01 - In The Beginning

On Monday morning, with memories of a hectic wedding weekend still fresh in my mind, I managed to get up in time to bid farewell to Jude and the gang, get dropped off by a tearful mother at 'Charmaines' to be scalped and catch my train to arrive at Gatwick with time to spare.

I have to say that it is certainly an odd feeling waiting for a flight that long to head off to the other side of the world on your own. I paid my respects to Burger King and Costa (Freddie their carrott cake isnt as good as yours!) before heading off to the gate.

The flight itself was ok, for those of you who have flown with me before you will know I am the worst fidget!! So you will no doubt find it amusing that I ended up sat next to an overwight 6'6'' Spanish giant. Nethertheless I had the window seat which in truth is all that matters! to my surprise I nodded off on the runway before we had even taken off (I am not an aeroplane sleeper) and I slept most of the flight, intersperssed with gazing out of the window at the Fench coast sending morse code signals to Ash (I take it that no reply means all is well)

Once we landed in Madrid I managed to identify two other solo travellers, Erica from OZ and Cath from UK. They are both on holiday from medical related jobs so we passed the time swapping stories about broken bones and exotic disseases. Again to my surprise I slept the majority of the flight to Buenos Aires, only to be disturbed by turbulence as we took the long route around a storm!

We said goodbye to Erica at the airport as she had to wait for a friend and then headed for the buses. We had been told we needed bus number 86, however a man told us in spanish (???!!!) that bus number 8 was the one we wanted. After a detour through some choice suburbs we got turfed out on one of the main central streets. I found my hostel (which true to style I had booked the morning of my flight) with ease and met up again with Cath to go exploring. We found a lunch bar to watch the world cup game in and were treated to 5 counts of "GGGGOOOOOAAAAAALLLLLLLLLL" from the exuberant South American TV commentary, much to our amusement!

After a kip we met up again to hunt down the Argentinian steak creature. It was rubbish night so there was crap all over the streets, however we managed to negotiate and traverse the enormous piles of card and plastic landslides and found a nice little place that did a steak the size of a small house and with wine, all totaling less than a tenner! bargain!

Thats about all there is to report for now, photos will follow as I have no cable to upload then and need to purchase a card reader. Needless to say I only have one or two photos as I´m sure you in England will all be glad to hear that the weather here is grim!

Over and out

Josh and the travelling owl