Maté and Rainbows

Roadtrip!

Last week we took the plunge and headed north for the 32 hour round trip pilgrimage to Iguazu Falls. We figure we travelled about 1200 miles each way. The long distance bus setup over here is something else. We travelled overnight on a Mercedes MarcoPolo and it was the complete shit, I mean exceptionally comfortable. The bus station in Retiro is bigger than some of the airports we’ve been to. There’s something like 86 gates for departures and another 86 gates on the other side of the building for arrivals with a constant queue of buses out the gate trying to secure a spot. Provincial buses and first class sleeper buses all leave from the same gates so you have this chaotic mixture of chicken carriers and people with gaff taped fruit boxes for luggage mixing with backpackers and Louis Vuitton victims. All human life is definitely at this bus station.

M as The Littlest Hobo - Retiro Bus Station

We went with a company called Via Bariloche and because of the distance involved we went overnight in a sleeper bus for a few extra dollars. The entire upstairs of the bus had these huge comfy chairs which reclined fully into a sleeping compartment behind you giving you something approximating to those first class Korean Airlines seats which you see in magazine advertisements. Our seats/bed for the trip down were right at the front of the bus on the top level so we got a magnificent 180 degree view of the city at sunset as we left, which was completely stunning. It’s only when it takes you over an hour to get to the suburbs that you realise how big a city BA is.


The drivers of these buses don’t hold back and it’s pretty disconcerting trying to fall asleep as you tear through the countryside along some less than impressive roads in the dark. Once you get off the 6 lane highway (which is only about an hour outside BA) all you get is a simple, one lane each direction roadway with no hard shoulders, reducing the margin for error by about a billion percent. So when you get a speeding tour bus meeting a speeding oil truck, things get pretty tight.

Extreme HGV'ing

You can judge how alert the driver is by the level of corrective swerve the bus takes as the oncoming bus or truck roars by, inches from the window. I went to sleep counting swerves instead of sheep. We watched a heroic Disney movie about huskey dogs and a half hour propaganda special on how they make the ubiquitous queso y jamon (cheese and ham) sandwiches which became less surreal and more fascinating as it progressed.


It brought us both back to the Bosco episodes of our youth where all kinds of advanced manufacturing techniques, predominantly confectionary related, happened behind the Magic Door. These jamon y queso things are made out of supersized slices of bread – think of a slice of bread the size of an open newspaper – with teams of women in hairnets carefully placing the huge slices of cheese and ham, surgically decrusting the elephant-wiches, slicing them up into the recognisable shapes of edible ubiquity we see on the streets of BA and manually packaging them for distribution. I got the impression we were meant to be awed by the industry and wowed by the attention to detail of these sandwich preparation professionals. All I could think of was how quickly they’ll be out of a job when their boss figures out he can afford the advanced mechanisation which Bosco demonstrated in HB all those years ago. But the real saving grace for passing the time was the ipod which we’d packed full of podcasts before we left. NPR.org is an independent news station working out of Washington DC and Boston and their news stories, news talk shows and general reporting are consistently top notch. We listened to everything from interviews with Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) who has picked up his guitar again, to how Hot Cheetos is the new taste sensation sweeping the nation (or at least the elementary schools in the states), to the graphic details of executions in the Mexican drug wars, to “anti stress” bars in China where, for an additional fee, you can pay to beat up your barman at the end of the night. This is truly the stuff of whatever gets you through the night. But seriously, check out their podcasts, particularly the On Point shows with Tom Ashbrook, intelligent and articulate with excellent guests – you’ll learn something interesting every show.

We slept surprisingly well given the circumstances. Although spending weeks living on a bus like that, like Metallica or The Scorpions regularly do, would be pretty hardcore. I had to stop myself thinking too much about Metallica and tour buses though. Here's why. I also found it almost impossible to piss standing up in the little WC as the bus swayed, swerved, braked and accelerated through the darkness. Any male who has ever tried, for scientific research purposes only, to walk while pissing will know what I’m talking about. There’s some very movement sensitive muscle in there somewhere which has the ultimate say in the flow of things even if your bladder and brain are both screaming for release. Needless to say swerves caused chaos.

The trip back was less impressive however. Our seats were at the back of the bus nearer to the engine and air conditioning so it was a little noisier. That wouldn’t have been so bad if the roof didn’t start leaking when the rains came.

Spotting the first droplets of rain coming through the air vent

In fairness these were absolutely torrential showers, the kind of showers where the noise of the rain hammering down on the roof drowns out all other noises, even the voices in your head, even the rolling thunder. The kind of showers in whose wake a carpet of frogs and a confused sasquatch are found. You get the idea. After several attempts to bring the problem to the attention of the road hostess (male) and a bizarre 3 way echoey VoIP phonecall at a bus station in Posadas to try and organise seats on another bus (our bus was completely full) with 2 “Superiors” who had no English – one of whom took humorous enjoyment out of my new hair and my Gilbert O’Sullivan beard, I resigned myself to a long night with a wet neck. I’d look for a refund when we got back to BA. Luckily however the rains stopped and so did my water torture.


All in all the trip was a good dry run (except for my wet neck) for our future adventures. It was useful because it encouraged you to lower or maybe just alter your expectations regarding quality of service down here and that the separation between bargain basement and first class can be as little as a ham sandwich. People take things a lot easier even in a crisis and some gringo fuming at the ears (I relate the laidback attitude of Argentinean males to the fact that mullets are flamable) isn’t going to change that especially when there’s no other solution. A shrug of the shoulders and the raising of a chin or an empty clipboard is the pinnacle of South American customer service and expecting anything more will slowly drive you crazy, especially if you’re simultaneously trying to pole vault the linguistic brick wall with the plastic fork of a portable phrasebook.

