Chunder and horses

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The boula bus drifts into the wind swept bus station, the dirt steams from the wheels and locals in heavy jackets and parkas, their heads turned away from the cutting rain scatter before it lugging suitcases and shepherding small children.

The doors open and a man steps out, clad in brilliant bright blue Bermudas, his toes already blueing from exposure and his private parts retreating from the frigid air into the lower echelons of his abdomen like a started hermit crab. Immediately after him comes petit Blondie in navy hot pants, eyes hidden behind sunglasses as large as saucers, she slings her bags over Bermuda man’s shoulder so that he resembles a bipedal packhorse and scurries off toward the bathroom.

Myself and niamh clearly didn’t think ahead concerning Patagonia’s weather when we boarded the bus in Buenos aires 22 hours ago.

We’ve arrived in baraloche, a town nestled amid a series of lakes and snow topped mountains. Tourists flock to baralochie like civil servants to the canteen at tea break and unfortunately accommodation prices are higher then elsewhere in Argentina so myself and niamh are dorming it again at the Tango inn hostel about 10 minutes outside the town. Tango inn run three hostels , a camping one in the hills, a luxury one in the centre and our current one on the outskirts.

As the printed English translation of the sign above reception reads “Welcomings to the funniest hostel in Baroloche” our temporary home for the next few days promises to be a hoot.

Niamh is staying in with a dorm with 3 other girls and I have one sole unnamed occupant based on the rucksack placed in the centre of the room. None of the beds seemed to have been claimed so I claim the middle bunk, strategically located next to the sole plug socket and place my flip flops and towel next to the pillow before skipping off the join Blondie for some dinner, she had a craving for cheese fondue, it being quite popular in fair old dish in all the eateries.

I returned and found my rucksack had been moved from my bed by my mystery roomie, too tired go about moving it back I climbed up to the top bunk and set about making an appointment with Mr Sandman, after our 22 hours on the boula bus we were in for what promised to be a relaxing uneventful night…oh how we were wrong

Did you ever have a dream so vivid you wake up, depending on the nature of the dream in question, momentary shocked with how insightful, inspirational, hilarious or sometimes downright terrifying it is? You fall back asleep, nod off and wake again later that morning and inevitably forget the dream and you kick yourself for not being able to recall it at all.

Well I’ve always kept a notebook beside my bed, when I wake up I jot down key words from the dream so I can recall it later in the morning. Sometimes you can find something incredibly interesting scribbled in blue ink, and more often then not you find “Philip seamour Hoffman stole my passport and then dinosaurs attacked”. You win some you lose some.

Well eating cheese before bed is never a good thing and eating an entire pot of cheese fondue another matter entirely. I woke up in my empty bunk covered in sweat and “Me and Charlie attacked by man eating toilet” scribbled on my notepad. Confident there was no porcelain beast lurking in the room I began to drift off when I heard a moan emanate from the floor of the room and the sound of something shuffling in the darkness and pad of bare feet over cheap carpet.

A shape emerges from the darkness and outstretches hands grab at my bunk, I skirt back towards the wall, and the shape collides with the steel and knocks over the bedside table. The shape appears to be a person with sluggish movement, poor motor function yet it seems to be navigating in the perfect darkness of the room as it makes a beeline for my bunk.


My sleep and mind confused with excess Argentinean wine and a cows udders helping of cheese fondue screams zombie before I relaxed and coped on it was my mystery room mate, who clearly made use of the “all you can drink tequila party held that evening by the “funniest” hostel in Baraloche.

Mystery housemate meandered away from my bunk before face planting himself on the central bunk, continually moaning “Oh cristo” and “fuck” and presumably a lot of other Spanish swear words , I hear the sounds of bedsprings flex and the room grows silent. Just as I am about to go to bed I hear the sound of laboured breathing and then a series of wet sounding belches. Uh Oh.

The bedsprings flex again, he going to the bathroom I think but I can still make out his silhouette raised on one hand, chest heaving, his head and shoulders are outlined against the faint streetlight coming through the curtains, the fucker isn’t moving toward the bathroom.

He groans and his gorge makes the sound of a toilet flushing and I hear the sound of barely digested tacos cascade against the carpet. I dive from the bed snatch the waste basket and thrust it before him, it far too late to drag him to the bathroom at this point. He utters a gracias upon receipt of the bucket but instead of doing the obvious thing of redirecting his flow of stomach acids into it he continues to projectile vomit a good ten inches clear into an ever increasing pile of stomach dexterous.

The room now reeks of sick and I can feel my own vomit reflex becoming eager. Eventually the mans regurgitating subsides and he sits, breathing heavily and looking up at me with a confused look on his face, the remains of what appears to be a recently ingested pepper is hanging from the side of his lips.

“Hello, my name Alexander, we have good parties in this hostel he says waving his hand over the pool of digestive liquids he is now sitting in. I suppose that’s one way of putting it.

