I write this from my hotel in BA after a couple of days rich with incident as our Victorian predecessors might have said. I’m writing this in haste as I’m leaving shortly for the airport and my flight home but I did want to post an update before I left…

Long, long day. Packed up and off early for our drive which will be 350k but will take at least 8 hours since there are no paved roads. The first couple of hours were through enormously wide expanses and fields of basalt froth which were blown out of the multiple volcanoes that dot the landscape as far as the eye can see off in the distance. Our track passes along the edges of waves of this material whose height reaches about 2 or 3 metres and which appears to be a black rocky foam filled with air bubbles. It would be impossible to make a road over or through it so we skirt the edge of the basalt lava flow which is so hard that edges are still razor sharp after a million years....

Alarm set for 5:30 to be up for an 8:00 am flight from the BA domestic airport to Posadas which is the city and airport closest to the marshes and wetlands in Iberà where we're going to spend the next three nights.Hugh arrived with his driver at 6:30 to pick us up and drive us to the airport and just as he did the skies opened up with torrential rains so we raced to the car through an overflowing stream that had already overrun the gutter. Given the weather, happy to be leaving....

Covered a lot of ground today. After last night's over-indulgence awoke late and didn't leave the hotel until 11:30. Started by taking a taxi to San Telmo, a district near the river famed for its market. Left everything of value in the hotel safe since we had been warned of pickpockets in the crowd; hate to mention this but everyone warned us of potential problems but it's common sense to take precautions in any big city anywhere. In any event our only problem so far has been a counterfeit 50 peso note but a couple in the hotel who we talked to at breakfast had been sprayed by someone from a squeeze bottle and a couple of people who in the course of drying them off and helping them had emptied their pockets. Not fun but again not unique to BA; we had the same thing happen to us in San Francisco so common sense is the order of the day anywhere....

Hugh had arranged for a car, driver and guide to spend Saturday morning with us to give us a sense of the city. Useful exercise, particularly with as fluent and as knowledgeable guide as Maryanna was. Got a good sense of the city and am beginning to create a mental map, a sense of where things are in relation to each other.

The afternoon was spent walking and in anticipation of our coming dinner. We had made a reservation at a "closed-door restaurant" described in an article here: "The secret to accessing some of the most memorable meals to be had in Buenos Aires is a bit of insider knowledge and a reservation. Puertas cerradas, or closed-door restaurants, are where some of the city's best chefs are at work, often in the comfort of their own homes, creating mouthwatering, multi-course meals. Lately, more and more of these closed-door restaurants have been popping up, leading to a new variety of cuisines and dining styles, and they're quickly becoming the most sought-after tables in town."...

Arrived on Friday morning after a relatively easy 10 hour flight. Have reached the conclusion that if you have to fly, and as exciting as I still find it after many years, it's getting to be a real PIA, the ideal flight crosses only 1 or 2 time zones, is an overnight flight, there are lie-flat beds available and is about 10 hours long. Using that yardstick the Houston-BA flight was ideal. Departed at 9PM had a large glass of red wine after take-off, refused dinner, laid my bed down flat, sleepmask on and a sleeping pill ingested I slept for a solid 7 hours. Awoke to a hot breakfast and shortly afterwards landed with virtually no jetlag since we crossed only 2 time zones. Met Hugh of McDermott's Argentina at the airport and spent a pleasant couple of hours driving to our hotel, having lunch and comparing adventures. Hugh is a widely-experienced young guy whose adventures have led him from a childhood in Dorset, to horse rearing on the Masi Mara in Kenya, to riding his horse Pancho across the Andes and riding from the northern top of Argentina to the southern bottom end....

After much turmoil with our flight itinerary; every leg of the trip has been cancelled, changed or modified at least once in the last couple of months and our final trip routing is now different in every respect as compared to our original plan, the only common factors being that we leave from Toronto, arrive in Buenos Aires and at some future date which also changes, we arrive back in Toronto. While Air Canada flies direct Toronto to BA, we were routed through Newark NJ where we were to pick up a United flight to BA and then returning it was to have been BA to Lima on Avianca, a change of planes and on to to San Salvador and a change of airlines and home to TO. Crazy. ...