Córdoba - Buenos Aires

I have finally made it to Buenos Aires.

4488 kilometres, five long bus journeys and four weeks after setting my foot in Lima, I am now on the Atlantic Coast.

My first task will be finding a place to stay for the month that I plan to spend here. Luckily an old friend, someone whom I haven't met for seven years, lives here. He's promised I can crash his couch for a few nights while looking for a room in a shared flat.

I'm eager to get to know the city. Right now all the different quarters are just names on the map for me. What kind of meanings will La Boca, San Telmo or Palermo carry in five week's time?

Playa de los Hippies

The family has promised to take me to the town of Jujuy, but to our dismay the car won't start, and after trying for a while to get the engine going by pushing, I have to give up and start a three-kilometre run to catch the bus that only runs once every day.

After an hour and a half of standing in an old rackety bus that anyone would have considered full already before the last twenty people got in, I'm finally at the bus station in Jujuy. It's almost 8 pm, and I find there is a night bus to Cordoba, 900 kilometres away, leaving in an hour. I decide to take that instead of making my way straight to Buenos Aires; I can still spend a day or two in Cordoba before reaching my final destination.

Cordoba is a university town, full of colonial and Jesuit history. I walk around the streets and visit a museum on the "disappeared" people in Argentina in the 1970s, but I'm mostly enthusiastic about the prospect of going to one of the riverside beaches outside Cordoba.

On my second day, I catch a bus that takes me one and a half hours outside the town - but I'm late. It's already early evening when I get there, and I also don't have precise directions. I ask a girl in the bus, and luckily she and the three guys she's with are going to the same beach I'm looking for: La Playa de los Hippies.

Although it's embarrassing how hard it is for me to understand their Argentinian accent, I'm still happy to be with them, since it turns out the route is not that straightforward. After getting out of the bus in the middle of nowhere, you first have to walk, then call a kind of a taxi, and after the taxi trip either pay for a canoe ride or walk over a hill for twenty minutes. As I haven't been aware of all these extra expenses, I haven't brought enough money with me, and have no chance but to hope I will find the right path over the hill. I say goodbye to the girl and her friends, who sit down to wait for the canoe.

But the Playa itself is lovely. Indeed, it is a Hippie Beach, with tents and more permanent makeshift living constructions all around the shore, but it's all very peaceful. I'm almost the only person in the water. I float in the  river and let the mild current carry me while the sun sets behind the hills.

When I begin my long walk back to where the bus left us, the moon has already risen to guide my path.

Jujuy - Córdoba

The fourth stretch in the bus. One of the shortest ones: just 12 hours, 898 km.

Reserva natural

I arrive at the farm by car in the early evening. It's not far from the town of Jujuy, but on that windy trail made of sand, mud and rocks, the trip lasts almost two hours. The car rocks and sways on the uneven road so that often I'm worried about it falling on one side. We cross many streams and little rivers by simply driving through them. Ever so often we stop to open a gate and then to close it behind us; they are for all the cattle and horses that roam free here.

The farm is small and surrounded by wooded hills. Not just surrounded: the farm itself is on a sloping hillside. There are two huts for the volunteers to sleep in; one that serves as a kitchen and a common space; and a house where the family lives themselves. There are no neighbours to be seen, no other houses anywhere on any of the hills as far as the eye can see.

I meet the other volunteers, a handful of young people from different corners of the world, who tell me of a river just down the hill. One of the farm dogs follows me to the river, and the cool water feels lovely after the warm day - but already halfway back up the steep hill, it's just as hot again.

The sun has already set behind the hills when I get back. Now it's time for dinner: we all gather around a long wooden table in the common room. After a delightful meal, the father of the family steps behind his DJ table, turns on the generator power and puts on some music. Saturday is their electricity day and therefore a party day. Outside the hills and the forests are dark and quiet, and in the middle of it is our cosy little hut, a festive atmosphere and happy voices shouting over the music.

But when I step outside, I am taken by surprise. It is not entirely dark. First I see one tiny light, then another, and then I realise they are all around: little sparkles in the bushes around me, above the grass, in the trees. They take turns in shining their light, and so the whole hillside glistens forming the most mesmerising backdrop. Thousands of them, millions of them. "Luciérnagas", the father tells me, "fireflies. This is their season." I stand spellbound, unwilling to go back in.

This is going to be my home for a week.

La Paz - Jujuy

1161 km. 27 hours (in two buses).

Compras, parte II

The people here like to cluster same kind of shops on the same street. I suppose it's wonderfully handy if you're a local: when the first hardware store doesn't have the kind of tool you're looking for, you just pop in at the next shop. When someone tells you of a new cake shop, "on the confectionery street", you'll have no problem finding it.

