Crucially I forgot to pack the lead that allows me to download photos from my Sony camera to a computer. As result, I trawled BA´s immense pedestianised shopping street, Florida, trying out my nascent Spanish, until I managed to buy a USB stick into which I can shove my memory card. As a result, photos are now up, here. In order to make sure I keep all my photos in the event of a mugging/dropping/smashing or forgetting, I'm uploading everything for the moment. Sorry.

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What San Telmo lacks in pleasantly on-trend eateries and shops, it makes up for in dog shit (and, according to a girl I just spoke to, street based armed robbery of tourists). The narrow pavements are full of steaming piles of lovingly curated turd pyramids, just begging for an unwitting flip-flop sole to crush them and disburse smeary fragments throughout the neighbourhood. But, of course that´s a little unfair. To date, I´ve neither trodden in poo, nor been mugged - but have been advised by a number of people to avoid certain streets after 10pm (I enjoyed Kate´s description of passing through a neighbouring barrio, La Boca: "we thought we'd ended up in the Wire"). As well as petty thugs, San Telmo is full of narrow streets bursting with ancient and beautiful crumbling blocks cut through with elegant Parisian style avenues, both housing a weird and fascinating variety of shops, restaurants and apartment blocks.

One such block houses the Art Factory hostel, where we currently reside. I haven't stayed in a hostel since interrailing in 1999, and even then I felt a little beyond that kind of thing. I think I stayed in my last dormitory in Kuala Lumpur in 1997. Coming back into the hostel world for the first time in 11ish years was a pretty easy undertaking. There are differences - now everyone sits around tapping away at their laptops (how do they fit them in their rucksacks?) but the place is still generally populated by newly bearded europeans and excitable gap year students (me: "do you know what the worst thing about youth hostels is? The youth" George: "yep, those who haven´t had their spirit broken yet".) But, it's a good place to be, and I enjoy staying here. That said, there was a little dreadlocked white guy, in long shorts, juggling on the roof terrace earlier. Is that such a terrible thing? It has a similar effect on me as does Glastonbury. There a city lawyer can grow a bit of a beard, forget about work and pretend to take an interest in sustainable dry stone-walling. Here it is the same, and that is, from my current perspective (and considering what I am taking a holiday from) a good thing.

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Everyone loves Palermo. Its quiet cobbled streets, the pavements marked every few yards by large leafy trees that bend over the road (I should know the species, but no), are packed with gently trendy restaurants, bars, shops. When George and I risked dissolving into puddles of salty water as we ventured out into other nearby barrios in the baking heat, it was always a pleasure returning. For me, the art, sanctioned or otherwise, that creeps up the walls of the buildings is a particular attraction. I found a couple of amazing shops with the same kind of feel, being, as they are, exercises in pointless graphic design. I resisted the impulse to buy useless books of pictures and random bric-a-brac at a particularly good one (the unfortunately named "Trippin´") and limited myself to a sketchbook, with a whimsical cartoon monster on the cover.

I wish I could say the George exercised similar retail restraint in Buenos Aires. But I can´t. What should have been a 30 minute walk along the shopping street Santa Fe, turned into a 2 hour expedition, and we bounced in and out of malls and shops. This was supposedly in the name of finding me some flip-flops and a hat, but the number of dresses tried on (not by me) led me to suspect otherwise. However, it was good to have an air-conditioned break every now again again. It really is unbelievably hot.

The trip down Santa Fe was part of a longer walk to BA´s VIP corpse-city, the walled Recoleta Cemetary. It´s not exactly "labyrinthine" (as the guidebooks would have you believe) but its crammed full of tombs, each one in a different style, all laid along streets and around plazas, and I loved it (although, philistine that I am, the only name I recognised in there was Eva Peron´s).

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The plane was delayed for 4 hours. We sat on it for 16 - 1 of which was spent on the runway at Sao Paulo. Luckily, sleep, "The Other Guys" and "Tamara Drewe" made it more or less bearable. That, and the fact that it was taking me on a 14 week holiday.

As I stepped out of the plane, on the the steps to the runway, I watched the ground advance with excitement. As my foot hit South America for the first time, a bolt of euphoria reverberated through my soul - the beat of the tango, the bloodied legacy of the conquistodors, the freedom of the gauchos, with the warm Patagonian wind on their face - like a space out of time and body, the whole of Argentina, of South America, was there thudding through my veins. No, of course it bloody wasn´t. It just felt like stepping onto hot concerete. But I´m meant to say somethng like that, aren´t I? On my travels? It´s just been so long.

Off the hot concrete, a long wait in immigration, ink staining my new passport for the first time. Cash out of the machine, and a pleasant taxi ride to our hotel in Buenos Aires, a nice little boutiquey thingy on Palmero Hollywood, recommended by Matt.

I´m being rushed out to supper now by George (it´s a couple of days later), but quickly I´d just like to share with you the obsession she´s developed over the last 48 hours (sweatily wandering through BA´s sweltering streets) about the beauty of certain Argentinian women. It´s reached such a level, that I have felt obliged to try and understand what it´s about. So, I have studied their long, olive brown legs, clad only slightly in denin shorts, their tumbling black hair and their plunging necklines, and I´m at a loss. I can´t see it at all, and shall have to try harder. Right, steak.

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A while ago, when I was more naively confident of my writing ability, I sat down and wrote this. It was about a real house that was, and remains vitally important to me. Tragically, a couple of Januarys ago, it burnt to the ground. Shortly afterwards, I went to visit the remains - they looked like something you might encounter in a Bronte novel: the garden was covered in blackened timber and broken bricks. The front of the house was gone. From the road I could look down the length of the corridor on the first floor, and see the doorways of the bedrooms where I used to stay. Only the two tall chimney stacks remained untouched, everything around them having fallen away. Now I have frequent dreams about the place, normally where me or my grandparents are living in the half-destroyed house. I'm briefly writing about it because, where previously Google Streetview hadn't covered the place, in its new trawl of Britain's roads, LM is there.

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