Argentina 2006 Cross Globe Reisverhalen / Travel stories

OUR PATAGONIA TRIP

The story below gives you a resumé of the trip that my husband (Peter) and I (Wendy) made through Patagonia from January the 11th until February the 5th 2006. In 23 days we drove 8700km in a rental car: from Buenos Aires, down South on the RN3 along the East coast, up North again on the famous Ruta 40 and all the way back to Buenos Aires. We didn't make it to Ushuaia ... reason enough to plan at least one more trip to Argentina later.
You will notice that we didn’t spend a lot of time in the towns itself. That's because we focused a little bit too much on culture during our last trips in Asia. During these holidays we wanted to take enough time to experience the wonders of nature.
Off course, not everything was perfect and the one place was more special than the other but overall, this trip made such an impression on us, that we consider it as one of the most beautiful trips we have every made.

FROM BELGIUM TO BUENOS AIRES

If you want to fly cheaply, you have to be prepared to choose for the more difficult option: instead of flying from Brussels to Buenos Aires for 860 euro per person, we decided to fly from Paris to Buenos Aires, via Sao Paolo, for 560 euro per person. For a €300/ticket difference we thought it was worth the hassle.
First a 1-hour train ride from our place to Brussels, then 1hr and 10 min by high velocity train from Brussels to Paris Charles-de-Gaulle Airport, followed by a flight of 12,5 hours from Paris to Sao Paolo (Brasil) and then, after a very "unorganized way-of-handling" in the airport of Sao Paolo, another flight of 2,5 hrs from Sao Paolo to Buenos Aires.
I’ll describe that “unorganized way-of-handling in the airport of Sao Paolo” briefly to you: after our landing in Sao Paolo and after the hand luggage scan, we had to hand in our passports at the “Connecting flights” desk because they wanted to compare the names on the tickets with the names on the passports. They asked us to take a seat in the waiting room but we didn’t go away from that desk to make sure we could keep an eye on our passports! They asked all passengers with connecting flights to hand in their documents which resulted in huge piles of passports without any logical sequence. Once in a while they paged a few passengers to hand back the passports. They hardly could pronounce the names of most people so we were happy when we recognized something that sounded like our names. We only had to wait for half an hour but other people were less lucky and had to wait a lot longer. I did hear one of the passengers mention something about "the Flintstones".
Although the monitor indicated that our flight to Buenos Aires would leave from gate 8, these people sent us to gate 11. From there we were sent to gate 6 to finally end up at gate 8 anyway. How unorganized can it be?
Our first encounter with Argentina wasn’t very promising: the sky was even more clouded and darker than in Belgium (which is really depressing) and it was raining cats and dogs. Did we travel all that way to get typical Belgian spring weather? Our bags were soaking wet when we picked them up from the luggage belt.

PICK-UP OF OUR RENTAL CAR AT BUENOS AIRES AIRPORT

Picking up our rental car didn’t go smooth either. The Belgian travel agency where we had booked the rental car had assured us that there would be an Alamo desk in the airport, even though I informed them that the official website of the BA Airport only mentions the AVIS and the Hertz car rental offices.
When walking through the Arrivals Hall, we realized that the travel agency had been wrong and there was no Alamo office or desk or whatsoever in the airport. We had rented a car from “Holiday Autos” but they are just an intermediate agency: Holiday Autos arranges a car with a real rental company. This time, they arranged a deal with Alamo.
Since we had a bad feeling about this whole car rental arrangement, Peter had looked up the telephone number of the Alamo office in central BA before we left on holidays. We phoned the office and they assured us that there would be an Alamo employee within minutes. It took another 15 minutes but then he showed up. Uff!
Filling in the paperwork took a while and all of a sudden the friendly Alamo guy said that we did not have any insurance. Wait a minute !! ……that was not possible because on the agreement with Holiday Autos it stated clearly that we had paid for an insurance and even an extra insurance. We knew that damage to the tires, the windshield and the bottom of the car were not covered. But the Alamo guy told us that we did not have ANY coverage. Another call, this time to our travel agency in Belgium. In the beginning our travel agent was confused herself but then she confirmed that we had everything insured via Holiday Autos except for the tires, the windshield and the bottom of the car. If we would have an accident we would have to pay for the damage ourselves and would have to get the money back from Holiday Autos afterwards. My goodness, what a bad deal! And an expensive deal as well ...
You should now that this was the smallest and the most expensive car that we've ever rented in our travel history. Travelling in Argentina is definitely a lot cheaper by buses! But we had decided to pay the price because we wanted the freedom of a car.
Anyway, it was time to check out the car. It appeared to be a Fiat Palio: the trunk was so small that we had to "dismantle" one of our bags to make our luggage fit. Together with the Alamo guy we noted down all the scratches and other damage. It showed already 80000 km. It was the most dirty car we had ever rented: there was sand everywhere. (Note: 3,5 weeks later, when we handed in the car, we realized that it was just unavoidable to keep a car sand-free in Patagonia. Then we had to admit to ourselves that the car was in fact very “clean” when we picked it up at BA Airport) ;^)

I imagine you thinking that our story doesn't sound that great so far, right?! Well, as soon as we left the airport everything changed and it only got better. We felt finally on holidays, very happy, relaxed and ready for the big Patagonian adventure.