Patience, my friend

Well, so I took a 20 hour bus ride from Bariloche to Mendoza. Or at least it was supposed to be 20 hours. Unfortunately, I awoke in the middle of the night to a stopped bus without heating a.k.a. it was freezing, even wrapped up in 2 sweatshirts, a winter jacket and a winter hat. Moreover, I had no idea why we were stopped.

When I looked outside, I saw that we were on the border of the Province of Mendoza. There were a bunch of signs welcoming people to the province, and signs indicating that spraying had to be undertaken to ward off any transfer of agricultural diseases from province to province. Since it was the middle of the night, I assumed that we were standing because the bus, which had been falling further and further behind schedule during the previous day (for instance, departure had been scheduled for 11 am but didn't happen until 11.45) had simply failed to arrive on time for the spraying and was now waiting for the station to open the next morning. Peeved and to cold to sleep, I resigned myself to reading crack - Harry Potter.

However, when these exceedingly annoying German-speaking girls from the back of the bus asked me what was going on, I vented my frustration over Argentine tardiness in about a 3 minute soliloquy about how the companies need to get their act together. It wasn't pretty, but at least I delivered in German so no one else understood, and even the girls, who had been mocking everything Argentine for the past 12 hours or so (this is what made them annoying) looked taken aback by my reaction.

About 90 minutes later I felt like a total jackass. The on board steward (like on a plane) came upstairs and told us that the replacement bus had arrived, so we could change buses and continue onward. Apparently, we had been stopped due to a mechanical fault in the motor, not incompetence. It made me feel really bad that I had gotten so upset over something that wasn't the fault of either driver or steward.

More importantly, it showed me that I still need to go a long way in relaxing and accepting the daily problematic of travelling in Latin America. In this sense, it was a major eye-opener. And since then, I've really worked hard on relaxing and taking things as they come. Moreover, now that I'm in Bolivia I'm very glad I had that epiphany in Argentina, as travel here is a complete mess. But more on that later.