First day in Buenos Aires

The next day we rushed to Buenos Aires to solve some business at the Romanian consulate. We took the “General Roca” train line from La Plata. After nearly one hour we arrived at Constitucion terminal in Buenos Aires. Both stations (photos 1 to 3), featuring turn of the century architecture, together with the steel and glass cover, have a true European design, in tone with the surroundings.

Being in a hurry, I just had time to take few photos en route. The city itself is a true masterpiece, with interesting statues, wide avenues and many parks. Unfortunately not as clean as Santiago de Chile, it wins at the diversity and quantity of classic (mostly mid 19th to early 20th century) buildings.

Last photo – in front of Casa Rosada; to the left a scene is organized for the festivities occasioned by the bicentennial of the independence while in the right side you can see the permanent camp of the Falklands war veterans.

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May 22, 2010|15 argentina|Post Comment »

Arrival in La Plata

After the bellow mentioned problems, we finally arrived in La Plata, which is the capital of the Buenos Aires province. Dan, a Romanian living there, who read about our trip in EvZ was expecting us (at 1AM) and offered us, together with his Argentinian wife, Nancy, a room in their apartment for the duration of our stay in area. Once again, many thanks!

978 dan nancy

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The third accident

This one happened not even 15 minutes after being almost squashed and I was still reflecting about life and death… Suddenly, a cat decided to cross the street right in front of us. Her action lead to bad endings for everybody:

– Palomina’s front suspension suffered unnecessary shocks
– I lost my thought
– Laura bursted into tears
– the cat died

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May 21, 2010|15 argentina|Post Comment »

The second accident (near miss)

You know what’s the good thing about people who use to run traffic lights? They do have the habit of observing the incoming traffic even when they have a green light, so it’s likely they will be able to avoid a collision with some other driver running a red light when they don’t 🙂 Same with me… I always follow very close to the vehicle ahead of me so I always expect to be followed and I keep checking the mirrors. And that’s what saved our lives yesterday!

We were riding North on Ruta 3 close to Buenos Aires. That day we did some 950km (the average being around 500). Even though it was night and fog, we had to reach La Plata on that day, as we had to be at the Romanian consulate in Buenos Aires (50km away) in the morning to get some papers.

At some point, the two lane road was on top of an embankment and the verge was narrow. That’s were I found a column of vehicles stopped ahead of us. I began slowing down with the intention to stop on the narrow verge (I generally stop between lanes in order to spare myself of injury in case someone can’t break on time). Before stopping I checked the mirrors and I found that the vehicle behind me still had a very high speed, much higher than it was supposed to be.

I decided to continue on the embankment (the gradient was not that high, but still the condition of the surface was unknown). The car I mentioned hit very hard the car ahead of me (which was now immediately to our left) which in turn began rolling inexplicably to it’s right (towards us).

As the second vehicle got closer than 0.5m from us, I continued to descent on the slope while at the same time increasing the speed in order to avoid a collision. The ending was happy for us, as I managed to keep the motorcycle under control on the uneven surface covered with grass, climb back and return to asphalt!

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The Patagonian plateau

What you see in this picture is what we saw for about 5000km 🙁 I can hardly remember any other situation that bored me more. But one thing is sure: many bikers and other adventure travelers follow this route, and I planned doing the same because I thought they all knew what and why they were doing.

But now, after spending weeks riding straight lines in the middle of nowhere, I strongly advise against doing the same. Probably the Western route (through the mountains) is better, but we could not follow that because of the winter.

976 patagonia

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