The random adventurers: Our hitching brings all the cars to the yard....

...and they're like: it's better than yours.

So, after the border crossing and all the boring paperwork, we were ready for some more hitchhiking.

Backpacks on the ground next to us, and happy-innocent faces on, we put our thumbs out... and for the second time in the trip, the first car we hitched to stopped for us.

It was a super chilled and pretty quiet man from a town called Rio Grande. He didn't say his name or ask ours, but told us he was going back to work after dropping his wife and kids in Buenos Aires for their holidays.

We shared mate and talked a very small amount of words without feeling uncomfortable at all. With him we did the crossing to the island of Tierra del Fuego. They take the cars slowly through the icy water in a ferry.

Little lighthouse by the ferry port.

Our ferry: Patagonia.

About to reach shore.

We got off the car and climbed the stairs to look at the ocean. On the side, following us, there were beautiful toninas (a kind of Patagonian dolphin).

A very happy Chey enjoys the fresh air.

Our mystery man took us through a second border crossing, entering Argentina again, and into the boring, uneventful Río Grande (we started to notice a trend of cities starting with "Rio"). He was lovely enough to drop us outside a hotel/café where we arranged our accomodation (in another place).

As I said, Rio Grande was uneventful. The most interesting things that happened to us were: trying to get food without meat (which ended up being pizza, of course), and discovering that, again, we had a beautiful brick wall view.

A room with a view.

One of the very few interesting things in Rio Grande was this piece of a train.
Or is it an old tractor? A war machine?

Next day, we started walking to leave Rio Grande. It's a fairly big town, so it was taking some effort. We had a stray dog following us, and I was already thinking how hard it was going to be to hitch with a dog beside us, when a car stopped... Let me remind you we were not even trying!

The driver was a local policeman, and he told us he thought we might be hitchhiking, so he wanted to give us a lift out of town, to a good spot. We said yes and got in, unable to believe our good luck, while our temporary dog looked at us leave with his eyes full of sorrow.

He (the guy, not the dog) told us he had done the same thing twice before, and he had even been convinced by some scoundrel backpacker to drive him all the way to the next town, 100 km down south. We didn't expect that, and were happy to be dropped at a great spot on the road, where we were picked up by a father in law- son in law duo. This was our last lift going south, since with them we finally got to Ushuaia.