Rally Argentina

Gronholm I think
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Finally, it was rally time.  For those that don´t know I (and this is boy Alex writing here) have been a big rallyfan for since dad used to take me to Chester to see the start of the RAC when I was 4.  Alex and I have been to see rallys in the UK, Sweden and Spain, but nothing had quite prepared us for Rally Argentina.

On the first day of the rally we were unable to see any stages as Alex was still ill, and we were looking for somewhere new to stay and trying to get the car fixed.

almost like upper-class of Virgin Atlantic

Whilst Alex was laid up in bed in a new town (La Falda) I went out to get the car serviced and fixed-up a bit.  The nice chap at the garage sort of set fire to the troublesome alternator, but as soon as head levered the battery connector off and thrown some water at the alternator things started to calm down again.  Anyway, during all the car fixing excitment, and old Argentine gent was trying to explain something about the rally to me.  It seemed that the whole of the first day had been called off as some of the drivers were stuck in Buenos Aires by a fog-bound plane.

So we hadn´t missed any stages after all.  On rally day 2 Alex was still not feeling to good, so I went out on my own up to a nearby stage.  And other than the rain I had a very plesant time.  Easy parking was found, and the stage was quite well managed with some pretty good views.

Alex was feeling better when I went back into town so we decided to join the locals and camp up on one of the stages waiting for the cars early on day 3.  However, things did not go quite to plan.  Our preffered stage was full by 5 in the afternoon when we arrived (the rally cars didn´t arrive for another 16 hours) our options were to camp up next to the main road in the middle of a big cloud, and then get up early to walk 5kms into the rally route, or to try a different stage.

2 hours of driving through fog later we arrived in a traffic jam for the next stage, this once started even earlier, but we were less than 1km from the route when we pulled into a temporary campsite.  And that´s when the trouble really began.  A nice farmer chap said we could but our tent up on his concrete patio, which was under a tin-roof.  We thought this was a fine idea as it was still raining a little.  Around 10 minutes later the heavens opened and a thunderstorm passed directly overhead, flooding the little concrete platform, and carrying all manner of doggy-do-dos into and under the tent.  Which we now discovered leaked from the bottom-up through the ground sheet.

So plan B was put into action, which was sleeping in the car, and leaving the tent in its puddle.  To be honest, we should have done this all along, as with the seats right back it is almost like upper-class on Virgin Atlantic (without the flunkies to massage your hands and pass you champagne of course).

In the morning we made the short trek, still through the cloud, up to the stage and had a nice, if limited by fog view of the cars for two passes through.

Overall, definintely a worthwhile detour from our planned route.  Hopefully we´ll catch the rally cars again elsewhere on our travels