Hot Stuff

After the delights of the Holy Land theme park, all other earthly activities seem a trifle mundane. Feeling spiritually unclean and leprous we decided to go to Mass in Buenos Aires Cathedral. Happily we were not smited upon entry which I took to be a good sign, although God turned a deaf ear to my pleas regarding the result of Fulham v Spurs. Further evidence of divine displeasure manifested itself in the thwarting of our dinner arrangements. Chris had found a 'Real British Curry House' promising us an actual Lamb Rogan Josh (curry being rarer than hens teeth in this part of the world) but to our dismay it was closed on Mondays. Feeling that we had exhausted our capacity for beautifully cooked steak and fine wines we then trawled the city for inferior chinese food.

I wish to state on record at this point that I loved Buenos Aires deeply and passionately. It is one of the few cities which I have ever seriously considered living in. I would encourage everyone to visit and sample its delights. But of course all cities have one fatal flaw and in BA it is an outrageous, nay, criminal inability to provide crispy duck pancakes on request. The only possible candidate involved a sweating, shirtless kitchen hand who seemed genuinely baffled that we weren't there to close his establishment down and deport him. After two hours of fruitless wandering we were forced to admit defeat and this will tarnish my memory of this great metropolis forever.

On the other hand, there is nothing like arriving anywhere else in Argentina to make you nostalgic for Buenos Aires and happily our next stop was Rosario. We got off the bus into the sort of oppressive heat that makes you visibly wilt. Fortunately there is nothing to do in Rosario at all so I lay around in a listless daze for the first day rallying occasionally to demand that Chris fan me with a towel. Eventually I became delirious, calling weakly for beer (too weakly; he didn't buckle).

Overnight a tropical storm, the worst in 27 years according to the news, lashed the town, ripping the shutters off the hostel window and with some impressive lightning (or so I am told: I was hiding under the covers). The storm blew away the international food festival in town so we really were left with nothing to do except fight with the world's most incompetent supermarket staff over their inability to make change or work out the barcode on a packet of blueberries. It seems little wonder that Che Guevara and Lionel Messi, both native sons, decided to hightail it out of there as quick as possible.

Currently we're hanging out in Posadas on the Paraguayan border. Up here our biggest concern is mosquitos. Here, dengue fever is all the rage. This nasty little ailment is carried by a different set of mosquitoes to the malarial kind. Dengue mosquitoes hang out during the daytime, making this part of the world a 24 hour bug nightmare. I'm particularly thrilled to report that dengue can lead to a wonderful complication called dengue haemorrhagic fever. As we all know I am exceptionally brave but haemorrhagic fevers are no picnic- not unless you are a vampire. Consequently I am now suffering from psychosomatic mosquito bites of the highest magnitude. Every tiny itch and twinge has now become a sign of impending doom. There's nothing you can do for dengue except drink fluids. Nothing much for malaria either, except drink gin and tonic (for the quinine) so by process of careful study I have concluded that there is no choice other than to be medicinally drunk until December.

Bring it on, Paraguay.