After I wrote the last entry we went out to find an aquarium that was mentioned in passing in the guidebook and which has an impressive-looking website. I had been expecting a single big tank and so was rather disappointed on entry; it would more accurately be called a Building In Which There Are Many Small Individual Aquariums, though I suppose that wouldn’t help the printing costs of the flyers. After a few minutes inside I started to hate it. The tanks were too small for their occupants – a sea-turtle went sadly around and around inside his barren tank, pushing up against the glass, and there were collections of big fish in small tanks. In what I can only assume was an indication of the number of attractions of Mendoza, the place was packed with families. I was happy to leave. At least I saw a devil fish on the way out which was pretty cool, though it looked forlorn in its narrow tank.
We spotted a place with snakes on display across the street. I’ve only just realised I don’t know what the name for that is – snakorium, maybe. It was small and dirty and also very crowded, and again the tanks were small, but it was enjoyable in its way. There were various pythons and boa constrictors and what not. It was not in any way evident to me which snakes were poisonous and which were not, and some of them were unsettlingly well disguised as sticks or part of the undergrowth. One of the things I would like to do that I never got around to on this trip is head into the jungle to see some of these guys in their natural environment.
We got back to the hostel to find that the jeep tour we had been hoping to do through the mountains the following day was not going to happen because the driver was otherwise engaged. Why the hostel had pitched us the event without checking if they could do it first is anybody’s guess. We looked at some of the other activities instead but nothing particularly appealed and all of them were quite expensive, and felt like a sort of arbitrary way to pass the day. There is surprisingly little to do in Mendoza other than the wine tours. The pages of the guidebook on the town are mostly filled with information about the city parks, and while those were pretty and interesting, they don’t exactly occupy a full day. So we had a look into seeing how much it would be to change the flight from the 22nd to the 21st, and much to my surprise it turned out to be free. Splendid.
That done, the casino was calling from down the street so we wandered the very short distance to it. I had never been in one before. There was a metal detector on entry to make sure you weren’t bringing the heavy weapons, manned by a friendly chap in a suit. The casino was spread over two floors. Most of the space was taken up by slot machines, and on the upper level there were some card and roulette tables. We tried the machines first. I didn’t find the one I tried very self-explanatory or interesting. There were multiple symbols on the screen in a grid about three by six, and you could choose the number of possible configurations you wanted to bet on, so not just the traditional three across the middle would win but also various diagonals and other paths. You could also choose a multiplier on the standard bet, increasing it up to a factor of twenty. All that done, you just pressed the button to bet and the symbols rotated for a moment and you either won or lost. Then you pushed the button again. I mostly lost.
I found the card tables much more fun and interesting. We stood and watched the blackjack table for a while, and Mike considered playing as he has done it before a few times and knows the rules. But we would have hit problems had anything in any way non-standard happened, or had we inadvertently violated some of the house rules or anything of that nature, as we wouldn’t have understood instructions from the dealer. So we let that one pass, and instead placed a few bets on the roulette table.
Roulette is a little more complex than I would have guessed. The numbers from one to 36 are printed on the felt, and if you place your chip on top of one of those you’re betting on the chance of the ball stopping in that exact slot. The odds of that are actually one in 37, as there is a double zero on the wheel in green. If it comes up everyone loses, unless someone had specifically bet on it by putting the chip on the double-zero space at the top of the grid of other numbers. But if you place a chip on the line between two boxes, you are effectively betting on both of them. So if you place a chip of value 10 on the line between three and four, for example, it’s like betting five on each of them individually. If you place the chip on the intersection of four squares, it’s like betting one fourth of the bet amount on all four. You can also bet on ranges of numbers, 12 per range, a shot just less than one in three (with the double zero again shifting the odds slightly off the integer).
Then there is the classic red or black bet, which is what most people think of when they think of roulette. We had got chips worth about 20 euro but were being nickel-and-dimed out of them, to mix currencies metaphorically, so instead I just bet on red. It came up and I doubled my money. And then as it’s something everyone should do once, even if there’s only a tenner at play, I put it all on red. I was actually nervous watching the ball go around and around the outside of the wheel first, then drop down and bounce around it, and then finish on… black. D’oh!
All in all we were there about an hour, and I can completely see how people end up getting attached to playing the table games in casinos, even if the slots didn’t appeal. We had a late nightcap in the hostel over which we talked about how much fun it would be to organise a trip to Vegas. Hmm.
The following day we went to the airport in the morning to get our flight to Buenos Aires. It was to touch down in San Juan on the way to drop people off there and pick people up – this bus-like behaviour for flights is something I have only seen in South America. The San Juan hop was so short that there was only a few minutes in which they plane was not either on the way up or down, and the end-to-end time was about 25 minutes. We touched down and waited a while. I couldn’t be sure exactly how long as I was buried in the end of the Easter Island book, but then there was an announcement that we had to get off the plane because of a ‘communication problem’ at the airport in BA. There was a café up stairs so we went to get a sandwich. There was a news station showing on the TV, and somewhat to our horror we saw that it was covering the very delay in which we were enmeshed. It emerged that all three of the city airports in the capital were in bother, and hundreds of flights were grounded all over the country. And things were likely to remain so for 48 hours. Ouch.
After a wait of about two and half hours they made the announcement that the flight would return to Mendoza. Despite the fact there is not a lot to do in Mendoza it’s a major urban centre compared to San Juan, so we got back on the plane for the short hop. Given that we didn’t want to stay in Mendoza and were anxious to get back to BA for our last few days, and as the airport was likely to be down for such a long time, we headed with a collective accepting sigh for the bus station.
