On Friday it's a year since we left. Not very real. Could barely be true. Did it really last six months? Am I really back six months? How? Yet another fast year. I don't think it's just me; everyone is saying they don't know when the previous twelve months have gone. At least I have an oft-summarised tale to tell.
The roads out of La Paz. For those inclined to bleak and dusty spaces, South America has two glorious choices; Patagonia and the Altiplano. Patagonia has less llamas, more Welsh. And better beer. The Altiplano, however, has colour.
At this point we were doing our best not to freeze to death. That is frost on the INSIDE of the window, but the way. We had watched our fellow passengers argue with the driver for an hour or so as we sat in a two mile traffic jam whilst miners blocked the road, forcing us into an eight hour detour which took us here. I have never felt anything like it and am honestly quite surprised I am here to tell the tale. Tenacity gets you further than you think. We opened our eyes on occasion during the night to see us driving over scrub land. Not even a road. I'm not sure how our driver did it. I'd almost like to go back with warm clothes and see how it works. But not just yet.
Tell a lie. I'd go this afternoon.
I got out and went for a quick run around to try and warm me up. I was breathing liquid nitrogen, judging by the plumes of smoke erupting from my mouth. As you can see, it was a bit silly.
We ploughed on.
This is Potosí, high, high, high in the mountains. At one point the richest place on Earth. Not so much any more.
This chap marks the entrance to Tupiza. It was about 4pm at this point. We were tired, hungry, disorientated. Hysteria was not far from the door. It was hard to get Sarah to eat on this bus trip. You needed a stomach of steel and she was still mindful of the awful times in Peru. She felt it was better to go hungry. Im not sure I entirely disagreed. Didn't stop us fighting about it though. I worried about her incessantly, as you do when you are basically the guardian of someone.
Eventually the bus drew to a stop in Villazon. We were twelve hours late. That didn't help our mood. Securing our backpacks from the hold (after a brief scare) we headed to the bus company's office, only to be told our tickets were still valid, just not for the next bus leaving here. We'd have to wait till 11am the next day.
Cue breakdown. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for Sarah. It is at times like this you rely on what little Spanish you may have. She, unfortunately, had none.
Onto the street, what options do we have? It's Wednesday evening, 6pm. If we wait till Thursday morning we will arrive in BA around midnight Friday evening. Our flight would be at 9pm Saturday night. A bit tight if anything went wrong. Time for decisive action. We return to the bus office and, on the advice of the chap at the counter, decide to take a bus that evening departing from the Argentine side of the border. All we have to do is get to that bus station ourselves.
We've done harder things than that. I hand over another £50 each in Argentine Pesos and receive two bus tickets in return. So off we go.
Take a taxi to the border, which is the other end of Villazon's main street. Get through the border with out passports with visas. Surprisingly straightforward. At every point (except the crossing into Uruguay), I have been impressed by the Argentine bureaucracy. Efficient and effective and, might I add, courteous too. Then into another taxi and it drops us BANG, five minutes away at the La Quiaca bus terminal.
The difference between countries is astounding. The sort of familiarity that you desperately need having been stuck up a freezing mountain barely 24 hours before. Parks, rivers, tidy streets, it is Civilisation. Almost imperceptible our moods brighten.
We track down our relevant office in the terminal. The man at the counter eyes our tickets with suspicion. "I need to check these" he says. My heart falls from my chest. We have been had. I feel like a tube. He returns. "Follow me" he says, and leads us three doors up the corridor to another office. There, tickets validated, we leave our cares behind us and prance across the street to a small eateries, wolf down a couple of Argentine steaks, delicious happiness in our mouths, washed down with delicious Quilmes beer, and it seems, for the first time in a little while, that things may have just turned out ok for us.
Oh beautiful, lush Argentina! Still in sight of the Andes but we are no longer on top of them.
