CHAPTER 44
We disembarked the Navimag Ferry in Puerto Montt, Chile on a cold overcast morning. After five days of ship board confinement on our voyage north through the Chilean Fjords, we were itching to stretch our legs, as they say, and get on the road. From Puerto Montt, it was a short, few hour drive to the Chile-Argentina boarder, daringly situated in a high pass of the Andes. Aside from a slight underestimate of how many Chilean pesos we would need for gas and toll-roads, followed by a frantic and ultimately fruitless search for an ATM, and the eventual reluctant use of our credit card to pay for our already pumped fuel (grudgingly accepting the outrageous international usage fee tacked on by MasterCard), our trip back into Argentina was uneventful.
The same could almost be said for our two day drive back across the girth of Argentina, from the high mountains in the west to the sunny eastern shore of the country. After hundreds of lonely miles through the pampas, we stopped at a small gas station, filled up, changed drivers, and pulled back on the road- and then, not 100 yards down this deserted highway, there was a random police checkpoint. Up until now we had had no trouble, what so ever, with the Argentine Gandarmaria, but by the crooked smile on the guard’s face, I could tell our luck had run out. He asked me to step out of the car, and bluntly told me that we would be getting a ticket. I calmly inquired as to the nature of our infraction, and he said “For driving without your headlights on!”- which is a law in Argentina, during both the day and night, if only seldom followed by the majority of drivers on the road in my experience. I pointed out to him that our headlights were in fact on, as we could both plainly see standing in front of the truck, and that we had been using them all day long. Then a slight hint of deviousness flickered in his eyes and he said “Yes, but you didn’t turn them on until after you pulled back on to the road from the gas station!” Never mind that we have full-time running lights, or discounting these as not true headlights, the fact that the total length of road we might have traveled with our main headlights off was at most 20 feet, this guy didn’t care. He was as crooked as they come and was purely fishing for a bribe.
Now that I knew where things stood, I mustered my full arsenal of “crooked cop” tactics. I started with the tried and true feigning my ability to understand Spanish at key points in the negotiations, but he wasn’t having it, so I quickly moved on to the usually more effective offer to pay the ticket at the police station. Generally, this will stop the unscrupulous officer in his path, because he knows that if he takes you to the station, and they do end up making you pay a fine, none of that money will go into his pocket. Again he blocked my move by saying that his little guard shack was the local station, and the main station for the region was over 100km away, so we obviously couldn’t go there and we would have to settle this matter right here. Now it was time to pull out the big guns- I flatly told him that we didn’t have any money. What he said next really got me- “I just saw you pull out of the gas station, how did you pay for your fuel?” Touché señor! But I can play that game too! “Well, we don’t have any cash, we used our credit card.” (which is an understandably normal thing to do, but up until yesterday wouldn’t have occurred to me as a plausible thing to say). He countered with “Well, let’s go to the ATM and use your card to withdrawal some cash to pay the ticket.” Oh sir, now you are just getting desperate. “Sorry” I said, “we have run out of money in our bank account, and are traveling purely on credit.” If someone told me this, I would laugh in their face, what a ridiculous statement! But what could he do? We both sat there silently. An unexpected stalemate had developed. He was unwilling to humiliate himself by letting us go free which would acknowledging that there wasn’t really a ticket, and I was sure as hell not going to give this d-bag even one penny, no matter how long I had to sit there. After a few minutes, he made a rather brilliant face-saving suggestion: he could mail me the ticket and I could mail back the payment when I returned home to the US. “Ok, sure.” I said, and handed him my Colorado driver’s license. He copied down the address, somehow neglecting the city and state, and directly followed the street name with a big, bold, “USA”. I’m still waiting to receive the ticket…
The Miami of Argentina- Mar del Plata
As we approached Argentina’s east coast, the environment changed perceptibly, from the cold windswept pampas to warm and sunny expanses of lush, rolling hills. Our destination was Mar del Plata, Argentina’s version of Miami, about 250 miles south of the capital, and the weekend beach retreat of choice for most of Buenos Aires’ well-to-do residents. With this idealized picture in mind, I was beginning to think we had been mislead by our guide book, because according to our GPS we were only a few miles from the city center, yet we were still driving through rural farm and ranch land, with no sign of a sparkling city on the sea. Maybe Lonely Planet’s idea of “Miami” was a little different than mine? Well, just about the time I remarked this to Kacey, we crested a hill and saw the gleaming skyscrapers of Mar del Plata looming straight ahead.
