Road to perdition

The 40-hour bus journey from Santa Cruz, Bolivia to Buenos Aires, Argentina was a lot less painful than I had expected. The previous, very lazy week in Santa Cruz could well have eased the journey, having provided excellent training for remaining seated with nothing but sleep, movies, conversation and snacks as entertainment.

Of course, there were a fair few annoyances on the bus that took some getting used to. First, there was the incessant blaring of B-grade movies. Stuck in our seats with no way of ignoring the audio, we were all but forced to watch movies of a surprisingly adult calibre, as they featured what a casual observer might assume to be a little too much violence and nudity for the few pre-teens on the bus. Cases in point are the shockingly bad Battle Royale remake, The Condemned, and a local soft-core movie about a group of poledancing women.

During our first very uncomfortable 12 hours on the bus, our only reprieve from the audioscape would be periodic announcements that were broadcast unnecessarily loudly, and in Castellano (the most commonly spoken Spanish dialect). By the time we had finally lost enough of our hearing to be able to fall asleep, we were awoken almost immediately to carry our bags off the bus and across the Bolivia-Argentina border.



On a more positive note, there was some beauty to be found in driving through the darkness on the top deck of our double-decker bus, watching the night quite literally pass me by. We moved in a capsule beyond space and time, with the splash of our headlights to casting a surreal halo on a blurry backdrop of gravel, shrubs, and the occasional run-down shack.

Jim and I seemed to be the only non-South Americans on the bus, which did afford some insight into local tourism. Our outlandishness was blatantly obvious at rest and meal stops, during which the conductor would have to come up the stairs to communicate the purpose of our stop and any instructions in a flurry of hand motions and the simplest of Castellano vocabulary.

Besides our first dinner, which was served in a tiny plastic container on board the bus, we were fed set meals restaurants of relatively impressive quality. Sadly, being seated beside fellow travellers with that lamentable language barrier between us made for many an oddly silent dining experience.

At around noon on August 20, two weary travellers dragged their grimy bodies from a Santa Cruz bus and onto the pavement of Buenos Aires' bus station. But our tribulations were not over yet. Having foolishly shunned a money exchange desk at the Bolivia-Argentina border, Jim and I had absolutely zero Argentinean pesos between us, leading to an ATM hunt with our taxi driver, followed by a scramble from corner shop to corner shop in search of change for 100 pesos (US$31). I suspect the driver was merely being difficult in hopes of us giving up with change and just letting him have an extra twenty or so pesos, but there really wasn't much we could do besides comply.

It was well after two in the afternoon when we arrived at the door to what would be our home for the next month. Disappointingly, we were informed that it was a public holiday so cleaners were scarce, and it would be another two hours before the owners would have the apartment ready for us.

After two hours of gorging ourselves on coffee-and-chocolate ice cream by the poolside of our apartment block, we were very much relieved to be welcomed into a beautiful, if small, studio. The place is well-lit and equipped with a brand new kitchen and bathroom, as well as a high-speed connection to the Internet. Only quarrel was with our balcony that opened onto the busy Avenida Cordoba, which unfortunately meant that we were assailed by traffic noises at all hours of the day and night.

But it was our apartment. Our new home. With our own computers. Our own schedules. Our own goals. Our own rules - or lack thereof. Many a day was spent wallowing in the freedom of our new arrangement. Dinners and breakfasts were home-cooked, improved and consumed. Hours upon hours were spent catching up with our lives on the Internet.

Sleep-ins were simply an everyday, unavoidable truth.

posted by liz at 6:37 PM