Maybe sleep deprivation is just the thing to get the creative urges going. I started to write this post at about 6am on a long distance bus travelling from Mendoza to Buenos Aires. We´d been on the bus since 8.30 the previous evening, trundling through huge, flat expanses of Argentina. It was one of those moments you get on long haul journeys, where everyone on the bus or plane seems to wake up at about the same moment. I glanced out the window and caught sight of a road sign - still another 312km to Buenos Aires.
Long distance buses are pretty unescapable feature of South American travel. With unlimited funds, we'd be on planes all over the continent, but putting in the hours overland at least gives you a sense of the terrain. Our journey from Chile crossed the Andes, where the border is high in the mountains (one hell of a commute for those customs officals!) and took us to Mendoza, Argentina. This is of course wine-making country, with rafting, horse-riding and trekking thrown in for the days when you've nearly had enough Malbec. (Unsurprisingly, we failed to have anything to do with rafts, horses or walking shoes during our brief stay. James even went so far as to throw his away before leaving Santiago, just to ensure there was no more epic cross-country nonsense on this trip.)
Heading now to BA, this city has in many ways always felt like the ultimate destination of our trip: apart from being the city we fly home from, it's been the place we've talked about most and which has been one of the most highly recommended cities from friends and fellow travellers. We hope it lives up to our expectations!
The Latin American leg of the adventure began in Santiago, one of the quieter and smaller capitals, but one which we came to really like. We took a week to find our feet and get over the monster 16-hour time difference from New Zealand, did a little sight-seeing and found that speaking no Spanish at all quickly became very irritating. After weighing up various options, we decided to take a week's lessons in the hope that we would at least be able to order some food and argue back with taxi drivers who swapped our 500 peso note for a 100... but that´s another story.
So the second week in saw us getting down to five days of emergency Spanish. The first lesson was pretty tough going - conducted entirely in Spanish, and both of us getting stressed out by the experience of being total beginners and getting everything wrong! We walked away the first day feeling this was an uphilltask we were facing (I don't know what else we were expecting, near-fluency at the end of one 90 minute session presumably) and realising that although we could now ask each other where we were from and what our jobs were - Hey James, where are you from? Really? Me too! - we still weren't in a position to get a coffee without an elaborate pantomime accompanying the few words we knew. However, the next morning over said coffee, we hit the coursebook and our homework exercises and got the first few bits of grammar sorted. I think it was our success in learning the verbs Ser and Estar that then gave our teacher a rather false impression of our capabilities: over the next four days we did a high-speed tour through times, dates, where things are ("the garden is behind the garage. The cat is under the tree etc etc) and the compexities of three different verb forms - James, walking dazedly away from one lesson: "Did she say we weren't doing any more verbs tomorrow?" Me: "No, I think she said we were doing a lot MORE verbs...."
But no one who knows me and James at all will be surprised to learn that we actually quite liked doing our little exercises and reading dialogues in which we were introduced to a range of fascinating characters called Paula, Pilar and Pedro who have conversations about what they had for lunch and how many brothers and sisters they have. By the end of the week, we had a basic grasp of forming questions and saying what we needed to say. The tandem conversation class probably topped skydiving in terms of terror but we managed to string a few sentences together... in the English half of the session, James, who had made it wordlessly clear that he didn't want to go, ended up in lively conversation with a delightful Brazilian girl - and I don't think any man can argue with that as an outcome for an evening!
Santiago has been a really cool city to get to know - cool bars in the Bellavista quarter, fantastic national buildings like La Moneda, the presidential palace that used to be the country´s mint, and sunshine, sunshine, sunshine. A walking tour gave us the inside track on the history behind the city, which bars we should visit, and how much you should pay for chorripan - a thin steak fried at a streetside vendor, then loaded up with guacamole, mayonnaise and salsa. With some elementary Spanish, we have ventured into the famous Cafe Haiti branches - a coffee chain that hit upon the idea of making their waitresses wear very short dresses to entice the customers in; unsurprisingly, I was the only woman in the there... and enjoyed nights out fuelled by piscolas (pisco plus cola) - then paid the price in the morning. Chileans have a reputation as the quieter, more reserved Latin Americans... so we can only imagine what Buenos Aires will be like!
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