Lost in Santa Fé

God, I hate conferences. When I'm a multimillionaire with my own successful business, remind me never to give a boring speech.

I was sent to Santa Fé to cover a conference about corn and wheat and agribusiness. The conference centre down at the port looks to be about 10 minutes walk from my hotel, so I set off walking with plenty of time. Predictably, within 15 minutes I'm thoroughly lost on the wrong side of the river and my requests for directions from the locals are met with blank faces. Nobody has heard of the conference centre, which is apparently at a shopping centre.

I'm wearing a grey, woollen, short French Connection dress and I clearly stand out in Santa Fé city like a sore thumb. It's boiling hot by 8am and I'm lost ambling along dirt paths on the riverbank like a real numpty. Finally I meet some industrial types working on a ship and they point me to the other side of the river. The trouble is, the only bridge to cross the river is another 10 minutes walk back in the direction I came. Sigh...

Another 20 minutes later, I arrive at the conference centre, still with plenty of time as I'm British and like to arrive ridiculously early for everything in life. The view of the river and ships is pretty cool:

Ship at Santa Fé

The conference bores me to tears. For starters, I'm supposed to blag some exclusive scoops from the corn and rice industry bods during the reception breakfast, but I'm confronted with a vast sea of grey-haired, middle-aged men with beards and I simply have no idea who anyone is. Rookie error... 

I stand there with my Crackberry, Googling images of the men I want to interview, and finally pluck up the courage to walk up to one of them who I believe I've correctly identified. It turns out he just looks like the dude with the specs and grey beard I wanted to interview, but in fact is an entirely different dude with specs and grey beard. I pretend I am not a complete and utter numpty and give him my business card and make some idle chat about the Falklands or something.

At the morning break, after an hour or so of dull presentations about corn and wheat, I finally see a familiar face - a female press officer I was introduced to a couple of weeks ago in Buenos Aires. I pounce on her and ask her to introduce me to some industry bods. It turns out virtually none of the grey-haired old men I'd Googled are actually present at today's conference, but she agrees to introduce me to some others.

I conduct a couple of pretty lame-ass interviews and set about trying to make a readable news story out of them. I send a couple of paragraphs to the wire to bore a few unsuspecting readers to death.

Finally, it's lunch time. I am notoriously crap at networking so I wander out by myself into the shopping centre. It's a pretty rubbish shopping centre and the food court consists of the likes of McDonalds and Burger King, but I head out onto the varanda by the river and stumble upon a lovely, empty fish restaurant called Pacú. I order fried fish, which the waiter says is called Boga fish. I Google it and find it's an authentic river fish found in Argentina and the Southern Cone. I'm thrilled, and it's delicious. 

Boga fish at Pacú restaurant

As you can see, I polish off every last bite, leaving just the fish bone for the flies to feast on... This is definitely my highlight of Santa Fé!

Nom nom nom

After another afternoon of dull-as-dishwater conference hell, I spent about an hour waiting for a man who said he'd give me an interview but has subsequently gone AWOL. I stand waiting for him while he talks to every single other person in the entire conference, knowing that I'm waiting for him, and in the end I give up - I have stories to file and I'm sick of waiting.

I return to the food court to go on Skype and type up my work. I file a couple more short stories and relax a little as I have an hour or so before my evening flight back to Buenos Aires.

At 8pm, I arrive at the tiniest, most ridiculous airport I've ever been to in my life - even smaller than the one in Palmas, back-of-beyond northern Brazil, where I used to live, which is really saying something. I always leave a couple of hours for a flight, so I'm a little frustrated when I realise there is only one single member of staff in the miniscule airport and it will take me all of 3 minutes to check in and board the plane, which obviously hasn't arrived yet. 

Even more frustrating is the fact that I haven't brought anything to eat with me and only thing in the airport is a tiny kiosk shop selling disgusting-looking packeted sandwiches, gummy sweets and packets of Cheetos. I have no choice but to purchase one of said grim sandwiches, though by the end of my wait I realise I could've got a taxi back into town, had dinner at a restaurant and got a taxi back again and still had plenty of time before my flight. Serves me right for being British...

A couple of hours later, I walk out onto the tarmac and see the miniature propeller plane that is going to take me back to the capital. Oh, Jesus Christ. It is tiny.

I get onto the 20-person propeller plane, fearing for my life. There are 10 rows, with just one seat on each side. And guess who's in the seat next to me? None other than the guy I was supposed to interview earlier but got sick of waiting for... Ah, jeez. Embarrassing.

Fortunately, I make it back to Buenos Aires alive, despite the rattling and shaking of the little toy plane for the entire journey. Santa Fé was quite an experience.