We were on the way back from our double-bank-holiday trip to Rosario (I'll go over the trip itself another time) - and we had left the beach at 4.30pm to get back to the car. The sat nav said it was about a 4 hour journey including a stop, so we were planning to get back and have some dinner at about 8.30, no problem. Yeah, right...
So about 3 hours into the journey we hit traffic all of a sudden. It was seriously slow, and we were crawling about 10 metres a minute. I'm pretty sure I move more than that when I'm asleep, but anyway - my friends football match started on the radio...and eventually ended, with us having moved about 2.6 inches. After the match we were bored and also conscious of the petrol gauge so we decided to get out and do what the people in front of us were doing - turning off the engine and pushing the car a little bit every couple of minutes, all whilst playing cards on the roof of the car. In the middle of the motorway, obviously.
A whole FOUR hours later, we'd moved 4 kilometres - a distance you normally travel in about 2 minutes - when we decided to casually hop across the dual carriageway to the petrol station on the other side. Once we´d bought supplies, made use of the toilets and taken a stroll along with hundreds of others, we went back to the car only to find everything now at a complete standstill because the police had now not only blocked off the motorway but also the exit.
Why? Because there had been a protest (probably against the government, just like everything else). What sort of protest? Well, they had put down a row of tyres on both sides - and set them on fire.
| it was too dark to get a good picture, but it looked like this... |
Whilst you may think the image of the night sky (and the motorway itself) being lit up by never ending flames is insane (and it is)- when you think about it, how hard is it for some firemen to come, put out the fire and push the tyres to the side? Apparently very hard in Argentina, because it seems you need some sort of decree from the President to disperse the protest - which wasn't forthcoming, presumably because she was also making use of the bank holiday. I guess the protesters knew what they were doing...
Eventually, at 4.30am, they opened up the exit to allow cars to take their chances driving through the nearby 'villa' (a poor neighbourhood where there had been reports of stone throwing earlier, which eventually caused the police to close the motorway exit). So, we took our chances down the dark country lanes, and despite our satnav constantly warning us to turn around (so useless sometimes...) we managed to get home at 6am, over 13 (sometimes very tense) hours after we first set off. Not bad for a 3 hour journey, right?
Update: I have been told now that the reason for the protest was that the lights/power had gone out in a nearby 'villa' and that they took to the streets to make the government do something about it, and that THAT was the authorization they needed.
In other news, there was a football match between (I think) Lanus and Colon which ended on that monday evening, and seeing as Colon are based in Rosario where we had just come from, their fans also got stuck on the highway. If you go back a couple of months to the football match article, you will remember that all teams here have a section of hooligan fans, the ones who are always fighting etc - so when they got to the roadblock, they got out their cars, beat the **** out of the protesters and drove through the tyres!!
p.s. if you were involved in the fire and happen to be reading this, you are an absolute son of a bitch!
No comments:
Post a Comment