Playa de los Hippies

The family has promised to take me to the town of Jujuy, but to our dismay the car won't start, and after trying for a while to get the engine going by pushing, I have to give up and start a three-kilometre run to catch the bus that only runs once every day.

After an hour and a half of standing in an old rackety bus that anyone would have considered full already before the last twenty people got in, I'm finally at the bus station in Jujuy. It's almost 8 pm, and I find there is a night bus to Cordoba, 900 kilometres away, leaving in an hour. I decide to take that instead of making my way straight to Buenos Aires; I can still spend a day or two in Cordoba before reaching my final destination.

Cordoba is a university town, full of colonial and Jesuit history. I walk around the streets and visit a museum on the "disappeared" people in Argentina in the 1970s, but I'm mostly enthusiastic about the prospect of going to one of the riverside beaches outside Cordoba.

On my second day, I catch a bus that takes me one and a half hours outside the town - but I'm late. It's already early evening when I get there, and I also don't have precise directions. I ask a girl in the bus, and luckily she and the three guys she's with are going to the same beach I'm looking for: La Playa de los Hippies.

Although it's embarrassing how hard it is for me to understand their Argentinian accent, I'm still happy to be with them, since it turns out the route is not that straightforward. After getting out of the bus in the middle of nowhere, you first have to walk, then call a kind of a taxi, and after the taxi trip either pay for a canoe ride or walk over a hill for twenty minutes. As I haven't been aware of all these extra expenses, I haven't brought enough money with me, and have no chance but to hope I will find the right path over the hill. I say goodbye to the girl and her friends, who sit down to wait for the canoe.

But the Playa itself is lovely. Indeed, it is a Hippie Beach, with tents and more permanent makeshift living constructions all around the shore, but it's all very peaceful. I'm almost the only person in the water. I float in the  river and let the mild current carry me while the sun sets behind the hills.

When I begin my long walk back to where the bus left us, the moon has already risen to guide my path.