Hitchhiking: Harder Than It Looks

It's a quiet Saturday night in Buenos Aires, so a retrospective at our first "successful" hitchhiking adventure is in order.

One of the other volunteers had a problem with his leg, so we hitched a ride from the estancia into sleepy town of Gobernator Gregores. Pauline dropped us off with our bags and some food and told us she'd come back in 3 hours to see if we were still there. The traffic was quite sparse, maybe a car every 5-10 minutes, and so thumbing was slow, but fun. Most of the drivers would react, giving us various signals that seemed to indicate they weren't going that far or were returning to town.

After about 40 minutes, a guy in a small car stopped and asked where we were going. We told him several times and he had no idea what we were talking about. After 4 or 5 times repeating "El Calafate" at various speeds, we tried varying the pronunciation which did the trick: we were saying the name incorrectly.

Unfortunately, Antonio, our friendly traveler, did not speak slow Spanish and we did not understand where he was going. He did say that we could get some kind of a bus from where he'd leave us to El Calafate. We hopped in the and 2 hour journey over gravel roads began.

Antonio finally dropped us off at the bus station in the town and wished us good luck. He is a technician at a power plant and was headed to the coast on business. In the station we saw the first map of this hitchhiking adventure ... It turns out there was a fork a few miles down the road from where we were thumbing a ride--and Antonio was going down the wrong fork!

We were bummed we had to end up traveling 3 sides of a square to get to El Calafate, but we were thankful that someone picked up us and all our bags. Both of us agreed that we're not even sure we would pick ourselves up, so we're thankful for whatever generosity we get. Next time though, we're taking a map.