Back in Buenos Aires

By Ryan Haynes
ryanchaynes.blogspot.com

Being back in Buenos Aires filled me with a little dread, considering our first experience resulted in the pickpocket of my beloved digital camera.

By foot we took to our hotel, the streets were surprisingly quiet. The streets were lined with ripped paper due to the end of the financial year – apparently we missed the accounts party as they tossed huge sums of paperwork from office buildings!

During our Desyuno (breakfast), we discovered that New Year’s Eve being a Friday is a bank holiday – so too the entire weekend. On the one hand we knew we would get the peace we wanted, on the other – finding things to do proved a challenge. Restaurants were hard to come by; our NYE meal was a Chinese buffet – much to be desired!  And we couldn’t exactly ‘Rock’ NYE. The obelisk, at midnight was pretty empty compared to any city crowd I’d ever seen for NYE celebrations. A few home-managed fireworks, a couple of violent fights and it was all over by 12.20am.

We decided to head to the Art Factory Hostel for a rooftop terrace NYE Party. Here we met the familiar Maltese faces, Plum and Phyllis from Iguaçu. They, being Dakar fanatics, were preparing for the next day and excitedly talked about the commencement of the race the next afternoon, amongst their plans to head south by bus for over 20 hours to ice-covered Patagonia. We partied ‘til dawn then headed back to the hotel for a rest.