before we continued. Diego assured us that we wouldn’t stop for long and that the town where we would go to next was a far better place for us to continue our journey to Salta. As promised, we were soon on our way again. I noticed at some point after this, between conversations, that the sun’s position in the sky had changed; it wasn’t blinding us from the front anymore – it was now to our right, but I didn’t think much of it. I really should have thought more of it.
Diego dropped us off an hour later at the bus station in the town of Charata and waved a friendly goodbye as we lugged our bags around to the ticket offices. By now well accustomed to asking for tickets in Spanish, and ready to give up on the hitchhiking for the time being, we enquired at one of the bus company’s offices about a bus ticket to Salta.
“No es posible, amigos”, replied the lady at the desk. Kim asked for clarification but neither of us understood the response, so we thought we would try our luck at another bus company. Soon, however, we realised that there were no buses going to Salta. And when one of the ladies explained it to us using Google Maps as a visual aid, we realised the problem: Diego had taken us entirely the wrong direction.
Ah, crap:
We needed to return to Sáenz Peña, the town we had stopped at with Diego a little over an hour before. No big deal, we agreed, and asked for a bus ticket so we could get there in time for a connecting bus to Salta. No such luck – the bus ride just to Sáenz Peña would take THREE hours. We would miss the last bus to Salta.
So it was decided – the only way to get there in time was to try and hitchhike. We trudged, weighed down in equal measure by our bags and our failings, for half an hour back to the main road and dumped our bags. (The bus stations around these parts, in a true stroke of town planning insanity, are located at the back of each town, as far as possible from the main road!) By now the sun was completely gone and we found ourselves in the dumbest of situations: standing under a flickering neon streetlight on a main road in the north of Argentina, hoping (best case scenario) to climb into a car with a stranger. Gaunt men on motorbikes, their facial expressions lost in the shadow cast by oversized baseball caps, turned their heads our way as they drifted through the sickly orange light and then back into darkness. The cars were even more unsettling, since we couldn’t even see the shape of the figures within. Despite appearances, though, the drivers were like snakes… in that, despite our concerns, they seemed to be more scared of us than we were of them; no-one stopped. And so, after an hour (there’s only so much failure two people can endure), we returned to the town, downtrodden and hoping to find somewhere to stay the night.
Twenty minutes passed and we still hadn’t seen a single building that looked anything like a hotel. We were beginning to worry. But then, as if it had been written into the story with intentional timing, just as we were reaching something of a despair-climax (the worst kind of climax), a hotel appeared. At the press of a button, an ancient, vertically-challenged woman appeared. But her deeply carved features did nothing to spoil her charming, toothless smile as she led us to reception with a lovely, wheezy cackle. She understood less of our Spanish than most, possibly because she wasn’t used to dealing with foreigners. Communication was difficult but she didn’t mind, and actually seemed to find the next ten minutes of getting nowhere quite hilarious. This, I had already decided, was how to win at being old: with whimsical, good-humoured self-deprecation and regular deprecation. She chuckled as I took control of her Internet-connected computer and punched some words into Google Translate***: “Is there a restaurant near here?”, I wrote, even though I was pretty sure I had already asked this question correctly in Spanish. The translation popped up immediately. I pointed at the screen for her to read it. Instead of looking, though, she kept looking at Kim and I, and said something about not liking computers. Maybe she just enjoyed the miscommunication too much to let it end. It did end though, and soon we were fed and in bed. One of the longest days of the trip so far had finally come to an end.
The final leg:
The next day we tried hitchhiking once more and, predictably, ended up getting several rides that each took us about ten minutes along the road. In our optimism, we had expected an abundance of cars along this main road, but pessimism would have served us better; the road was almost empty. Then we realised why – it was Sunday and (for the most part) people don’t leave their houses except to go to church on Sundays around here. Five hours after beginning, we were forced to climb aboard a passing bus. With bittersweet poetic injustice, we pulled in to Sáenz Peña just short of twenty-four hours after we had first passed through that dusty little city.
Booking a bus to Salta, we headed out into the town to find some food. But alas, there was one last speed-bump (not literal – that would have been easy) in our way: not only was it a Sunday (most things are closed on a Sunday, too), but it turns out that we had arrived on a public holiday, commemorating some Christian saint. Oh and it was Siesta-o’clock, too.
We found some food after an hour or so, and then pulled up a square of grass on the banks of a mucky little pond. As we ate, we watched four teenage boys harass a sizable turtle they’d caught. They threw it around, jumped on its shell, pretending to surf and, eventually, when they grew bored, threw it back into the water. Just imagine the semi-fictional horror stories it will tell its grandchildren years from now – “And then, when the nightmare land creatures were looking the other way, I made a run for it”. The turtle-grandkids would gasp, but secretly wonder to themselves what on earth this word run might mean.
Returning to the bus station, along sparsely populated streets, once more carrying all our stuff, we absorbed stares from all directions. The looks we fielded seemed to say “This is no place for you!”, but not in a particularly unfriendly way. This was more of a raised eyebrow, as if our presence here made no sense. It was the same look you or I might give a cake we found in the bath.
I took note of this in my little black book of thoughts, once safely aboard the bus. It was the last thing I did before closing my eyes. The next time I opened them, we had arrived in Salta.
* When I say “jokes”, I don’t mean those read from a book – those rarely translate well. Only situational stuff has a chance of surviving the jump – “you had to be there” humour. So now I’ve clarified that you had to be there, allow me, like every other person who says that, to proceed to tell you all about what made it all so funny. On second thought… nah. You had to be there.
** We heard stories of a third possibility, too. Apparently the police in Argentina try to find anything they can wrong with the car, and then ask for a bribe to let you go. Basically a fine, but the amount can vary substantially, and it goes directly to the cop’s pocket. Even as I write this, I’m asking myself whether that really matters – you lose the money either way, and this way at least it goes to the man doing the work. Hm – I don’t know.
*** This blog is starting to sound like an ad for Google, isn’t it? Such is the state of that company’s hold on the WWW, I suppose
How to fail at hitchhiking in Argentina We had planned to hitchhike out of Iguazu but, at the last minute, decided to take a bus to Corrientes instead.
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