The main road into town was a massive one-way 6 lane wide boulevard
Within minutes we had gone from a potholed 2-lane highway weaving through cow filled pastures to a grand 6-lane wide boulevard lined with restaurants and boutiques that cut directly to the heart of the city. We had approached from a rather obscure direction, not coming on the main highway from BA, but this abrupt shift from rural countryside to metropolitan refinement surprised me, and in my opinion was a refreshing lack of suburban sprawl. Not to go off on a tangent here, but I feel a certain repugnance for America’s love affair with the “suburbs”. It seems to me that if you want to live somewhere with the small town feel of no traffic and a big yard, why not live in a small town? Wouldn’t it be better if we kept the city the city, and the country the country? The countless square miles of cookie cutter track homes that ooze out from most of our major cities like some virulent ameba only destroys the charm of both the city that they surround and the country which the devour. I understand that all those people have to live and work somewhere, but I think we could come up with something a little less soul draining than the typical American suburb. But that’s just me. And now I will step down off of my soap box, and on to the soft sand beaches of Mar del Plata…
Our trusty, if somewhat under-used, surf boards with 'For Sale' signs. We ended up getting about half what we paid for them in the States.
Our primary reason for coming to Mar del Plata was to try and sell our surfboards. When we purchased them nine months earlier in California, I had held grand ambitions of surfing every wave down the Pacific coast. Unfortunately, for various reasons, we weren’t really in the lackadaisical beach bum state of mind during most of this trip that I imagine one requires to truly devote one’s self to learning the fine art of surfing. We definitely gave it a handful of valiant attempts, and I am still enamored with the idea, but surfing is just going to have to wait until our lives are a little more in rhythm with the sea. So, wasting no time, we set out to sell our boards. This proved a little trickier than we had imagined. We weren’t going to make the same mistake of setting up at a flea market like we did in Punta Arenas, and I threw out the idea of posting them on craigslist, like I would have done at home, because we didn’t have the luxury of waiting around for a response to the ad. Then Kacey got a brilliant idea- we could drive down the road that follows the beach, and look for some place where all the surfers hang out. Sure enough, after about 20 minutes we found a small little beach bar with signs and flags announcing a surfing competition. This would be perfect. I unloaded the boards from the truck, while Kacey asked the bar manager if it would be ok for us to prop them up against the wall in an attempt to attract a buyer. He said sure, but if we wanted to sit at a table we would have to order something. Well, “you have to spend money to make money” has always been my motto, so I happily got us a big liter bottle of beer and two giant bratwursts that they were serving up for all of the spectators. No one paid us, or our surfboards, much attention, because they were all watching the waves. It was a pretty tame affair, the waves weren’t very big, and most of the competitors seemed to be local kids, but a few of them were really quite talented. I found out that it was the last competition of the season, and because the conditions were so poor by this late in the year, everyone treated it more like a party than a serious contest. And as such, the last event of the day was a surfing costume competition.
We stopped at a surfing competition with hopes of selling our boards. The last event of the day was a costume competition.
By this time, we had been sitting there for almost three hours, and our compulsion to sell our surfboards was quickly waning with every liter-bottle of beer we opened. All of the costumed riders were coming out of the waves, and I was about to suggest that we give up and head back to town, when a curly blond haired kid sauntered up and started asking questions about the boards. I knew this would be my only chance to get rid of them today, so I put on my best salesmen face and tried to grease him up a bit. I don’t know if it was the 3 liters of beer sloshing around in my head, or my comically inept bartering skills, but somehow the kid walked away with one of our boards, the board bag, and more surfwax than I’m sure is healthy for one so young, all for less than half of what we paid for just the board only a few months earlier. Kacey didn’t say anything outwardly derisive, but the expression on her face clearly spoke “Now Dave, who exactly, would you say, greased who?” Even so, it was a lot better deal than what we got the next day when we took our second board into the local pawn shop.
Sunset over Mar del Plata
With that unpleasant chore complete, and a few days of relaxing on the boardwalk that lined the city’s main bay, we decided it was time to leave the surfing to the surfers and move on. We wanted to experience something a little more genuinely Argentine, a little more removed from the modern world- we were headed to a place frozen in time: the small village of San Antonio de Areco, the home of the gauchos.
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