It all went a bit clockwork. We had a bottle of sparkling wine in the airport and got onto the plane no bother. We arrived in Houston where we, due to the ineptitude of the Customs staff, who found it impossible to identify a US Visa in my passport, were sentenced to a few hours in a holding room with a load of Nigerians, a few Brazilians and Argentines, and some other non-Amerkan folks. We missed our connecting flight to Newark. I, utterly disgusted by how people were being treated by these officials, swore never to set foot in Amerka again. No matter how dishonest some people are, others are not. There is no need to denigrate and belittle people as part of your job. So to hell with the USA. (Am I being a bit rash? The chap who appeared to be in charge of the operation referred to a Brazilian gentleman as The Wheelchair Guy).
Eventually it works out. United clearly have to deal with this all the time. So we are onto the next plane and have time before that to indulge in breakfast. It's ok. I'll be ok with never being here again.
How did the story end? We made it to Buenos Aires, via Potosí, about 6pm on Wednesday. If what does not kill you makes you stronger then that bus journey most certainly turned us into iron men (and women). Wearing all our clothes on top of the highest point in Latin America, ice on the floor of the bus, our companions swaddled in blankets, coats, hats, everything they had. We must have looked insane. I was not scared but I have never been as afeared.
The roads out of La Paz. For those inclined to bleak and dusty spaces, South America has two glorious choices; Patagonia and the Altiplano. Patagonia has less llamas, more Welsh. And better beer. The Altiplano, however, has colour.
At this point we were doing our best not to freeze to death. That is frost on the INSIDE of the window, but the way. We had watched our fellow passengers argue with the driver for an hour or so as we sat in a two mile traffic jam whilst miners blocked the road, forcing us into an eight hour detour which took us here. I have never felt anything like it and am honestly quite surprised I am here to tell the tale. Tenacity gets you further than you think. We opened our eyes on occasion during the night to see us driving over scrub land. Not even a road. I'm not sure how our driver did it. I'd almost like to go back with warm clothes and see how it works. But not just yet.
Tell a lie. I'd go this afternoon.
I got out and went for a quick run around to try and warm me up. I was breathing liquid nitrogen, judging by the plumes of smoke erupting from my mouth. As you can see, it was a bit silly.
We ploughed on.
This is Potosí, high, high, high in the mountains. At one point the richest place on Earth. Not so much any more.
This chap marks the entrance to Tupiza. It was about 4pm at this point. We were tired, hungry, disorientated. Hysteria was not far from the door. It was hard to get Sarah to eat on this bus trip. You needed a stomach of steel and she was still mindful of the awful times in Peru. She felt it was better to go hungry. Im not sure I entirely disagreed. Didn't stop us fighting about it though. I worried about her incessantly, as you do when you are basically the guardian of someone.
Eventually the bus drew to a stop in Villazon. We were twelve hours late. That didn't help our mood. Securing our backpacks from the hold (after a brief scare) we headed to the bus company's office, only to be told our tickets were still valid, just not for the next bus leaving here. We'd have to wait till 11am the next day.
Cue breakdown. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for Sarah. It is at times like this you rely on what little Spanish you may have. She, unfortunately, had none.
Onto the street, what options do we have? It's Wednesday evening, 6pm. If we wait till Thursday morning we will arrive in BA around midnight Friday evening. Our flight would be at 9pm Saturday night. A bit tight if anything went wrong. Time for decisive action. We return to the bus office and, on the advice of the chap at the counter, decide to take a bus that evening departing from the Argentine side of the border. All we have to do is get to that bus station ourselves.
We've done harder things than that. I hand over another £50 each in Argentine Pesos and receive two bus tickets in return. So off we go.
Take a taxi to the border, which is the other end of Villazon's main street. Get through the border with out passports with visas. Surprisingly straightforward. At every point (except the crossing into Uruguay), I have been impressed by the Argentine bureaucracy. Efficient and effective and, might I add, courteous too. Then into another taxi and it drops us BANG, five minutes away at the La Quiaca bus terminal.
