I was quite enjoying myself just surfing in the hostel room but as I just have this one night here I figured I ought to go out. It's not great at Kilkenny or any of the bars on Reconquista, but the only possibly better place I know is Palermo and I don't want to be faffing around with taxis tonight, and I also want to reduce the temptation to stay out too late. I have to be up in time for the taxi picking me up at 9am and I don't have a proper alarm.
This is my last night in the southern hemisphere. :-)
It occurs to me I have clocked up a large number of crossings of the Argentinian border. Including tomorrow, it will be:
- flight in from Santiago
- flight out to Panama City
- land border both ways to go to Perito Moreno
- land border both ways to Paraguay
- land border both ways to Urugay.
So that's 2 air crossings and 6 land. I think only Chile might come close:
- flight in from Sao Paulo
- flight out to Buenos Aires
- land border both ways on Perito Moreno day trip
- land border out into Bolivia
- land border in from Peru
which is 2 air and 4 land. So yes, I think Argentina will take the trip record. Everywhere else is or probably will be one in and one out.
I just may end up crossing into (say) Guatemala from Mexico or Panama, especially the latter if two weeks seems too long for Panama (although I suspect it won't be). (Maybe Guatemala doesn't have a land border with Panama, I have an idea it does but I'm not so familiar with the central American map.)
I have loads of spare cash. I have ARS100+ in my wallet and I don't have any expenses left except drinks and food (probably not today, just maybe a snack at the airport tomorrow). I also have ARS100 or 200 in my hidden belt. So it should work out nicely, I won't be left with too much 'useless' cash.
I ended up with a UYU200 note and a small amount of change, so that worked out well too, though I think I did have to make a smallish withdrawal the other day but it couldn't be helped.
Oh, I did look up the Mexican and Panamanian exchange rates. Turns out Panama does use balboas but they are (and always have been?) pegged to the dollar at parity and in practice all notes are US notes, only coins are denominated in balboas.
Mexican pesos run about 18.5 to the pound, which is not too bad, I remember it being *approximately* 20 when I was there before, and it may well have really been about the same as it is now in practice.
Oh, the taxi driver was slightly disconcerted at me paying the ARS40 fare with a 100 note. He was genuinely OK about it, but come on, it's hardly unreasonable. I told him I'd just come from Uruguay and he asked if I had Uruguayan cash, but since I only had 100 it was no good. (Probably for the best. My mental arithmetic is not up to generating ARS/UYU from ARS/GBP and UYU/GBP on the spur of the moment and I don't remember the rate I saw at the exchange place at the port earlier. So I would have suspected I was being ripped off. I had this a bit buying a bottle of drink at the bus terminal in Ciudad del Este paying with Brazilian cash, but I didn't care there as I knew I wasn't paying that much, I was desperate and the Brazilian cash was just 'padding' for my wallet and sort of a souvenir.) In the end he made change OK. I would have offered to pop out and buy something at the kiosk we were next to if push came to shove, though in hindsight the idea of leaving my suitcase in the boot w
ould have sucked. But I guess nearly everyone would prefer a small, no quibble, honest payment to a suitcase full of random junk which is worth more to replace but probably has negligible resale value.
I just got another pint. I half feel I should go have a drink at one of the bars with tables outside in this street (Stone Roses playing now BTW) but it is perhaps a bit nippy, though I was fine walking over. I will have this and perhaps one more then maybe go and have a last beer in the street. On the other hand, I should stop worrying about what I "should" do and just do what I want.
Oh, especially since I said nice things about the guy at reception (who I gather is Dutch, though I wouldn't have guessed from his accent, he sounded 'English but not sure where from' to me), I am staying at El Sol Hostel.
20:54. Just got a (very expensive, though I knew that before I ordered) Guinness (ARS39 vs 14 for Heineken). Figured it might be cool to have at least one on the continent. Reminds me that Kevin told me when we met in Puerto Iguazu he had come down here for St Patrick's Day (he had told me BA was his plan when we were in La Paz) and he said it was a bit crap. :-) The night, not the Guinness, on which he made no comment. :-)
I stopped drinking Guinness regularly when they switched to the extra cold everywhere, so I am far from a good judge, but it seems OK at least. I do always seem to neck the stuff far too quickly, I will have to try to exercise a little restraint tonight at least.
