The flight from Lima to Buenos Aires went smoothly. Taca seems to run everything by clockwork and we left right on time. This was especially good as Lima airport is one of the most boring places on earth and you want to spend as little time there as possible. It is also obscenely expensive – an Americano breakfast there costs 48 soles as opposed to the 15 soles it costs everywhere else. Even Melbourne airport does not mark things up by over 300%. At least not the coffee anyway.
Once we touched down in Argentina, at 4.40pm on the dot, we decided to catch the public bus number 86 to town. For only three pesos we got a two hour tour of the dodgiest suburbs of Buenos Aires. Talk about a bargain! It was akin to catching a bus from Melbourne Airport to town via Lilydale (i.e. not very direct). We got to see lots of dirty, concrete towers (I think it was community housing or at least that’s what it reminded me of) surrounded by fields and fields of litter. I think the outskirts of Buenos Aires are a depressing place to live.
Eventually we made it to the city centre. We had to hike with our packs for about 10 blocks until we arrived at our cheap lodgings. I knew the Hotel O Rei was not going to be crash hot - it had bad reviews, but what do you expect from a one star brothel. Since we had to be back at the airport at 4am I didn’t want to spend much, but perhaps we should have forked out a bit more, or just stayed in a dorm and not cared about waking everyone up in the early hours of the morning.
Hotel O Rei was the most run down dump we have encountered so far (on par with our first night in Cairo). It was the kind of place where random gun shots and blood stains would have not been out of character. At 2am people were yelling, slamming doors, watching tv with the volume up full ball, and moaning (not in a pleasurable way although I am sure that was happening elsewhere in the hotel).
When we checked out at 3.30am, a girl with her skirt halfway down her arse and a very obvious black lacey thong (you saw a good 15cm of it) came out asking for change from the man at reception. He gave her some and she walked back to the room she came from. Hmmm. Jon and I just looked at each other.
I was relieved when our taxi arrived and whisked us away from there forever.
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