We leave El Calafate and say goodbye to Airport Cat before boarding our 11:15 flight back to Buenos Aires.
On arrival at Jorge Newbery local airport, there's an enormous queue of hundreds of people for a taxi and the traffic is horrendous, so we decide to shun the queues and set off walking to find one on the street. Half an hour of taxi-searching along the Costanera later, we admit defeat and walk back to the airport to join the queue.
Another fifteen minutes later, we're in the back of a cab, sitting in motionless traffic. We ask the driver why so much traffic and he explains there is an Argentina-Bolivia football game at 5pm. Are there still tickets left? we ask. Of course, he replies. It turns out it's a World Cup 2014 qualifier and, all of a sudden, we're desperate to go. It's 3:30pm and we have huge suitcases so we ask him to take us back to my place to drop off our cases before immediately driving us to the River Plate stadium.
Another 45 minutes later, we're still in the cab, having been stuck in ridiculous traffic for an age. It turns out not only is there a football match on, there's also a massive airline workers strike and we're stuck in the middle of it all. We eventually make it to my flat, run in to dump our bags and run back out again, armed with just a crappy rucksack as we know football matches can be violent in Argentina and we don't want to take much with us.
Another 30 minutes or so later, we arrive at River Plate stadium just before 5pm. We pay the taxi driver with a tip for his efforts and jump out to squeeze through to the ticket windows in the stadium. There are crowds of people everywhere, but once we make it to the ticket window, we are told all the tickets are gone. What can we do to get a ticket? we ask. We've come all this way. The ticket officer just shakes his head at us, so we ask a policeman, who tells us if we go to a nearby football club, we can still buy a ticket. Where is it? we ask. We're told it's about 10 blocks away and are given some very vague directions.
Five minutes later, we're lost as the policeman's directions make no sense - he clearly didn't have a clue. We ask two sets of football fans and they both tell us different things. We set off walking in what we think is the vague direction and eventually come to some football fans who are marching keenly in the same direction, clearly looking for tickets also. The game has already started.
By the time we eventually arrive at the football club, it is almost half time and we're pretty much despairing but still determined to get tickets. We arrive at a tiny ticket window and we're the last in the queue of about ten people. Just as we reach the back, we hear the guys at the front saying the tickets are all sold out. By the time we reach the window to check, there are only 600-peso tickets left. We umm and ahh for about five minutes over whether to spend 85 pounds each on tickets for a football game that is already half-way through. We desperately want to see Argentina play - it could be the only chance for both of us - but we don't even have enough cash in our wallets and they don't take credit cards, so we take it as a sign and walk away, heads bowed.
We wander trying to find somewhere to eat and end up at a random, grotty football cafe with a load of fat old men, where we stand out like a sore thumb. But we're starving so we order some pasta, which turns out to be disgusting re-heated instant stuff. We've just wasted about 3 hours of our lives trying to see a football match in Argentina and all our plans for the afternoon have gone out the window. Ah well...
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