The hairdressers' street appears to include nail studios and tattoo artists as well.

For a visitor, however, it can be a nightmare. You're starving and wish to find one single restaurant, but all the street has to offer is barber shops. You've left your toothbrush in the last town and would simply like to clean your teeth for the first time in three days, but there is nothing but wallpaper everywhere. I've been lucky enough to also walk down a toilet bowl street and even a dentist's chair street. Or this - costumes and party deco street. (Parties and dressing up is important in these parts of the world.)

Be different: go for the barefooted Spiderman/Santa Claus costume next time.

And what about my bikini?

Well, I finally stumbled upon my luck, when I had already decided I would not look one street further. I was knackered, disappointed and angry. I had asked at several clothes shops, underwear shops and sports shops, and walked past hundreds of other businesses.

Then one saleswoman called me from a clothing store. It was one of those little shops inside a kind of a small market hall that consisted of just eight shops on both sides of a corridor. "What are you looking for, can I help?" she asked, and resigned, I answered, "You surely don't have bikinis, do you?"

"Of course we do!" she answered briskly. She was there with a friend, both of them in their fifties. The shop was perhaps six square metres and covered from the floor to the ceiling with clothes that looked like they were all about to fall from the shelves. Eagerly, the woman pulled a plastic bag from one of the shelves, and together with the friend, they started emptying its contents onto the counter.

There was a swimming suit and two sets of bikinis. No different colours, different models, not even different sizes. Just those three, take it or leave it. The women lifted the bikini tops to hold them over my chest; that was the amount of trying on there was to do. They concluded that the black one fit me perfectly.

I left the shop with a new black bikini in my bag.

In general, I try as much as possible to avoid posting photos of people without their permission, unless they are in large groups and thus not that intimately portrayed. In this post, however, I felt like it would have been impossible to picture the topic without showing a couple of faces too.

Compras, parte I

When travelling, one encounters a stunning number of surprising things. The people look different from those at home. They speak a strange language. The climate may be completely different and the weather might do unexpected things. The houses look probably different, the food tastes unlike anything you've tasted, and such everyday things as doing sports, using the bathroom or taking a bus may leave you at a loss.

But there's one thing that surely must be more or less the same everywhere: shopping! All over the world, people need groceries, toothpaste and underwear, right? Walk in the shop, make your pick, pay, done?

Haha. Ha.

Case Study Bikini:

I had arrived in Lima just a few days earlier, and I knew I was going to visit some hot springs near Machu Picchu in a couple of days. As my next destination, Cusco, was up on the mountains and nowhere near lakes or the sea, I figured I should try to find a swimming suit already in Lima, just to be sure.

Just to be sure! After having wondered around the streets for three hours, I gave up on the other thing on my To Buy List, a sleeping bag; I was exhausted and decided that in addition to sleeping without a mattress the next couple of nights, I would also have to sleep without any covers. But the bikini was more important. I was not going to miss out on the hot springs after hiking up and down mountain paths for two days.

Typically, I assume, people in Peru and Bolivia buy everything they need from tiny stores which are just a couple of shelves or even just one stand. The most common form of it is a street vendor's stand, and it can sell anything. That is, anything within a range. The problem is that what belongs to a range might not be that obvious for a foreigner.

There's the cosmetics stand, with hundreds if not thousands of little products arranged meticulously under one big umbrella - but if you're looking for toothpaste, you'll be met with just an apologetic (or disgusted) shake of a head. There's the underwear stand with its selection of simple white cotton knickers, plush red lacy underwear and the daring lean G string - but of course no swimwear. The bakery stand has all kinds of tempting-looking sweet goods but definitely no bread. And so on.

Even when things are not sold on the streets, the indoor stores are hardly any bigger. They come mostly in a cluster of little shops, much like a market hall, but so tiny that the salesperson barely has room for that one chair that he or she sits on. They can sell fruit, or hardware, or mobile phone parts, anything. Just that the range is always very restricted. Services are possible too: I've seen several shoe repair shops that have made me take another look in astonishment, as it seems that no one can repair anything is such a confined space.

In Lima, and even more in La Paz, I also saw some more Western-style shops, with enough room for the customers to walk in and look at things. Presumably they are there just for the tourists and the richest of the rich, though. And even though I browsed through those, too, on my bikini-searching quest,  I didn't find one - or then they had a selection of just two models in horrid eighties' Hawaii-style colours and patterns.

(to be continued!)