Dear Sir,
My friend Andrew and I would like to express our sincere gratitude to you for your generosity. We very much enjoyed our visit to your establishment in the small hours of Thursday morning and the kind hospitality provided by your staff. We are especially grateful to you for so kindly giving us the money to pay for our trip to Iguazu. The cash that we received after playing on the roulette wheel was ample to cover our two day stay in a top-end hotel in town.
Thanks again,
Mark (and, in absentia because he is having his mid-afternoon nap, Andrew)
Andrew waving cash outside the casino, circa 3am
* * * * *
So after Iguazu we flew back to Buenos Aires and then had to catch an overnight bus to Mendoza. We were at the bus station in plenty of time, but the station is huge and with so many buses leaving they only appear on the departure board 15 minutes before departure. It was about this time that, misled by my suggestion that there might be another bus station with the same or similar name, Andrew thought he may've misread the Spanish on the ticket and that we were, in fact, in the wrong station. This would be a total disaster for our trip. So we ran with our bags to the taxi rank, piled in to the closest one and said ¨Take us to the Terminal de Autobus o Parador!!¨*, he pulled away and we thrust the ticket under his nose, to confirm our destination. At which point he started yelling in Spanish, stopped the car and pointed to where we had come from. Evidently we were, indeed, at the correct station. About 8 minutes to go. We got out the taxi, found a member of station staff, gave them the ticket... she pointed back up the stairs to the station. At this point I realised I had left my small rucksack - with passport, yellow fever vaccine certificate (necessary to get back in to Australia) plus other things, in the now disappearing taxi. This was now turning in to more than a disaster, this was catastrophic. And there was the humiliation. The fact that it seemed that we had abandoned the correct bus station, put my bag in an anonymous taxi, and then watched the bus leave. I ran down the middle of the road.... but which taxi? I decided it was best to stop the furthest taxi I could reach at the end of the street, on the basis that I could at least temporarily cause the traffic to stop and work my way back from there. This I did, and, having thrown myself at the bonnet of the second taxi, correctly identified the fat man behind the wheel. He shouted, I shouted and pointed, he opened the door and I found the bag, and ran back to the bus station. 6 minutes to go. Up the stairs. Along the 150 ish gates, to the Mendoza bus. Sweaty, out of breath, feeling more than a bit foolish - but we made it.
The bus on this route is the only First Class service in the country - half the number of seats which fully recline (effectively beds), with free wine, champagne, dinner, breakfast... and bingo (in Spanish obviously). With top deck, front seat positions we travelled, and slept, in some style. Long distance coach travel in Argentina is unquestionably among the best in the world (better than most of Europe), and we were on the best service in the country.
We´re now here in Mendoza, at the foot of the Andes, with our embarassing (and near disasterous) litany of errors behind us - and it's lovely; gloriously sunny, with a fresh chill in the air, large parks with fountains, and tree-lined streets. Tomorrow we're off wine tasting on bikes. Not simultaneously, but bikes, then wine tasting, then bikes, then wine tasting. Given recent events this could, obviously, be a total disaster, so watch this space....
Plaza Indepencia, Mendoza
View from our hotel room
* We later discovered that 'parador' means bus-stop. Thus we said "Take us to the bus terminal or bus stop!" to the (somewhat bemused) taxi driver....
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