Lost and Found
Buenos Aires
Being a creature of habit, I again sought out the Hotel Alcazar in the heart of Buenos Aires. I know a good thing when I pay for it and its simple, neat rooms and friendly, unpretentious staff, make it an easy choice at £15 a night. It's just off Avenida 9 de Junio, possibly the widest avenue in the world made up of around 20 lanes spread across four separate roads. A strip of land divides each road. One could build a substantial house and garden on each without disturbing anyone. The monitor blinks a 30 second countdown for pedestrians crossing the middle section though it's not recommended for the old, infirm or apathetic.
The hotel is on Avenida de Mayo, which crosses the larger avenue. It may be narrower but it's equally important. It's placed half way between the Casa Rosada, Argentina's rosier equivalent of the White house, and the Congreso National, a dowdier version of Washington's Capitol. Evita Peron did her famous impression of Madonna from the balcony of the Casa Rosada. For most people, this location would make an easy map reference for orientating oneself about a city of 18 million. But the two maps I followed offered directly opposing interpretations of north and south thus considerably increasing my ground coverage.
One day I walked, quite deliberately, in a great circle about the BA city centre hoping to end up roughly where I started. Several hours later, I sat down at a restaurant and found the menu rather predictable. It was only when I found the waiters faces equally predictable that I realised I'd got back to the restaurant I'd had breakfast in. My low expectations are such that I don't even realise when I've been successful. Fortunately, lunch was also good.
I found the hotel much as I had four years ago by sitting on a bus until I got saddle sore. It cost a fraction of the taxi fare, but wound about shabby suburbs so long I worried that I might be leaving BA on the far side towards Chile. Exhausted by my sleepless overnight journey I nodded off intermittedly with the early morning workers.
I was irritated by the sleepy passengers reluctance to disembark. It suggested there was no obvious terminal and that I might snag them on my bags if I made any effort to leave. I sat it out, figuring that if I didn't know where I was going, it didn't matter much where I was. But slowly the weaker ones cracked. They left resentfully for work in straggles of twos and threes creating a narrow defile through which I could now exit. I emerged into a vaguely familiar, fume-choked boulevard and sat down for a coffee in the same café in which I'd tried to get my bearings last time around.
I shared my table with an affable, bearded Bolivian, who had sat next to me on the bus. He quickly realised I was the wrong person to ask directions, but seemed to find me interesting, if strange. By the time we had finished several cups and swapped emails, I decided that he was more friend than foe, at which time he left to work in the Ministry of Health across the road. Such is the nature of the fleeting travelling relationship. By the time you appreciate each other, it's time to say goodbye.
Several minutes later a man asked me if I knew where he could find the Ministry of Health. I said 'No' instinctively, before recanting and pointing at the building in front of us. He thanked me suspiciously.
I finished my coffee and took a deep breath of the same petrol-laden air I'd tasted once before, now matured, like a foul, festering wine. Later I found out the city was covered in smoke from raging fires lit by pyromaniac farmers. They had land to burn and grievances to air. I contacted the BBC to offer my assistance, rather optimistically, as I'd got my information from their website.
Sniping from the Gutter
Having spent a night perusing the options for even cheaper accommodation I took a taxi to Hotel Maido the next morning, a lodging only half the price of my current one. I was less pleased by its interior, which seemed an ideal place to escort a budget streetwalker if she could only be persuaded to cross its threshold. Sometimes you have to step down into the gutter to appreciate the places in which you have grown complacent.
The musty odours of my new room clung to the sparse few imitations of furniture despite my instinct not to inhale for the next day or so. Within this dank tenement carved cruelly into a sleazy street I rued the window, shower and TV I'd lost, and the prospect of sharing the barely flushing toilet and shower with my fellow accursed. The door that separated the other customers from my laptop and camera would probably collapse from the first toxic breath of a wandering drunk.
The concierge didn't seem surprised that I had downgraded my stay to one night. I had requested a week through the intercom, three or four minutes earlier. I probably wasn't the first disillusioned customer. Throughout the night, when the reluctant clientele returned to the hotel, she sounded genuinely baffled by the electronic screech of the buzzer, screaming "Que?' with surprise as people asked to come in.
I made the best of it by using the available wi-fi service. Over the afternoon, I tried to organise the rest of my trip, and contact every friend I'd ever lost. My attempts to find new lodgings via websites like normal, organised people, foundered on my newfound knowledge that it was Saturday. Almost everywhere confirmed the Internet.
Night fell and a street culture emerged that complemented the interior. Women smiled at me lasciviously and men pushed flyers in my direction with lewd winks. I took it with good grace before realising, once again, that I'd been earmarked for either eternal damnation or a night in the nearest strip-bar.
The sleaze sat incongruously alongside slick bistros patrolled by rushing waiters in tuxedos, while the togged up Saturday night visitors snacked in their elegant surroundings before taking in a show at one of the local coliseums. Their posters displayed cheeky Latin chappies winking and gurning alongside luscious honey-skinned beauties spilling out of their scanty sequinned outfits.
I dined with my book before meandering home, slaloming wide of the shady clubs and their leering hawkers. After persuading the new receptionist that I wanted to come in I retired for the night to follow a boxing match on my computer. Such was my entertainment. I checked my emails for replies to my earlier outburst of digital socialising. The one hotel that sounded too good to be true was being rebuilt, while my friends appeared to be out living their lives far from their computer screens. That's not to say I was totally bereft of contact. I resisted all 46 offers to improve the scale and functionality of my love tool.
