Hello there,

I�m sick. It�s been so long since I last had a proper cold/flu type thing that I�d forgotten how shit it is. Anyway, sickness aside, I�ve been having a pretty interesting time....

After my last post I decided that I needed to move to get myself back on track, and later that afternnon I discovered a note on my bed that I�d obviously missed before. It was from Nicole and it said that she was heading off that evening for San Juan if I was still up for it. So I packed up my stuff and at 6pm we headed for the bus station. Soon after, we were on a bus headed north, and I settled myself down to watch what promised to be a spectacular sunset.... I woke up an hour later just in time to see that it had indeed been a spectactular sunset and I had missed it. But there was still some beatiful coloured clouds and they were framing perfectly a full moon which was sitting unusually low on the horizon. It was a perfect photograph. Suddenly waking up I groped for my bag and clumsily rummaged thru it for my camera. After what seemed like an age I finally had my camera in my hands, and I switched it on. After another age the lens emerged and the lcd moitor came on. I pointed it and clicked the shutter, and was presented with a picture of some grey clouds completely obscuring what I knew to be a full moon. Bugger.

Oh well, nevermind, I thought, and leant back into my really rather comfortable seat to doze back off to sleep. That was when the kicking began. At first it was fairly intermittent. Whoever was sat behind me abviously thought it was pretty funny to give the back of my seat a good kick every now and then. Then it became pretty regular and I started to hear a child�s voice behind me talking in spanish, no doubt saying "Look mummy, I kicked the gringo�s seat!". "Why can�t these parents control their bloody children?!" I thought to myself. After another hour of kicking I finally decided to take action and turned around in my seat, only to be confronted by the face of a 4 year old boy grinning insanely, his face only inches from mine. He was leaning over my headrest and his face must have been just above my head the whole time. Then the hissing started. I say hissing, but that�s not really what it was, it was more guttural, from the back of the throat, and gave him the look and sound of a possessed child from a stephen king movie. The hissing was accompanied by clawing gestures with his hands, and I imagine in his 4 year old brain he had probably decided he was a dinousaur or something, but through my 26 year old eyes he looked very much like an extra from The Exorcist. This monster routine went on for a good few hours, and I couldn�t really ignore it, because every time I tried to sit back down and face front, I�d hear him hissing and spitting just above my head, and I�d imagine the string of drool that was slowly working its way down towards my hair, and I�d be forced to turn back around and face my enemy.

Nicole thought the whole thing was hilarious, even encouraging him to pull my hair, that was until he decided that pulling off the shoulder strap of her top was even more fun than spitting in my hair. Every now and then we�d look at the mother, sometimes with a pleading "Can�t you do something?" look, and other times with a "Why the fuck don�t you do something?!" look, but always she replied with her "what can I do? I�m just his mother!" look. I can�t say i blame her tho, she was obviously enjoying the brief respite we were providing from her obviously very hyperactive devil child.

Soon he became bored of just leaning over the seat, and started actually climbing over on top of us. By now we had discovered the secret weapon of tickling and were using it to some effect, but always he returned even more detemined than before...

Eventually we arrived in San Juan, said goodbye to our unwanted child and checked into a hotel.

I�ve got loads more to tell you but my headache is coming back with a vengence! Time to go and find some more ibuprofen.... Why?! Why do I have to be ill now?! I�m currently in Cordoba, the biggest University city in Argentina, the highest concentration of attractive young women anywhere in the world, the most non stop party scene this side of Rio, and I have to be ill! And to top it off I�ve just finished my book and have nothing to read! Ok, time to lie down again.....
posted by Billy at 6:29 PM