Buenos Aires - heading to bed before dawn in not acceptable, eeek!!

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From Montevideo we headed to Buenos Aires for New Year, where we met up with a friend Chico who we’d met at Iguaçu Falls. The people of Buenos Aires seem akin to vampires, eating at midnight, heading out at about 3a.m and then partying till way past breakfast.

The climate in Buenos Aires was fantastic, beautiful blue skies and baking hot Sun. We had about a week to enjoy the city and got to explore quite a lot of it, mainly on James’ magical mystery tours which were always good fun. One such wandering took us the area of La Boca, home of Tango, painted houses and the Boca Junior’s stadium. We toured the stadium, which was pretty disappointing really. It was quite dilapidated and smaller than expected, though I think filled with 70,000 odd passionate Argentines on match day it would seem a little more spectacular. Our lunch in La Boca turned out to be an expensive affair for me, as the 2 peso dish I had ordered wasn’t available and the waitress asked me if I wanted to substitute it for something similar - only thing she didn’t mention was that at 14 pesos the other dish was 7 times the price!! Fleecing!!

We visited the district of Recolleta as well, which has come to prominence for its enormous cemetery where many of Argentina’s most famous people have been buried in elaborately constructed mausoleums, with probably the most visited occupant being “Evita”.

As usual on our trip we made plenty of time for some very good eating. Argentina is surely home to the world’s greatest beef, and this was not better illustrated than when we all sat down for a meal at “Siga la Vaca”. The meal was an all you can eat buffet affair with lots of side dishes available to go on the side of the huge slabs of meat which were grilled to perfection by the sweating chefs in a huge wood burning range. The meal turned into a 3 hour plus affair with a fair amount of alcohol being sunk and us boys doing our best to wring every last morsel we could eat out of the buffet! Top eating from Alger Junior!

Other wanderings took us to a park which randomly seemed to contain an enormous sculpture of a mechanical flower, and closer to the hotel was a tiny plaza where an artist worked with a tiny hacksaw sculpting the centres of various coins from around the world. For instance on a British coin he would saw around the outside of the Queen’s portrait, removing all the excess metal and the finished products were just incredibly intricate.

We also managed to watch the film King Kong in possibly the worst cinema in the world. It seemed to be some sort of converted church with enormous high ceilings which meant that the sound echoed around and was barely intelligible, and the contrast on the screen was so poor that the subtitles for the locals were rendered virtually illegible! Luckily, us English speakers were able to cobble together some semblance of a plot, but for the locals it must have been a complete waste of time!

Through the traveller’s grapevine, James had got word of the location of an autonomous, co-operatively owned hotel that had been taken over by the workers when it had been forced to close during Argentina’s economic crisis. When we tracked down the Hotel, no-one seemed to be able to really help us, but they did tell us to come back the next day to “have a look around” and also gave us some vague directions to a co-operatively owning printing factory which James had also heard of. Feeling adventurous we set off on our wild goose chase, somehow got on a collectivo heading in the right direction and through a combination of luck, skill and judgement (though I’m not sure in which proportions!) we ended up at the factory. We hesitantly buzzed on the intercom, but were rewarded when James’ superb Spanish managed to get us inside for a tour of the factory and an explanation of the practices!! A successful trip indeed, and when we returned to the hotel the next day it seemed that our request to look around the hotel had been somewhat “Lost in Translation” and we were actually lined up to conduct an interview with one of the guys who worked their!! James’ Spanish coped admirably under the pressure and we had a good laugh!!

We struggled to keep up with BA’s night owl culture on most nights, but on New Year´s Eve we were there with bells on, and, after spraying champagne and watching fireworks in the street at midnight, drinking in the cafes in Palmero until 3 we ended up moving on to a club and partying the night away in true BA style!! The club we headed to was Pacha, which had an incredible location right on the Rio Plata, (River Plate - like the footy team), and a cool chill out garden which stretched right down to the waters edge!! Here, although it wasn’t a gay club there was a huge gay section down at the front by the DJ booth. Pretty much inebriated by the early hours none of us realised this, and when Chris said we should go and check out the busy area down at the front, Chico and I followed. Luckily though, something triggered in Chico and my brain that down at the front there were an awful lot of sweaty men wearing vests and sunglasses and dancing together…oh, and kissing - that kind of gave it away and stopped us in our tracks. Not so for Chris though as he pointy finger danced his way into the throng of flesh before realising what was up and promptly pointy finger dancing straight out of there double-quick!! Classic!!

We eventually staggered out at about 7 a.m. having watched the sunrise over the Rio Plata, hours earlier - a surreal and amazing experience which topped off an absolutely superb New Year’s eve for us all.

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Photos

BA's giant mechanical flower thing!!
Exactly what it says on the tin!!