The only bus ride he ever feared

Originally I planned out this trip as an overland journey to the bottom of the world and then back up. No planes along the way. The practicality of this decision met its first test yesterday with the bus ride to Bariloche. 1600 km and 7 degrees of lattitude looks so easy on the world map....

I knew in advance it was going to be 23 hours long. Bus travel is a huge industry in Argentina and many cities have large bus terminals (as I very soon found out). The terminal in Buenos Aires is a little sketchy - I hadn´t really realized until recently that basically Buenos Aires is a catch-all for the entire continent, it´s one of the most important cities in Latin America and accumulates all the good that comes with that title as well as the not-so-good. When I bought my ticket a day earlier, I was careful to watch my bag and even then at one point I noticed that a zipper had been eased open, but nothing taken. Returning on departure day, I was a quite high-strung on minding my space, a state of mind that only got worse when the bus didn´t show up on time. Had I misunderstood something when ordering the ticket?

The bus eventually arrived, and we ended up leaving 30 minutes late. The bus company I choose was called Andesmar, and I choose it because the name sounded cool. The buses are these beauty double-decker coach buses with different seat classes, a ¨bus attendant¨, and easy rock hits. I had the front panorama window on the upper level, and the attendant brought out ham sandwiches right away. Not bad.

The ride out of town was certainly something, dominated by massive shipyards, shantytowns, and slums. I was surprised to see the true wealth disparity of the city, and how much of a deception the idea of travel can be. Without such a bus ride, I´d have just known the postcard pictures and some sketchy neighbourhoods on the edge of the tourist circuit. I can believe that all major cities have poorer suburbs, but not like this. I´ve never been to a city like this. The engineer in me perked up whenever we passed a slum, the architecture of these flat-roofed hovels built on top of each other did look remarkable. But that´s the closest I´ll ever get to them. ¨You must learn one thing: the world was made to be free in.¨ I don´t think David Whyte was thinking of slums when he wrote those words, not for us and not for them.

We passed two Walmarts. And then we made a detour around a run-off the mill protest of some sort where there was burning piles of grass on the road.

They must drug the air in the bus for the amount I slept during the ride. Or maybe it was the choice of films - Jack Nicholson´s rivetting work in The Pledge or the one-scene wonder Before the Sunset. Coupled with Assault on Precinct 13 the next day and Nights in Rodanthe on the plane ride in, I´m beginning to fear America´s long-term cultural effects on Argentina.

When I awoke at 9am the next day, it became clear that we were several hours behind schedule. The pampas and their black cows (delicious!) stretched for miles in all directions. Sleep. The view gave way to low sagebrush, a hot, dead land, and no civilization save for electrical towers running haphazardly all over the place. I ate my FibreMax cereal, a relic from the second day grocery shop that I think I´ll be working on for quite some time.

With Bariloche still 200km away and already 3 hours late with no hope of lunch on the horizon, the attendant decided it was time for a bus-wide game of Bingo. Basically he donned us. I was actually glad I didn´t win the bag of goodies as I´m sure there would have been quite some confusion when he explained in rapid Spanish what it was I won. As it was, I shared a nice communication relationship with the lady next to me that consisted of hand motions and head nodding. Precinct 13´s bad-ass score provided an appropriate soundtrack to our entry into the steppes of the Andes, following sinuous roads along deep-blue lakes as peaks began to appear in the distance.

We arrived at Bariloche 5 hours late, which I guess isn´t bad (20% error). All in all it was a good ride. And Bariloche is amazing, a little resort town nestled between the mountains and a wind-swept lake, one of the great South American ski destinations. They had live music in the town square and and endless main street of outdoor goods stores. The hostel is no longer dominated by partiers but long distance cyclists and hikers. I could spend months here. The Chilean border is near, but all the crossings involve some combination of boat, hike, and horse. I´m sure paragliding fits in there somewhere too.

In and around Buenos Aires

Surprise, I´m not actually in Buenos Aires anymore. But I was, and it´s a great place.

The city feels completely different from home, right from the start. The streets are either very narrow alleys that look like they are transported from some city in Europe, complete with hanging lights overhead and cobblestone beneath, or they are enormous deserts of roadway that you wouldn´t dare cross without the confidence of other pedestrians. Giant trees line most avenues, and important boulevards intersect each other at grandiose plazas. The buildings are never more than 12 stories high, and everyone has a balcony, which on the muggy, hot days of last week must be a blessing. And the women are spellbinding! It all has the air of a city you´d want to live in, if only I could share through pictures.

I wandered into this random pink building where other tourists were entering, and joined a mandatory tour. Might have understood about 5 words. But it was a cool building, a very grande feel to it. Turned out to be the Casa Rosada, the equivalent of Argentina´s White House.

