Jason Argall’s Blog Marketing and adventure. Business and pleasure.

The Last Three Months

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Well, it’s been almost three months since I posted to my blog and I feel like an update is in order.  Since writing my last post after crossing from Argentina to Chile a lot has happened.  Here are the highlights:

• I spent a week with a friend in Santiago, Chile.
• I did some wine tours in Mendoza, Argentina.
• I went to Cordoba, Argentina to visit a girl from last year’s Oktoberfest in Villa General Belgrano only to discover she was “muy de novia”  (very much in a relationship).
• I spent 10 days in a hostel in Buenos Aires where I discovered how 8 strangers’ lives could come together at the right time and we could somehow get along as well as old high school friends.  I don’t usually make great friends with backpackers so this particular group was a rare find (well, only a couple were technically “backpackers”).
• A friend from Sao Paulo, Brazil invited me to her home town Lima, Peru for a week where I got to experience great food (ceviche and more) and great parties (pisco sours and more).
• I went to Cusco, Peru, the city that used to be covered in gold–complete with gold-plated buildings and plazas with mock corn crops and gardens made of gold. All of that was melted down and sent to Spain hundreds of years ago of course.
• I climbed up to Machu Picchu alone… at 3am… without a flash light.
• I witnessed the most incredible view of my life: the view sitting at the top of Wayna Picchu.
• I suffered through “Bolivia Belly”  which I got from a llama steak in La Paz and the accompanying melancholy of being lonely and sick at the same time.
• At the lowest point of my trip, I had lunch with a friend from a boat party in Miami two years ago.  He tipped me off that there was something more to Bolivia than sickness, coldness, dirtiness, poverty and ugly people.  The Promised Land: Santa Cruz.
• After turning down a 1-hour flight for $900, I suffered through an 18-hour bus ride from La Paz to Santa Cruz on a “local’s bus”, the highlights of which were: no heat in the cold mountains as we drove out of La Paz, sitting next to smelly locals on a smelly bus,  being awoken at 2am by the sound of a large pipe flying through the windshield and hitting the glass behind the bus driver (3 inches above his head) nearly decapitating him and sending us off a steep cliff, no A/C in the sweltering jungle heat when the sun came up, vomiting and defecating in the lavatory every hour or so.
• I arrived in Santa Cruz emaciated and miserable.  I booked a plane ticket home within an hour of arriving at my hotel.
• Just getting my health back from being the sickest I’ve been in my life, I went to a fair and met a nice girl who went to lunch with me the next day, 4 hours before my flight home.
• At lunch, I really liked the girl so I took a chance on love and changed my flight for a week later.
• After getting home to Tampa, I’ve been busy working very hard.  I went to the Bahamas for 4 days and went on a business trip to New York for Ad:Tech.
• I just booked a plane ticket to go back to Santa Cruz, Bolivia to continue my adventures.

That’s been my life for the last three months.  Now that this blog is updated I won’t hesitate to post more often.