You know what’s the good thing about people who use to run traffic lights? They do have the habit of observing the incoming traffic even when they have a green light, so it’s likely they will be able to avoid a collision with some other driver running a red light when they don’t 🙂 Same with me… I always follow very close to the vehicle ahead of me so I always expect to be followed and I keep checking the mirrors. And that’s what saved our lives yesterday!

We were riding North on Ruta 3 close to Buenos Aires. That day we did some 950km (the average being around 500). Even though it was night and fog, we had to reach La Plata on that day, as we had to be at the Romanian consulate in Buenos Aires (50km away) in the morning to get some papers.

At some point, the two lane road was on top of an embankment and the verge was narrow. That’s were I found a column of vehicles stopped ahead of us. I began slowing down with the intention to stop on the narrow verge (I generally stop between lanes in order to spare myself of injury in case someone can’t break on time). Before stopping I checked the mirrors and I found that the vehicle behind me still had a very high speed, much higher than it was supposed to be.

I decided to continue on the embankment (the gradient was not that high, but still the condition of the surface was unknown). The car I mentioned hit very hard the car ahead of me (which was now immediately to our left) which in turn began rolling inexplicably to it’s right (towards us).

As the second vehicle got closer than 0.5m from us, I continued to descent on the slope while at the same time increasing the speed in order to avoid a collision. The ending was happy for us, as I managed to keep the motorcycle under control on the uneven surface covered with grass, climb back and return to asphalt!

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