In the plaza out front there are big hand-painted banners on the light-blue and white colours of Argentina, with big slogans written about the Falkland Islands. During a tour a few days later, our guide told the accompanying Brits ¨we´re all Canadians right now¨ to avoid any trouble. It´s manned everyday by veterans of the war, which was a bad deal for Argentina and resulted in the death of 600 Argentinians. There´s a stand with all the newspaper articles from the crisis on display. It was all quite moving, since the people are still very angry about the event, but to us it´s just a point on a map and a memory from a distant wikipedia article.

We watched the Oscars with Spanish dubbing. Why they dubbed it is beyond me, most movies have subtitles here. And when Hugh Jackman started singing I think the dubbing guys just shook their heads in failure and said ¨to hell with it¨.

We went to this awesome event with the hostel called Bomba del Tiempo, best twenty pesos of the trip so far. Arriving at this sort of open-air warehouse venue, we walked past a messy line of several hundred that encircled the building on three sides. Since we already had tickets we approached the entrance and its fearsome hoard of people. I watched my fellow hostelers slip away as other groups squeezed by with locked arms. But once inside, we watched this awesome, high energy drum show, put on with maybe a dozen amplified bongo drums and a few other percussion. It was incredible. It happens every week and is basically a big pre-drink to the bar/club scene, but what a great pre-drink it was.

After the drum show we met up with the second planned part of the evening, the local pub crawl. Slightly less authentic, there must have been a unwritten requirement that you had to be an English speaker to attend. Basically it was like a pub crawl back home, or in England or Australia I would imagine. It was nice to have a taste of home and not have to try to speak in Spanish. I did of course try my Spanish since alcohol seems to greatly improve it: mi casa es su casa! Turns out the pub crawl is run by some foreigners, they do it 4 times a week as a business. And then you realize that even as a hosteler you´re part of the giant wheels of tourism.

I went to lunch with a nice American couple I met on the plane, they are vacationing here for a month and also getting their dental-work done. Sounds like a plan. They weren´t optimistic about the political state of the country, which boasts over 20 years of tenuous democracy after some real bad times in the 70s. All public statues stand behind sharp fences to prevent political graffitti, and walking by it makes you wonder if Argentina can survive the coming crisis...

To soak up all the beer with a bit of culture (hint: beer here is usually sold in litre bottles) I checked out the Ricoleta Cemetary and the Museum of Fine Arts. Damn I wish I had my camera, the cemetary was this maze-like village of marble and granite sanctuaries, no grass in sight. I made the requisite stop to see Eva Perron, but I was also struck by the tombs of many other famous Argentinians, especially some of the generals who really screwed up the nation. I thought about filming a US Marshals-style showdown in the cemetary....maybe next time.

And in keeping with using travel as a means of accumulating exotic wall ornamentation for my future home, I made note of Xul Solar, a Buenos Aires artist of the 20th Century:

Generalizations: they say that people from Buenos Aires love their ice cream. Absolutely true. They sell it everywhere, at dedicated shops, corner stores, ice cream stands. I was walking home during rush hour and saw this man in a suit absolutely loving this ice cream cone. Another generalization: the stupid nightlife. Instead of going to the bar like civilized people from 10 till 2 or something, they sleep and rest until 1 am and then go out to the bar till 5. Oh that makes sense. We´ll take a cab home at 4am and there are still people on restaurant patios. Do they party harder? Not really, they´re out for the same amount of time. But they are a very tired bunch of people. What a bunch of idiots.

Last generalization is the ridiculous hair. I asked to look more Argentinian when I got my hair cut, and my only observation is that they left it pretty long in the back...

A Camera Story

So as many know, I elected to bring my nifty Nikon D80 with me on the trip. Ever since I got this thing it´s become more of a hobby, most days I can just go out and ¨shoot¨ for an hour at a time, and that´s only in boring Markham. Imagine the possibility in a city of millions.

This is a terrible story.

After being exposed to the ¨hostel¨ life, which involves drinking late into the night and then getting up approaching noon, I decided to try for a little earlier morning. It was a Sunday, my third day in the city, and I was headed to the San Telmo market which from all I´ve heard is the stuff dreams are made of.

Buenos Aires doesn´t really get moving until 1pm either , and it was quiet where I was. Part of the problem was that I was one steet over from main tourist strip, parading down Av. Bolivar taking epic pictures of the street facades and random soccer games. I crossed into an area called La Boca, which is a more blue-collar neighbourhood with a few streets on the tourist circuit. I reached an intersection, sat next to a magazine stand to discretely look at my guidebook in my bag to see where the hell San Telmo had disappeared to. Two fellas who had been walking on the street near me walked past. Suddenly they pivoted. And I knew what was going to happen.

It was a blur. There must have been a knife involved to cut the strap of the camera, I later found a small cut on my hand. They pushed, I rolled, scrambled back onto my feet, and they were already off. Seeing only red, I dropped my knapsack, started yelling, and burst into pursuit. I don´t know exactly what I was hoping to accomplish, maybe hoping someone would trip them or I could find some Jackie Chan-type prop on the street to throw at them to neutrelize them. After two short blocks a car sped by, they dove in, and my camera was gone. I swear the licence plate was VIY 450, but I wasn´t sure enough. A police officer was one block away at this point, and he picked me up to go make a police report happen.

