Let's Not Meet Again

Red Hair in Argentina

This happened last summer, while studying abroad in Argentina for a semester. I was with six other girls from my host university--we had left our respective apartments in Buenos Aires and taken a bus to Mendoza in the west, known for beautiful scenery and great wine. Our second day at the hostel, we decided we'd do a hike in the Andean foothills close-ish to where we were staying, to a place called Cerro Arco.

We opted not to do a guided tour since it was expensive and we were pretty low on pesos, plus who needs a guide if you can do it yourself, right? (Wrong.) We took a bus as far as we could from the city to the outskirts of town, and figured we'd just ask locals where we needed to go, having been told it wasn't far from the last stop of that bus's route. In retrospect, we should have already been clued in to the weirdness of this situation because the locals we asked on the bus, including the bus driver, claimed they didn't know how to get to Cerro Arco, and I know now that this is a popular hiking spot, so most people should have known at least the general direction.

Regardless, after setting out from the end-of-the-route bus stop, which was really just an unmarked spot on a hill, we wandered until we found a woman who pointed us where to go, remarking as we thanked her, "Be careful--don't walk down that road after dark. It's not safe for a bunch of young girls." We had about 5 or so hours until dark (this was during the winter and it got dark early), so no one was particularly worried, and we walked down the dusty and deserted road towards the trail.

We walked a kilometer or so, and didn't seem anywhere near a hiking trail, just continuously walking down some sort of rural highway with low mountains looming far in the distance. This was not the beautiful Andean hiking experience we'd been promised, so we stopped at a rundown gas station to ask if this was genuinely the right way to go. This is when shit got weird fast.

The "gas station" (didn't seem to have any gas pumps so I remain unconvinced) was run by an older man. We asked for directions, and upon leaving, he asked if we wanted a ride part of the way there from his son, who was "going down there anyway." It turned out we still had a good deal of highway to walk down, but we declined, having decided we were going to do this on our own, and willing to do a shorter hike to make it back before dark. The son had appeared shortly upon our arrival into the store, and leered at us from behind the counter the whole time we spoke to his dad.

We had walked about 10 minutes when we hear a car behind us. The son clearly hadn't taken our polite no for an answer and was coming to convince us that we should ride with him. The hour or so that followed was profoundly nerve-wracking and made me swear I'd never travel with only girls again while abroad.

Physically, I'm exotic looking to many Argentines. I'm very tall--I towered over most Argentine dudes--with long red hair. This man seemed to latch on to that right away. "My, what hair you have," he said, like some twisted version of Little Red Riding Hood. "I'd love to touch it." He was hanging out of his piece-of-shit truck, with the six of us on the very edge of the highway, hugging the safety rail, trying to keep our distance. He kept calling me "mi flaca" a cutesy nickname as if we weren't total strangers, and wouldn't take his eyes off me.

My Spanish is good, but I froze in the weirdness of this situation and just stared at the ground without speaking. "I can take you up to where the trail starts," he kept saying, "I'm a good guy, I'll let you ride for free." My friends, who must have no sense of self-preservation, at first shrugged and seemed willing to take him up on his offer even though we had agreed not to just minutes before.

"Fuck no. I'm not going." I said. We talked amongst ourselves until they finally agreed that this was probably not safe, and told him, firmly, that we weren't interested. He whispered some things to himself and to us to freak us out (I couldn't hear what he was saying), then shrugged and drove off a side road. I was a little shaken up because of the intensity of the way he stared at me and how he literally licked his lips when talking about my hair, but figured it would be fine. We kept walking, keeping the mountains on the horizon in our sights.

Not even five minutes later I heard the same clanking truck sound from behind us. My heart sank. He pulled up, even closer to us this time, and seemed angry now. "I'm a good man. I'm a family man. I'm not going to rape you," laughing harshly (who the fuck says that if not a rapist.) He looked over at me again and sighed loudly. "You make me want to come out of this truck, standing there with that hair." He then leaned out and offered us some kind of herb to chew that supposedly helped with altitude sickness, which none of us accepted. He was now visibly angry, and would drive a while in front of us to seem like he was finally leaving, and then abruptly stomp on the brakes and laugh as we jumped in shock. There was still nobody on the road, and we had no idea how far away this stupid trail really was.

One more time he drove off, several of us now on the verge of tears. One more time he came back--the clanking engine sound announcing his return. This time he literally parked the truck, lunged out, and pursued us on foot. We took off, scrambling in the middle of this god-forsaken rural highway, hearing his angry, maniacal laugh behind us. He gave up at some point, but we kept booking it until eventually the road forked and a dusty campsite came into view. There were lots of hikers, a small hostel, and several dogs, so we knew we were safe.

We sat and regained our composure--I was literally shaking and some of the other girls were crying. Some of the hikers spoke to us, and a few reiterated that we shouldn't have been walking by ourselves, though it was clearly a popular hiking location. We did an abridged hike, waited for a giant group of South Africans to leave, heading towards the same hostel, and found a bus that left from a spot much closer to the trail than the one that had dropped us off. In retrospect, one man would've struggled to kidnap/hurt six girls, but his fixation with my hair and general crazy demeanor made me deeply regret that hike. Argentina was a wonderful experience and I never once felt unsafe in the city of Buenos Aires, but to the rural man who wouldn't take no for an answer and wanted to touch my hair, let's not meet again, you weird fuck.