Buenos Aires

I landed in Buenos Aires without any hassle, and once they had me fingerprinted and face-recognised I found Kevin waiting for me with a baggage trolley and a hug.

After an over-priced celebratory airport beer we got a coach into town and had an over-priced celebratory bus station chicken lunch and started trying to figure out where our couch-surfing host Faylin lived.

On the way we were trying to second-guess the numbering system and Kev made me shake on a stupid bet about how many blocks we were from Faylin's house. And the '5-peso-bet' was born.

We couldn't have asked for a better host, Faylin lived with two great Colombianos and over the week we stayed there we met loads of their friends, went out drinking and dancing, had days out in the park, entangled each other in many ridiculous 5-peso-bet's, and, most importantly "Got Our Shit Together".

I should explain a little - I met Kevin 15 months before in Nimes in the south of France for only 2 days, where, while drunk, he said he needed an accomplice in a daring adventure across South America in the footsteps of Ernesto "Che" Guevara 60 years before.

This was all I knew, except for another evening in Nimes the following summer (I had gone to visit Kev to see if he was still "in") where Kevin told a pretty girl in a bar that I was to be the star in his next film. Classy wing-man manoeuvre I thought. Very classy.

Well, Kev had turned up in Bs. As. with a Macbook, two professional cameras, a selection of microphones and a stack of DV tapes and memory cards. Apparently it was more than a great wing-man line.

But, we still had no actual idea what we were really doing here, where to go or how.

One day in Bs. As. was especially inspiring - we'd found out about a small hardware store which had become an impromptu Che museum, and had inherited the artefacts left by the real (long-closed) museum.

The owner, Eladio spent an hour talking to me about the attitude and achievements of Che, and had a true passion for the man and a firm belief that if everyone was a bit more like Che, the world would be a better place.

"Just ask yourself, what would Che do?" became the quote of the day.

Che and Alberto had started their journey going south in Argentina, before crossing the Andes mountains for Chile, and an Argentine friend of Kevins had told him of a paradisiacal village on a lake nestled in the Patagonian Andes near the Chilean border and given him the name and address of a family friend there - We had a goal.

Restrictive import taxes and border controls meant that we couldn't buy motorbikes in Argentina as I'd have liked to, but we heard some great tales of hitch-hiking through La Pampa and the semi-arid desert of Central and Southern Argentina from Faylin and her friends - We had a method.

Our Shit Was Together.