This was a terrible, jarring experience on a few levels, but it could have been much worse, as everyone tells you. I could have been hurt. I could be penniless and without passport. But that doesn´t change the fact that my camera is gone and I was the dummy who was stupid enough to let it happen. Afterwards I walked over one street and found the San Telmo market, complete with hundreds of camera-touting tourists.

It took time to even find comfort in the phone call I had with Heather Cook the day of my flight: the one where we insured the camera under my ma & pa´s house insurance for $15 per year. So it´ll make a triumphant return once I get home, but I´ll be reluctant to take it out in exotic locations ever again.

So a little part of me died that day. Not just the part that went into the trip as a budding photography hobbyist, but also the part that went into the trip as an intrepid explorer. I can´t walk on a street anymore without thinking it might happen again. I scan faces, assess risks, consider different routes. I look to see if I´m being followed and to see if anyone else is taking too keen an interest in me. Perhaps I was foolish and naive at first, and if so, I´m glad to have learned my lesson safely and so early on. But I wonder if I will ever look at travel the same way again.

Anyway, before this essay gets too long, consider that at the local department store, Falabella´s, a simple $120 digital Canon costs about 1000 pesos, or $500! Apparently Argentina heavily taxes all electronic imports, upwards of 60%. So they will probably be able to sell that camera of mine for double the cost it was to me. In a way I´ve made my contribution to the poor this year.

Concering JFK International Airport

Already one week and no news from down south. Well let me start with the flight, or even better, the airport. See, I´ve always really liked airports for their high symmetrical ceilings, wide open spaces, and hundreds of people with different destinations. Being in an airport means the start of a trip or the triumphant return home, they´re really only places of good memories. Very clean, overpriced maple syrup stores, that sort of thing, great. All of that of course was before I elected to book a connection through JFK.

The plane that was to take us from Pearson to JFK was still in New York when we were supposed to be boarding. So the 45 minute connection at JFK was doomed from the start. Arriving at JFK at midnight, the vibe is completely different than other airports during the day. It becomes a ghost-town, a collection of night-shifters that don´t make eye contact and other travellers stuck in limbo. The corridors that carry so much energy in daylight become eerie dark passages from one abadoned terminal to the next. I eventually found a burger in terminal 4 (of 8) and headed for my free night at the not-so-luxurious Ramada Suites. And score one free mini-shampoo.

It´s a recurring theme that no one really goes to Argentina: trying to get pesos in Markham is met with very confused responses, and flights are only twice a day from America´s biggest airport, at night. Faced with a 6-hour period without anything to do, I figured it was the perfect time to visit the Met, a veritable New York institution. Something got lost along the way, and I missed it by about 120 blocks. Instead ended up at the very top of Manhatten Island, in an area known as Washington Heights. Luckily, a nifty artistic couple who were visiting the same area befriended me and we went for delicious Cuban sandwiches before a sort of mini-tour of the area. We saw the GW (the George Washington Bridge) and the Cloisters, an offshoot of the Met that is a collection of medieval statues and art in a sort of romanesque church. After that experience I feel I can comfortably use the word romanesque in a sentence, so it all worked out. Caught the flight later and slept like a baby.

Fast forward to an incredibly humid airport in Buenos Aires, watching a luggage carrousel for a bag that never comes. My bag had spent the NYC night in limbo, probably just circling the millions of kilometers of baggage conveyor belts, and I was assured it would automatically get transferred to the next flight down south. That was not the case. Then a second flight to Buenos Aires for the day arrived 15 minutes later and I felt a surge of relief when my bag traipsed by. But it was a scary 15 minutes.

And now I´m in 25 degree weather and you suckers are still shovelling snow back home. And lesson learned, never connect through JFK.

Kilometer 0

Hello World!

There's a first time for everything, and today it is blogging. So far it's like talking to a wall, that is, it's pretty one-sided. In truth, I am writing a journal for myself of a bunch of semi-interesting experiences that I will one day read again. But I am tapping away at the keyboard with this belief - this hope - that someone else is reading, learning, listening, maybe even enjoying. Either way, the internet just accumulated another page of crap today.

Tomorrow I am flying to Buenos Aires in Argentina. Tomorrow a tiny spot on the map that I've always tried to say in my best Spanish accent will become a living, breathing reality. And that's just the start of a journey that will with some luck take me across city and farm, through mountain passes, across deserts and glaciars, and even to the bottom of the world. Unbelievable.
But that's all for tomorrow. Right now I'm excited, apprehensive, ready, unprepared, but most of all, tired. So I'll be spending the night at Kilometer 0:

Until we blog again!