Well, yesterday was an interesting day.
I met an Irish guy in Cordóba, and he decided to tag along with me on my hitchiking journey to Mendoza. We both had a blast, and were picked up by some very interesting characters.
We started the day off in Mina Clavero, a small town just outside of Cordóba where we stayed for a couple of nights. The town is quite small and picturesque, though relatively dead on account of the off-season. It quite literally rolls up the sidewalks during this time of year. Despite this, we were able to find a place that will rent you bikes for a day, and we took a ride up the side of the mountain to have a look at the landscape. It was quite beautiful.
The next day, we were on the way outside of town to try and find a place that would offer shade and enough space for a driver to pick us up. We were picked up first by an older hippy lady that took us 10km down the road to a town called Nono. She seemed to me like the kind of lady who would become a housewife just to give a big middle finger to the feminists out there who said she shouldn’t have been. She seemed very happy with life, and was quite the chatter.
When she dropped us off, we tried to flag down another ride and ended up being picked up a couple of hours later by an Argentine psychologist who worked with adicts. He told us all about his life (in perfect English), icluding the time he went to work for Medecins sans frontières in the Central African Republic. Listening to him speak about his life and the patients he worked with was quite insane. He told us story after story that made the 45 minutes he drove us for seem like absolutely nothing. I was sad to see him go, but his final destination was a small town called Via Dolores, and not Mendoza. We said goodbye shortly afterwards, and he pointed us to the right direction of town to find another ride.
The next car that stopped for us was a small Peugot with an older gentleman inside. He was mercifully making the whole trip to Mendoza, roughly a 4 hour drive from that point, and offered to take both of us and our backpacks. This guy was probably the most interesting of all of them. He had been an Argentine Special Forces member, and was at the invasion of Las Malvinas (The Falkland Islands) and Kosovo. He’d travelled all over his country from tip to tip and most of Europe as well, and told us very interesting anecdotes of his time in the army, for which he was still working. He would go into retirement soon, he told us, though he didn’t seem too happy about it.
The drive to Mendoza took us through the desert as well, and as the sun went down, we were treated to a wide variety of colours that will unfortunately have to remain in my memory for the rest of my life, given that my camera was in the trunk at the time. It was beautiful though, and me trying to describe it wouldn’t do it justice.
And so, this portion of the hitchiking journey came to an end. It was a wonderful contrast from the 4 hours waiting in Cafayate, and the back of the truck next to the motorcycle.
Global Thoroughfare 