Despite the surprising absence of vampiric bugs, I slept fitfully, thinking it was time to check out every half hour or so from around 2.30am. The concierge banged needlessly on my door at half nine possibly surprised to find me still there. She laughed lightly when I said I might be back. I stepped into the nearest taxi.
Scary Little Hippies
The miasmic odour followed me back to my compact but bijou residence in the Hotel Alcazar but faded after the showering and personal grooming I had saved for my return.
I took off on a jaunt towards San Telmo - the Covent Garden of BA replete with antique shops and tango dancers. Having never mastered the basics of salsa - a source of great frustration over the years - I'm in even greater awe of the classical technique and drama of tango. The music that accompanies the dance and the tangents that spring from it were being brilliantly performed by legions of exponents on every street corner by the serried ranks of violins and accordions. Elsewhere, musicians, barefooted and open-shirted played faster rhythms and different tunes but infused with a hypnotic melancholic strain that marks much of the music.
I'd stumbled into San Telmo a few days earlier but had been unnerved by a hippy toddler tugging at my arm unexpectedly as I sipped my daily strawberry Batido. Minutes later two of his cohorts just missed my head with a football, which I flapped away like a hysterical goalkeeper. Hippy children may have the dreadlocks but there's no guarantee they have been passed the loving genes. People lurked about looking to sell me trinkets and baubles I could never want. With company I might have diluted my victimhood. Two worlds seem to be superimposed on each other, one made up of tourists and the other of the resident hippies and their broods. With too little time to significantly grow my hair, I left.
But I wasn't a gringo here - a term rarely used when so much of the population is descended from Italians up here, and the Germans, down towards Patagonia. This wasn't the case in Ecuador from where I'd flow in. It was a journey that was made more passable by the company of a Colombian woman. I'd been debating whether to ask the man by the window to move, as he was in my seat. As it was already after dark, it seemed a pointless challenge, but there was some kind of principle involved.
Sitting down quietly was the right decision. A few minutes later a willowy Latina with a twinkle in her eyes stood next to the aisle seat on my right. She had the kind of face that's most natural with a smile pasted on it, or possibly just looking quizzically amused. I imagine she hummed a lot, in all circumstances. There was something in the way she kept looking up from her ticket stub towards the number written above her head that suggested she usually applied her mind to more intellectual pursuit than, say, basic arithmetic or playing Snap.
'Numero 30?' I ventured to add a further and surely clinching vote in favour of her having found the correct seat.
'Si!' she responded with delight as if I'd confirmed her final lottery number. She added incredulously: 'Where's you accent from?' as if never expecting to bump into a foreigner on an international flight.
Yuliett was a roving human rights lawyer who had worked everywhere between Venezuela and Clapham South. She reminded me of my dentist - another untypical Colombian with a heart of gold who had recently given me a dozen free dental appointments. The child in the seat ahead screamed at the sight of her, but with delight. She told me that most children did this, and while she was incapable of harnessing this unusual power, she had learned to live with it.
It was one of the best conversations I've had in 40 years. When we separated for connecting flights Yuliett was shouting 'Promise you'll write!' across the crowded terminal. It followed the kind of goodbye hug I'd usually reserve for friends who had survived the Titanic.
The Art of Noise
The previous week in Quito had reminded me how different the countries of the Andes were to those of the Southern Cone of South America.
Apart from standing tall alongside the diminutive indigenous people that make up a sizeable chunk of the population, I'd forgotten how noisy it was. Staying with my friends D and Miss LE - English and Ecuadorian respectively - I was woken frequently by the chorus of wolfish howling that echoed around the neighbourhood through the night. Before I'd tamed them to my presence, the resident dogs of Casa Gibb kept me in the house, and the burglars out, by virtue of their bulk and puppyish enthusiasm. The German Shepard was hefty enough though not to be compared with his adopted brother a Saint Bernard almost three times his size on which the Gibb's daughter - herself larger than most of her older classmates - occasionally rides. I only smoked a few cigarettes that week as it became too uncomfortable doing so with one cheek pressed against a pillar - a position best assumed to avoid being nuzzled over the garden wall.
The objects of much of the dogs' attention were the trucks that paraded periodically by hooting their horns repeatedly to let us know that their dry-cleaning, gas and water services were available, let alone their second-hand furniture. And again 20 minutes later, in case we changed our minds. My glares were confused for strange foreign smiles.
The horn is also used to alert other drivers to your position and no doubt reflect a complex system of communication in the right hands much like the fabled drums of Africa. Sadly there's no common cipher to those that use the code. One man's 'I'm coming through!' is another's reference to your mother. The deaf must have a mortality rate comparable with aviators from World War 1, while the rosary beads that adorn the front of the local taxis and buses hardly betoken an optimistic outlook.
Inexplicably, the seemingly psychopathic authorities don't feel any compunction to adorn their crossroads with give way lines. Presumably, this is a cheaper alternative to building roads that lead off the edges of cliffs as you can kill two cars with one stone by driving them into each other. The result of all this is that junctions are crossed at the same speed driven elsewhere but with the addition of more cacophonous beeping to let your rival know you will be crashing into them any second now.
Pathetic policeman are installed on these junctions during the daytime. They are called Tourist Police and apparently receive training though not in self-assertion as they are ignored by everyone including pedestrians. But they seem to enjoy their whistle blowing. It lets them avoid eye contact with tourists, and they can do it together in huddles of three or four even on those junctions equipped with working traffic lights. When it gets dark and the thieves come out, they go home. Salaried twats.
Coming soon: Paraguay, Land of the Indecipherable!
Buenos Aires Hotels
