Good Air

Waking up at around 7:30 we are keen to make the most of the day- which will now be my only day in Argentina.
Magda provides us with breakfast of toast and coffee. Her granddaughter is over for the day and is a very cute addition to the table although she appears somewhat wary of us. The meal is interrupted by Magda’s cat jumping on the table and getting dangerously close to the butter, not wanting to touch it Chris attempts to ward it off with a teddy that was on the table, the cat thinks it’s a game and starts swiping at him. Jumping back in alarm Chris drops an f bomb and the teddy. I take delight in being particularly unhelpful to the situation and just having a laugh.

We head out for a walking tour of Buenos Aires. It’s actually way more pleasant and cool than I expected, kind of a cross between somewhere in Europe and New York. We walk the cobbled streets at a good pace, checking out markets, a cathedral, a bunch of funky buildings and waterways and a well refurbished museum/ruin. We cram in as much as we can, ordering takeaway sandwiches and smoothies before racing back for our taxi to the airport.
Arriving at our checkin counter we find out we aren’t permitted to fly to Bolivia without having an exit ticket booked. This proves problematic as we plan to bus onwards, have no tickets and the wifi isn’t working. Chris starts swearing like a trooper and I start laughing- what has become our typical responses.
We become ‘those people’ holding up the entire line as we fumble around on our phones trying to sort it out. Finally my phone comes through with a connection, we rapidly book a bus ticket and head onwards.
Our trip to Bolivia is a couple of 2 hour flights with a few hours between. Swapping travel, work and life stories and plans for how he could propose to his girlfriend we’ve been chatting non stop for almost 6 hours. In a moment of self awareness we realise no one around us has been speaking English the entire time- we are those annoying foreigners who gabble away in their own language at rapid speed 😆
We hit customs at Santa Fe, I go through with no problems but Chris is getting a hard core interrogation about his motives for visiting and length of stay. The customs lady still doesn’t appear happy with his answers as if she expects him to be attempting to hide out in the country for an extended period of time. She continues questioning and asks about his occupation. Upon hearing he is a doctor her qualms appear appeased and she waves him on through.
Getting off the plane in La Paz we are at an altitude of 3,600. This is super high. When climbing Everest we had a gradual process of about 5 days to get to this height and yet here we have just flown straight in. I can feel my head spinning immediately and when we debate whether navigating the public mini-vans or getting a taxi Chris makes the executive decision that right now we don’t have the cognitive ability to navigate the system and should just pay the extra bolivianos to get to town safely.
Checking into a hostel we head out to get some dinner, the streets are dark and narrow and considering we don’t really know where we are going Chris tries out his Spanish, asking a lady ‘perdóneme-restaurante?’ The lady looks him in the face and then instead of pointing us in the right direction she let’s out a startled laugh as if he’s just made an inappropriate joke. The response is so unexpected that we both finding cracking up and finding our own way to a local eatery.Read more