So we arrive in Puerto Iguazu a good 3 hours late, 19 hours after we left BA which meant we couldn’t hit the falls the day we arrived as we had planned. The town itself was like something out of the third world, strictly Bundeslige as Rob would say, very dusty – red dusty, ramshackle and underdeveloped - although certain buildings, gas stations in particular, were pretty modern. The roads were barely paved, with whatever carrion the stray dogs and street kids deemed inedible or unsellable, bobbing alongside in open sewers. Mopeds and little engined bikes were very popular, as was the pass time of who could pull the longest most acute angled wheelie up the hill of the main street. Apparently these kids have had a lot of practice. These godforsaken machines would be set alight or thrown in a skip in somewhere like Darndale, but here they were instruments of social interaction, sturdy steeds symbolic of great social standing.

Waiting For Evil Knievel

There were a lot of backpackers and tourists floating around the town but the locals seemed to regard them more as a hindrance, or an unfortunate fact of life than anything else. There was very obvious and very visible poverty with whatever tourist dollars in circulation not seeming to filter down anywhere near the families on the street. We had originally planned to pitch our tent but we soon discovered that the campsite was 5km outside of the town. There were several hostels however a block or two from the bus station where we’d catch a bus to the falls and also get our bus back to BA. So given the time constraints we decided to try for a hostel. The word hostel for me conjures up images of bunk beds, snoring which tickles the Richter scale, flip flops in the showers and half eaten tins of tuna lying around the communal kitchen. While this is exactly what we experienced, deciding to hit a hostel was the best idea we ever had.

The pool at the hostel

We checked in to Hostel Puerto Iguazu, got an air conditioned room sharing with 4 others, dumped our stuff and went out wandering. The heat was intense, close to 40 degrees and the humidity made it feel like you were wading through treacle just walking down the street. I quickly realised I had stumbled into an open sewer, jumped back onto the pavement and the treacle feeling disappeared. Iguaza is situated in a jungle area right on the border of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. The weather was schizophrenic to say the least. Intense heat followed by a period of overcast, cloudy and close weather, followed by short, intense torrents of rain - this cycle continues every couple of hours. We summoned up the energy to pick up some provisions for our tea, including a couple of bottles of wine and headed back to the hostel. We met more people that night than we have for the previous 3 weeks in BA. We met another med student from the states, Brandon (the 3rd American med student we’ve met on out travels), a semi pro skater guy called Jesse from LA who was into his final month of an 6 month trek around South America, and also a bona fide cowboy from Wyoming complete with a special hand woven rope which he’d just bought from an Argentinean cowboy and which he used to entertain us with drunken rope tricks later before we went to bed ("Ok, pretend I'm a calf......"). There was also a couple from Belgium, some hectic hirsute ladies from Israel and a couple from Australia, who along with Jesse recommended Bolivia as one of the highlights of their extended travels down here so we’ll have to look into that. We drank well, conversed in English (the release was ….relieving) and retired to our bunk beds with dizzy heads early enough as we needed to get up for 6 to be at the Falls by 7:30.

M at one of the "Lesser Falls"

We took the earliest bus and we were treated to our first proper, in-the-wild demonstration of the morning maté ritual. Maté tea drinking is an institution over here. It originated with the gauchos and is still very popular in Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina. Most everyone (even in the urban environment of BA) wanders around with their paraphernalia which includes the gourd (an ornate fist sized bowl where the tea leaves are placed), a pipe with a filter on the end and comically, a supersize Thermos flask of hot water which they use to top up the gourd after every hit. It's a quaintly intimate and very much a shared ritual between close friends with upto 5 or 6 people all supping from the same gourd. One cleancut guy got on the bus at one of the first stops outside the town, obviously on his way to work. As the bus made its way through the countryside and more of his friends / workmates boarded, he became extra busy preparing the maté and passing it to each of them in turn. It was obviously something they'd been doing all their lives, not a word of acknowledgement or thanks was offered or expected, the owner of the gourd always passing the freshly prepared tea to each member of the ad hoc group before taking his turn.

The Devil's Throat

The falls themselves were pretty spectacular – particularly the dramatic by name, dramatic by nature Garganta del Diablo “The Devil’s Throat”. I’m not going to even attempt to describe the awesome natural wonder we experienced. We got there before the mid morning rush and had a pretty undisturbed and intense half hour staring into the depths. The waters from 30 rivers converge at these falls and the roar of water alone was enough to mesmerise you never mind the spectacular vista.


As you stood staring into the abyss with the spray, like a rain shower from below blowing up into your face and the thunderous roar of the waters it was really all you could do just to close your eyes and completely surrender yourself to the experience. Amazing.


Several impromptu rainbows, a beautiful and surreal side effect of the spray in the early morning light, appeared and disappeared and expanded and contracted in diameter depending on the direction of the wind and how the spray caught the light. I’m pretty disappointed with the photos though - a mixture of shooting into pretty intense morning light, a very hostile photographic environment with the driving spray from the falls and being over protective of the camera. So apparently I’m not going to attempt to describe the falls OR show you any pictures….. so really I have no proof that we didn’t actually go to Bundoran for the few days. (edit : I've included some photos in retrospect - please disregard the Bundoran comment).