The difference between countries is astounding. The sort of familiarity that you desperately need having been stuck up a freezing mountain barely 24 hours before. Parks, rivers, tidy streets, it is Civilisation. Almost imperceptible our moods brighten.
We track down our relevant office in the terminal. The man at the counter eyes our tickets with suspicion. "I need to check these" he says. My heart falls from my chest. We have been had. I feel like a tube. He returns. "Follow me" he says, and leads us three doors up the corridor to another office. There, tickets validated, we leave our cares behind us and prance across the street to a small eateries, wolf down a couple of Argentine steaks, delicious happiness in our mouths, washed down with delicious Quilmes beer, and it seems, for the first time in a little while, that things may have just turned out ok for us.
Security checks, the distance, late for our hotel room, whatever. We don't care. I think I manage at some stage to fire off an email to our hotel in BA to say we'll be late. Or I phoned them. Not sure. Automatic pilot at that point. Onto the bus and away we go. Our 1am departure went almost flawlessly.
Oh beautiful, lush Argentina! Still in sight of the Andes but we are no longer on top of them.
Perhaps here I have told Sarah that we have ordered two specials for lunch and both are Fishy Bastards. She doesn't like fish much. You might remember that.
Around 6am, Friday morning, we roll in to Retiro. It's still a monster, though not so much as we remember. That's familiarity for you. A quick taxi to our hotel and we are ready for a quick snooze (Sarah) and a shower, then breakfast and out the door. I don't know where our energy reserves came from. But I suppose we had to. One single day to enjoy, one day to fanny around and head to the airport. My chest is tight thinking of it. But that's what we did. Busied ourselves around Buenos Aires, did a small amount of shopping, including a wild goose chase for a shirt for Sarah's uncle, only to dodge the rain and end up back at the hotel for 4pm, nap, swim, refreshed then out for dinner.
Buenos Aires is a suitable city for the winter. It looks quite right in the grey as much as in the blue. And there are buckets of things to do.
Sarah had sussed out a fancy restaurant called Don Julio's (parrilladonjulio.com.ar - possibly the only website I have referenced on this entire trip, with good reason) and so we turned up, glad rags on, ready for our final proper meal in South America. A few tears may have been shed. We talk a tough game sometimes, but our final weeks here were weird. Were we right to stay on and finish the trip after it all went tits up? I think it's impossible to answer that, although I'm guessing yes, given that I know where we are at now, and how it affected us to carry on.
Chimichurri - condiment of champions.
As the food begins to arrive, I look smug. Justifiably too, given the bottle of El Enemigo we were quaffing.
The joy of this restaurant, apart from its very family-friendly atmosphere (in spite of being posh as hell) is that you can sign your bottle of wine and have it adorn the surface of the restaurant. We, naturally, had to do it.
A perfect ultimate night. Una ultima noche mas perfecta.
Breakfast on Saturday 30th May.
This little cafe had treated us well on our first visit here in January. We had to return. It is quite difficult to get a really good cup of coffee in Argentina, given the maté obsession, but these guys didn't let us down. And the view is quite good too, in an urban sort of way.
And so back to the hotel, collect our bags, get a taxi to the Starbucks where our minivan colectivo will pick us up and take us to the airport (I shall not digress as to the many varied ways one can travel to Ezeiza International Airport, but this is certainly one of the cheapest and quickest). We sup our coffees and, as you do on your last day of a holiday, wait around impatiently for it all to be over. The girls at the table beside us eye us knowingly, as everyone does at backpackers the world over. Your lifestyle is travel, you have no employment, and experience 'their' world in a shallow and unrepresentative way. We also took over an awful lot of space around our tiny table with our stuff.
Nothing like a big Lego fleg.
