Oh Puerto Madryn, beautiful sunny beaches and mammalian sea life…time to leave it behind, at least for the morning. For the first time on the trip I would be crossing off a bicycle from my list of transportation modes with a mountain bike rented from the hostel. I cruised up the beach for a couple hours and found an awesome dirt track for some quad/motorcycle action near a shipwreck. On the way back I faced a horrible headwind that made me forget about how strong the sun was. I returned with a sunburn with finger marks on my back from where I missed applying the sun block (the tan lines are still here three months later).
Well after packing up I talked with the hostel owner about soccer, apparently he is actually a fan of one of our Seattle Sounders Alvaro Fernandez, he didn’t expect the city that produced Nirvana would have a team. At the bus station I met a true saint and it came in the form of a twenty something blonde wearing a “Denver Hockey” shirt. Her sainthood came from the Costco size jar of Jif peanut butter in her backpack, her one comfort object for the five months in South America. I told her it was a wise choice as she let me knife out a nice wad of the hydrogenated goodness.
The bus trip to Buenos Aires was a good finale with a comfy window seat, no one to sit next to, three consecutive Wayans Brothers movies (which kept my nose in my book), bottomless wine with dinner and a night cap of about five ounces of whiskey to savor before bed. Needless to say I woke up with a slight headache as we sat in about two hours of traffic before reaching the BA bus station.
Well I couldn’t check into my hostel room until the afternoon so I hopped on the internet. When checking my email I saw Ella was on Gmail and it turns out she was in a hostel about 13 blocks away. With nothing else to do, I headed out to meet her. On the way I encountered one of the biggest challenges of BA life, finding an ATM with cash! Her new housemate pointed us in the direction of a nice tourist attraction/café where we got some very mediocre burgers and ventured out to see some scenery. That afternoon we saw a weekly protest in one of the plazas, a monument to Christopher Colombus, a really interesting pedestrian bridge, the naval museum and finally we both had our first experience in a Hooters!
Ella’s housemates had invited us out to a club for the evening so we headed back and tried to find some empanadas on the way…no go. So we sought out some McDonalds to quickly fill our bellies before a night of drinking and possibly dancing. Big mistake, it costs more than the steaks we would eat the next day and took longer to prepare, it really is a delicacy abroad. That night we made it to an expat club called Sugar, where we schemed to use the girls in the group to give me access to the ladies night special of free wells until 11. For some reason we were there until 3:00 drinking rum and apple juice and discovered our mutual distaste for fernet and coke.
We cabbed it back home with her friends and decided we weren’t done with our first night on the town…and this is where it might get drawn out, but the following sequence of events really blew us away. We walked towards the town center and met some kids looking for cigarettes, immediately they picked up on the fact that we were tourists (oh shit). One kid wanted to hang out, and when I say kid he was something like sixteen, but spoke excellent English. He told us we could probably find a bar or some beer over in San Telmo a short walk away and insisted he come with us. I didn’t hesitate much because I knew San Telmo was sketchy at that time of night and a local guide might not be bad.
When we got about 20 min away from the hostel I started to think, “A guide would be great, but this kid could be anything but a guide” and started reading every street sign I could and counting the blocks back to the hostel. By then we had been of talking all sorts of things with him, he and Ella discussed the impact of the Falklands War, or as it was known in Argentina La Guerra de las Malvinas. I was educated on the whole thing as before that night I would not have known where those islands were and I am a geographer!
We asked him what he was doing out so late during the middle of the week and he said he had to go to school the next day and such, but he was just doing his thing. He told us about his family life and history, I can’t remember the details, but it was not an easy situation. Well unfortunately no beer, just creepsters out in the early morning hours where every shop was locked up. Our innocent guide lead us back in the direction of his home and Ella’s hostel. On the way he wanted to stop for cigarettes, we insisted on buying them for him and he accepted. Normally I would not buy a sixteen year old cigarettes, but I felt better about it after he explained that you have to quit for your mandatory stint in the military so it’s just what the kids do before they enlist. He is a pretty smart kid, he aspired to be a policeman in his neighborhood following his service then work then become a lawyer to help settle future water disputes that may erupt from the vast aquifer Argentina sits above. We bid him farewell as he had to be in class in a few hours and still had a long walk home.
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