Day 7 - 257 KMs, Access Road for PN Perito Morenes, Argentina (09:15) to Eastern Side of Lago Buenos Aires, Argentina (16:00)

No petrol for close to 200KMs return except for paying hotel guests? WTF!?
This is major tourism "FAIL". 

Long Drives & Bad Decisions

Getting a good night sleep by a highway doesn’t seem possible but it was in Patagonia. Woke up to a very windy conditions though.    Ate a banana and then tried to figure out if I could make it down to PN Perito Moreno and back as well as well to the next town for Petrol.  The verdict is NO.  It’s 98 km one way to the park and only hotel guests can buy petrol according to the sign I saw. WTF is that all about ?   Anyway, the ride to the next town from my current location is 158km according to the map.   I’d run out of gas with (98KMs  x 2) + 158 KMs according to all maps I have. This desired side trip was not possible... Sadly the show must go on to the North!

Breaking up camp and getting ready to head
onwards up Ruta 40 Norte

After what became a very hot drive, I finally made it to the little town of Perito Moreno at at about 1300. The only things open were the visitor centre and the petrol station.   Boring-- boring and more boring.   I got the tank filled up and got the F outta there.   Oh by the way, did I mention the same hitchers are still with me?  I am thinking at this point that “I want my own space”.   They haven’t paid one peso towards to petrol and it’s beginning to annoy me.  They say they are broke with no cash,  but that’s not my problem.  There’s a saying I’ve heard a long time ago from my days hanging out in Vancouver, Canada.. The saying goes as “Cash, grass or ass, no one rides for free”.    That means cash, pot or sex, no rides for free. 

Vast expanses of nothing on Ruta 40 towards Puerto Moreno

I was not interested in hooking up with either of them as I have my loving Rebecca waiting for me at home, so then girls at that point had given me no cash (for petrol) or grass over 3 days. And to make it worse, they talked way too much together in Portuguese not allowing me to enjoy the vast expanses of Patagonian Ruta 40 desert in peace.   Not good.  Anyway, I digress.. sorry about that.  LOL!  I tried to be a good sport (a nice guy) and we did a manage to get lucky and find some wildlife.  Check out the wild foxes we saw on the side of the road here:

After driving 30 mins to the West towards the border or Chile. I saw a nice huge blue lake called Lago Buenos Aires   I am used to seeing fences everywhere, but this one did not have fences stopping people going down to it. I thought I was dreaming.  I was not because I saw a hidden campervan between 2 trees.!!!  WOW! So I stopped the van and turned around.  I went down then short gravel road.   The beach was nice, but a wee bit polluted with (like coke cans,  beer bottles, and etc. Typical idiots leaving rubbish.).  The girls got out and liked the beach and begin collecting rocks  I looked farther down the beach and saw a tree not being used by any vehicle as a shady area  I told the girls I was going there with the van and take your time here.  

The Eastern side of Lago Buenos Aires (Argentina) under the
hot Patagonian sun

After stopping the van and backing it under the tree facing the ocean-like lake, (ç), I then took out the water jug (20 L) and filled it up with the lake water.  It took a while to do it because the lake had massive waves of like .75m tall breaking on the shore.  Anyway, I added 10 pills to purify the water.  I then turned my van into a "basecamp" sort of.   

My "base camp" with solar power and all

The girls were messing around still down the beach some, so I laid out my solar panel and etc. I pulled out my tripod and DSLR; took some photos.  It was getting crowded though. It seems this is a popular place with locals!    I caught up with some blog entries from the day before and gathered some wood for the fire..   Eventually my fun-minded, but sort of flaky hitchhikers came back to the van.  One of them came back and just sat there on the beach. Lazy?  The English-speaking one went off and got some wood for the campfire for later.  They setup their tent that was on the verge of not being usable anymore.   

Once they managed to get their dilapidated tent up, they asked to use my natural soap to wash clothes in the lake.   I replied, "sure why not and smiled". Well to my dismay they used 1/3 of my soap. WTF?  Selfish? They had nowhere to hang there wet clothes either so they hung them in the tree in the shade.  

Bad planning?  So they asked to borrow my clothes like that I packed with me. (They saw it before).  So they hung up their clothes, tied to the van as an anchor, in a slightly more effective manner, but they washed clothes too late in the afternoon so it was hopeless to have dry clothes anytime soon. Here’s the where the day gets bad.  These very inexperienced travellers decide to hitchhike into town (25 KMs away) at 6:30pm to get some food (fresh veggies) at the market.  That was their only stated intention.

They said they’d be back ASAP in less than 1.5 hours.   As they walked away with no ID, just cash in their hands, I said, “if you don’t come back soon  I will called the cops for search and rescue…  Just kidding be safe! We’ll eat dinner when you get back”.  They never took their backpacks or IDs (passports). They never came back within 2 hours.  During this entire waiting period, I used the peacefulness to do some evening photography with my Canon DSLR. It was very beautiful outside to say the least:

Just 20 minutes after the sun just dipped below the horizon past
Lago Buenos Aires

The moon high and medium level visible light during sunset over
Lago Buenos Aires

In FULL-ON manual DSLR camera settings mode to get this photograph...
Last visible light over Lago Buenos Aires, Argentina

Four hours past by and it was pitch dark as the above photo illustrates clearly. I had started the campire earlier at 8:45pm.  By 10pm I was running out of wood very fast.  




The girls were still not back to their tent yet?!??!?!  Are they dead, did they get raped? WTF?    This was pissing me off because I was forced to eat a can of tuna for dinner over a dying camp fire and face the realisation that I'd be involved in a possible missing persons report. I was able to TXT Rebecca and she gave me the numbers to the NZ Embassies in both Chile and Argentina just in case I had to deal with the local police for a “missing persons” report.    I decided to work on my blog for a while.

I was dead tired, so I went to bed at 11:30pm.  Around 00:30 I was awoken to hear a car outside the van.  I hear voices and etc outside for 5 mins.  It’s the girls….the flaky…no experience traveling girls who hitched rides with me.  Obviously their parents never taught them about decency and responsibility.


I went to bed glad they were not dead or missing, but also went to bed pissed off knowing exactly I was going to say to them first thing tomorrow morning, “You are not getting my van again…good bye”.  

Time for bed..  it’s late now..    too late! Zzzzzz as a new day awaits tomorrow!  CIAO!   ;-)

Daily Summary:

I'm going be much more careful in the future about who I pick up In terms of hitchhikers.  Very much looking forward to getting back into Chile and seeing more mountains.