Boogie baby - Tango in BA
Trip Start
Nov 02, 2007
1
11
22
Trip End
??? ??, 2008
Buenos Aires,
Argentina
Friday, January 18, 2008
Well the first 6 hours passed quite quickly we made small talk about our families, travelling, Argentina and its political and economic instability in the past..
Our crazy hitch
. (At least thats what we think we were talking about in our pigeon Spanish!!)He graciously put on all of his english music CD's, so we listened to Sting, The Police, Phil Collins, Elton John in fact all was going well til we hit Celine Dion! Finally after 13 hours we got to Caleta Olivia, just an hour short of our destination. Daniel decided that he was going to have a shower and cook some dinner with his mate who had been following us in the truck behind, and then we would carry on. It was 10.30pm but we weren't worried as the sun doesn't set in these borders til midnight in the summer, so we played cards for a couple of hours and as the sun was setting he knocked on the lorry door and said that he wasn't going anywhere as him and his mate were both pissed as farts on half a bottle of wine each. He offered to let us sleep in the back of his hermetically sealed low temperature food cargo carrier, but we had visions of the scene in Goodfellas, of being found in the morn frozen solid attached to meat hooks, so we pleasantly declined. Stan sourced out a comfy patch to sleep on in the petrol station shop and we managed to get 4 hrs of broken sleep on the cold hard floor, before getting up at 5am and securing a hitch with a coach to the bus station 3km away. Stan woke Daniel up (he tells me he was asleep naked - eek!!), we got our bags and headed straight for the bus station and the nearest coach and fell alseep on the way to Puerto Madryn - a blissful 8hrs of sleep!
Bring back C & A, it rocks!!!
!We only stayed in Puerto Madryn long enough to take a hitch up to the welsh town of Gaiman, where we graced a rather posh Welsh tea house with our presence for the lengthy period of 5mins. Long enough to sit down, smell the cakes, read the very expensive menu and get the hell out of there!! Of course there was plenty to do in Puerto Madryn like the sealion, whale and penguin colonies at Peninsular Valdes and Punto Tombo, but as this meant parting from our rapidly decreasing pesos, and really not wanting to attempt a 20hr hitch to Buenos Aires, we blew our budget on a bus to BA. Had it not been for the lovely Juan, his wife Andrea and his baby Geronimo, we would've slept on the floor of the bus station, but the lovely couple felt sorry for us poor sods and took us home!!
Well after an eventful journey up to Buenos Aires - the big city did not disappoint. Staying in the backpacker hub of San Telmo we did the touristy stuff. San Telmo was a shoppers fantasy stuffed full of antique and thrift shops from street to street. We headed down to La Bocca football stadium where Diego Maradonna played and we walked around the colourful houses of Caminito. It was great, the only drawback to this beautiful city was the hundreds of turds on every inch of footpath, but you can easily avoid them if you do a bit of hopscotch and all the quickstepping to avoid these lethal brown grenades really gets you in shape for a bit of salsa...
Having met some rather lovely and interesting peeps on our eventful journey to BA (hello Stormwind!!!) , we packed up and headed up to Puerto Iguazu, desperate to get there before Stan's 30th and before his hair got any greyer and those wrinkles any deeper...