Oh, further to my arbitrary whinge the other day, the 'stained glass' skylight here has that Johnnie Walker logo on...
On the subject of my earlier 'hand luggage only' wafflings, it occurs to me that even the most minimal packing is likely to result in a fairly chunky bit of hand luggage and run the risk of some airline refusing to allow it as cabin baggage. In which case you would have to check it in and run the risk of a baggage handling error leaving you with only the stuff on your person. So you'd be prudent to ensure you had adequate financial resources (cash or cards) on your person. And this might be a good reason to adopt a 'compact but not solely hand baggage' style of packing. It almost inclines me to think the suitcase+small rucksack approach I am using now (the rucksack being the sort of thing you might use around London, and acting as my hand baggage) being almost ideal, except with a much smaller suitcase. But then, it would suck a bit to have two items, using the 'comfortably put it on your knee on a bus' test. (And for that matter, the 'get onto the bus and pay the driver while manipu
lating your luggage' test.) Maybe the suitcase could be mostly empty and you could squeeze the rucksack into it when not forced to separate yourself from your baggage.
Playing around with my phone, I see it has been four months nine days since my last day working for CS (though I actually finished a bit earlier, of course). It occurs to me to see how many days I've been travelling... Taking 13th Jan, the day I flew out of London as the start point (and thus not counted in the reckoning, since it's date subtraction) I have apparently been travelling for three months and 14 days, or in other words this is day 104 with day 1 being the day I landed in Sao Paulo.
It's moderately busy here now. Far from rammed but there are quite a few people. I feel a bit of a loner sitting here if I think about it, but generally I'm not that bothered. It's been a while (probably Asuncion was the last time) since I had a 'proper' social chat, but there have been one or two little encounters here and there and I guess I'm still well within my zone of tolerance, it's not like when I had that major 'drought' earlier. I doubt I'd have even thought about it now had I not felt I should observe it's got busier than it was when I got here.
22:00. Just got a fourth pint. I find myself oddly meditating on the idea of doing psychometric readings for charity at a psychic fair, which I believe occurred to me on a more drunken night earlier and was blogged about accordingly. It scares me a bit, especially the possible legal aspects, and I don't know how easy it is to get a charity to give you a collection box (although logically it should be easy, first rule of 'business' is to make it easy for people to give you money). I think with a little study I could pull it off as I have before for far less self-selectedly credulous audiences and it would be a cool thing to do, though the prospect of failure scares me, even though it wouldn't really matter. I suppose in part it would depend on how much a stall costs. Fifty or even a hundred quid (given I'm not planning on recouping my costs, all proceeds to charity, genuinely) might be acceptable for the experience, but given how much some of those guys might be on the make I guess it
could be more. I guess it's just something to bear in mind once I am back in the UK and have got myself settled.
(I suspect in part this has been stimulated by my flitting away from the Mexico book, and indeed one or two others, on my phone to a re-reading of Godwin's (?) "Lives of the Necromancers".)
22:35. Just got another and almost certainly last beer. Consulting my anal-retentive records, I see this is actually my sixth pint tonight not my fifth as I thought. Maybe I made a mistake in my bookkeeping but I suspect it was correct. I have lost my little niche by the stairs to a group of three women but no problem, there was another nearby, it isn't *that* busy.
Continue to meditate on the psychometric reading idea. I really need to stop thinking about stuff and start doing it, this might be a good start once I am established back in London. If not for the possible legal implications I would say I am definitely going to do it. I have visions of myself up before a magistrate showing I made no profit from it and still getting a conviction, albeit with a token sentence. On the other hand, it's unlikely (if psychic fairs are permitted, you can hardly blame people who participate) and while I don't exactly relish trying to tell future clients or employers I have a non-motoring office on my criminal record, I am a bit sick of being Mr Clean. ;-) The wages of sin might be death, but the wages of purity don't seem to be that great either. ;-)
I am sure I could do it. Right now at this instant I couldn't, but minimal study seemed to satisfy my random audiences before, so a bit of study plus believers ought to equate to success and ideally a few hundred quid in the coffers of (say) the RSCPA. If I can at least escape total scorn at the hands of random women in bars, believers should be a lead pipe cinch. If I don't take their money it will only go into the pockets of genuine charlatans (is that a contradiction in terms?).
