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 beloveddigital camera.
By foot we took to our hotel, the streets were surprisinglyquiet. The streets were lined with ripped paper due to the end of the financialyear – apparently we missed the accounts party as they tossed huge sums of paperworkfrom office buildings!
During our Desyuno (breakfast), we discovered that New Year’sEve being a Friday is a bank holiday – so too the entire weekend. On the onehand we knew we would get the peace we wanted, on the other – finding things todo proved a challenge. Restaurants were hard to come by; our NYE meal was aChinese buffet – much to be desired! Andwe couldn’t exactly ‘Rock’ NYE. The obelisk, at midnight was pretty emptycompared to any city crowd I’d ever seen for NYE celebrations. A fewhome-managed fireworks, a couple of violent fights and it was all over by12.20am.
We decided to head to the Art Factory Hostel for a rooftopterrace NYE Party. Here we met the familiar Maltese faces, Plum and Phyllisfrom Iguaçu. They, being Dakar fanatics, were preparing for the next day andexcitedly talked about the commencement of the race the next afternoon, amongsttheir plans to head south by bus for over 20 hours to ice-covered Patagonia. Wepartied ‘til dawn then headed back to the hotel for a rest.