Santiago -> Buenos Aires
24th of March: I got up early and cooked some porage (the local bakery doesn’t open until 8.30, so no bread or eggs), and took the metro to the bus terminal. The metro in Santiago is rather unique (as to what I have seen), they took a lot of trains, took the normal wheels off and equipped them with normal bus wheels, so instead of rails they have concrete floors. But they still have rails, which instead are attached to the trains to keep them in the right direction, so they don’t fly off somewhere else. The bus terminal was fine, a few shops, orderly information and I easily found my bus and got on it. The border crossing was the slowest yet (2 hours and 40 minutes) and was apparently in a height of 2800 meters (in the Andes). However in Mendoza the story was quite different, so far that is officially the worst bus terminal in the history of bus terminals, 60 super busy terminals (yup, they have the same word, the building they are in, and the individual stops for the buses) with no information what so ever (so a couple hundred people all trying to find their bus in a tiny building. You literally had to force your way through (not easy with a huge backpack), hold onto your wallet (and other valuables) and walk in endless circles trying to find your bus, check for new arrivals and what time they leave and for where, as there was no information in any way what so ever. I found my bus 20 minutes after it was supposed to leave (it was late, it wasn’t me who hadn’t seen it in time), got on-board, watched the movie (Shooter) and fell asleep. 25th of March: I arrived in Buenos Aires exactly two months and one day since I had last been here, but unlike last time I arrived 2 hours later, at 10:50 instead of 8:50. I made my way to the hostel via the Buenos Aires metro, which is very smelly, very dirty and mentally cheap (roughly 1DKK or 13 eurocent). My hostel is wonderful, clean, airy, nicely temperated and with amazing views from the sixth floor where I am staying. After having showered and eaten, I went out to find a netcafe where I could burn my pictures to a DVD (fifth DVD so far), but after having visited 25 netcafe’s or so, I gave up. It may be possible in tiny towns like Futaleufú with 1800 inhabitants, but in a huge city with 13 million inhabitants? Certainly not… Which really is a shame.
Back at the hostel I started reading in my new book (in fact, I had read one chapter already), The Odyssey by Homer, but after having read one chapter, a Norwegian girl started talking to me (yes, a Scandinavian!), her name is Anne Dorte, and check this… She’s from Trysil. We started talking and after a little while we were joined by none other than Eddie from Futaleufú and later by another Norwegian (now it’s crawling with Scandinavians) Jon, two Australians whose names elude me at the moment as well as some random people here and there. However around 22 o’clock a lot of people left for dinner (I had eaten a huge lunch), and by 23:40 it was just me and Anne Dorte again, so I went to bed (had had a long trip to Buenos Aires), only to find someone else in it, so I had to find another bed, get new linen and then go to bed (that did annoy me endlessly).
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 19:12. It is filed under Argentina, Chile.
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