El Tigre

It didn’t take long before the bus stalled in downtown Buenos Aires traffic. Is it still deja vu if this has actually happened before? Only this time, we were minus MC and Simon, so I took the driver’s seat and Jason ran back and messed with the engine. It actually didn’t take too long to get rolling again, and we were only honked at a few dozen times.

Still, this sort of shot our plan to get to Uruguay that day. Instead, we changed plans and stopped short at a campsite in El Tigre, about an hour north of Buenos Aires. Because we started about an hour south of BA, this actually took all day, or at least seemed to. The bus died about 3 more times along the way. And, it’s getting hot.

Our plan was to spread out, do some shade-tree work and have a proper cleaning. Stuff we couldn’t get to at Rody’s shop. But, Mother Nature decided we better just spend an evening under the awning watching it rain instead.

After Bode came down from his bed declaring ‘there’s quite a storm out there’, the 3 of us didn’t get much sleep. Even from the inside, the bus was lit up by an incredible lightening storm. By the next day, the already muddy ground was a sticky gross mess. Not optimal for laying on the ground under the bus. Also, the awning didn’t quite make it through the night- one pole was snapped in half. Add that to the list, too.

The rain stopped for a while the boys caught up on their beauty sleep, I had my coffee at the campsite pier and chatted with Beatriz, the owner. She knows her overlanders, and spoke of the older German couples, French families, and single Swiss men in giant tanks that come through.

We were camped directly in front of the river, next to a giant ‘shipwreck’. The river is quite busy with ferry service, and while we were out there the school kids lined up to get on the boat for school. It was really cute.

When the guys were awake, we decided that this place wasn’t very good for our project list, so we went into town to run a few errands. Jason managed to tune up the bus on a side street in Centro Tigre and it stopped overheating (we figure the new oil pump may have had to ‘break in’ a bit too, so that could have contributed.) So, with a happy bus, after lunch we decided to make our border run and re-visit Uruguay.