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Published: April 16th 2008
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Back in BA
Thank god!
We checked into the Palermo Suites hostel at around midnight and headed straight out for a few drinks on Plaza Serrano. Unfortunately the nacho place (Tazz Bar) had stopped serving food so we had to settle for a couple of tapas style dishes at the place next door which were nice.
We then had two full days. The first day we found a mass of market stalls selling second hand books (we’d now gone about 3 weeks with nothing to read) most of which had an English language selection at about £1.60 each. We both bought one each as the choice wasn’t great but, hallelujah, we now had something to read.
Today we also arranged our flight to our next destination, El Calafate, by going direct to the LAN office as this route isn’t available on their website for some reason. We were expecting it to be expensive and, therefore, thinking we’d end up having to do a couple of days by bus but it was only £67 each which wasn’t much more than we were expecting to pay on the bus. Unfortunately, the next return flight was 10 days later which was a lot longer
than we were planning to spend so we just booked one way with the intention of worrying about getting out of El Calafate when we needed to. From El Calafate we wanted to go to Mendoza but there were no flights at all between these two places with LAN so again it looked like we might be stuck down near the South Pole for some time but again we decided we’d have to cross that bridge when we came to it.
The Palermo Suites hostel is owned by the same people as Hostel Inn in Iguazu and our private double was very nice and the staff were fantastic. We asked the girl on reception to see if their place in El Calafate had availability, which it did, so that saved us trawling the net for the next hostel.
On the night we had our Nacho’s at Tazz bar which were as good as ever.
The next day we took the bus (29 again) to Recoleta cemetery where Eva Peron is buried. The guide book said to get this bus but as I was following our route on the map we were getting further and further away and eventually ended up
in San Telmo, miles away! Never mind we went back to Plaza Dorrego and got a drink and watched the tango show again then took a taxi to Recoleta.
Walking round a cemetery is not exactly my idea of a good time but this place is very impressive, more like a small town. All the great and good of Buenos Aires & Argentina seem to be buried here and you recognize a lot of the names from street names you’ve seen. The map & short guide you get for a small donation tells you who they all were. They were mainly politicians, writers and military figures. There were small footnotes about when these generals had had their military successes, all of which appeared to be prior to 1982 for some reason.
After the cemetery we found a Northern Argentinian Indigenous restaurant called Cumana on Rodriguez Pena. Here we tried mate tea for the first time. All over BA and in Uruguay people carry flasks under their arms and a mate “gourd” which is a small bowl which they put the tea leaves into and pour hot water over. They then drink it through a metal straw. The taste is similar
to English tea but a bit stronger and more bitter. It was ok but I haven’t been and bought my own gourd and flask yet. To eat we had Locro which is a traditional stew of beans, chopped chorizo, veg and a spicy red sauce and Tamales which were a kind of suet pastry with a minced beef & veg filling, a bit like an Argentinian Hollands Pudding. The food was out of this world and dirt cheap, even by BA standards, and we were gutted that we were flying south in a few hours and, therefore, wouldn’t be able to return.
Upon leaving the restaurant we found a bookshop with more English language books, some of them quite decent this time so stocked up further in there - we now had 7 new books to read after having none that morning.
We then had an early night then caught our flight at 5 in the morning and left BA with no plans in our itinerary to come back. Shame (maybe we can squeeze it in somewhere?).
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