So since we've come back we've made it to Uruguay aswell. I'll fill you in on that mini adventure later. We're very close to formulating our itinerary for the rest of the trip. We leave BA on the 5th of February and head towards the Atlantic Coast for a few days on the beach. Then it's down to Puerto Madryn to look at Penguins (maybe whales) and off down through Bariloche (for some world renowned hiking) to Tierra del Fuego and Ushuaia at the southern most tip of this vast continent. That'll get us to the end of February at which point we turn around and make our way back up through Chile, visiting the Lake District and some of the Glaciers in Patagonia. We'll probably spend a couple of weeks with ValParaiso as our base and return to Argentina to check out Salta (the Galway of Argentina) and Mendoza (the famous wine making region). There's a train you can take from Antofagasta in Chile called Tren a las Nubes (The Cloud Train) which takes you from Chile, through a pass in the Andes and into Salta. We like the sound of that. Depending on how the SSIA pans out we may even make it to Easter Island - a kind of a dream for both of us - which is apparently incredibly expensive (flight wise). After that Peru, Bolivia and Brazil. So, exciting times. I'm still loving the craziness of Buenos Aires but I'm very much looking forward to the peace and quiet of the great outdoors aswell. In other news – a ménage a trois plus a kid have leased the house in Ruanbeg for a year so that’s a huge relief. Georgie boy, if you’re reading this, the best of luck with your new neighbours!

Buenos Bizarres 3 – Sitting on the steps of the Argentine Central Bank (cool marble steps in the shade) just off Plaza del Mayo having a Sunday Afternoon picnic and we spot a lot of blonde girls all kitted out in the same white vest and red running shorts, running around the park in the centre of the Plaza. Blonde hair is extremely rare over here. Seeing 30 specimens of Aryan womanhood altogether running around a national monument in the blistering heat looking like they’re having a shitload of fun was pretty odd looking. We figured it was some kind of Aryan race. An Aryan mini marathon maybe. They passed underneath us after completing a couple of laps of the park, followed eventually by some guy sweating bullets laden down with 2 coolers full of refreshments. This vision of bizarreness was followed swiftly by 2 hot blooded young local males legging it after the entourage, eyes popping out of their heads. We figure it may have been some woman’s national hockey team or something….. it could of course have been something far more sinister.

Hola

Buenos dias a blustery Buenos Aires. I think. It’s all hustle bustle here as usual. We’re getting ready to leave for the relative peace and quiet of the Iguazu Falls this evening. They’re located in the North East of this vast country and we’re taking an overnight 16 hour bus journey to enjoy the spectacularity. It’ll be the first outing for the tent in the wilds of South America so we’ll see how that goes. We’ll be heading north towards the equator, from where BA is located at about 35 degrees south to 25 degrees south, so it’s going to get warmer still. It’s a jungle area and very humid by all accounts. But the falls are the one thing that you’re advised not to miss while in the area so even though I’m not a huge waterfall man myself, I’m going to make a 32 hour round trip to see what all the fuss is about. For some meaningless statistics about the falls see here.

I got in trouble for taking this - I still don't know what it is

We’re still wandering around being gawked at. Each apartment building here, pretty much every second building on any street in Palermo or Recoleta, has it’s resident “Super” or caretaker. Far from having superpowers as their name suggests, these men, ranging in age from early twenties to late sixties, spend their day standing on the steps of their building ogling women and giving macho looks to passing men (or fellow supers). This not quite blatant local talent watching (they will turn their bodies to face the direction of travel of their target in advance, so as to appear wholly disinterested, watching nonchalantly, generally out of the corner of their eye as their visual entertainment passes and then getting really stuck in when the ass in question has passed) is commonplace, regardless of age (the super’s or the talent’s). Their other daily duties include polishing the nameplate and fancy brass multi-doorbell, washing the marble footpaths outside their building (although they have been known to stand watching a steaming canine cookie for hours if the cookie in question arrived between scheduled pavement washings), replacing light bulbs and ushering tenant’s cars into the adjacent underground parking while crowd managing the pedestrians.


Having said all that, some of the foyers of the buildings these guys work in are very visually impressive in themselves. They are generally very understated, open, marble floored or polished wooden floored areas, with usually little or no furniture (except in the one pictured above.....) for the hard working supers to rest their weary eyeballs. One wouldn’t want to the ruin the austere minimalism to accommodate the hired help. These elegant hallways are usually barricaded off from the lowly pavement pounders with huge impressive old wooden doors (some of them are a combination of Art Deco carved wood and glass) which look like they’ve been designed by a team of midget European master craftsmen. I say team because these things are huge and probably very heavy. No single midget master craftsman could manage it on his own.

Overexposure 101

At night when passing these buildings, a homely glow radiates from a very inviting and opulent lobby, but standing somewhere in the shadows you’ll always spot the lowly super either asleep standing up or with his eyes rolling randomly in his head a sure symptom of the onset of advanced boredom. I‘m not sure what the perks are for this position, most likely you get a room in the building, unlimited use of a hose and obviously an air conditioned perch from which to bird watch all day, but it seems to be a pretty mind numbing occupation. Despite this however, it seems also to be a highly coveted position in working class porteňo life with the younger guys inheriting the position only when an elder super has keeled over from chronic eye muscle exhaustion. It is quite a social occupation also, with all supers on a given street who are within shouting distance of each other, gathering for the morning and afternoon mate tea rituals.


It’s very interesting though, if they are ogling in groups, not a word or any audible manifestation of their enjoyment passes between them. These guys ogle in stealth mode and don’t feel the need or feel it appropriate to wink, whistle, exhale frustradely or make any rude hand gestures. They merely appreciate, the only sign of anything resembling communication being a shared look of silent shock when something particularly inflated (or deflated) passes under their noses. Porteňos generally are pretty unabashed gawkers. Certain things like M’s pink sandals (or me being forced into wearing swimming trunks out for a morning walk due to everything else being in the wash – the chafing in the morning heat was extreme) will cause a stir.

