I have slipped in my blogging duties recently, but I need to temporarily interrupt the chronology to say that Mick has arrived safe and sound and we are together in Buenos Aires. However, on his second night he had a brush with some local muggers, one of whom produced an Uzi which was presumably fake. Thankfully all that remains of the story now is a good anecdote.
Mick arrived on the 26th as I think I have noted already. He met some girls from Galway on the plane, so he spent his first day touring BA on the tourist bus with them. (He managed to amass a remarkably large set of facts about the city in a short space of time, which he has been regaling me with ever since.) On his second evening they all went out for dinner, and then Mick started to make his way back to the hostel to meet me, as I was due to be there about 11pm. It’s the same hostel that I stayed in the last time.
It wasn’t that far from where he had dinner to where the hostel is, and so he set out walking. It’s a very easy thing to do without really thinking about it, especially when you are starting from a place that has lots of people around, but it is undoubtedly dumb. He was about half way back when he saw two young guys – he estimates them to have been about 16 – catch sight of him, and turn from the street they were about to go down to follow him instead. There was no-one else around. They were some distance behind him. Mick kept walking; he said later his heart was punding. One of the two guys moved quickly down the opposite side of the street to be ahead of him, so he was boxed in. He came to a red light at a junction with cars passing by, and instead of stopping he crossed the street to the other side, at which point his path crossed directly with the guy who had gone ahead. The guy shouted something and then pulled out an Uzi machine gun.
As if operating from a checklist in a book called ‘How to get yourself killed in South America’, Mick spread his arms wide and shouted ‘What!’ He was running on pure adrenaline, he said after, and the gun looked plastic and fake. He also noticed it had no magazine, and the guy was holding it as if to hide that, which showed remarkable presence of mind under the circumstances. The guy then swung the gun to hit him, but it didn’t come within more than a foot. Then Mick shouted at the guy again, and he walked off, joined by the other guy. Mick made it the rest of the way home uneventfully.
By the time I joined him in the hostel about midnight he was calm about the whole thing, but good Lord that story could easily have had a very unhappy ending. Mick was rattled when he came into the hostel and he told the guy working there about what had happened, but he seemed to think it wasn’t much to shout about given Mick had no actual wounds to report. You can be sure we will both be a boon to the South American taxi industry in the future. And I have taken to calling him Machine Gun Mick.
Going backwards, then: my last few days in Ushuaia were quiet and pleasant. The day after I last wrote, and despite my predictions to the contrary, I slept until 11am. One of the girls back from the other tour of the Antarctic was going into town the same time as me so we shared a taxi, and had lunch there. Then we got a taxi up to the chairlift which leads to near the glacier you can see from the main street in the mountains behind the town. The chairlift was both slower and more expensive than I anticipated, but once at the top we had splendid views over the mountains and the town and the Channel beyond. There were some trails leading up to the glacier proper, i.e. to where you could put your hands on the ice, but the stiffness of my legs meant I was content to just look at them.
We had a pleasant afternoon up there, and then returned to the town and parted ways for a while before regrouping to meet other friends of my companion’s. They were to be in a group in the Irish bar in town, but when we went in we were the only customers. The Irish bar was as Irish as I am Bahrainian. We had a drink there and something to eat, and I was back in the hostel early. Getting up late really shortens the day.
The following day was my last in Ushuaia. In the morning I caught up on email and news, and then went to town and strolled around and said my mental goodbyes. I bought a bag for the Antarctic stuff that I intended to leave in the hostel in BA, which at the time of writing has been done, so I am less weighed down with stuff. (I dreamed the other night that my camera was working again, but alas that was not the case on waking). I got some chocolate from the café that I really liked, and then walked back out to the hostel slowly.
On arrival at the airport, I found chaos unfolding. I checked in uneventfully then went upstairs to where the two doors were to the departure gates, and found that both were blocked by protesting people, and the doors themselves were closed. One of the protestors had his hand on a pillar used for holding up the ropes to form the queue corral, and he was banging the metal cylinder repeatedly against the metal base, producing a rhythmic, almost musical sound. People were clapping along and shouting, though I could not make out what they were saying or even what language it was in. I spotted a reasonably friendly-looking punter and asked her what was happening. She was French, and called over an English-speaking, French-looking man to explain to me that they had turned up for a flight in the evening of the previous day which had been cancelled. They had had no information about any replacement flight and had been in the airport ever since without food or water being provided, or any suggestion of leaving for a hotel, or anything of that nature. They were clearly tired, and I felt very sorry for them.
Things were escalating. Two men took the desk where under normal circumstances there would be a person checking boarding passes, and moved it on front of one of the doors. Then a group of people took the pillars and ropes used for the queue and used them to block the second door. I stood back, wondering what would happen next. The shouting got louder. There were some very angry people. It’s hard to know where it might have gone had a man not showed up with a gun. He was part of airport security, and he didn’t take it out of its holster, but he looked like a grim specimen. The crowd suddenly dispersed away from the doors. The security guy and another man moved the desk and ropes out of the way. One of them looked at me and said ‘LAN?’ I nodded. They opened the door, and said ‘Hurry,’ then pushed me and a few others through and shut it immediately after.
