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Still not knowing whether we were going to continue around South America for a further five weeks or make our way home sharpish, we headed to Buenos Aires anyway as it was the next stop on our tour and if we were to get a flight anywhere it would need to be from here. What better way to recover from an armed assault than a 15 hour bus journey? Hmmmm.
Our recent ordeal had left me shaky, upset and feeling a bit unstable; I became really easily upset by pretty much anything, and being on the bus from Mendoza to Buenos Aires with very loud music on a loop blaring out of the speaker above us really didn’t help. Apparently when booking online we had chosen the only seats on the bus that had music coming out of the overhead speakers and it was so loud that it was crackling and becoming distorted. Nightmare. We didn’t get much sleep that night and eventually arrived into Buenos Aires bus station at about 11am, 15 hours after we boarded. The time spent on the bus really didn’t bother me though, I think we are just really used to long journeys now.
The bus station was quite freaky, too many dodgy looking characters, just like in Mendoza and probably like in most cities in the world but I was suspecting everyone of being about to mug us - talk about paranoia. We quickly got out of there and bought metro tickets then took the metro to Ave de Mayo where our hostel was; thankfully the metro was quiet so once we boarded the carriage, I calmed down a little. Matt has had to put up with a very wobbly wife since Mendoza - I’m sure he is going to lose patience with me at some point soon as I walk down the street flinching and yelping because I can’t trust any local people - it’s really terrible. I think that in a strange way, the fact that Cate was so upset at the time and jumpy ever since helped me deal with what happened without getting too upset, as I had Cate to focus on and try to help her through it. At the same time, I really do feel that it’s not worth dwelling on what happened (or even what could’ve happened), although I don’t think you’ll catch me going on
any winery tours for a while!
It was kind of strange the way that Matt and I were dealing with things - complete polar opposites and it frustrated me that I was feeling so rubbish (despite not being in shock anymore and therefore the whole ordeal feeling quite unreal) when Matt was seemingly fine with the situation. Although I didn’t want Matt to feel upset, I just wanted to see that I wasn’t over-reacting, but he couldn’t show me that but he did try to tell me. It was pretty obvious from Cate’s reaction to the bus journey and her constant suspicion of anyone Argentinean looking that we weren’t going to be able to last for five more weeks in South America, with Cate jumping out of her skin every time a South American appeared in view (there’s a few of them here you know) so Buenos Aires was where we tweaked our travel plans. We toyed with the idea of doing a couple of weeks edited highlights tour of South America, taking in Iguazu Falls, the salt flats and Machu Picchu before heading home ... but reading a Brazilian news story of 19 jeeps on the
way to the salt flats being held hostage by angry Bolvian villagers was not the kind of news you want to hear following a brush with gunmen, and was probably more than enough to put an already nervous Cate off the idea.
I’d also heard that the roads were pretty terrible (very few paved and drivers often driving drunk) and I just couldn’t face the thought of anything else bad happening. However we were determined not to finish our whole travelling experience by being hounded out of the continent by two hoons with a gun; we wanted to finish on a high. With that in mind we decided to make one last journey through South America before we left, to go to see Machu Picchu. So we booked ourselves some expensive flights from Buenos Aires to Lima, Lima to Cuzco and finally Cuzco back to Lima ... one last hurrah before heading home to reality.
I knew that Machu Picchu was one of the few places that Matt had dreamed of going to on our trip (the other being Angkor Wat) and I couldn’t deprive him of that. Although all I wanted was to go home, I also didn’t want my lasting memory of South America to be of gunmen in Mendoza and I just wanted to get out of Argentina.
The hostel in Buenos Aires that we had booked, Estoril Terrazil was really nice. We were in a dorm room of course but the whole place had a very easy-going , chilled out vibe. The staff and fellow travellers were very friendly and it was a good thing too as we spent a very long time just sitting there, watching TV and using the free WIFI. I didn’t feel up to straying very far from the hostel so we stayed close, just leaving for meals, for short walks and to get some laundry done for us. I couldn’t bring myself to take our camera out of my bag for fear of anyone watching us then trying to mug us afterwards, so photos here are sparse.
Buenos Aires itself is quite a nice place. It is absolutely huge and has a road that has twenty lanes of traffic right at its heart, I kid you not. The pavements are wide and there were loads of cars everywhere. It has a very French feel to it, there
are shoe shiners and nut sellers on the streets and it is a very busy place. There are some really beautiful buildings there, very ornate but unfortunately it has a huge amount of graffiti on walls, statues and even on the pavement, can you believe it? I was shocked! The food was good although we went to the same restaurant both evenings we were there and ordered the same thing each night, a pizza with mozzarella, parma ham and black olives both times. Queue very dehydrated Goddards. All food in South America seems to be really salty, which of course I’m not complaining about as anyone who knows me well knows that I will sit and eat spoonfuls of marmite out of the jar, whole Oxo cubes and salt on its own. But even for me, it was a little difficult to handle! They’ve also got shed loads of cafes over here, not being coffee drinkers we instead managed to force down a bucket load of croissants and churros whilst slurping on hot chocolates, good times!
Apart from eating and our daytime wanderings we really didn’t do much more in Buenos Aires ... like Cate said, it seems like
a nice place, but we weren’t really in the right frame of mind to take to the streets and see what there was to offer, so instead it became our gateway to Peru!
Cate & Matt x
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