Freewheeling in Buenos Aires

Well its been a hell of a two weeks but I won't bore you with the details... wait - thats not right, I am going to bore you with the details.

We got into Buenos Aires about 30 minutes after we left Sydney 14 hours earlier. Sleep had been minimal and jet lag was high. We stumbled through the airport like a couple of zombies and were lucky not to be robbed there and then. After negotiating a taxi to take us and our enormous pile of baggage to our hostel we sat back and watched the seedier outer suburbs of BA slide by. We spent that first afternoon trying our hardest to stay awake in a foolish attempt to get our body clocks on line - not recalling that the Argentines have no respect for such foolish notions as body clocks or circadian rhythms.

So we wandered the extensive parks of Palermo armed with a paper bag full of empenadas and some weird oranged flavoured soy drink which was the closest we could negotiate for orange juice.

We found a weird little park around an old building which was inhabited by about 100 cats until the sun finally went down and we could get the first of our Argentine priorities out of the way.

2 fat steaks and a bottle of red wine later and we were done and hit the hay.

The next few days were spent chilling in and around BA. We had high hopes of getting a bunch of tasks out of the way while we were in the city but almost all were shot down early on by a combination of Argentine inefficiency and our appalling Spanish. Our attempts to open a bank account at 3 different banks were met with blank faces, a flat out no, and finally a helpful soul who led us into her office, reeled off a list of things we could have with our account and then told us that of course unless we could provide a utility bill for the past 6 months we were boned. So we abandoned the bank chasing and embarked on telecommunications.

After a mystifying couple of hours standing in line after line at the phone company's main sales office we gave up and were pleasantly surprised to find a little kiosk on the street that not only sold me a SIM card but programmed the phone, downloaded some settings or other and recommended how much cash I should put on it.

After all this we figured that we had pretty much had enough of mundane tasks and decided that drinks and dancing were in order. We were staying in Palermo which is a hub of discotech and bar activity so we were reasonably surprised that there was absolutely nothing happening when we hit the town at around 10pm on a Wednesday night. Whole streets of bars open, music blaring, bouncers waiting and not a patron in sight. We found one that at least had 2 other people in it and ordered some large, cheap, drinks and figured we'd just have a couple.

2 hours later and things were starting to pick up, people were streaming in, dressed in their disco kit, the tunes were pumping up and the drinks kept coming. By 12am the whole street was jumping with a serious salsa session going on which we found ourselves in the midst of. By the time we left exhausted at 1am (soft, soft gringos) the place was in full swing and looked like it had every intention of going to dawn... which would explain why rush hour in BA is the very respectable time of 10:30 - 11am... you've got to love that kind of schedule.

The next day we thought we'd try something a little different and took the tren de la costa about an hour out from downtown BA and found ourselves on another planet at the river mouth towns of Tigre and Tres Bocas. For anyone thinking of traveling through BA I thoroughly recommend this side trip. From the downtown mayhem of Retiro station you travel through some “colourful” neighbourhoods before the high rise apartments give way to palatial homes which then give way to large English country houses complete with creeping vines and weeping willows and crushed pebble driveways. Finally you reach the delta of the River Plata and the transportation from South America to Surrey is complete. Canal boats ply the delta, linking a string of small islands which contain large tudor style homes, country pubs, and beachside resorts.

Being the middle of winter of course the whole place was deserted and there was a slight mist hanging over the canals which together with the autumn foilage (love that word) and hushed sounds of rowers' oars on the water made the whole scene seem surreal and dream like.

We wasted hours just wandering around, wondering who the hell all these houses belonged to and where were all the people were... very, very cool way to spend a day.

So we headed back to the hostel and cranked out an awesome 4 hour nap and woke up at 10pm ready to start Friday part 2. Some red wine and no small amount of caiperinhas later and we were heading to BA's “it” club Crobar. Even thought we got there at 1am it was not open yet and we waited about 20th in line for it to open. Finally we were in and were once again left wondering where the hell was everyone.. it was 2am on Saturday morning and what is apparently one of the citys best dance establishments was barely half full. Around 2:30am I suddenly realised the place was getting pretty full. The headline DJ Marcus Schultz took control of the decks and the place quite literally went berserk. All of a sudden you couldn't turn around without stumbling over the beautiful people of BA.. the rest of the night pretty much wrote itself, although once again we were way off the pace, leaving the club around 5am while it looked like the atmosphere was still building... still, we had a 20 hour bus ride leaving that morning and no-one wants to go into such an undertaking straight from a heaving BA club... the shock could kill a man...

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