Travel days:
As I write this while flying all night back to the US, I can freely admit that the travel portion of each distantly remote hunt I do is certainly the LEAST favorite part of each hunt. Each person’s experience is obviously unique but in my case, I don’t fly in business or first class. I fly coach in the cattle car section with the chickens and crying babies. I learned long ago that I have trouble sleeping on planes and my stomach doesn’t agree with airline meals. So I don’t sleep much on planes…I don’t eat on planes…and I just have to make the most of those hours. Figure out what works for you and follow that system....and take some Immodium with you!
In this case, the flight on United went from DFW to Houston first. Then it flew about 10 hours to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Coming home, the flight was on American and it was direct to DFW. It’s all based on where the airlines hubs are of course but that was the best combination of timing and cost that I found. On this trip, I booked my own flights on Expedia since I wasn’t bringing guns and would be renting a camp rifle and ammo. I will share more on that subject later with some important details.
So after we landed in Buenos Aires, we had to go through Immigration Control and found the typical long line and on this trip, no VIP services. For trips like Africa, I highly recommend securing a VIP service to speed up and grease the wheels of 3rd world industry, such as it is. When you don’t have access to those services, you can really miss them! Other than a wait of about 1 hour to get processed, it went fine.
On the other side of Immigration, we met a hunt representative who had secured taxi services to get us across town to another airport where a charter flight waited. Our charter flight did not occur from EZE airport and this was not a minor detail. This was my first time in Buenos Aires and the traffic was as bad as any place I have been including Bangkok, Thailand. It took over 1 hour for us to grind across town in mostly stopped traffic, banging gears and missing one every now and again to keep it interesting. Four of us with luggage plus the driver in a little clown car after an all night flight...serenity now! There’s nothing you can do about that except try to have a good attitude. On the amusing side of things, I can now say that I have gone through a toll booth backwards across 4 lanes of stopped traffic. That has to be worth something around a camp fire somewhere!
When we all got to the next airport, we waited for the rest of the group to arrive and then got onto a charter flight of a little less than 2 hours through a storm system with more than average turbulence. We were all glad to get back on terra firma again but the large storm was here for a couple of days to deal with and that would create its own issues during this hunt.
Now that we have flown from Buenos Aires to Santa Rosa, we have arrived in the La Pampa region. La Pampa means the prairie and this is a huge agricultural and ranching area of Argentina. From there, we drove on a road that didn’t make a single curve or wiggle for 2 hours until we pulled off into a rest area on the highway. Here the guides’ pickup trucks (Hi Lux models in good condition but oddly no 4WD) were ready to take us on the final leg to the ranch. We drove across the highway and entered a dirt road that took us about 30 minutes to the ranch. It was now early afternoon on the 2nd day of travel.
Cant wait to hear the rest
