In Which I Get In My First Car Accident

If it can be called that, since I was driving a golf cart. I did hit a car though, so I suppose it counts.

[To preface, I had a great time in Uruguay! Loved the town of Colonia, it was super cute and a very nice break from Buenos Aires. There isn't too much to recount except for this accident, however. So back to the story.]

The situation is this: I rent a golf cart for the day in Uruguay with a Chilean girl I had met at my hostel, Lorena. We're on some random road in Colonia when I decide to turn left on to a promising-looking side road. I move to the center of the road, flip on the turn signal (even though by this point the two of us are pretty sure that it doesn't do anything) and wait for the car coming towards us to go by. As soon as the road is clear ahead, I turn – directly into the side of a car trying to pass me.

Now, in my memory, and that of Lorena, we were definitely in the middle of the road; ie where people should not be passing to the left. In the memory of the man driving the car, we were more towards the right of the road, and thus open to be passed (especially as there was no one coming the other direction and we had no left-hand turn signal on). I suppose it might be hard to tell lanes when one of the objects is a golf cart and there are no lines on the road, but I definitely don't think I was completely in the wrong, particularly if you consider the fact that our turn signal was theoretically on at the time.

Nevertheless, if I had been more aware of my surroundings, it wouldn't have happened. And for a golf cart at very low velocity hitting a car, I did a surprising amount of damage. I messed up the alignment of the wheels of the golf cart to the point where it was definitely un-driveable, and made some pretty significant dents and scratches on the side of the car that I hit. The car happened to contain a couple taking their two grandkids to a birthday party, and they were not very happy about the situation. Luckily no one was hurt at all – one of the little kids was scared,* but even the big cake that the grandmother was holding was undamaged during the incident.

Given that I have never even been pulled over in the US, and that this was in a foreign country, I really had no idea what to do immediately following the collision. Exchange insurance information? I didn't know mine. Exchange phone numbers? Neither Lorena nor I had an Uruguyuan cell phone. Since the car had a party to get to, I ended up writing down their phone number and promising to call them from the agency as soon as we got back. Lorena and I hitched a ride with a man and his wife, who happened to work for the ferry service that I had used to get to Uruguay (the boat deserves a post of its own! It was huge and awesome), and who were very nice and more than happy to help us out. The wife kept telling me that "there are always two people in an accident", and the husband recounted anecdotes about the town to us as we drove.

I was super nervous to talk to the rental company, but they were surprisingly very nice about the whole ordeal. They weren't angry at all, and kept assuring me that things happen, and not to worry about it. I was, however, unique: apparently the worst golf cart accident in recent history was a family tipping over their cart outside a shopping mall, and it wasn't even through the same company. But as the car I had hit had insurance, and I was insured through the rental company, there was no problem taking care of it (besides me having to pay the accident fee stipulated in the contract). The worst was probably the awkward 45 minutes of waiting for insurance to come with paperwork for us to fill out, spent making small talk with with one of the rental agency guys and the still-not-very-happy couple, who had come back from the party after dropping their grandchildren off.

The $366 fee I had to pay means that my bank account just halved for the rest of my trip. This probably means that I shouldn't spend $500 for the trip to Iguazú Falls that I was contemplating. But in all, I can't complain. I think I did more than $400 worth of damage to the other car (which I'm almost glad about, considering that I would have had to pay the fee no matter how little damage there was). And given the circumstances, the experience was just about as not-bad as it could have been. The rental service even tried to convince me to take out another cart afterwards, since I had rented one for the entire day (I declined, as I was scared to even cross the street at that point!). All in all, I am left with a very, very good impression of Uruguayans.

Plus, now I have a story. What was my first car accident? Oh, that one time in Uruguay, when I was driving a golf cart...


*the grandmother told me later that the kid was completely fine at the party, that he had forgotten all about it