A friend I met in Brazil a few years ago invites me to Córdoba. I’m happy to drop by and am picked up by her at the terminal after the first really shitty night bus due to a massive lack of space. Her flat on the eleventh floor with a view over the whole of Córdoba is the panoramic web design office of the trip.
She works as a TV and radio presenter. For her birthday, she gives me a guided tour of all the studios. I feel like I’m on a kindergarten trip: the world is big, exciting and endlessly interesting. In the Cuesta Del Viento’s internet hole, all the work has been left behind. Here in the panorama over Córdoba, I work through a lot of things and listen to her on the radio.
After almost three months with new people practically every day, it’s wonderful to be able to concentrate on just one person again. Especially when that person is also wonderfully colourful, quirky and funny. I realise how much I’ve missed friends and look forward to being back home. In the evening, I cook up – or fight passionately with gigantic barbecue portions in the restaurant.
We do little, but we do it right. Little is really good. Travelling is always a lot. This time often too much. The 50 metre high waterfall shrinks to a pleasantly insignificant three metres in reality. I don’t take part in any city tours, there are no tempting hikes and there is no wind for kiting. We don’t go to any bars or concerts and the rest of the culture in Córdoba, a city of two million people, goes completely unnoticed.
Lots of sleep is a wonderful change. Great journeys over high mountains don’t seem to need any more highlights. So I drive us calmly and clearly too fast through five police checkpoints in her car, without a single one asking me about my stolen driving licence. Hemingway waves to us at a traffic light, smoking.
On my third stop together at what is probably the last Paris Dakar Rally, we just manage to see the last trucks leave Cosquín for the award ceremony. We sneak into the same event in the city centre of Córdoba in the evening without tickets. The Paris Dakar Rally seems to be the only event in the world where people pay money to be stuffed with adverts. Red Bull is now the universal sponsor. Virtually every vehicle has been given wings. Despite this, most of them still drive – and nobody gets upset.
I reach the last bus of my longest journey drenched in sweat and at the last minute. In this state, my tolerance for miscreants is zero. The last bus loader charges me a third of the already expensive night bus to Buenos Aires as a surcharge for my kite bag – without a receipt, of course, but with the threat of trouble.
For this undisputed top score over 15,000 kilometres through South America, I posthumously present him with the tinny trophy for arsehole of the year. He will be killed by a piece of sports equipment the very next time he unloads his bike. Well, actually, it will just fall on his toe. He stumbles backwards. Right in front of the next incoming bus. It rolls over him. Very slowly. Twice forwards. Once backwards. The bus driver waves to me with a grin, while I hear the satisfied sound of a kite tube bursting.
But my wave was directed at the wonderfully colourful person down there, standing on the bus platform and using every gap between the masses of people now gathering to wave a little longer between the bus curtains at what people can move together. Thank you for everything!
Frank Woelky, born in 1973. Kitesurfer since 1998. Since 2006, I have been combining kitesurfing and web design on trips lasting several months off the beaten track.