I now have visions of this blog post being entered as evidence. Almost another reason to do it, I am sick of being so fucking paranoid. Say what you like about my morals in the psychometric area, I at least have generally good intentions and have no idea of financial gain.
I shall probably navigate back at least in part via GPS. I got a bit lost coming over here, nominally simple as it was. I could of course take a taxi but I see no need and the walk will do me good, as long as I have confidence I am walking in the right direction.
23:05. I suspect it's not wise but I just got another beer. I hope this isn't going to be a larger scale version of missing my first trip to Perito Moreno... This will almost certainly be the last, I just wish I had a proper alarm clock.
As blogged about on my previous visit here the condom machine vends at one peso, or about 20p. I couldn't resist feeding it a peso the last time I went to the bog, I received a little carboard package which looks distressingly unhygienic. Maybe I will use it when I'm back in the UK. :-) There must be an acknowledged fetish for 'sex with foreign condoms', or rule 42 doesn't really exist. :-)
I had to extract an ARS100 note from my hidden belt while in the bog to get this beer. But I did have 200 in there as it turns out and in a certain irrational sense spending foreign currency when I'm about to leave that country for the forseeable future almost equates to 'beers cost nothing'. At this rate I have not much shy of ARS200 (given that beer was only 14) for any emergencies tomorrow, plus of course if push comes to shove there's always a cash machine given I am safely in a city, unlike the 'Concordia experience'.
I am sure I can get 'Panamanian' cash at the airport in Panama City, but if not my USD travellers cheques will be far more acceptable than in most places. I guess Mexico is also dollar-oriented to a lesser extent. While it seems a bit sucky I should maybe try to use the travellers cheques up over the next two months rather than be stuck with them for years or take the hit of changing them back to pounds. Yet since they are there as an emergency measure I don't like to try and use them up in Panama since I still have further travel to go.
I must also say I imagine nearly everywhere being a bit sniffy about accepting travellers cheques. Though I guess the vendors thereof don't like that, and so I might hope at least in Panama I could, if I wanted, dispose of some without too much effort, especially given the lack of currency conversion issues.
I guess I could hang on to them for emergency use on a future trip, but then I'm a victim of inflation. On the other hand, while the dollar ain't what it was, it may be better holding dollars at zero interest than pounds which rapidly decline in value. :-) And of course the fees involved in buying the travellers cheques are a one off, so to a certain extent holding on to them saves that expense on a subsequent trip.
Incidentally, while not quite rammed yet, it is pretty busy here now. Had I not already secured my little niche, I might struggle to find one. But I do think I'd get a seat somewhere, I did on occasions when it was much busier.
23:35. Just left, leaving probably a bit under half a pint. I am not that pissed - I have no focussing issues right now :-) - but wasn't feeling it. Getting a bit busy, but sod it. You bunch of losers, I'm off to be mugged in Panama tomorrow. :-) Bit dubious about the walk home in terms of tedium as my earlier timings suggest I may be half an hour away, but it's cool. I do get a certain kick from the idea of little Stevey Flintham walking the streets of South America without worrying about it. :-)
GPS says I am 1.5km from the hostel. That's manageable and at least thanks to it I know I won't get lost in the minor maze of streets round here. I am sure I could walk home without it, but I am not one to sneer at any possible simplification.
Incidentally, checking a street sign on the way home (I like to use my intellect despite GPS), I note, as I have probably blogged before, the street signs are sponsored. So I have just crossed "American Express Florida". Weird.
00:10. Just got back. Minor hiccups. Due to random chat with door staff suspect I am being knocked up at 8:15, a bit early. Sadly my room has a balcony so I am out here listening to Half Man Half Biscuit. Balconies have this weird draw and I suspect this will impede me going to bed. The view is just over the street but man, it's a balcony. :-)
01:20. Finally dragged myself off the balcony. Fingers crossed for getting up in time but hey, they are knocking on my door at 8ish. :-) To bed...
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