Like they say, it’s not what you know, it’s who your friends know. We arrived at the Jorge Newbery international airport in Buenos Aires, which had transformed from rocking a few weeks ago to empty and spotless, smelling of industrial strength disinfectant.

We caught one of the few taxis and our cabbie Alejandro gave us an up close and personal tour of the downtown district that would have been gnarled with traffic on a typical Sunday. Today it was a ghost town. And still hauntingly beautiful. The architecture in the city is a wonder.

We’re on our way to the San Telmo district in Buenos Aires, where we first started this expedition, to meet Amigo, a buddy of our good friend (and now patron saint) the Fixer. Amigo is part of the Fixer’s global beer network. He greets us at an imposing wooden door.

Part hotel, part event center, the remnants of a beer tasting soirée were still present, the cleanup crew unable to complete their work before being confined to quarters. Amigo poured us a cold beer from the bar and turned the keys to the historic building over to us in a mi hotel es tu hotel kind of gesture.

We put our bags down and Amigo enlisted our help. He also owns a bar down the street and he needed to salvage what food he could before he turned off the power. We loaded crates into his pickup and he made a box for us to take back to the hotel before he headed home.

They say it’s OK to go out to buy groceries, but after the Neuquen plight, we’re a tad gun shy.

So, gentle readers, with a lot of help from our friends, on March 22 we became the only residents of a lovely San Telmo inn. Now if only our flight through Panama City stays on track for the 26th…four days isn’t that long, right?

Only Episode 12 knows…

[Editor’s note: This episode originally featured the given names of some of the characters described. Podunk’s legal counsel advised that due to the likelihood that Podunk would eventually libel, slander or otherwise disparage these characters, aliases should be used instead.]