Less cars, more car parks

In general though, the locals are super friendly and it really is a shame we cant return their friendliness without having to resort to our phrasebook. We’ve been meaning to get Spanish lessons but have been too busy topping up our 3rd degree burns and taking in all this city has to offer to commit to them. I figure, in the provinces where there’s even less English than in BA, M’s improvisation and drama skills will be sufficient for us to communicate.

M being effortlessly dramatic - here she's seen asking for directions to the Off License

A recent shocking demonstration of our abject lack of local language; M dropped some clothes down in the local launderette and returned later to collect the clean clothes. On returning to the apartment she noticed that the laundry bags she brought the dirty washing down in were missing. How in the name of God was she going to be able to communicate this to the non English speaking washer women?


She had the brilliant idea of drawing these lovely ladies a picture. She decided to try and explain her predicament without having to resort to flash cards for the sake of everyone’s dignity, but on trying to explain using only the power of hand gestures, a majorette’s baton and monosyllabic English, the ladies in the launderette just looked at her blankly punctuating her every attempt at explanation with one word……”Nada” meaning nothing, or in local speak – what the hell are you speaking of child?. So M pulls out her handy work, flashes them the diagram, hilarity ensues and the bags are returned within seconds. M said she could have spent the whole morning chatting to them had she possessed even the most rudimentary Spanish. They seemed extremely friendly and very impressed with her abstract rendering of laundry bags. We cudda been their friends for life. I went for a haircut this morning aswell and because of my inability to describe in detail the exact requirements for my coiffure, I ended up with a locally de rigueur mullet.

41C in the Subway

We’re walking several hundred blocks a day aswell visiting museums, fancy colonial houses and out of the way vegetarian restaurants (meatless oases in a city of carniverous carnage). We’ve gotten our heads around the scarily primitive but very effective local subway system (La Subte) but sometimes its far nicer and far more interesting to walk to your destination. We had one moment of weakness on Saturday when having walked all afternoon, we needed to get home and the subway was out of action for some reason (our translation of the flashing neon sign at the mouth of the subway was “Large Malfunction”), we hailed one of the bajillion cabs which roam this city.


Bad idea. I was carrying my camera and wearing trainers and in fairness we did look like the first couple of Tourism Inc. but this old taxi driver dude completely took the piss. I think I saw a dollar shaped twinkle in his eye when I completely mispronounced our street name when he requested our destination. He took off at a leisurely pace in vaguely the right direction but 10 minutes later when I stopped recognising street names I consulted our much used, sweat soaked pocket map. I couldn’t even find the street we were currently bouncing along on the map. Our map covers the city centre and all surrounding neighbourhoods. The bastard had taken us off the map as the meter ticked happily along and he played completely dumb (with very little obvious effort it has to be said). To give you some indication of the level of corruption of this man, if I was to use the geography of Dublin as an example, we were on Stephens Green, we needed a taxi back to Milltown and this guy brings us home via Saggart. Half blind as he was, judging by the thickness of his glasses, he had chosen the scenic route. We twigged, he knew we’d twigged, but we let him bring us back close to our neighbourhood before telling him to let us out immediately and throwing 10 pesos at him (what the fare directly back would have been) and ignoring the hugely inflated price on the meter. I didn’t even give him a chance to bleat his dissent at me as we legged it although I’m pretty sure he knew he’d been rumbled and he was left to ponder his own lack of finesse and that famous parable of The Blind Man Who Took The Scenic Route. It was an altogether maddening experience although we did get a pretty much free tour of the Saggart of Buenos Aires (without the ramps), so we can’t really complain.


Buenos Bizarres 2 : We’re watching too much CNN (Jon Stewart from The Daily Show said that CNN is only watched by ex pats, or bored or very ill tourists) these days mainly because it’s the only English speaking news channel we have any access to. Anyways, they have constant ads for their own sub par news delivery services, one of them being cnn.com/anywhere which they pronounce as cnn.com “slash anywhere”. We find this particularly amusing seeing as that’s what the kids over here seem to enjoy doing. On Friday, we were walking down Avenida Corrientes, a busy shopping street in central Buenos Aires and there’s this 3 or 4 year old kid standing on the steps of an upmarket department store, nonchalantly launching forth a high arc of kiddie piss into the street. His dad is standing beside him half laughing at the kid in a very self conscious way, and half waiting until the kid is finished his business before taking any action. In the meantime unaware shoppers are being drizzled on from a height. But no one seemed to mind too much.

So we'll be offline for 4-5 days but sure we'll be full of news when we come back. Laters.

For Graham & Gill. Whooda thunk this stuff came in cans?

The second biggest Nirvana fan I've ever met

Papas Fritas Y Calvita Peron

The heat. The taxi packed beyond belief. Back to a city with noxious diesel fumes. This crazy place reminds us so much of Naples, and Havana. Neither of us can get over the Italian feel in the place. Stinking fumes means the city’s alive. The old cars belching black exhalations into the twilight as the dim or non existent headlights from oncoming traffic make little or no impression on the city’s dirty cloak, their unimpeded progress a factor of luck, determination and nonchalant hope rather than rules or written or observed law. We’ve spotted a couple of extra large disco balls on the outside of buildings using the sun as its spotlight. We don't know why they're there either. The beautiful sky-blue of the Argentinean flag with the ever present sun perched high. One of the first evenings, still a little bit jet lagged with drool on our cheeks and very much overwhelmed, heads spinning and eyes rolling in our head we take a wander out into our new world of Buenos Aires at sunset, a completely over the top, crazily colourful, heavily polluted sunset. I promptly get sucked on by a bastard parasite mosquito as we sit under the shade of trees at a local open space. My hand ends up looking like a granny’s hand with gout. I have a nasty scar on the back of my hand to prove it aswell. We’ve been lucky since though, basically staying away from shaded areas, stagnant water and not being out and about at dusk. It’s crazy how such a small creature (though they are huge over here) can effect your habits in such an adverse way.


