Last post I didn't mention that our house at Cabo Polonio was filled to the brim with red ants. It wasn't a huge deal -- we planned to spend most of the day out of the house anyways, could hang our bags on hooks out of reach from the ants, and could sleep on the deck under the stars where there were no ants. Plus the filth was endearing.
But that night after I passed out on the deck, Dickie and Mike snuck inside the Bug House to sleep on the mattresses, which they knew were more ant colonies than mattress by now. Dumbest Guys.
When they woke up, they had the bug! Bites everywhere. One little guy woke Dickie up by nibbling on his finger, which had swelled to several times it's normal size. Mike just let the bugs bite him through the morning. After all was said and done, Dickie's swollen hands had 14 fingers-worth of mass on them. Mike's back did too. The whole ordeal was gross and heelarious at the same time. The only concerning part was whether the bites were from just ants or whether they got the bed bugs too.
Feeling dirty, infested, and itchy, we booked it out of there. Cabo Polonio is a strange and special place -- great and terrible at the same time. A lot of grief, but the fun kind. I like to think Charlie Brown had Cabo Polonio in mind when he famously spoke of "good grief".
Buenos Aires is a five hour bus and a two hour ferry ride away from Cabo Polonio and we wanted to make the journey by nightfall. At the bus station we bought out every single empanada they had and loaded up for our long journey ahead.
The ferry we rode was unreal -- spacious, luxurious, new. They must have smelled the bug on us because they made us put these on our feet as we came aboard:
We arrived in Buenos Aires at 9:30p without a place to stay and took a cab to a neighborhood called Palermo Soho. There we walked from packed hotel to packed hotel until we finally found a place with room for three. By the time we had a room and stopped for dinner it was 2am.
Having our first taste of Argentine steak at a bar called Negroni
The first order of business was to set up a quarantine area for our bugged luggage. We wanted to see if we should throw out our stuff in case some bed bugs had hitched a ride with us to Argentina. To inspect, Mike and Dickie turned off the lights to simulate a night time environment and watched their luggage with flashlights for any signs of bug movement.
After a while without movement we called it a night. Happy to be in civilization again, I planned to look for an Airbnb with a washer/dryer the next day.
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