Coming Back Down To Earth

Upon arrival in Rosario I managed to secure a wonderful day of sunshine and solitude: a wonderful way to shake off the backpacker blues. I have bought a guitar in spite of the fact that I have no room to transport it but I managed to get a decent nylon strung for 42 pounds so it's hardly going to break the bank if I have to dump her at some point. I have named the guitar blackbird and a couple of artistic types have done some designs for her. As most people seem to get a tatoo on the trail I think that mine will be on my guitar.

Rosario is great and the hostel is cool, as previously mentioned, I had a day wondering around the cool shops, pretty cafes and had a visit to the birthplace of Che 'commie from another mommie' Guevara, but there wasn't really much to see. Upon returning to the hostel I met a few cool people who are here in Rosario thoroughly enjoying the chilled style of the place, and once again obtained a little crew of homies. On the first evening when thinking of what 'chilled' things we could do here, we finally decided to jump out of a plane the next day.

An early morning led to a long wait for an answer on whether we could get the skydiving dudes, and an answer finally came an hour before jump time... It was on! After some quick preparations we were bundled into a vehicle and taken to a tiny airfield. Being the man who organised the whole thing I was given first dibs on when I wanted to go there was only one option: liam goes first! So after a very small amount of preparation in pigeon English, I found myself tightly strapped to a dude in a tiny sesna at 3000 feet giving a thumbs up to a dude with a video camera. I had kind of expected my 'i can do anything bravado' to only last until takeoff, yet it was not until the door burst open that I realised what was about to happen. With my feet hanging over the side of the plane and the dude strapped to me fingering three; two; one, we fell from the plane. We spun headfirst, the sky becoming the ground, becoming the sky, becoming the ground... It was literally out of this world! For around 20 more seconds we dropped before the chute was released. The exhaltation of dropping to the earth was followed by what can only be described as a world of pain. The straps holding me safely against the man returning me safely dug in like a fat girl into tiramasu and it was hardly pleasant. This, however, did not take away from the experience of hanging in the air over miles of golden sun stroked fields, and, in spite of the pain, the landing came way too soon.

The rest of the afternoon was spent lazing drinking beer at the airfield while the other three guys did their jumps, and the evening being unsurprisingly filled by alcohol and exclamations of how manly we all were. An excellent day.

My initial plans were to skip across to Montevideo tonight, however there don't appear to be any buses that can be taken from here, so I returned and booked myself in for another four nights. The weekends are apparently great here so why not. I'm ahead of schedule, so I might as well hang here for a little while longer.