I could hear the clapping and shouting and calling for the following hour, until I got on my own flight which thankfully left on time. I wonder how long they were there. Hopefully as I write this two days later, they are not there still.
As we took off and got to cruising height, Tierra del Fuego gave me one last show to say goodbye. The sun was setting, and from the plane I could see the incongruous, almost shocking blue of lakes high up in the mountains, from small pools to large expanses. A river wound over and back through a broad, high-walled valley, the twisting of its bends the product of the flowing water of time unimaginable, an illustration from a geography book. The immensity and harshness of the mountainous land at the end of the world was strangely inviting, like a mirage. I watched from the window until I could see no more and the curtains of cloud were firmly drawn closed.
On landing in Buenos Aires we had to wait for almost an hour on the plane as apparently we didn’t have a gate to get off at, which in the scheme of oversights and errors would seem to be a strange one. But we finally got out and I got a taxi to the hostel and heard about Machine Gun’s adventures. I had pondered on my words of greeting and went with ‘Doctor Nichol, I presume,’ rather than ‘The Nichol has landed.’ But it was a close-run thing. We had a beer or two on the terrace outside until the small hours, and it was very pleasant indeed.
The following day – now yesterday – we were up at a reasonable hour and went for a long ramble around the city. Mick reckons we covered a good 10km at a conservative estimate. We started at the bridge which was designed by the same guy who designed our Beckett Bridge in Dublin. The one in BA looks like an earlier draft. They say here that it represents tango dancers, though to see it takes the same sort of imagination that sees dragons in the constellations. We walked along the river front, and then had lunch in a famous café where various poets and writers used to meet, including Borges. From there went to San Martin, a square where there is a monument to the fallen of the Falklands War, with two soldiers on front of it standing to attention in the sun. The names are written on austere black stones, and it’s hard not to look at it and not hear Thatcher’s tones of Received Pronunciation. The lady’s not for turning… Politics and blood.
About four we went back to the hostel to plan where we might go over the coming weeks. We are much constrained by the fact that the waterfalls and the glaciers we want to see are in exact opposite corners of the country, northeast to southwest. We looked at flights and buses and combinations thereof and have a reasonable idea of how we might manage it at acceptable though not low cost, and hopefully we will have something booked within 24 hours of the time of writing.
All that took several hours, as it always does, and then it was Steak O’clock. I had been going on about it all day, and we were among the first few into La Plata. When I had been there last the idea of being there with Mick seemed far in the future. I agonised about having the chorizo instead of the medallion, but in the end I stuck with what I know. And it was good. Very good. It was a 9.8 on the SSS, the Steve Steak Scale. I very much doubt that anything could ever beat it – a fine cut of Argentinian meat in a good steakhouse in Buenos Aires is probably the top of the game. But I reserve the top two points because out there in the world are Kobe beef and Shanahan’s and other things I can only dream of, the famous known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns, and perhaps there is a higher expression yet of the art of the steak.
The early hours again found us on the terrace. We met a guy from Slovenia and his girlfriend and had a pleasant hour or so with them. I was rather wishing this morning that we had gone to bed earlier. Looking in the mirror I was greeted by a chap who looked tired, and who had crazy mad-scientist hair. I really need a haircut, and the longer I leave it the more I look like Doc Brown from Back to the Future.
We had a swift breakfast in the hostel and got a taxi from there to the ferry station, from where we got a boat to Colonio del Sacramento in Uruguay, and it is on that boat I now write this. It is, apparently, the fastest ferry in the world, and takes one hour to complete the crossing. Some of the other boats take three or even six. To my right is a window out of which I can see muddy brown water to the horizon, and it does seem to be moving by rather quickly. Certainly faster than the Expedition. The ferry station was very like an airport – we had to check in our bags and go through scanners and fill out immigration forms, and then many stamps were required before we were successfully relinquished by the Argentinian authorities and accepted by their Uruguayan counterparts.
Our plan now is to see Colonio and go from there to Montevideo, then back to Buenos Aires. All going well we will fly to Iguazu for the waterfalls, and some time later fly back to the southwest for the glacier. Those flights will form the pillars of the trip, with other travels around them which we are currently investigating. Oddly when we are in the south I will be back close to Ushuaia, where ‘close’ is less than 20 hours on a bus. We looked at meeting down there and then working our way back up there, but the logistics grew too complex too quickly, so we stuck with the original plan of meeting in BA and looping from there instead.
And that brings us back up to date, where hopefully we will stay. Looking back over the entries I think that when I write each day as it happens the end result is more alive. I am still way behind on organising photos too, but aiming to put that right as soon as I have a decent internet connection again.
Land has just come into view off the starboard bow (no Klingons that I can see, though), so it’s time for me to wrap this up for now. We’re booked into a hostel run by two Uruguayans that met in Ireland, or at least I think we are – Machine Gun took care of the booking so possibly we’ll be hanging out with his underworld pals and sleeping on park benches. So wish me luck, and talk soon.
