Tucuman, Argentina

There´s no sense in beating around the bush. This place pretty much blows. It´s big and dirty and lacks the old-world feel of Salta. Also it´s been drooling gray rain all day and I feel like I´m in Seattle. The power just went out in this hostel but the ceilings are high so I´m giving it the benefit of the doubt. I´m over halfway through the Che Guevara biography I´m reading and have gone from kind of admiring the guy (in his younger days) to having nightmares about him. Shit´s getting pretty brown in Cuba and by page 600 I´m expecting the number of executed "counterrevolutionaries" to reach the thousands.

Cusco smelled like roasted corn and Cafayete (where very little happened except for the fact that I bought my first ice cream cone of the journey) smelled like bologna.

Having consulted my English/Spanish dictionary about 24 hours too late, I´m now 85% certain that I ate a pig´s testicle on my last night in Salta.

The cab driver who picked me up from the Tucuman bus station today put me through the most stressful 20 minutes of my entire trip, screaming in an indiscernable Argentine accent (they drop about 10 rather important letters from the alphabet entirely and mispronounce another four) about where to go and what to eat and who to drink and constantly scribbling down phone numbers for hookers and shoving them at me while steering with his knee and dancing with his left hand and right elbow to the salsa music that was blaring out of his radio. Was quite glad to finally get out of that cab, and actually lied about where I wanted to stay so I could get out earlier.

Then I went to an Internet cafe to avoid the rain and read Simmons´ blog, which is sheer genius.