Buenos Aires 5 - Troy

Thanks to "the stalker" from our blog comments I will now do 1 more post to answer his/her (I presume his from the request) questions.

Just to clarify things, I was meant to leave today, but it was really cold out, I was feeling too lazy to pack and got stuck on skype with ma belle copine (who could not when speaking with an angel).

1. Neal Dawes U.S. American.

The upshot of the lost tank bag is an amazing saga. I only received a brief mail from NDUSA, yet the story seems to be that as he was waiting in his hostel (kind of similar to my failed attempt to leave BA), after beginning the process of getting all his documents replaced, then he received a strange message on his facebook account.

It seems that some guy contacted him and offered to either give or I guess sell him his documents. I presume that he set up a meet and then the exchange took place, cos he described the vendor as "some homeless guy".

Thus NDUSA retrieved his documents, though I presume nothing else of value that could be hocked or exchanged for drugs, and thus continued on with his journey. So that is what I know, I'm sure readers can fill in the blanks...

2. The women of BA.

I have heard much from other travellers about the beauty of the women of BA.

Now I must make clear at this stage that everyone has their own concept of beauty, learned or adapted from their cultural or media oriented leanings. Thus I cannot speak for everyone. What I will say is that the women here are quite stunning, though for different reasons from their northern counterparts. I also must make it clear that the women of all the other nations possess equal beauty in different measures, so essentially none can be truly compared.

I will now post a quote from a mail I sent to the most beautiful of all...tutu...

It's such a cosmopolitan city, so I find it weird seeing so many homeless people going through rubbish bins here, and the little kids begging in the streets of San Telmo. I am used to that in the rest of south america though here it seems so incongruous. It kind of feels like Australia here in so many ways, both colonised and relatively wealthy, both of our lands raped by industrialisation and farming which changed the nature of too much of the landscape, many other similarities except that Australia has homeless people and beggars, though not children...

Then there's palermo, it sort of felt like another world, I sat in a park in the dappled sunlight which has a volcanic haze over it at the moment, and contemplated this: it feels so prosperous, the people so well dressed, the shops and buildings so modern... but at it's heart it still exists in a continent that has been relegated by history to 2nd world. I started thinking about the spanish conquistadors and how they managed to almost decimate the indiginous peoples, then I looked around me and saw almost no face there that reminded me of the indiginous peoples up north. Somehow despite the fact that I was surrounded by incredibly beautiful women (and I suppose men), there was something tragic in that...

It's hard to work out a side to be on... Bolivia appeared to me to be an unhappy and unfriendly place, but don't they have a right to be, to me a seemingly prosperous and happy westerner, look at what history had done to them. Somehow colonisation drew a border and said the people on this side will prosper and those on the other will not. It's the story of continents like africa, its the story of so much of the world... but here it seems so perfectly demarcated that I am left in awe of the influence, nay the power of borders. How does it happen that I can be in a park that feels like a park in any European or first world city, yet be in a continent pretty much disected by poverty and priveledge.

None of the countries I have travelled through so far in this trip have had such a dearth of indiginous faces. I have travelled now to most continents and for me the changing faces of the inhabitants is one of the most exciting aspects to experience. When I was in India I travelled from the south, where the people were really dark and almost had the features of Australian aborigines, and as I further travelled North I gradually saw their features change through huge differences, the people to the west had arabic features, to the east pacific, to the north asiatic even european. I could usually put a region to a face, but here in Buenos Aires, I cant.

So I must say that firstly "yes" the women I have seen here are quite beautiful, though in a new world sense. As Dr David Suzuki once said "variety is the source of life, and without it life would cease to exist". Thus the chicas are cute and could be on the cover of any international fashion magazine, though it doesn't discount the fact that the chicas of the more northern regions are just as cute.

I'm not sure if I rode the line of political correctness or overstatement there but anyways...

jajajaja (hahahaha)