We left Buones Aires after almost five days of urban life (thank you Monica for your great appartment!). It took us nearly an hour to get out of this 12 million megapolis. On ruta nacional no. 7 we headed westwards in direction of Mendoza. We made it until the village of Alem where we settled down to pass the night behind a Shell gas Station. At 5 o’clock next morning we were rolling again with the kids still sleeping in the back. This time we covered only about 100km until the engine would suddenly stop.
Here we were in the middle of the Argentinian pampas on an unpaved road at 6:30 in the morning with an engine failure. My first guess was that we tanked bad Diesel. With the aid of two very helpful Univia employees patrolling the unhabited area, we made it to the next town called Rufino (note that rute no. 7 is privately runned by Univia inc. and we enjoyed a great customer service for the couple of pesos we payed for this toll road). Since we are member of the Canadian Automobil Club and the latter has an affiliation with the Automovil Club de Argentina, we automatically qualify for ACA’s services. While I was discussing possible engine failures theories with two ACA mechanics, a journalist of a local newspaper spotted our Canadian car licence and started immediately started inverviewing Marisol. Our story is scheduled for this weeks issue of El Diferente, one of Rufinos two weekly newspaper. Two very friendly mechanics (one of them insisted that we would come to see his newborn pony horse Rocco at his place – Yoska loved it!) repaired our camper in a way that we could at least drive another 200km and sleep behind yet another gas station in a small town called Vicuna Mackenna. Feeling and hearing that our Westfalia was far from being back in shape, we still decided to move on until San Luis, Capital city of evenly named province.
We hoped to get a better choice of reliable car repair shops. Since we arrived on Saturday around 5PM, we immediately went to the local ACA subsidary with another helpful clerk welcoming us. He helped us to locate Jorge, the hands-on guy who was welding our broken exhaust right on the street. With clean Diesel and a fixed exhaust we headed of towards Mendoza next morning but our VW was hardly running 40 miles an hour and consuming twice as much Diesel ans usual! It was clear that we would pass another night at the hotel and search for reliable mechanic folks again. To make things more complicated, I always had to Google the spanish words for the needed pieces/service as well as the approximate pricing before I actually met with these car doctors (you can be sure that you pay 5 times too much if you walk in as an innocent tourist not being able to properly describe the problem!). Two pesos for a cyber cafe hour was always an excellent investment.
One day later, we finally had our camper back in shape with a brandnew distribution belt and a perfectly tuned engine. Happy and confident, we were then able to attack the Cordillera de los Andes again and climb up towards the 3850 meter high Cristo Redentor tunnel that will bring us back to Chile again.
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