Buenos Aires

I spent a few days visiting Buenos Aires. It is one of the largest cities I've biked into, requiring me to follow an 18 lane traffic artery from the suburbs to downtown. I was of course the only bike out there. The city is nice. It is clean. The streets are lined with attractive buildings in the 6 to 12 stories range, if there are tall skyscrapers I didn't find them. Despite the population of four million it never felt crowded. At times it even seemed quiet. I took long slow walks, frequently stopping in restaurants as I went. I made friends to go partying with. In Buenos Aires the parties don't even start until 2am and people will arrive for a few more hours after that. A more typical night for me is falling asleep shortly after it gets dark at 7pm. Why siestas are part of the culture here makes more sense to me now.

I was mugged after one if those parties while walking back to where I was staying. A tourist experience that I hadn't had yet. It was very late at night, or early in the morning depending how you look at it, the small bakeries I passed were already starting their day. Two men approached walking down the wide dark sidewalk in front of me. The shorter man grabbed my arm and pointed the barrel of a gun at me from within his coat pocket, pressing it hard against my ribs. Or it could have just been his fingers poking me. I wasn't convinced either way. I had showered, washed my clothes and shaved within the previous 48 hours so these two guys did not realize I was homeless, out of a job for years and at that moment nearly penniless. I only had 5 pesos on me, the equivalent of 50¢, no phone, no passport, nothing else. The rest of my cash I had just given to a man spending the night on the street a few blocks back. The karma quickly paid off. The mugger, with his fingers on my ribs, patted my pockets and when he came up with nothing the two of them quickly left without a word. The whole event took just a few seconds. I carried on too, back to slowly meandering the dark and quiet streets, smelling the fresh bread, trying to pick out the stars shining between the tall buildings.

I also had my bike fixed up while in town. I've lost track of my exact distance but I think I'm about 18000 miles from Fairbanks. Few things on my bike started there and have made it here. I had everything cleaned and a couple more pieces replaced. This tuneup will hopefully get me across the barrens of Southern Argentina. The road ahead gets shorter every day.

Oddly enough the actual time is the average of these three clocks.

A mushroom for you.