5 Songs of the Mo’
1. Andrew W.K. – Party Hard - Dedicated to Master James Richmond, who I believe wants this song played during the birth of his first child. It's so bad it's good!
2. Blackalicious – Make You Feel That Way
3. Iggy Pop – Lust For Life
4. Elliott Smith – Angel In the Snow
5. Girl Talk – Play Your Part (Pt. 1) – Featuring Lil Wayne’s best lyrical attempt to describe my life

A couple of pics from Huacachina, Peru that I missed before…











ARGENTINA

Bolivia was an amazing country, and I really wish I had had more time to explore it. However, when you notice that statues such as this




are centrally featured on the main thoroughfare of a town you have the option of staying in, you realize that it’s time to get out of dodge.

So, on a bus that was literally and very obviously held together by duct tape, we made for the Argentinean border. Despite the ominous duct tape fact, the bus-ride was relatively uneventful, other than a 2-hour breakdown that I slept through and Toulch most definitely didn’t, and an unfortunate instance when I awoke to the portly advances of a middle-aged, traditional garb-wearing Bolivian woman on my lap, which I wish I were making up but sadly am not.

After navigating an absurd Bolivian exit-stamp lineup at the border, which was so combative and desperate that one would have expected it to be present in more of a peepee-soaked heckhole-type country like Iraq or Afghanistan or Taiwan rather than Bolivia, we found ourselves in the beautiful country of Argentina. Unfortunately, thanks to this degenerate hippie:



Seriously, who dresses like this?



our first few hours in that wonderful nation were spent on the side of a highway while the Argentinean army searched our bags, bus and selves for drugs. Clearly having been tipped off by this guy’s drug dealer in the border town, and the fact that he hadn’t showered in months, the Gendarmerie didn’t leave until his bag of weed and pills were produced. And then, inexplicably, he wasn’t shot on the side of the road or made to change his pants. It was an inauspicious start to our visit.

But despite the pain inflicted on us by the soap-dodger, I have to say that everything from there on in was allllll right. Although limited time and a desire to spend as much time as possible in the capital city of Buenos Aires meant that we missed large swathes of the country, I think I can conclusively say that this place is pretty awesome. And people in Argentina just know it, appreciate how lucky they are, and act accordingly. The awesomeness first presented itself to us when we were sitting at a restaurant beside the central plaza in Salta, a nice little city in the Northwest of the country. We were eating the world’s most delicious empanadas, which are addictive bready pockets filled with meat or cheese or chicken, and possibly poppies, when a small boy walked up to the plant approximately 7 feet away from us, pulled down his pants all the way to his ankles, put one hand up on the adjacent pillar like he was 12 cervezas deep, and proceeded to pee for a solid 30-40 seconds. His mother, either the best or worst on the planet, sauntered up behind her possibly trashed 5-year-old and gave our waiter a knowing laugh. Our waiter gave her his best slight-head-tilt-to-the-side smile while waving at her in a who-really-cares-if-this-kid-is-violating-laws-in-178-countries-we-have-cheap-steaks-and-delicious-empanadas-and-beautiful-women-everywhere kind of manner, and then everything returned to normal. And why wouldn’t it, everyone is just so casually happy and casually beautiful in Argentina. Wait to have dinner ‘til 11PM? Stay up ‘til 7AM in a nightclub 6 nights per week? Sleep in until 3PM? Cheap steaks and booze for all? Welcome to Argentina, where everyone follows social norms typically reserved for 20-year-old college students, degenerate gamblers and alcoholics in every single other country in the world. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Salta wasn’t all fun and pee parties though, we did accidentally eat cow intestines, and we did stay in a hostel in which we were a distinct and unwelcome minority, but more on that farther down.

From Salta we hopped on a 24-hour bus-ride to Igaussu, which is a town situated in the Northeast-ish of the country, right on the border with Brazil and near Paraguay. The draw of Igaussu is the breathtaking natural wonder nearby, Igaussu Falls, a sight I’ve had high on my list ever since seeing the crazy French hitchhiker ( http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ludovichubler.com%2F )’s photo of it 5ish years ago. It didn’t disappoint at all, and, speaking of Frenchmen, I could be heard muttering in a French accent much of the day. Evidence:
















We also hiked a jungle trail through Spidertown:



to find this incredible swimming hole near the Falls:




Next it was to the incomparable Buenos Aires. Ahhh Buenos Aires



There was the party scene, which, despite being bigger and better than all other party scenes, was still just filled with all those hilarious things that happen on your typical big night out… you know, telling people you are bush pilots from Manitoba, speaking broken spanglish while arguing about futbol with a local, putting the random friendly local in a friendly headlock, realizing this is a bad idea, buying tequila for all… yada yada telling people you are king-crab fishermen from the New Found Land… yada yada… suddenly realizing it is 6:30AM and being the first person to leave the bar and go home because you are a gutless Canadian, and also because you have been indulging since 5PM when the hockey game came on… waking up in a place that resembles Flanders Field more than a dorm room, genuinely concerned for all the bodies strewn everywhere… Pretty typical really.

Coming across this small piece of paper perhaps represents the happiest moment of my time in South America:



No need to point out that that is pathetic. And if you think that means I didn’t greatly enjoy myself in South America, then you just don’t know me well enough. Seriously though, I was beside myself with happiness, Hockey Day in Canada! THREE games! Canucks victory!