So, initial thoughts after almost 2 full weeks and 2 glasses of heady Malbec – this city stinks like no other. In other cities, their inner workings are underground or overhead, hidden from nervous humans' awareness. In Buenos Aires every function is public, the city’s modesty is never spared - from the electrical cabling dangling in front of your face as you walk the pavements, to the thousands of external facing air conditioning units, trickling chemically infected droplets onto your unsuspecting overheating brow, the cracked paving, harbouring fetid stagnant rainwater from last nights storm, blessing each passing pedestrian with a foot squirt of unholy water up the trouser leg to speed them on their journey through the craziest city in the world. The smells are noxious and intoxicating at the same time, the smell of gas mixed with the smell of open sewers mixed with the smell of verdant plantlife from the parks at the height of Summer. Mosquitoes who attack you through your clothes. Roving hordes of unwashed unshirted young boys rifling through the stacks of rubbish on every street corner looking for salvageable recyclable trash to stack separately on opposite corners of the street for later collection by moustachioed men in high backed clapboard trucks, which appear to be in more urgent need of recycling.


The learning of a new language from the subtitles on television with quick reference to our phrase book when difficulty occurs. I make random misguided attempts to read the newspapers and generally end up second best. For example I translated the caption under a picture in a newspaper using our phrase book as : “These beach people are Almost Cutlery” – I think I might need to update my phrase book. Sitting watching shit retro American rerun movies and “Look Who’s Talking” comes on – and guess where it was shot? Van-fricking-couver. The scene where John Travolta picks up Kirstie Alley in the taxi to bring her to hospital was shot on Robson and then they speed around Burrard / West Pender for a while (you can see the Pacific Centre dome) and then its off down to Chinatown with them. Gas crack – we can never escape!


We’re in a brand new apartment and all new neighbourhood now. Our neighbourhood, Palermo, has a great feel with tree lined, humid streets abuzz with activity – kind of reminds me of what I imagine Brooklyn would be like, except the stoops are made of highly polished marble rather than redbrick. There seems to be a lot more money here than I gave BsAs credit for. We’re presuming that people who had a healthy stash of dollars when the dollar / peso decoupling took place were made instantly 3 times richer. Our apartment is functional – only just. It needed a wallop of TLC from M to try and knock it into liveability. It’s located beside and oldschool liftshaft and underneath a night time flight path. So bizarre science fiction noises awake us regular. The lift is tiny – a 2 man at best – with the quaint in-the-movies-only sliding gate. Porteňos are a very cultured bunch, very European in their comportment but very Latino in their passions. Dancing, eating rich, mostly meaty foods, drinking fine wines, staying up into the wee hours every night having heated discussions and expressive conversations in sidewalk cafes.


When it comes to local transportation, Ireland is so incredibly boring compared to here. Where we’re obsessed with the newest, shiniest, most ergonomic model of Japanese or German production line spawn, the streets here are living, heaving, belching automotive museums. How can it be that over here in the Americas, a car will keep getting up for work each day as long as its owner keeps depositing gas in its gas bank. Why after 10 years do cars at home become prohibitively expensive to maintain? The whole scrappage and emissions and NCT thing has a large part to do with it I suppose, but it doesn’t explain why there’s such a lack of interesting or aesthetically pleasing cars on Irish roads. Could it be the inbuilt, much reduced mean time to failure of components nowadays? Car manufacturers under handedly reproducing their lucrative markets every half generation by rolling out paragons of comfort and technology which are programmed to roll over and die after only 10-15 years. Or is it just Irish people’s obsession to drive shiny, new, over obvious symbols of their status as the bright young things of Europe? Something that will always start first time to get you to the back of the traffic jam quicker, a vehicle which will make you look like you’ve arrived even while sitting in a 5 mile tailback. Bring back the Renault 19, the Peugeot 2000, the Ford Cortina. Cars with character, coming in odd, funky colours as standard. Who ever heard of an olive green Lexus with dark red faux leather seats? Or a pastel yellow Avensis? Bizarrely the old model Opel Astra has just recently been launched over here as the Chevrolet Astra. And there’s the Chevrolet Corsa aswell. Similar to the Opel Astra down to the minutest detail except for the branding. Cortinas are called Taunus down here and Taurus in North America.


There’s a load of shitty Fiat 127s still bombing around like the 80s and 90s never happened. And the ominous Ford Falcons – ominous in my mind because I read somewhere that during the dictatorship of the mid 70s and early 80s, the Ford Falcon was the Secret Police’s car of choice to cruise the city streets after dark picking up young agitators, most of them never to be seen again. And then there’s the trucks – dinosaurs exposed to a lifetime’s abuse in the most unforgiving of conditions. But yet they’re still roaring around the city holding their own, hauling everything from sand and gravel to half buildings.


