Close Calls and Casualties of the Trip

It was a sad evening in Salta when we turned the keys of our truck over to friends and bid farewell to our trusty Toyota Hilux pickup. In the three years that we had it, we put on nearly 100,000 km. It was the perfect truck for us, and we had hoped to drive it all the way back to Canada but we were beaten by Argentine bureaucracy, which made it pretty much impossible to take it out of the country permanently.

Leaving the truck behind also meant that we reduced the risk of running into things. So far, we had driven nearly 6,000 km on our little trip, with only a few casualties. We very narrowly missed the small cow somewhere northeast of San Juan while traveling at night. They certainly are hard to see. The large black and white bird didn’t make it though. It was actually stuck in the grill for a couple of days before we noticed it. I don’t think the four foot green snake that we ran over just south of Chilicito made it either…but Andrea wouldn’t let me stop to check.

However, the black stone in the middle of the road southwest of Salta, on the switchbacks, sort of “gushed”, instead of “clunked”. Not a very stone-like sound at all…worth backing up and checking. Well, there it was, we had flattened a 4 inch tarantula…Andrea was not impressed…