Kyle- Buenos Aires, Argentina- After leaving Paraguay, we crossed the border into Argentina. Nico said that he felt safer and relieved that we were in Argentina, but was unaware of what would come. Yesterday and today consisted of a lot of driving. We drove 8 hours on Thursday and 10 hours on Friday. The drive started very well. The drive in Northwest, Argentina was tremendous. The forests we drove by were beautiful, and the sky looked awesome (filled with pink clouds). Even when we got lost, we came across a an amazing part of the forest that we had to stop and take pictures. The drive was going so well.
Unfortunately, the near perfect drive in Argentina turned into the most stressful part of the entire trip. As we drove, we started looking for hotels to stay for the night. All of sudden, we approached a National guard, check point. The National Guards took one look at our car and asked us to pull over (Only A small percentage of cars were pulled over). I got nervous even though I knew we did nothing wrong. Three guards approached the car. The Chief guard asked us for our passports and car registration. They walked away from the car and talked for a few minutes. When they returned, they asked us to step out of the car and take all our bags out. As soon as we stepped out, three guards began searching the car. This was a very thorough search- they looked under the seats, in the trunk, on doors ect. Then the chief guard brought over a table and asked me to put my suitcase on it and take everything out. As I removed my clothes i heard Danny and the Chief talking. I had no idea what they were talking about but figured it wasn't good. The guards then made Nico do the same thing to his bag. After they searched all the suitcases they let us go. When we got in the car, I asked Danny what they spoke about and he said they just talked about the World Cup. These guards weren't actually so bad and were just doing there jobs. Everything was fine!? not really!
We left the next morning at 6 am with 950 kilometers to Buenos, Aires. Within 5 minutes of the drive, we were stopped at another National guard check point. They asked us to step out of the car, searched it, but this time they only searched our backpacks (instead of our suitcases). It turned out, these checking points were about every 100 kilometers on the way to Buenos Aires. After being stopped for the sixth time (going through the process of being searched each time)we ran into corrupt police officers that decided they were going to give us an absurd infraction and take our money. We were brought into a small police office near where we were pulled over. The officer explained to us that our car lacked a fire extinguisher and the penalty was 273 pesos (approximately $75). This is one law I have never heard of but the officer said that we needed to pay the fine before we could leave. We only had 280 pesos which would not leave us with enough money for tolls had we given them 273. Danny told the officers that we only had 200 pesos and the officer said " okay great! we'll take it!" These cops really scared me. I knew we did nothing wrong, but that did not matter.
The rest of the drive was very stressful. We were all really upset, and knew we still had 4 hours left of driving (and possibly more police/national guard check points). I got nervous each time we got stopped and it became very annoying to empty our bags and suitcases so many times. We did not feel better until we arrived in Buenos Aires where Danny's Uncle and Grandmother took us out to dinner around 8p.m. At the restaurant we realized... it was our first meal of the day.
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