I’m still very much coming to grips with my new camera. Shots I try to make end up looking crap but sometimes, by some fluke of configuration and lighting, something is produced which encourages me to keep trying, that with more practice and theory that the craft will come to prop up the art. But then it makes a complete idiot out of me and I have to start from scratch again. What else? The cult of the dessert – there are several large, very upmarket dessert places over here which are generally packed at all hours with young families, courting couples, and retired old dears – don’t let anyone tell you that Argentina is experiencing economic difficulties. Anyone who can afford to spend $10 on a dessert is doing just fine. The hyper efficient lifer waiter is also a bit of an institution in the cafes over here. Think of that actor from Waking Ned or Sylvie from Glenroe (David Kelly) having spent his entire life working in somewhere like Bewley’s, and as a result can do some serious junior voodoo with one hand like unscrew the top from a bottle of water and pour the water into a glass while holding the glass in the same hand – these guys must have done an apprenticeship straight out of school, they’re so talented. The embarrassment of riches in restaurants, cafes, wine bars. Every city is the same – or at least it’s inhabitants are. They may eat later or earlier, they may be more obvious in their disdain or admiration, they may accept a certain level of hedonism more easily than another city’s inhabitants, they may be more courteous or aggressive whilst navigating the arteries of their adopted or inherited beast - but when it comes down to it, cities everywhere are inhabited by the same species of man woman and child who by their innate actions of protection, aggression, self advancement or benevolence shape their living space making sure to keep us all moving in the same direction. The rich crave further riches. The poor crave to be less poor. Speaking of poor – the kids juggling at traffic lights is an interesting more visually impressive sight than Vancouver’s window washers or those Eastern European people in Dublin with Big Issues. There’s also the depressing sight of plenty of infants on street corners with shaven scalps and bloody scabs looking like the devil just dragged his hoof across their head, forever marking them as unworthy, lesser beings - at least until their industrial strength infestation of cooties clears up.

Puerto Madero (please may I have some Gurr Cake)

The means we’re using to get to grips to this vast unwieldy metropolis is that we basically take a neighbourhood and wander around it for the day getting lost, having lunch and finding out how to get out again. We hit Recoleta on Saturday. Recoleta is probably close enough to the Ballsbridge of BA and it’s centre piece is the famous Recoleta Cemetry. Recoleta has the reputation of being The Manhattan of Cemeteries. The uber exclusive space is at a huge premium – even allowing for the fact that they stack the caskets, very elegantly mind you, one on top of the other.


It’s a bizarre setup where families have tombs (basically large marbled rooms – almost like mini churches) with shelves for each family member. Some of the shelves are filled, others are ominously empty awaiting the passing of the next family member, so they too can go on the pile. Strangely, some of the lesser maintained tombs are used by the cemetery staff to store fertiliser and the forklift of death.

The Forklift Of Death

We saw tiny caskets belonging to babies and we saw the tomb and HUGE casket of Luis Angel Firpo (“The Wild Bull Of The Pampas”), a heavy weight fighter who boxed Jack Dempsey for the Heavy Weight crown in 1923 – he lost but apparently it was a cracking fight. We also learned a lot about Evita (Eva Peron), for example how she died at the very early age 33. The city’s elders refused to have her buried in Recoleta cemetery, burial place of the socially and politically elite (being very rich won’t necessarily cut it – you really have to earn your spot in this place). Evita was a lowly peasant from the provinces who married Juan Peron. Her body actually went missing for 20 years when Peron was deposed – he fled the country neglecting to ensure that her body came with him. The body apparently ended up in Milan and was only repatriated (grudgingly) to Recoleta cemetery when Peron regained power in the mid 70s.

Then on Monday we hit the colourful (in many more ways than one) barrio of La Boca (pronounced La Botcha). Neighbourhoods where scrawny dogs roam free always make me feel a little uneasy. The wandering runts of La Boca are in marked contrast to their canine compadres in Palermo or Recoleta, other more well heeled barrios of BsAs where professional dog walkers (some of them are required to have veterinary qualifications) drag upto 12 well groomed, well bred dogs at a time around the manicured parks for their twice daily walks. Another distinctly Buenos Aires trait is the phenomenal amount of dogshit on the pavements.

Consuela, will yeh take Pat Kenny out for a shite in the street?

Its like the set of All Creatures Great and Small here some days. So very very different than the very anal (ahem) Vancouverite dog owners. It makes wandering around looking at the sights, the architecture, the local wetware, that little bit more difficult because if you take your eyes off the path for more than 2 seconds you’re guaranteed to be up to your oxter (or the strap of your flip flops) in fibre rich, autumn hued dogshit (may contain traces of nuts). I left Maeve to go wandering and spent a good hour floating around (I wish – imagine not having to worry about the dogshit for a while) taking pictures in and around La Bombonera (the chocolate box) – Boca Juniors, (Argentina’s most popular club and South America’s most successful soccer team – also Maradona’s original club and the club where he returned to retire his spare tyre) stadium. The location would remind you of Croke Park, a world class stadium (albeit a little bit more creaky and not in as modern a state of repair as Croke Park – that’s another bizarre thing about having a Summer in the Winter – I keep wanting to turn on the telly to watch the Gaaaah – I’m so confused) suddenly appearing on the horizon from a warren of residential streets in a well dicey area.

"Smile Jesus Loves You" - La Boca

I’ve come to the conclusion that having zero Spanish is actually beneficial if approached by someone who’s trying to scam you or who plans to do you harm. One group of topless chungflas (their Boca Juniors jerseys were in the wash) either wanted to get their hands on my camera or wanted me to take a group photo of them – either way they wanted to engage my attention. Me simply repeating “no entiendo” “sin carne” “papas fritas” “bith-kooit?” and ignoring their attempted communication-by-charades soon exasperated them enough for them to move on, convinced no doubt that I was retarded. I’m pretty sure if we had a shared language they’d have been a bit more feisty and possibly even given me the bumps.

