Hola y chau, Buenos Aires.

Step 2 ended up involving crashing in BA for a night (at the ArtFactory - a hostel I had wanted to stay at back in February, bonus!), getting some much needed rest and heading to Uruguay the next morning. Turns out that the hostel is awesome (great breakfasts, great crazy murals everywhere and great staff who kindly ordered empenada delivery for us that night as it poured and poured and poured outside). But it was a thunderstorm in BA and that was pretty amazing. Those little things never cease to catch me off guard.

In the morning I went for a quiet walk to reconnect with the city that was my intro to South America. (Truth be told, it was to look for peanut butter - which there is a dearth of in BA and Uruguay, turns out.) The holiday was evident from the empty streets, and the barely-spitting sky seemed to keep people inside as well. It was a good 30 minutes.

And well timed, apparently. When I got back to the hostel we called for a taxi and were waiting in the lobby, and who should walk around the corner and stop in his tracks but my old Manta surfing buddy. We caught up briefly and he planned to be there for a while so I hope to hear about his adventures in Columbia. I really couldn't get over the whole "sliding doors" idea which seems to happen to a lot of people here - randomly running into acquaintences months apart in different countries. How odd to start and end my trip seeing the same person a continent's width apart, though. I wonder what I am supposed to learn from this...?