Buenos Aires, Uruguay & Puerto Madryn

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Argentina is fantastic! Well what we have seen so far... We spent 5 days in Buenos Aires which was pretty quiet as we needed some time to recover from our flights. While in Buenos Aires we did loads of walking as the city is pretty spread out. We visited Casa Rosada which is the main parliament building. As it was the weekend we were able to join a free walking tour & explore inside. We also went to the Recoleta Cemetery, where Eva Peron was finally laid to rest. It's also the most expensive real estate in Buenos Aires. The tombs are so elaborate & large, it's unlike any other cemetery we have visited. We also organised our next couple of weeks & managed to book our boat & bus tickets in spanish and so far they have worked out!

While in Buenos Aires we learnt more about the "Blue rate" for exchanging US dollars & asked for a recommendation of where to change money from someone else staying at our hostel. The government rate is currently about 8 pesos to the US dollar whereas the blue rate is about 12. We have now also been told about a website we can use to transfer direct from our GBP bank account at the blue rate.

We went to Uruguay (to get more USD), and stopped at Montevideo first. The city isn't anything spectacular, but we hired bikes and cycled 30km along the coast and went swimming at a lovely quiet beach. We were a little surprised that the beach front wasn't more built up with shops & restaurants as we expected to be able to stop along the way to buy Iunch. The weather was also fantastic, this unfortunately led to some rather bad sunburn!

We also visited Colonia, however it rained most of the time we were there so we spent lots of time reading and relaxing. It was a cute little town, we particularly liked the historic old town (UNESCO) which had a very quaint colonial look and feel as well as a Lighthouse that we were able to climb for a great view. Uruguay is, surprisingly expensive compared to Argentina.

We took the ferry back to Buenes Aires before an 18 hour bus ride to Puerto Madryn which has been our favourite place so far. We went swimming with sea lions which was great - they swim right up to you and are happy to let people touch them. We also did a day trip around the Peninsula Valdez to see lots more wildlife including (super cute) penguins, sealions, elephant seals, & armadillos. Unfortunately we did not get lucky and we missed the Orcas by a couple of hours.

Although the water is a bit fresh the beach at Puerto Madryn is lovely and was very busy with locals enjoying their holidays. The bikini bottom is a tad more revealing here than we are used to, it was just a shame we left before the bikini contest started!

We took the bus to Rio Gallegos (18 hours) on our way to Ushuaia. There wasn't much there but it was nice to break up our time on the buses. We took another bus down to Ushuaia, our trip included 2 border crossings (into Chile & out again), & a boat across the Magallanes Strait - It was the first water crossing found through the Americas. We were due to arrive a 7:30pm however we didn't arrive until midnight so it ended up being a very long day (15.5 hours).

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Comments

[Katy]

Great start!!
Hey guys, love this blog Robyn! Thanks for doing it for all of us following your travels. I would love to see Sarah's face if she ever saw an armadillo. I have never seen one but think they are adorable. It's cool to see your photos - all those courses have laid off, they are stunning. Miss you and looking forward to our next Skype catch up, Katy x