One of the best trips my friends and I took was in 2005. They were my classmates at law school. We drove for about three weeks trough Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, departing from Porto Alegre, where we three used to live. I always liked to drive – just take my car and hit the road, sometimes with minimum planning – or even with no plans at all… Car trips are great because you enjoy the whole journey, not only the destination point, especially when there are beautiful landscapes along the way. I need to say that the friendship among us helped for the success of this journey. We all had the same spirit and almost always agreed about where to go and what to do.
This time was no exception to the rule: we had no rigid plans. Our idea was to visit the capitals of the three respective countries: Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Santiago. We wanted to visit Bariloche not just for its natural beauty, but because we wished to cross the Andes mountains in two different points: at first there, in the south, and after that, near Santiago, already on our way back.
At the very beginning of our trip, we headed south, crossing the border in Chuy, in the extreme south of Brazil. Then we went to Montevideo, where we spent two or three days. I enjoyed Mercado del Puerto very much. It is a place where we can have a good “parrilla” (traditional regional barbecue) and drink Uruguayan beer.
Talking about beer, a funny event happened in Montevideo. At a random night, we all went to a night club. While we were buying our tickets at the entrance, each one received a free beer voucher to consume inside the club. We went straight to the bar, gave one ticket to the bartender, and ordered just one 600ml beer to share among us three. A short time later, three girls arrived at the bar counter, but, different from us, each one ordered their own beer bottle. And they did not ask for glasses. They drunk the beer straight from the bottle. My friends and I looked at each other and said at the same time: “What a bummer!
Our next stop was in Buenos Aires, but, at first, we visited Colonia de Sacramento, a beautiful and small city in Uruguay, with fantastic colonial architecture, on the banks of the Prata River. From there we took the ferry to Argentina´s capital.
In Buenos Aires, we visited the main touristic sites, such as Casa Rosada, El Caminito and Puerto Madero, where there are a lot of good restaurants to enjoy great meals or just get have a cup of coffee. We also went to a football match at the Bombonera, the famous stadium of the Boca Juniors team. It was a tense experience, because, by mistake, we bought tickets to the opposite team… We watched the whole match with our mouths completely shut, and almost motionless, to avoid being identified. In Argentina, we needed to change some of our plans. Our car broke down and we had to leave it to be fixed at a mechanic workshop for several days. Then, not to interrupt our trip, we rented a car to go to Bariloche. On the way there, one of the hghlights of the trip was that we could see beautiful and quite different landscapes, varying from deserts to green mountains with iced tops.
After some days in Bariloche, we went back to Buenos Aires to take our car back and follow to Santiago. We couldn´t cross de border to Chile near Bariloche, as we had initially planned, because we were in a rented car, with no authorization to leave the country.
With our car back, it was time for more adventure. The road to Santiago was so amazing. Crossing the Andes mountains is a unique experience in life. Each curve brings a new spectacular view. You can see the highest mountains in South America, very deep cliffs just along the road, waterfalls and lakes made from melting ice from the mountain tops. And it got even better when we were on our way back from Santiago. It had snowed some days previously in the mountains and everything had gotten white, covered with ice. It was fantastic!
One curious thing I remember from Santiago is that they usually put avocado in almost all dishes they eat. As soon as we arrived in the city, even before finding a hotel, we went to a restaurant, because we were starving, and ordered some cheeseburgers. To our surprise, inside the cheeseburgers there was smashed avocado. None of us had ever heard of a cheeseburger with avocado before. But, after our initial surprise, we quite enjoyed it very much; in fact. It´s strange, but it tastes quite good.
Well, our vacation was amazing, not just because the wonderful landscapes and the driving experience, but also because it was a good opportunity to interact with each other and learn more about different cultures. This trip is recorded forever in my memory and have inspired me to many other adventures. Some of which, I am already working on!
