How Wonderful Life Is

Monday 25 January
Buenos Aires

I pack and check out, while trying to remain cool in the one room with air con in the hostel, not entirely successfully. I check out BA tube (or Subte as they call it) – the line I take is very old, like a box car from Railroad Tycoon for those that remember that computer game. And it has no air con. I go and look at the congress building – it has a funny squashed dome. I walk around for a bit to kill time and enjoy looking at the beautiful people.

I go to the bus station and get on the bus. I realise I’ve missed lunch but I have snacks to tide me over. The bus sets off on its epic 20 hour journey and they play a bunch of movies, one with the great Paul Rudd and Eva Longoria as a bitchy ghost (I kid you not), Marley and Me which is pretty good and makes me cry like a girl (even the bit where Owen Wilson’s mate looks at the picture of his family and says “you did good,”) and a Clive Owen one where he’s a renegade ex-Yard Interpol suit fighting an Evil Bank. Strangely the DVDs they show don’t have the film titles so I don’t know what they’re called.

The food they serve has unusual flavours – you’re never quite sure what it’s trying to be – but edible enough. For some reason I can’t sleep very well which is strange as on paper it’s pretty comfortable. So my mind keeps thinking about my life and how it’s changed so much over the last few years for the better. Phil was right, the 30s are the best decade. It’s at times like this that I like to listen to depressing music, for some reason the contrast makes me feel good and of course, it’s the music I love the most. So The Smith and Radiohead it is then.

The other thing to mention about this part of the bus journey is that when the polar ice melts, Argentina is gonna be in big trouble. Both on the first part of this bus journey and the whole of the trip to Mar del Plata the landscape is completely flat. You thought the Netherlands were flat. Well, they are, but so is this, and on a much larger scale. It’s not until we hit Patagonia at sunrise on the following morning that we start to see any hill action. And what hill action that is.