B.A. update

hot town. summer in the city.

all is well. liv, mac, jeff and christine all headed south to torres del paine but i haven´t been lonely because i welcomed a new roommate, dec. i met dec at the farm, irish king of one liners, traveling with rory. after the farm they headed north together until they hit the bolivian border when dec had to return to buenos aires because of an unfortunate "misplacement" of his passport. he was planning on heading back to ireland from BA but instead, after scoring a temp passport from the irish embassy, jumped on a bus and headed back north to meet rory again. below is an amusing email i received from him this morning regarding his trip:

"talk about an adventure ! So we took off from Yacuiba ( a smallborder town ) at 6.30pm ish. I asked for an aisle seat remembering that these buses would not be as plush. My seat was broken in that it wouldn´t stay up and the dude next to me, lovely man, had about 4 bags and so just took my bag out of the rack to shovel his in. I managed to get my bag back up eventually. Someone threw an egg at him about 5 mins into the journey,from the road I mean not on the bus. So we go about 500m really slowlybecause every bus company leaves at the same time and then we´re stopped and boarded by a million kids selling fruit and soda and empanadas and abolivian army dude screaming about "Has anyone got any meat etc..." in theirbags. So this is all like the first 45 mins and we haven´t gone a mile. The journey in theory is 10 hours according to the man beside me although the woman who sold the ticket claimed 8. I think she knew her driver to be honest. The dude was driving like Michael Schumacher going to an emergency.After a while I said "ok just sleep and it´ll all be over soon." Little didI know it was all about to start. The bus "broke down" after about 2 hoursand we took about 15 mins to get going again. Whatever tapping tires with rocks does it seemed to work. So we kept going till we hit a little town in the mountains after about 4 hours. We got back on the bus after I had alittle 2 bol ( 15 cents maybe ? ) burger with chips in the bun and I beganto nod off. I was having this wonderful dream. Well I say wonderful,wonderful in the sense that actual people I´d met on this journey were in it. They were out chasing kittens and that was why the bus had stopped in mydream. In reality the bus had stopped again beacuse we were on a thin roadwhere no overtaking was possible and the bus in front of us had developedsevere engine trouble. We had been stopped for a while I realised as I cameout of the dream. This was because a convoy of vehicles that could go no further were all stuck behind this damn bus. So of course our driver, whoseemed to be a bit of a good samaratin in that he stopped to pick up everylocal while other buses left them in dirt, was up tinkering around with thebus to beat the band. It was dark when I woke up. It was light when we left with our driver obviously keen to make up for lost time putting our bus into warp factor 9 to take some scary bends. As it is we arrived only 3 and a half hours past the stated time. I get the feeling as I wait for todaysfinal ( god willing ) bus journey that the adventure may only be beginning.This will be my fourth overnight bus in a week. This will make it 79 hours in this one week on buses. I´m doing my best to avoid deep vein thrombosis.Insanity however has been reached and breached long ago."

speaking of long bus rides. after torres del paine, liv and mac really wanted to check out the patagonia lake district. they were planning on doing that and then we were all going to meet in mendoza to continue our trip. they were talking about hitting up bariloche and i started urging them to take the two hour trip south to el bolson and to spend at least one night at the farm. as per usual, i began waxing nostalgic for the magic redonkness that is the farm and not only did i convince them to go, i convinced myself to go back. so, on march 6th, i´m boarding a bus for the 24 hour trip south, back to the farm...a little detour before we head to mendoza. i´m SO excited to be back on the farm (albeit not as excited for the bus ride) and this time with the girls. AMAZING. cannot wait.