Bus to Bariloche

Air travel within Argentina and the rest of South America is prohibitively expensive, it's absolute lunacy that a 2 hour plane ride can cost $500 or more. For this reason a lot of people travel by bus which is infinitely less expensive, and since most bus companies have fleets of new luxury buses, it is in most cases a more comfortable form of travel. The one draw back is that it is illegal and dangerous for these double decker buses to travel faster than 90 kilometers an hour; thus, a long distance trip can take a seriously long time. I just took a bus from Buenos Aires to Bariloche, a distance of 1,571 kilometers, and it took a little under 20 hours to complete the journey. Here's a break down of how I handled it.

Hour 1: Just got going- the novelty of staring out the window hasn't worn off yet. So far so good. Graham is feeling a little hungover so he ate a bag of chips and shut his eyes for a nap. I want to listen to my iPod but I've got to conserve the battery, I wonder how long I can hold out for?

Hour 2: My butt is getting numb. There's a movie on right now that I've been wanting to see but it's dubbed in Castellano and subtitled in Spanish! What's the point of that? I took my iPod out to play Scrabble with Graham because the scenery got old quite quickly. The pampas are completely flat, sparsely populated and kind of uninteresting to look at for any length of time. But, if the scenery changes before nightfall I will gladly return to it.

Hour 4: Only 16 left! They've finally put on a movie that isn't dubbed but I've already seen it, typical.

Graham scolded me for talking to the bus attendant in English, however, I only asked for coffee or tea, which isn't that difficult to figure out considering the Spanish is cafe o te. He's clearly a bit dense and I'm not to blame.

*I wonder if bus attendants ever dream of becoming flight attendants?

Hour 7: Just finished with dinner- even on long bus journeys Argentines insist on eating late, now there's a line for the bathroom. I'm hoping to get another little bottle of wine to help me go to sleep but I'm not sure if they've got a one/customer policy going on here. I'll bribe that dense bus attendant if I have to, I need something to put me to bed so I can escape this misery- the dubbed version of Australia just came on and the only thing more annoying than Nicole Kidman's voice is her voice dubbed in Spanish.

Hour 13: Graham just woke me up because that's what he does when he can't sleep. He sees me sleeping peacefully and somehow it gets into his head that if he wakes me up he'll be able to go to sleep, as if sleep is a physical thing that he has to steal from me so he can get some. It's so hot in here, my arm is right next to the radiator and it's en fuego, and my mouth is dry, I'm so thirsty. I hate Graham for waking me up. I'll smother him later for this.

Hour 19: After a fitful night of sleep, being jolted awake by the swaying and stopping of the bus and bad dreams I actually feel quite well rested. We're pretty far south now and the sun is only just rising right now. We're definitely in Patagonia as we've reached some mountains and we're driving through a string of lakes. It's really beautiful scenery now, a pleasure to stare at, and it's somewhat ghostly. We must be at a high altitude because every now and then a wisp of cloud flies by my window. The fog is heavy in some places but it only sits on the water, you can see it so clearly defined that it looks like a glob of white, impenetrable, fluffy cotton, plopped down by some unseen hand.

And Graham doesn't remember ever waking me up, how nice.

I didn't bother to write down what I did at Hour 20 because it was more of the same, but my legs weren't as stiff as I thought they'd be and six hours later I'm still feeling good. But sleeping in a bed tonight will definitely be very nice.

La Fiaca

image via Treehugger.com

Fiaca (pronounced Fi-A-Caah) is the Lunfardo word that describes a sense of sluggishness, tiredness, reluctance to do anything and proneness to illness.  Since I've been in this city I've had three colds and experienced uncommon laziness.  I'm not trying to say that I'm the epitome of health or an 'early-bird-gets-the-worm' kind of person usually, it's just very strange for me to come down with three colds in a row and rue the moment of waking up as much as I do sometimes. 

As I was running for the bus one day I happened to dash behind another bus just as a cloud of exhaust fumes spewed out of its backside.  I instantly felt a strong urge to vomit.  When walking down the sidewalk it's not unusual to have to hold your breath every other block or so to stop yourself from inhaling bus fumes.  By the time you get home from a day out and about you're typically dying to take a shower because the layer of grime all over you is starting to seep into your pores.  Sometimes I seriously worry about the damage I'm doing to my lungs just by breathing the air here and the years it could be reducing my lifespan by, the tragic irony of living in a city named "Good Airs".

But this affliction isn't just the blight of the un-acclimated immigrants.  They have a cultural-specific word for the symptoms that I (and it seems almost everybody else) routinely experience, so obviously this is a fairly common state of being that's been around for some time.

However, if you try to convince the Portenos that fiaca is possibly brought on by the poor air quality they are simply opposed to the argument.  Never mind the deductive reasoning behind why, when they get out of the city and into the mountains they suddenly have enough energy to run up and down hills all day.  Or why, once they come back to the city, they want to curl up in bed and watch TV all day.  I tried bringing this up with one of my classes this morning and true to form they denied any connection between the state of the air and the health of their bodies.  They said that fiaca is simply a cultural characteristic of the city-dwellers, a side affect of living in small spaces with too many people around, something that is really rather quaint and charming if you think about it.  A persistent cold is actually just allergies, and in this city 'allergies' are as common as parrillas.  

For me, I can't stand the poor air quality so it's not surprising that since coming here I've developed a deep appreciation for mountains simply because they look like they're surrounded with cool, crisp, untouched-by-diesel-fumes air.  As great as Buenos Aires is, I'll never live in another city that doesn't have some kind of law imposing mandatory emissions testing.  

To read about someone else's first encounters with fiaca click here.