La Boca

An hour or so later, after I’d met back up with M, a cop car pulled up beside us, the two boyos got out and basically told us we should leave the area we were in for our own safety. We had wandered off the tourist path and they could now no longer guarantee our safety. Thinking about that, it’s a pretty strange impression of an area to leave on a tourist. Obviously getting mugged would also leave a bad impression but for the local cops to proactively discourage curious tourists from discovering all their city has to offer, that felt kind of strange. I’d spent the previous hour wandering aimlessly but carefully and hadn’t experienced any overt evilness. There was a decent enough police presence on the street to discourage any random attacks so why they felt the need to tell us that, rather than them have to actually do their jobs effectively and protect us, they’d prefer it we left altogether. We still thanked them profusely (MUCHOS Banshee Bones) but it was a strange encounter.

There’s a zoo around the corner from us aswell, ironically enough on a very well appointed and wide avenue called Avenida del Libretador (liberation avenue). We have the very strange privilege of being able to see the monkeys through the railings as we walk down to the shop (the local Dunne’s is called Disco over here – just poppin’ downt’ Disco) to buy banshee bones and chomps.


They seem to absolutely adore U2 over here aswell – every coffee shop, every shopping centre, every lift banging out the U2 – particularly Achtung Baby and the Joshua Tree. There’s a general preoccupation with late 80s / early 90s music over here – judging primarily by what gets blasted out of parked cars - middle aged sweating bald men in wife beaters tapping their fingers along to “I wanna Break Free” by Queen or random Genesis-ness. Coincidentally, as I write – “Don’t You Want Me Baby” has just come on the speakers in the café, causing this middle aged, sweating man to tap his fingers on the table.

Buenos Bizarres 1 : We’re on an early morning walk in the park up the road from us and we encounter one of the aforementioned dog walkers, stressed to the max with 15 dogs of vastly varying sizes all trying desperately hard to enjoy their exercise. One Labrador, obviously new to the routine and a little bit over excited, keeps wandering behind the dog walker causing all the leads to get mucho tangled and completely pissing him off. This happens twice and the third time the guy stops his whole doggy entourage and punches the Labrador in the face! Don’t let these people babysit your kids is all I have to say.

Join us next time for further editions of Buenos Bizarres and also exclusive to hollowsolid : Papas Fritas and Calvita Peron’s Neighbourhood Watch…….. (I’ve been watching WAY too much shitty cable TV – alarmingly, only some of it in English). Hopefully (for Maeve's sake more than anything else) there'll be far less photos of cars.

Algo Mas?

San Diego and Santa Clause

First post from beautiful Buenos Aires. I'm sitting here in some random posh cafe at 11 O'Clock at night because they have wifi and it's free. Not sure how this is going to pan out.... but sure we'll see. The coffee is absolutely top notch over here by the way. None of your take out in paper cup stuff . If you are looking for take out coffee, you call them up and a lady with a tray walks the streets with your coffee in its real china cup until she finds you to hand deliver your order. Nice. Then theres the guys who deliver pizza on rollerblades - nerves of pure steel are a pre-requisite because they must coexist with the crazy loco local motorists - particularly the taxi drivers who you can see aiming for you as they accelerate to pedestrian crossings.

Taxi traveling at the speed of light

So we're still settling in - despite the fact we've been here almost a week. The heat and the culture shock and the weariness caused by the craziness of the past couple of months in Vancouver are all taking their toll which means we need regular cat naps - assisted by the cheap and delicious local Malbec wine. But we're having the most fun wandering around this fabulous city, eyes agog letting it all soak in slowly.

Avoiding the heat on New Years day by learning another 2 Spanish words

So lets start by wishing you all a very happy and prosperous and adventurous and interesting New Year. New years eve in Buenos Aires was….interesting. We had heard that anything before 1am would be a wipe out as the locals hole up in family or friend’s places and only venture out into the anonymous throngs when they’ve celebrated the coming of the new year in more intimate surroundings. And so it turned out. We got half dressed up (the heat is so intense – it hit 44 degrees on New Years Day - that you literally wet yourself by walking two blocks) – me in a pair of shorts, flipflops and a dress shirt, M in a nice skirt and a tshirt, and went in search of new years kicks in Puerto Madero - an area by the river, teeming with nice restaurants. Well, we walked in the considerable heat and humidity (even though it was approaching 8pm) of a BsAs evening and soon we had verily wet ourselves. I was sweating profusely from the head area and my lovely dress shirt looked like I’d gotten Footlose in it (consult wedding photos for pictures of me sweating in a dress shirt). Even at 8pm all the lovely restaurants weren’t open yet and the staff were still preparing the tables both inside and out on the riverside promenade. Any preliminary pigeon English enquiries (because we have no Spanish, I find you have to talk to the locals as if they were pigeons so that they get the gist of what you’re trying to say) to the waiting staff seemed to suggest that the restaurants wouldn’t open until after 9pm and when they did, it was either reservation only or $300 a plate for a very set and very meaty menu. Hmmmm. At this stage we were getting pretty hungry and almost falling down with heat exhaustion and dehydration so we stopped at a concession (as they call beach front hut shops in Vancouver) and had beers and, wait for it………biscuits! Biscuits is obviously not a Spanish word – they pronounce it like Bithkoo-its. Shamie and Mamie never enjoyed beer and bithkoo-its so much in their lives. We sat for a while, watching the sun go down and absorbing the smell of death coming from the river (one of the most polluted river basins on the planet) and moved next door to grab some icecream. Big mistake. The twilight brings the bloodthirsty squadrons of oversized kamikaze mosquitoes out in force. There’s currently an infestation of mosquitos in BA – we’re watching people on the news every morning comparing bites / scars and flagellating themselves with branches of trees as they walk through the parks. A pleasant New Years Eve stroll through Puerto Madero soon turned into a demented, frenzied, insect obstacle course as we bobbed and weaved, pre emptively swiping at the tenacious hordes of single minded mozzies who were all the more attracted by the sweat we were generating. At this stage our ice cream hit melting point aswell and started dripping in sweet sticky rivers down our sweaty sticky arms. Mosquitos apparently LOVE ice cream. We were fucked. M (who generally attracts far less bites than me) had already been bitten a couple of times on the legs and arms and once on the face. They seem to like my hands and knuckles for some reason – probably because they were covered in delicious melted chocolate and almond ice cream. We had made the mistake of setting out far too early. As we made our way, disoriented, broken, bitten, sweat and ice-cream soaked back towards town we met the dignified and well heeled families of Portenos (these people are big on families) all dressed completely in white (an upper class new years tradition apparently), looking immaculate heading for the expensive restaurants from which we had been silently banished (too much sweat on your dress shirt sir). We must have looked hilariously demented as we rushed up side streets, shadow swiping the humid air to get back to the air conditioned mosquito-free green zone of our hotel room. We felt like Vietnam vets who were returning from a particularly hellish tour of duty – and it was only 9:30pm. This feeling was heightened by having to step over a couple of rancid pieces of discarded raw meat left to rot on the pavement - don't ask, we have no idea. No tidy towns prizes here for a while.