“This is the part when you clean the place up” I think but Alexander simply spits some left over vomit onto the wall and crawls into his bed into the foetal position. This was fucking ridiculous. Now theres no shame in coming home into the hostel room drunk, there arguably nothing wrong taking that a bit further and being sick, presumably if your in the bathroom. We’ve all been that trooper at one point or another. But making no effort to get to the toilet and simply hurling directly onto the floor is just as bang out of order as a Gary glitter hosting the late late toy show and should you ever be guilty of such a crime then it would be prudent to clean the mess immediately and apologise profusely to anyone unfortunate to be sharing the room concerned.

I’ve been on a number of holidays with the lads where our hygiene and behaviour has been less then exemplary, to compare our behaviour on the aforementioned holidays as comparable to the chimpanzees in Dublin zoo would be an insult to the poor upstanding primates but vomiting on the floor and not bothering to clean it up is as taboo as attending Wesley disco beyond the age of 16.

I dragged Alexander, one of the many swearwords as I was referring to him to through clinched teeth at the present time, by his ankle to the bathroom where he preceded hurl bile in all directions and places except for inside the toilet bowl.

Shortly thereafter I was confronting the night receptionist insisting I was put in to a another room, he informed me that there were no other rooms available, to talk to the manageress in the morning and gave me a complementary chocolate biscuit. If that’s customer service I don’t know what is. I slept on the living area couch.

Manageress was a star, told us the entire tango chain was full and said that all she could offer was a private room for the duration of our stay on a dorm rate, a fantastic deal. A Dutch couple, Duncan and Lonica who were sharing our table overheard our breakfast friendly conversation and invited us to for a spot of horse riding.

The deal was that we would get ferried off to a stables enjoy an asado BBQ and then enjoy a three hour pony trek led by a gaucho, apart from the Dutch we were also joined by an Irish girl called Louisa and an American woman whose name I cannot recall The latter despite showing only slight advances on the rest of the party’s horse riding ability liked to bark orders and critique anyone within earshot. She regularly liked to remind us that she had been riding and breeding with horses for 10 years…a statement that not only flew in the face of the science of biology and broke several international laws but also made it very difficult for someone with my sense of humour to keep a straight face.

Last time I was on a horse was nearly 20 years ago so naturally I was completely out of practice. I was given a horse called Ramon, a big brown pony who had insatiable taste for the most thorn and nettle filled plants native to Patagonia. Ramon would bypass wholesome evergreens and healthy clumps of shrubbery to consume thorny branches, nettles and he had a particular penchant for thistles, upon sight of the concerned flora purple he would utter a Mr Ed horsy laugh and break trail to chomp the unfortunate plant to cud.

We soon left the forest and arrived on some plains right in the shadow of the Andes, the mountains themselves looming up all around us making us appear like ticks in their presence beneath the sky which in a stark contrast to yesterday was crayon blue and belting us with much needed sun, the peaks looked even more impressive. The massive conifers they were coated in seemed like shrubs in the distance the highest peaks were crowned in snow, the wind made the trees themselves sway and from a distance it gave you the impression the mountains themselves were breathing.

I kicked roman into a trot and we were all given the chance to spread out a bit and roman soon began to trot from thistle to thistle playing his own game of edible orienteering. The valley was filled with all the manner of Fauna, a family of cattle, new borne calf in tow, inhabited one spot, the mother bellowing in anger when Roman wandered to close to eat the various thorn bushes that grew nearby, the gauchos dog ran around the edge of the clearing upsetting all kinds of water fowl. The only human sounds that could be heard was the American woman screaming at someone over the length of their reins and the occasional shrill squeal from Niamh when her horse moved at anything faster then a light trot. We took a detour after the valley and entered the deep woods, the horses traversing some very difficult terrain before we moved onto the rocky shore of the beach. Myself and Duncan making all sorts of silly faces behind our zoophile companions back while she complained to the suffering Gaucho about how the rest of us couldn’t keep up, be advised that I had now taken to calling Niamhs Pony “Siptu” due to its enthusiasm for keeping up.

The final stretch was a full canter along the stony shore of the river beach; the gaucho actually moved his own horse a few feet into the water which looked like something out of a spaghetti western. If I can describe how exhilarating it is to be guiding a pony at a canter, along a stony beach by a blue lake, in the shadow of the mountains with the mountains reflection perfect on the milk still surface I would but such an experience defies simple description.

Ramon was so taken by this spectacle he decided to gallop the rest of the way to the horses pen with me attempting in vain to slow him, niamhs camera dangled from my wrist down below Ramón’s saddle, perilously close to his hooves while my other hand griped his mane. The more frantic shouting to stop the more Ramon accelerated. His breach came in bursts, “Kumph Kumph” but in my fright, bad taste as it might seem, all it sounded like he was snorting “Christopher Reeve, Christopher Reeve”. The Gaucho eventually saved the day by telling me to pull my reins “like Questar amigo” and I managed to bring Ramon to a halt and once he was in the paddock I managed to find him some more thistles to munch on.


With sore arses and bellies filled with the BBQ thrown in we spent the rest of the rest of the evening relaxing in a vomit free room before we met the Duncan and Lonica for Pasta.

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Comments

[Trish]

Red Pepper
Andy, could have done without the description of the red pepper hanging off his lip. I will never eat a red pepper again

[Christopher Reeves]

LOL
LOL... you nailed it!