I should be writing this from the chilly airs of Ushuaia, but instead I am sitting on a terrace in Buenos Aires. I missed the flight connection today and am on standby for a flight tomorrow. If that doesn’t work it will be Sunday. But I’m not Antarctica bound until the 14th, so I have plenty of time to get there. If could have picked the slot to have delay in my plans, this would be it.
To go backwards: I couldn’t make it to Isla Negra and Neruda’s last house because of time and buses – there is no bus from Isla Negra to Santiago, so I would have had to go back to Valpa from Isla Negra and then from there to Santiago. I considered it, but ultimately got a bus straight back to the capital instead. I got a hostel online that is not particularly near anything, and when I got there I found I had a really nice room and it seemed far more tempting to chill out there and read and write rather than get a train back into the city centre. So I did.
I met an Irish guy there called Alan who was a nice chap, and other people started to trickle in as the evening wore on, so there was much nodding and smiling. About six I went out for dinner – the owner of the hostel had given me an annotated Google map with a bunch of restaurants marked on it. I went from one to the other and found, with an increasing sense of despondency, that each of them was either closed or undergoing renovation. I ended up doing almost the complete circuit twice looking for somewhere, getting hungrier and more irritable as I went. Bang on time for the pathetic fallacy, it started to rain. Heavily. It emerged that my waterproof jacket from Easter Island is not in fact waterproof. I ended up eating a small pizza outside a small shop, the equivalent of eating outside the Spar in Ballsbridge. Something was better than nothing. On the way back, I noted that one of the places I had checked out twice had finally opened.
Not to worry. A hot shower later, I wandered to the common area to find other people to talk to and then someone suggested a drink and I thought that was a fine idea. There was a ‘bottle shop’ nearby and Alan and I went down there with a girl from England and her boyfriend from Zimbabwe, and we got some hooch. We went back and sat outside at the back of the hostel. More people joined. The owner produced pisco sours for everyone. Conversation and craic were excellent. I had to be up at 5am for the flight to Buenos Aires, but that seemed distant. Everything flowed. Somehow, there were only five of us left and it was 3am, and I dragged myself off to bed.
Packing this morning at 5am was challenging, but if I have forgotten anything I haven’t yet realised it. When I got to the airport I found the flight was leaving 35 minutes later than in my original itinerary. I figured I could still make the transfer to the other flight. I needed to change airports, but it was only 45 minutes by taxi from the main airport to the other one. Then my name was called on the tannoy, and I wondered what I had done wrong. I presented myself to find they were giving me an upgrade to ‘premium economy’, for which I offered heartfelt thanks. Perhaps my complaining the other day had more effect than I realised.
Premium economy meant that of the three seats on each side of the aisle, only the window and aisle seats were filled, with no-one in the middle. And the food was much better, served with actual metal cutlery. There was always an air hostess (are they called air hosts now?) hovering around. So it was very pleasant. I slept much of it.
When I got there I got through immigration and got my bag quickly and figured at that point I would surely make the transfer. I went to the desk offering official taxis, and there learned that a long stretch of the main motorway was closed. No-one seemed to know why. That meant the 45-minute transfer would be an hour to an hour and a half. Coupled with the later departure, I was guthered.
The taxi driver in fairness did everything he could for me, dodging and weaving through traffic in a way that would have been very alarming had India not taught me zen traffic calm. I still missed it by half an hour though. I went up the LAN desk and explained that I had missed my connection, and they were half way through getting me a new flight when it occurred to them to ask why. I hadn’t offered any information on that front, given that I was not entirely sure to whom blame could be successfully assigned – the LAN flight from Santiago was on time, and it was really the motorway that was the problem. But in the end they gave me a standby slot on the flight tomorrow. I have to turn up at 10am and wait for three hours and hope for the best. It’s a bit of a classic case of it’s either a dive or a penalty – if it was my fault I should not have got the free replacement, and if it was their fault they should be paying for my hotel and all the rest of it. But I am happy enough with the settlement.
The hostel I am staying in now is not far from Plaza de Mayo. I went there for a look around and saw the cathedral, which was amazing. The ceiling arches far above, and the decoration all makes sense in a way that the decoration of the churches in Lima did not. It’s a peaceful place. There is a central dome that is beautifully painted. From there I walked around more or less at random. BA is much closer to a European city than Santiago. On the way through the edges in the taxi things were properly south American, but the centre could be dropped unnoticed in Spain.
I had been recommended steakhouse near the hostel and I went there to check it out. I randomly met an Irish woman outside who was doing the same thing. It turned out that dinner didn’t start until eight, two hours from that time, and so we ended up going for a drink nearby. Her name was Barbara, and she had got a two-year absence from work and gone teaching English in Santiago for a year. She was now on her way home, travelling a bit in South America first. She was 43 and had a 24-year-old daughter, and we had a nice chat – first over drinks and then over dinner – about work and travel and Ireland and all the rest of it.
The steak was superb, but due to some confusion with my ordering, entirely my fault, my steak was not as rare as it would need to be to do it justice. So while it was good, I will return with Mick when he arrives, and reserve full judgement until then. I had the scent of greatness.
Since then I got back to the hostel and discovered, in the common area, that South American cockraoches are huge and incredibly quick and they significantly freak me out. An American girl laughed at me. I went upstairs to the outside terrace instead. I can only assume that even now the cockroach is nestling in among my socks and things.
So it has been a funny sort of period where not a lot has happened but I’ve met loads of people and had a great time. Hopefully I’ll get the flight tomorrow, but if not I will be back at the steakhouse. So really, whatever happens is a win.