So we regrouped in our hotel room, built a sandwich and opened a bottle of wine to settle our nerves. We turned on the television to try and see could we find the Argentinian equivalent of Mary Kennedy’s Up For The Match (or whatever it’s new years eve equivalent is). We stumbled across a live broadcast of an open air classical concert in Buenos Aries and we recognised the monument in the background (The Obelisca @ Plaza de la Republica – pretty damned recognisable). We figured, despite the stressful and disappointing experience of NYE in BsAs up to that point that we’d venture out again, this time armed with a headful of wine, and give it another try. We walked the 20 minutes to the Obelisco (taxis are impossible to get at the best of times – homeless guys (Sean Marty Lockhards) aggressively offer their roadside taxi procurement services. Why they think they have a better chance in their dishevelled state of successfully flagging down a speeding taxi is anyone’s guess) to find that in the half hour since we spotted the festivities on the telly, the concert had ended and everyone had scarpered back to the bosoms of their familial homes to do whatever it is they do that they cant do in public at midnight. Oh Well. It was about 11pm at this stage. There was a massive digital clock on the wall of one of the buildings opposite the Plaza so we decided we’d sit tight, relax in the gloriously balmy evening (a novel NYE experience in itself) and bed down with the locals and street urchins to herald in the new year. Hanging with the homeless so to speak. We basically did the equivalent of sitting at the Hoor in the Sewer on O’Connell Street with the local howeyas drinking cheap champagne. A marked difference to how we expected to spend it – fine dining in Puerto Madero. But it turned out to be so much fun. Around about 11:15 couples, visiting families and other homesick fellow travellers started to congregate – more because it was a group of people on an otherwise deserted street than because it looked like anything interesting or exciting was going to happen. But slowly the Plaza started coming alive, first with street kids and their cheap penny bangers, then with older more well to do kids and their expensive fireworks. Young drunken Argentinian males are funny – dancing studiously to “rock” music bleating from their cell phones, nodding their mullets and posing for self portraits on their camera phones (seriously). One particularly animated and inebriated vagrant gentleman – an absolute dead ringer for Diego Maradona (post 10 year cocaine binge) - took it upon himself to orchestrate the proceedings and encourage everyone into performing Mexican waves, singing what we imagined to be pretty bawdy street songs. He was absolutely hilarious as he flirted with the young German tourists (completely oblivious to their recoiling in disgust every time he tried to wish them a Felize Ane with his lips) and “borrowed” bottles of champagne from other onlookers. As midnight approached the night became a cacophony of fireworks explosions, with people cheering the more elaborate displays and singing indecipherable songs, mixed with the noise of semi formed Mexican waves not so much rippling as dribbling through the ever more drunken crowd. There was also the hilariously entertaining sideshow of a dim dog attacking the kids who were setting the fireworks in wine bottles in the middle of the Plaza. It became a race against time to see who could set, light and launch their fireworks before Dim Lassie, the playful but determined stray, attracted by the sparks and crackling, could intervene and save the world from the imminent chaos. He got a very painful comeuppance when he successfully managed to reach a firework before it launched (after it had been lit) but was unsuccessful in quenching it as it went off in its mouth. I’ve never seen anything with its tail as firmly between its legs as it quietly excused itself from centre stage and briskly walked away through the crowds to presumably scream with pain in solitude. He returned 10 minutes later even more determined to rid the world of fireworks on New Years Eve. Midnight came soon after dragging 2007 with it, 5 hours earlier than Vancouver, 3 hours later than home and 2 hours earlier than New York. We watched the Times Square celebrations in our hotel room via the medium of Anderson Cooper having walked back through the streets lined with discarded champagne bottles, spent fireworks and BA revellers getting stuck in for the night.

So while it was relatively quiet, it was a vast improvement on last new years eve in Vancouver where we spent it in bed....asleep.

Me finding Spanish journalism very insightful

Rumbled. Tin Tin doesn't speak Spanish!

The Spanish phrasebook which T, L and A bought us is proving absolutely invaluable so thanks again for that. A and P's BA guidebook has kept us hammering the pavements looking for further adventure aswell. We just moved into our lovely new apartment in Palermo yesterday so it feels like we're on a new holiday. We'll keep you posted as often as we can to let you know how it's all going. Chau for now.