The Luxury Bus Diaries
Trip Start
Nov 01, 2004
1
47
51
Trip End
??? ??, 2006
San Antonio de Areco,
Argentina
Wednesday, December 7, 2005
I probably shouldn´t abmit this but the reports I´d heard of wine on long distance bus journeys were one of the main reasons I came to Argentina. So I was more than a little dismayed when we didn´t get anything stronger than coke - the fizzy kind - on a first few journeys. I was even more upset for Maria who I´d enticed out to Argentina with a text message that said "Why don´t u come to Argentina too? There´s free wine on the buses".
But our last long distance journey with Maria (Posados to Buenos Aires) has made up for all prior disappointments
Champagne on the bus
. It was like travelling from A to B in your own bed - only better! Not only did we get breakfast in bed, we also got whiskey, dinner, wine, sweets and champagne. CIE eat your heart out!Our continued efforts to get to gribs with Spanish are interesting. Saying "si", nodding and smiling works in most situations. However you can get a bit bored with that. To jazz things up a little we´ve started to repeat stuff back at people.
Waiter: Would you like anything else?
Us: Would you like anything else?
AWKWARD SILENCE
Us: (nodding and smiling) si, si
First impressions are important when you´re travelling about from place to place. So we were pretty chuffed when the first person we saw in San Antonio de Areco was a real life gaucho walking down the street. You could be picky and wonder where is his horse but we were satisfied with his cowboy boots, leather belt, massive cowboy hat and surly expression. A few minutes later we found a lovely guesthouse to stay in complete with a hummingbird in the garden
Gaucho wannabes
. San Antonio de Areco is gaucho central in Argentina. It´s a beautiful quiet town full of bicycles with no locks, cars that should have been scrapped several decades ago and gorgeous little bars where it´s very easy to drink a few bottles of Malbec whilst nibbling on a platter of cheese, olives and ham. And there´s lots of real life gauchos.Mr Guesthouse was a friendly fellow. He even kept talking to us when it became obvious we didn´t have a clue what he was saying. By day three we were all best mates and making some progress on the communication front. Somehow we managed to tell him how much we´d paid to hang out on a local Estancia (historic ranch) the day before. Before we could blink we was running around the entire guesthouse shouting "quarente cinco dollars!!!!" at the top of his voice. He obviously thought we were the biggest muppets ever for paying that much. But we were still mates and his gave us all a big hug and kiss when we were leaving.
In our humble opinion $45 to hang out at an amazing ranch for the day with unlimited horse-riding, drinks and half a cow each for lunch was a bargain. Maria and I both agreed that young Pablo, who´s family owned the ranch, was the best catch we´d seen in ages. Although our favorite was Mr Gaucho himself who seemed to control all the horses and the field of cows by just whistling. And he had the best work uniform I´ve ever seen.
Buses may be good but horses are a close second.