We were sitting on a bus within ten minutes of arriving. I still had a sense of disbelief that it was actually happening. The advertised journey time was 14 hours, and we settled in for what was becoming a familiar routine of reading and playing games on Mike’s phone and looking out the window and thinking of nothing. The services offered by each company are not consistent and this was the only one we were on which served food. It was just about edible. The stops however were not announced so we never knew how long we had, which was irritating. And there were very few of them. At one stop I went into a shop to get food, and as with most transactions here it took a while. The driver got very anxious and then aggressive with Mike as they had to wait for me for a minute or so. He also snarled at me when I got back on. Pleasant chap.
I slept in bursts of increasing shortness and was awake to see the red dawn. Coming into BA we hit the worst of rush-hour traffic and it took for-ev-er to get through to the main bus station. The total journey time was 16 hours. We had inadvertently completed our entire loop through Argentina by land, but it would take a rare and pressing event indeed for me to get on another long-haul bus in the near future. We later learned that the ’48-hour closure’ was actually eight hours, and so all we saved was a few hours. But we didn’t know that when we got on the bus, and we made the right decision with the information we had at the time.
We had booked into a hostel called the Milhouse, which we picked because it shares a name with a Simpsons character. But it clicked with me when we arrived that someone had told me about a notorious hostel in BA called ‘the Mill House’, and we had indeed tripped on that particular one. It’s famous for the kind of activity that is televised late at night on Brits Abroad and programmes of that ilk. Almost everyone there, including the staff, was English. At the early hour we arrived everyone seemed very tired from the previous night’s activities. The girls tended to have blonde unshowered hair tied back, and many of the guys wore wife-beater vests or pyjama bottoms. You could populate a few series of Big Brother without leaving the building.
All that said, it was very clean and well-run and much closer to a hotel than most of the hostels we have stayed in, and it was a more-than-adequate base of operations for the short time we were there. We had a rest when we came in but managed to avoid sleeping for the entire afternoon, then headed out to visit Palermo, an area of the city new to both of us. Our first stop was at the main zoo in the city. There was a good selection of rhinos and elephants and ferocious felines. The most notable event was that a very cute and fluffy chick was in the enclosure with a creature that looked much like a Kimodo dragon, though I don’t think that’s quite what it was. It was certainly a nightmare lizard-ish thing though. We stopped to watch what seemed to be inevitable with a sense of horror and interest. But while the chick cheeped and picked around, the creature seemed uninterested and eventually we left to see the rest of the zoo. But we swung back that way as we were leaving. The chick was nowhere to be seen.
We walked from there to Japanese gardens mentioned in the guidebook. Buenos Aires is so vast that even what seemed like a short walk on a small-scale map took a while. It was nice there, but we have better at home. There was none of the sense of peace and time that such a place should generate, and not a whole lot to indicate its Oriental nature. We left there to go to a large museum which turned out to be closed on Tuesdays. Outside though was a large decibel-meter, functioning as public art, about five metres high and one wide. When a big truck would pass by it lit up to the orange level of lights, and with the honking madness of rush hour I suspect it gets to the red.
There was a museum about Eva Person within range so we went there instead. It was a lot better than I expected and presented a pretty balanced portrayal of the famous Evita. The fundamental question is whether she was a power-hungry gold-digger or a genuine woman of the people, and the truth I imagine is somewhere in between. The self-righteous saintly tone of the translated excerpts from her autobiography don’t lend much weight towards the latter position, though. The expensive stylish dresses on display there could be interpreted either way; I guess you can’t expect the wife of the leader of a country to dress in rags. Ultimately her ending was sad and dark – she died of cancer at only 33, and then the military seized and mutilated her body post-mortem. That’s an act of incalculable bleakness and hate.
We had planned to have one last day of adventure and do a day-trip out of BA, but the flight problems put paid to that. And we had been going on and on about booking a nice hotel for our final night. So in the end, we turned the hotel itself into an event and booked the Four Seasons. I am writing this seated at the desk in the hotel room. It’s a definite one-off-the-life-list kind of place. The bathroom is entirely marble and about twice the size of the kitchen in my old apartment. The beds are as comfortable as the clouds of angels. The doormen are so quick off the mark I have yet to open the front door under my own power. The provided writing paper is thick and parchment-like, suitable for wedding invitations or declarations of independence. It’s wonderful.
Today we have taken things very easy. In the morning we went back to our old hostel and reclaimed the bag that I left there before we headed for Rio Gallegos. We got an oddly paranoid welcome there, even by South American standards – they wouldn’t let us through the front gate until they had come down and recognised us from being there before. Then we crossed town in a taxi and checked in to what may well be the fanciest hotel I will ever stay in and chilled out for a while; the dinner last night has caused some digestive repercussions for both of us. We went out for a wander around and bought a few bits and pieces to take home, and now as it inches towards 9pm I am writing this, and Mike is watching TV. I would estimate the screen to be somewhat over forty inches. We’ll get a final steak somewhere pretty soon.
And there it is. The ending has approached with silent swiftness; the flight home has changed from ‘soon’ to ‘tomorrow’. God willing the next post I write is likely to be in the air, or after my return to Ireland. The excitement of the thought of being back, of seeing Katie at the airport, of seeing family and friends, is far outweighing any sadness at leaving South America. I’m ready to go home.