Overjoyed, or maybe just drunk:




On a definite sporting high and spurred on by our semi-successful jaunt to watch soccer/futbol in Bolivia, we decided to go see the Boca Juniors , an incredibly popular professional soccer club in Buenos Aires, play live. Luckily, they were playing against one of their rivals while we were there, the Argentine Juniors, but unluckily not at the actual Boca Juniors stadium.

We had heard many stories about the obsessive and downright scary tendencies of South American futbol fans, but by most accounts fans of the Boca Juniors are the most insane of all. Fans from the different teams have to sit in different sections to minimize homicides! There is apparently a Grant Theft Auto: Boca Juniors video game! There was even a story floating around about Requelme, Boca’s star, who had briefly transferred to a team in Europe a few years ago only to have his brother kidnapped by a deranged fan who wanted Requelme to return to play for Boca! A story like that has to be true!

So with this in mind and a feeling of genuine concern arising from the fact that our tickets were for Boca’s section of the stadium, Touch and I threw on our last clean clothes and caught our bus to the stadium, 3.5 hours before the game started. The early start for the gringos is so we could avoid the homicidal crowds entering the stadium and walk quickly through the six separate police pat-down checkpoints (How should one react to such an excessive (?) show of police attentiveness? Comforted or terrified?). Anyways, as we looked down at the clothes we had selected, Touch uttered a line just as ominous as many other famously inauspicious quotes from the past, such as “Fuck it, I’ll just go with the 97L bag” and “Fuck it Rich, let’s have a fourth kid” when he thought out loud “Gee, I hope the Argentine Juniors’ colours aren’t red and white.” While I, of course, found it absolutely hilarious when their colours were absolutely red and white, Touch had 3 hours before the game to sit and think about the difficulties that may arise from sitting in a team’s section, a team with fans irrational enough to believe that kidnapping family members of players will entice them to play there, wearing the other team’s colours. And on top of that, to appear to be a rich, godless American. Good times!





Pictures of the riot police through a hole in the stadium wall. Yes, there were cannonball-sized holes in the stadium wall.





Sadly for us and fortunately for him, the 3 hours preceding the game were the peak of Touch’s uncomfortableness, as we were seated in the very back corner of the stadium away from the barbed wire-scaling hooligans



and next to reserved families. He was forced to take off the shirt to exit the stadium alive though, high comedy.









A Potpourri of Definitely Random and Possibly Connected Drunken Musings From South America
-Dulce de leche is a caramelly substance with the consistency of nutella and the addictive properties of crack. It’s found throughout South America but for some inexplicable, despicable reason has not made inroads into the Northern hemisphere. It alone is worth the airfare.

-A little inside I know, but at about 2AM on one of our 24 bus-rides we realized that the impossibly bad movie that was on, “Passengers” starring the one and only Anne Hathaway, was partially filmed at the venerable UBC Law School building, may it rest in peace. Although it didn’t really feel like school without Jordan Wallpaper Watson sitting in the background stealing his $11.83 an hour to preside over the Distribution Centre or Professor Kleefeld’s rundown brother sleeping on the couch, this was a very exciting development at Hour 17 of the trip.

-A tip to the bug-eyed, teenage would-be muggers of Argentina: Don’t let me see you put your hand under your shirt in pretending to have a gun, or you will get a stiff slap to the wrist rather than money. I’m sorry, I know that probably hurt for all of 3 seconds, but us Canadians are not to be trifled with.

-#34 on the Life To Do List – Hear the Cranberries deliver a life-changing rendition of “Zombie” live.



I missed crossing this one off in Buenos Aires by two life-changing days. FML.

-Public Displays of Affection are egregious and found everywhere (I was going to use the word ‘ubiquitous’ here, but changed my mind when I realized I would get an email from Mikey informing me that I’m a loser. I disagree, by the by) in Buenos Aires. Intertwined Couples are like tumbleweeds blowing down the roads. We didn’t even find safety in our sports bar, as our hockey-watching was rudely interrupted by a tumbling couple that managed to not notice they were using us to stand up for a solid 45 seconds

-We went to an incredible drum show that devolved into a hilarious mosh pit, complete with the drummers leading all the spectators out of the venue to a bar afterwards in a dancing procession. If my life needs more of something, it's dancing processions to music. And of course there was the added hilarity of a guy standing on his buddy's shoulders most of the show and doing the screaming eagle:





-Walking sticks on hikes are useless unless they are used to supplement air-guitar performances, complete with jumping leg-kicks, through the Andes to “Lust for Life” by Iggy Pop

-A friend of a friend was once walking in Los Angeles when he saw Bill Murray, star of the incomparable comedy hit, Groundhog Day. Upon realizing he was in the presence of greatness, the young man excitedly stopped him to rant and rave about how much he loved him. Without uttering a word, Bill Murray looked him in the eyes, then quickly lunged at him, grabbed him in a headlock and gave him a noogie. After ten seconds, he let go and ran back in the direction he had come from. Before disappearing around the corner, he stopped, turned, and yelled “NOBODY IS EVER GOING TO BELIEVE YOU!” Then he was gone… Just when I thought it wasn’t possible for me to love Punxatawny Phil anymore… I am unable to get over this. Amazing.

WithmuchloveDunc