Final location: Recoleta, Buenos Aires
Total miles: 15,393
Appropriate tune: Ramblin’ man, by Lemonjelly
Secretly, and without telling anyone, I always hoped to get to Buenos Aires. And now I’m here it feels, well, weird.
After eight months, more than 15,000 miles, 13 countries, thousands of chicken pieces, several hundred fried bananas, a tonne of rice and one brand new tyre (thanks, Todd) I’m finally at journey’s end.
I think I started to get slightly sick of travelling somewhere around Colombia. It was not so much riding the motorbike – that remained a daily delight – but the constant checking in and checking out of some hotel or hostel somewhere, and unpacking and repacking all my possessions into three medium sized aluminium boxes on a daily basis.
Add in the frustration of having to navigate your way around yet another unfamiliar place and the sense of dislocation that comes from knowing nothing about it, and knowing no-one there, and you can see why I became fixated on the idea of being in one place. And logic demanded that one place should be my ultimate destination, Buenos Aires.
As a consequence I rushed through places I now wish I’d spent more time – desert Peru, for example, or Chile – as I was lured towards the nirvana of my final halt like some kind of moth towards some kind of flame.
No matter how much I loathed the limits set by those boxes you get used to the life you’ve made for yourself, even if it feels unpleasant. It’s what keeps us going to work everyday, after all. And now that life has gone, I cannot help feeling like something is missing.
Everyday I get up and I’m in the same place – a pleasant apartment on the tenth floor of a modern building in Buenos Aires’ poshest barrio, Recoleta, home to ambassadors and most famous as the last resting place of the great and good of Argentinian society. The local cemetery contains the graves of independence heroes and presidents, authors, musicians, businessmen and one Eva Peron Duarte.
I don’t have to wrap my t-shirts in plastic bags and squeeze them into a metal box. Instead, like normal people, I can stack them neatly on one of the shelves of my built-in wardrobe. I don’t have to make sure I’ve got on enough layers on to cope with the penetrating cold. The only fuel I’ve got to worry about is coffee, and with at least 10 cafes within a block of my apartment I’m pretty confident I’m never going to go short.
There’s live coverage of the Tour de France on the telly every morning, and a proper pop-up toaster in the kitchen. There’s no need to consult a map before I leave the apartment, and no need to hunt down a bed for the night before it gets dark. And if I see something I like in a shop I can buy it. Unlike the panniers, I don’t have to worry about running out of space in the flat. There is a long, long way to go until I become a Mr Trebus of the south Atlantic.
Luckily, coping with the loss of my old life on the road is made considerably easier by the fact there is so much to do in Buenos Aires. And, because of the march of swine flu through the country, I’m one of the few people still doing it. While many people are staying at home trying to avoid their coughing neighbours, I’m doing my bit for the Argentinian balance of trade by continuing to visit the many excellent art galleries, museums, shops and cinemas in this outpost of Europe in South America.
To rip off Alex Garland’s novel The Beach, Buenos Aires is like a decompression chamber between Europe and South America. As a first destination on this huge continent for people from the Olde Worlde it’s pretty convenient. It looks like a cross between New York and Haussman’s Paris – broad boulevards with bellas artes architecture interspersed with grids of apartment blocks, small shops and cafes.
It’s got loads of pretty parks where the main activities are jogging, and walking dogs. Like Paris, the vast amount of dog crap on pavements is legendary. Like New York, the sound of fire engine sirens wailing around the towerblocks reminds you you’re a long day’s ride from the countryside.
And as a final stop before returning to Europe it’s pretty handy too. Everything functions. Shops and restaurants are open after 5pm. They’ve even got Starbucks, for God’s ‘s sake. Stepping onto a plane here and off in London or Madrid or Miami feels more like travelling from one part of a city to another, rather than crossing a vast ocean and a couple of continents.
I don’t think this will be my final post on this blog site. I still haven’t told you what the journey was like, or what the best and the worst bits were. To some extent it’s bacause I don’t really know. I think it’s too soon after stopping to take it all in. It’ll take a few weeks – or months – to make sense of it all.
One thing I do know is that it was much more exhausting than I thought it could be. Since checking into my BA apartment I’ve probably spent more time in bed than in any other part of the flat. I’ve also reintroduced my body to the idea of exercise, to the shock of us both.
One other thing I know is that I’m in no rush to do it again. In a coffee bar yesterday a bloke asked me if I was going to ride the bike back to Miami. No fear, I said, without even thinking about it. Too far.
But do I regret it? No. When I was in Florida – which seems a lifetime ago now – I was listening to music on my laptop. At the end of the Laura Marling album Alas I Cannot Swim there’s a secret track (it’s after all the birdsong, you just have to persevere a bit – or be too lazy to switch it off).
Anyway, it’s got some appropriate lyrics, which I thought I’d share:
“There’s a house across the river but alas I cannot swim, and a garden of such beauty that the flowers seem to grin;
“There’s a house across the river but alas I cannot swim, I’ll live my life regretting that I never jumped in.”
I don’t regret jumping in, not one bit. At least now I know what the house across the river really looks like.
