The long ride home / Page 6 of 6
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| Arica |
I had about 10 days before my flight, so I decided to come back to Buenos Aires via Chile because I still had a shit load of Chilean pesos, and it would be silly to keep them. What would I do with 110,000 pesos back in Cape Town? So instead I spent it on my bus trips, all the way back to Mendoza. I thought it would get me farther than that, but buses are expensive in Chile. The first trip, to Arica was particularly bad, because of border control and bladder control. The line to check out of Bolivia lasted over an hour, plus 9 hours without a toilet, with Bolivian revenge occurring in my intestines. I slept in a lousy residential house without hot water. But it was ok. I ate a gigantic chicken supper, which I couldn't finish, though I tried. I took the next bus to Valparaiso. 30 hours, 27000 pesos. The north of Chile was barren. On the bus, four passengers were arrested for transporting cocaine. To me, it seemed like magic. One minute, two couples are hugging and snuggling, then the next, there is a flat tyre, and police come on board, and arrest them all. I asked the guy next to me how the police knew. He said 'datos', which meant 'facts', so basically, they were suspicious, which all people coming from Arica must be, since theres no bloody reason to be in Arica other than to get drugs from the Bolivian border. The guy also told me some ridiculously interesting history that Chile and Peru and Bolivia used to war amongst themselves often, and at one point, Peru controlled down to Antofagasta, and at another point, Chile controlled up to Lima. That is some serious border changes.
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| Valparaiso |
I just missed Jaroslav by two days. I wrote to him, and he left Valparaiso for La Paz 2 days ago. In Valpo, I ate pizza and was fairly unimpressed by the city at night. It's pretty and hilly, but it's no La Paz. I bought meds and t.p. and went to bed early. Nice city compared to most, though. I walked around, and checked out Pablo Neruda's mansion on the hill. He was a pretty good poet. You have to be to get the Nobel prize for it. Valpo has some of the best graffiti in the world, and all its houses are painted a different colour, making it like a giant cross between San Francisco and Muizenberg. I cut it damn close on the money front. I planned it well, but then found a book store, and bought a book on Bertrand Russell, and a book on 6 existentialists, and so I couldn't afford food the next day. But it was ok, because I still had bananas. Ramble warningAbout Bertrand Russell, it was just 45 pages. But it was great. He went through such a lifelong process of changing what he thought was the basis of Math. In the end, he simply realised it was a descriptive notation, and somewhat unimportant: that math and logic are equivalent, and that given different axioms, different truths emerge. The Gödel Incompleteness theorem, written in response to Russell's Principia Mathematica, showed that truth is limited, or contained by the system in which the classes, or propositions, or numbers, etc., are defined. Russell's main achievement, I think, was doing all the thinking, so that today's computer scientists have an easy time understanding propositional functions and classes. He troubled to understand whether these logical constructs exist in the real world, and from these thoughts came the concepts of programming languages, (all of which interests me, because it pays my bills, and lets me travel for 3 months at a time).
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| From Valpo to Cordoba |
I took a bus to Mendoza, through some beautiful snow scenery, and ate an ice cream. Then immediately got on a bus to Cordoba.
In Cordoba, I stayed at Le Grand Hostel, which was pretty cool. I was finally taking a break from a RIDICULOUS few days of bus trip. La Paz -> Arica 9hr. Arica -> Valpo 35hr. Valpo -> Mendoza 9hr. Mendoza -> Cordoba 13 hr. And 10 more until Buenos Aires. FML. I befriended an Aussie chick, and an American dude. They were somewhat interesting, but not enough to remember their names. They had character flaws which has made me forget them, such as the girl shushing me when I interrupted her watching Grey's Anatomy. And the guy was from Wisconson. Cordoba was pretty average. Cultural capital of Argentina, apparently, but pretty lame otherwise. I saw a bunch of teens, who were unmistakably South African. I talked to them in Afrikaans, and fooled them for a minute, making them happy. They couldn't believe I was here alone. They were from Port Elizabeth. I said I'd be there in a week. So would they, since they were only travelling for 2 weeks on some school sponsored thing. Then I switched to English, cause of the black guys. It's just sort of rude to speak Afrikaans to black people, if you're not Afrikaans. Strange but true. Then the one impertinent bastard chunes 'Three months travelling without work? What, are you rich?' So I looked at him with an 'I know you like to think your shit don't stink' look, and said 'I have a job.' So I said 'cheers' and buggered off, a bit irate with the lack of manners.
I went to Alta Gracia, a suburb an hour away, where Ernesto Che Guevara
was born, and I went to the house he grew up in, which is now a museum.
It was really cool to see the bike he rode, and to read about his
adventures. A lot of people like to say 'Urrrrhhhhhhhh, people wear
his face on their shirt, and don't even know what he stood for! He was
a communist!' He was fucking awesome. Like Gandhi with a gun.
Anyone who says this Urrrrhhh statement with any pretext of authority
should be slapped, and taken to the Che museum.
Here are some awesome quotes:
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| Back to Buenos Aires |
I finally made it back to BA. I went straight to Giramondo Hostel, and there was a great group of people there, and it was a fairly exciting last few days. There was Andrea, Ruben, Gaston, Sebastian, and others whose faces and nationalities I remember but whose names I do not. Sebastian was organising an asado, and I said I was an expert at braai'ing. He belly laughed, and said 'Hooooo, nunca escuchaba alguien dice ke'sta experto!!!', incredulous that I would call myself an expert. So he challenged me to do the asado. No problemo. Asado for 6 people? Pah. Besides, how much food could he buy for 80 pesos? But it turned out I was braaing for 25 people, and apparently in the beef capital of the universe, you can go to the carneceria and buy all their aging meat for 80 pesos. So anyway, I ended up marinating and braai'ing all the meat, except for a few pieces whose brown colour or ultra-fat content suggested they were not fit for human consumption. Ruben braai'ed those. My style was to take off excess fat, and cook them to just past medium, with a bbq and tomato baste sauce. Ruben's style was to leave all the fat, douse it in chimi-churi sauce, and have it licked by the flames. I prefered mine, but didn't have a chance to taste more than a little cube, before it was finished. Ruben gave me one of his pieces, which took me 20 minutes to chew through. I got a standing ovation, which was nice. I have never got an ovation in my life. I smoked a joint with the Peruvian guy Wednesday night, and there was some crazy electro-pop music, which I danced to for a minute before deciding it was too ridiculous, and went to bed. Thursday, the next night, I returned to the downstairs party in the hostel's bar, but it was not as hectic as I thought it would be. They partied too hard Wednesday. There were some funny stories that night, but I don't want to incriminate anyone. In the morning, I had pizza with Andrea, a girl who lived for a year as a squatter in London, I got a few email addresses, and buggered off back to Cape Town, to continue my adventures in the Transkei with Aurora. There were some funny stories from that trip too, but I don't want to incriminate myself.
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