Day 168 - Adios Latin America

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After 5 1/2 months in the Americas, and most of that spent in Spanish-speaking Latin America, the day finally arrived for us to leave. We had a bit of a wander around San Telmo, the home of Tango, said “Goodbye” to Matt and “Auf Wiedersehen” to Dea, and made our way to the airport. Our tickets from Buenos Aires to Johannesburg had cost us £200 each, rather than the £1000+ that our internet searches had come up with, so we expected to be sharing a plane with some Argentine cattle. We needn’t have worried, and had an excellent flight with Malaysian Airlines - the plane continued its journey after South Africa to Kuala Lumpur. The girl sitting next to us was nanny for a family sitting a couple of rows back. They were flying Argentina - South Africa - Kuala Lumpur - China with 2 small kids. Rather them than us.

We're ready to move on, but will definitely miss plenty of things about Latin life. Like the 1 litre beer bottles that people share, like a coulpe of girls might share a bottle of wine on a gossipy night out in London. And we'll definitely miss the football scene - there's no Christiano Ronaldo-style play acting down here and what would be yellow card offences in the Premiership are waved on. The skill level is lower, but more than compensated for by the tough challenges, disregard for defending and of course the fans. Ed has probably been to getting on for 200 English games and none had quite the atmosphere of the Santiago derby. Our best moments have been football-related meetings with Chileans, no doubt.

What else do we love here? The buses for one - as soon as we left the USA we said goodbye to rubbish Greyhound and found better buses everywhere, even Honduras, Peru, Bolivia and Guatemala. Amongst serious competition, the ETN buses in Mexico are the best with the staff waving off each departing bus.

Spending a couple of weeks learning Spanish really helped our experience, although we never moved far beyone survival level. Just the effort implied by a Spanglish attempt is an excellent way to make people like us. Rather than getting easier as we went on it actually got more difficult - Argentinians speak at light speed and with a lot of different words from what we'd been taught.

Obviously each country is different, but there's enough to make them similar at least. Every town or city on the whole continent has the same road names like Colon (Christopher Colombus) and plenty of roads named after dates. The original September 11th for example.

Anyway, goodbye Latin America. We recommend that everyone should go there.

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