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1. Arrival

I was ready for anything, which was vital, as a quick scan around the arrivals lounge of Buenos Aires airport revealed potential danger almost everywhere. The overjoyed family welcoming home their sweet grandmother, the tired businessmen shuffling along in a semi-conscious daze and even the loving couple embarking on their honeymoon were not fooling me. It may have been my first time in Latin America, but I had read all the guidebooks, watched all the documentaries and heard all the urban legends about the drugging, kidnapping and organ harvesting.
     They were doing a fine job of disguising all of this however, even going as far as making the airport appear just like every other one I had been in previously. There were confusing signs indicating that taxis could be taken from the gift shop, seats in the waiting area designed with discomfort in mind, a cafeteria serving overpriced limp sandwiches and a bookshop replete with John Grisham and Danielle Steel novels, all effortlessly held together by a nauseating interior design style.
     They may have been cunning, but my potential attackers didn’t realise I was sporting a full set of safety paraphernalia. I had four hidden pouches on my body with all my credit cards, cash, documents and photocopies of those documents dispersed between them. As I said previously, I was ready.
     A brief inspection of the gift shop confirmed my suspicions that no taxis were available there, so I made my way out onto the street. It was a perfectly ordinary sunny day, unremarkable in every way apart from a whiff of freedom in the air. Before I had time to wallow in my self-indulgence though, I was pounced upon by an overfriendly taxi-driver and before I knew it, we were on the way to the Limehouse hostel. Or at least that’s what I was hoping.
     He was rather chatty despite my abstention from the conversation, which helped put me at ease. Then it occurred to me that for all I knew, he could have been describing how he was going to drive me to a dark alleyway where he and his most gruesomely terrifying friends would beat me to a pulp.
     As it happened, the only threat to my safety on the drive to the hostel was the drive to the hostel. I had heard about the erratic driving style in Latin America, but I was still wholly unprepared for the experience. The lane markings were for decoration only, the distance between two cars at cruising speed on the highway was about the thickness of a piece of card, indicating was evidently only for the weak, changing lanes could happen with no warning or space to support such a manoeuvre and seatbelts were an unnecessary luxury. I was so pleasantly surprised to arrive at my hostel in one piece that I happily handed over my money for two weeks’ accommodation without even checking the place out.
     My first trip to the toilet suggested I shouldn’t have been so hasty in parting with my money. The first surprise came when I went in search of the bathroom and instead found a shoilet - an ingenious space saving design consisting of a pokey cubicle containing a toilet, a sink, a showerhead and a hole in the floor for the water to drain away. It meant I would be showering on a floor soaked in the badly aimed urine of travellers from all over the world. If that wasn’t disconcerting enough, at least two of the four shoilets were unusable at any one time due to blockages or non-functioning flush systems. It meant that over the course of a day, a viciously pungent habitat would evolve for many of the homeless insects of Buenos Aires. It was less than ideal.
     It may sound like I was placing too much importance on the lavatory situation, but there’s nothing like a good crap. There was certainly no chance of that happening when I caught a glimpse of ‘old nasty’ - an encrusted turd fossilised into one of the toilet basins that loomed in a way nothing good ever can. Even a mere glance towards it would send a shudder down my spine.
     While I was considering the state of the bathroom hygiene, I suddenly remembered this was my first time in the southern hemisphere, so I eagerly flushed the toilet and the water did indeed spin the opposite way to what I was used to. I repeated it to confirm my findings, but impressive as this was, it didn’t help at all with the sanitation issues.
     It crossed my mind that my lifestyle change might have been a bad idea. What the hell was I doing in a random hostel in a country where I didn’t speak the language, didn’t know another soul and had absolutely nothing to do? Who was I kidding? I was no traveller, and despite what I had thought at the airport, I could never be ready for what was to come.
     After some reflection, I realised it wasn’t such a bad thing after all. I wanted an adventure, something out of the ordinary, new experiences and an escape from the drudgery of my previous life. How could I be ready for something like that? Surely, the mere act of being prepared fundamentally prevents the experience from being fresh and exciting. My breakthrough deserved some celebration so I walked to the hostel bar for a beer, confidently unprepared for what might happen next.

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