news, travel, rock 'n roll

It made Australian news for a week or two when the Chilean Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcano first erupted back in June. The ash cloud - and it was a spectacular ash cloud - was in our airspace, dammit! But four months on, it wasn’t until I got to Santiago that I discovered the ash continues to wreak havoc, albeit on a more local scale. And unfortunately for me, I was meant to be in Buenos Aires. 

The unplanned stop-over threw my airline into chaos. Updates trickled through from harried staff, all in Spanish.  The remonstrations of my fellow passengers, also in Spanish, effectively got the news across. No bueno.

The result was a few wasted hours, some shuffling around in a marble foyer, a free night of accommodation, and arrival in Buenos Aires a day late. It also meant some fellow strandees hooked me up with the greatest little hostel I’ve ever stumbled upon, and I had exploring buddies for a couple days amidst 13 million people (BA is bigger than London, who would have thought?! And I’ve now been to six of the top 20, some work to go there.) The best-laid plans, etc etc, and I don’t think I’ve ever had a re-routing end badly. 

A week later, my 1900 overnight bus isn’t at the BA Retiro. Rolling with the punches at the front of my mind, I settled in, an eye on the tv screen that listed bus departures. At 2000, my bus name suddenly appeared - and I leaped up, just in time to see my bus. Not appear, but disappear.. out of the station.  

In the hour-long wait, I’d established the station guards matched my please-and-thankyou Spanish with a few short words of English. Now, one of them saw me. “That’s your bus!” then an exasperated “Come!” As we sprinted out of the station and into the dark, I tried to recall if bus stations were popular staging points for elaborate kidnappings. It suddenly seemed likely, as our gallop drew rein at his car. “Next stop!”

Speeding along the highway, the bus dipped in and out of sight for the next ninety minutes, and turned, just before us, into a fringe bus station. “My service - 183 pesos”, my hero intoned. I’m still wondering the exact parameters of his job description, but I could hardly argue. The bus ride had cost 480, and I was back on it. Another re-routing, not badly ended, but maybe expensively. 

When you’re travelling, sometimes you can know too much about where you’re going. 

A week ago, I saw a band play the Workers Club. The lead singer was not long back from South America, and told a story about the Iguazu Falls. 

As much as any traveller wants to be independent-minded, what are you going to do if you don’t follow the pack? So he followed the pack to Iguazu.

While everyone else oooohed and aaahed and waxed lyrical about how sensitive they are to positive ions, his response was less poetic. “It looks like a waterfall,” although I’m not sure he’d have said it out loud. When you’re running with a pack, and that pack is experiencing transcendental perfection, your pithy two pesos is rarely appreciated.

Back at the hostel, the singer said, he put on his iPod, and listened to Jonathan Richman’s Roadrunner. Then, he said, he felt it. That was transcendental, that was perfection - a driving three-chord ditty about seeing the beauty in radio towers in cold old Massachusetts. I knew exactly what he meant.

At that point, he sat down and wrote a song. He called it Rock ‘n Roll Is the Only Thing That Makes Me Feel Good. 

He wrote a song, I might write a blog. 

And I’ll take my headphones when I follow the pack to the falls. And keep an eye out for particularly perfect radio towers.