It all went a bit clockwork. We had a bottle of sparkling wine in the airport and got onto the plane no bother. We arrived in Houston where we, due to the ineptitude of the Customs staff, who found it impossible to identify a US Visa in my passport, were sentenced to a few hours in a holding room with a load of Nigerians, a few Brazilians and Argentines, and some other non-Amerkan folks. We missed our connecting flight to Newark. I, utterly disgusted by how people were being treated by these officials, swore never to set foot in Amerka again. No matter how dishonest some people are, others are not. There is no need to denigrate and belittle people as part of your job. So to hell with the USA. (Am I being a bit rash? The chap who appeared to be in charge of the operation referred to a Brazilian gentleman as The Wheelchair Guy).
Eventually it works out. United clearly have to deal with this all the time. So we are onto the next plane and have time before that to indulge in breakfast. It's ok. I'll be ok with never being here again.
At Newark I experience my first Philly Cheesesteak and deep fried pickles. I can state categorically that they are both good inventions.
Obviously it needs to be followed with a donut and coffee.
This is the last photo of me and Sarah. We broke up a few weeks after returning to Northern Ireland.
...
It is the 26th of November 2014. 3pm. This time a year ago we had just returned the Transit van to the rental company after evacuating the apartment of my possessions and storing them in the roofspace of my parents' house. That's where I've been for six months. I barely leave Carrick.
We hit the ground with a bump on 2nd June. Sarah's 29th Birthday. We arrived home with virtually nothing. I handed back a small loan my sister had helped me with instantly which left me penniless. I got a tax refund, that was nice. I learnt a valuable lesson about Travel Insurance - my company managed to (more or less) classify everything I had with me as 'valuables'. This included all electronic devices. So laptop, replacement camera, MP3 players, etc etc, all counted as valuables, with a £150 limit on claims. That did not help matters.
Nor did the stringing out of the passport situation. Eventually HMPO granted me an ex-gratia payment towards my unusual costs that my insurance hadn't helped with. That helped too, although its really only been sorted in the past two weeks.
Somewhere in August I decided that, if I wanted to get out of here, I needed a skill. Something interesting. So I clambered onto the Chartered Accountancy bandwagon. To be fair, its quite interesting in its own right. But I am unemployed and, whilst studying like billy-o, am broke. That doesn't make things much better.
What has been achieved in my six months since I got back? I have not lost the urge to escape Northern Ireland, nor sidestepped my cynicism, nor made new friends, although I have courted a few old ones now that I am able to again. I spend most time in this bedroom, or at the kitchen table, and every so often cabin fever takes hold and I escape to my local Wetherspoons for a cheap pint of ale. I learnt how to make beer in the months after my return, and spent all of that tax break on a decent setup. I've made five beers now, varying qualities, but then thats how it goes at the start. I passed my driving test first time after half a dozen lessons. I managed to catch a good friend's wedding in Athens which didn't do anything to stave off whatever the opposite of homesickness is. I also pulled myself together long enough to write a few EPs for my alter-egos, and at least make a dent in the staggering pile of songs I have sitting around waiting for the kiss of a prince to revive them. One or two might actually be pretty good.
I've read a few things. My first Vonnegut (Jailbird). Some Borges. Some Pessoa. A lot of books of numbers and ethics and laws and stuff. A biography of Alan Lomax, guaranteed to make anyone feeling like their life is erroneous to the point of pointlessness to feel even worse and maybe drink a hundred espressos, just to see if it really would kill you. Today I learned about Bulletproof Coffee and lapsed back into a despair of First World Problems. My glass is a little less full these days.
Winter is here too. I haven't had a winter really in two years. I have not missed it. My blood runs cold under normal circumstances.
Christmas is over in a month. It is like slapping myself in the face to remember a year ago was spent, rooftop in Asuncion, arguing with Sarah till I was blue in the face that we would not just be breaking up by default when we arrived by in Northern Ireland. I was almost wrong.
Some of this blog contains patent lies, the sort the evolve from knowing other people read it, people who might otherwise be unduly concerned at how often things went awry and whether we, really, we two, should have been loosed upon a journey without an intermediary, a go-between, a friend? Doesn't matter now of course.
I am not honestly sure if this draws an end to this story. Or if there was even a beginning.
D.
