Hitchhiking from BA to Iguazu was the idea of a couple of friends, and I am so glad we did it. It enabled us to fully enjoy the northern route to Iguazu and to exchange with some many people from different backgrounds, it was so interesting!
Leaving Buenos Aires at 6:30 in the morning to catch a bus from the city centre to Zarate where the highway starts, we start hitchhiking around 9:30 am. Within 30 min a car takes us and the journey begins! 8 cars and camions later we finally make it to Iguazu the following day at 4pm (2 hours later than our friends who left BA 6 hours later than us. Some have more luck than others…!). The first day we managed to make about 1’000 km with 3 cars and 2 truck drivers. If there’s one thing hitchhiking made me discover is the special and tough life of truck drivers. Dilmar nicely helped us the first day, driving us 280km further down our route. He is Brazilian and drives different merchandise (23’000 kg of Mc Donald’s French fries in his truck when we were with him) between Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. His work is very much technologically controlled by the company and he only sees his children about 2 to 4 days per month when he has to chance to be back home. Sometime he spends 8-10 days on the road, and once it took him 22 days to go from Brazil to Santiago de Chile due to blocked routes because of snow. And most of the time he stays blocked at the border a good 3-5 days for customs control. What a life..! Provoking our luck on the first day, the last car who nicely took us drove us all the way to Posadas and even hosted us in their beautiful house overnight. We approached them asking for help and felt that they were novice to hitchhiking and unease at first. Luckily though they accepted to help us and we shared a lovely 4-5 hour route exchanging a variety of interesting discussion. After few hours of sleep and a full day of hitchhiking we were so happy to being offered hospitality, especially seeing the beautiful and comfort of their house. They even offered us local culinary specialities for breakfast and put us in contact with one of his friends who could advise us about hitchhiking through Paraguay. Experiences such as these two days of hitchhiking give me an exciting feeling of travel greatness!
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AuteurHola! I’m Aliénor, a 24 year old life enthusiast and eager to discover the world in any way possible with an emphasis on engaging with local people and cultural exchange! Archives
Mars 2017
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