Today is a transit day, and fittingly I am writing this from the airport in Buenos Aires, a place I have come to know well. This is the fifth time I have been here – three times on the transfer to Ushuaia, once to go to Iguazu, and now to go to Rio Gallegos, where we will stay tonight. Tomorrow afternoon we go to El Calafate and the famous glacier field.
This morning we spent a few hours getting sorted out with accommodation and a rough idea of a plan for the coming days, and we had a look at how we are going to close the loop from the south-west part of the country where we are headed back to Buenos Aires for the flight home. That was the moment that the idea of going home became real to me – it is two weeks from today. More on that shortly.
There are no hostels listed in Rio Gallegos on either of the major hostel sites, which I think cannot be a good sign, and most of the comments online are expositions on the fact there is nothing to do there. We managed to get a hotel by asking the helpful girl on the front desk of our hostel in Iguazu to call them for us, and they have since sent me a confirmation email. We will be checking in around 3am, and given our bus is leaving at 2pm in some ways it seems a waste, and we thought of just toughing it out in the airport and bus station. But I have done that trick before and it means being tired for the next day or two, so we went with the more expensive option of beds rather than the cheaper option of airport seats for almost 12 hours.
After our planning we went out for a long and unpressured lunch in the place we were turned away from before. Given that there is no chance of an evening steak today, we had an afternoon steak. It was a 9.7 in my book – epically good, but just short of La Plata in BA. Mike though I think would give it his top slot. We wandered back to the hostel, picked up our stuff, and got a taxi to the airport. The flight from Iguazu to BA was uneventful – Mike ‘rested’ and I wrote most of the last two entries of the blog. We got in and had coffee, then had a sandwich where the only notable attribute was its ludicrous cost – we paid as much for a basic ham and cheese sandwich and a Pepsi as we have elsewhere for a steak.
We wandered to the gate and went through security and now here we sit. Mike is playing a game on his iPhone and I am typing this. All going well later we will get a taxi to the hotel in Rio Gallegos and tomorrow afternoon will see me back in the south, where mountains are higher and the air is cooler and I am far more climatically at home than I am here in the heat. From there we start moving up the west side of Argentina with possible loops into Chile, though all of that is yet undecided.
And home is on the horizon. That one certainly raises conflicting feelings. There are times I miss Katie and my family and everyone so much that it is a physical thing, a tightening, and there have been nights where I awoke in a half-dream state and felt the feeling that it was good to be home slide away as I realised I was no such thing. And yet I would love to keep going, to keep exploring and seeing things and learning things, on and on through the rest of South America and then New Zealand and Australia, back up through Asia, though the deepest reaches of Russia and the Stans, into the Far East, the Middle East, North Africa and all way the way south down through it… I want to see it all and plot my path through it, politics and reality and finances be damned.
Way back at the beginning of this blog, 50,000 words ago or thereabouts, I wondered about what it meant to travel, what was the nature of the thing, and though the question confuses me as much now as it did then, I am at least a little closer to an answer through my own experiences and the conversations I have had with others. A huge volume of information has come my way in the last few months – places and people and books and talks across countries and cultures, and I think to make sense of it I need to be distant from it, to let it recede a little so my subconscious can mull it over. Maybe the purpose of it all is just to get that information load, to feel the complexity that I was on about recently, to draw what lessons you can from the confusion even if they are obvious, even if they have been learned many times before.
Anyway, I am getting ahead of myself. Much yet awaits, and we will speak anon.
