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So I start this blog now for the second time. I had more than half written it when some six days ago, in the main Buenos Aires bus station, my bag was stolen and with it my new $500 camera, IPod, sunglasses and some other stuff including the laptop and of course on it the blog. All told about $1500-$2000 I estimate was taken when the bag was stolen. Could have been worse I guess in that the passports were not in my day bag but in Tracy´s which wasn´t stolen, but still it´s damn annoying. We have since bought a new laptop and hence I am writing the blog on it. I will wait on the IPod and probably get an Iphone in six months from now. The Camera, sunglass and other stuff I will pick up I guess on route.
So where did we get to.
Buenos Aires On Day 230 of our travels (or May 5th, 2010) we waved goodbye to Christchurch, New Zealand and Oceania generally and ´Hola´ to Buenos Aires (going forward in this blog to be called BA) and South America. The flight was long but pretty painless. We once again spent
the night of the 4th in the Auckland Airport as we flew in for around 8pm from Christchurch and our fight to BA (via Sydney) was supposed to be leaving at 6am, so there seemed little point going to a hotel, paying $100, for 6-8 hours. The flight from Auckland was actually rescheduled to 8am which made getting off the flight and on the next flight from Sydney somewhat precarious as we only had 40 minutes turn around now in Sydney. Tracy and I made it comfortably on to the 13 hour flight to BA that awaited us, the bags we weren’t so sure about. As it turned out the bags did make it and as we had left at 10.40am on May 5th from Sydney and arrived in BA at 10.10am on May 5th it would appear we did a little time travelling in between. Of course we had crossed the date line and gained a day which helped. The most interesting thing about the Qantas flight to BA was that all the flight staff were male, we did not have one female stewardess, well not exactly, amongst them. Never been on a flight before where that has happened.
We spent 5 days in BA staying at a hostel called Ayres de San Telmo, in the San Telmo district. The hostel was pretty basic and a little too noisy for my liking, but maybe that was just the corner room we had which faced out onto a very major road called Avenida San Juan; the staff however were top notch. Extremely helpful does not cut it, they took time to explain the local area, gave us ideas on things to do, places to go see and places not to be seen late at night etc. Unfortunately for us we seemed to spend quite a bit of time over the next 5 days in the hostel as we were extremely jet lagged and struggling to sleep at night and of course not during the day (we are OK now).
We did one day manage to make it down to the La Boca area. La Boca is generally I think a very poor run down area of BA, it does however have a very famous football stadium and team; we will come to that later, and a famous touristy area as well. The touristy area is famous because of
all the colourful buildings within it. The buildings are in fact just very old cheap looking tin shacks, that ordinarily you would not give a second glance too, but what makes them so spectacular is that many years ago the owners of these houses decided to take the excess paint of the docks and paint them all vivid colours, such that it would make Bermuda look a little dull. It is quite a sight now and has become very touristy for it with many cafes and restaurants having sprung up and numerous street vendors trying to sell you cheap tourist gifts or tango lessons that you probably don´t need or want. I am glad I saw the area, but there is little to it really and it´s one of the places our hostel staff told us not to go to after dark, looking around the area that hadn´t been painted for the tourists I could see why they would say that to us.
As I mentioned the other thing La Boca is famous for is the football team, the Boca Juniors. This is where one Diego Maradona started out before crossing the Atlantic to play for Barcelona and then
Napoli. Today he is still revered there as a god like figure with a statue of him in the main shop of the stadium and indeed he also has his own personal private box in the stadium, bang on the half way line with gold coloured seating in it. Every other executive box has the Boca blue for seating. I don´t have great deal of time for the man myself and it´s interesting that here in Argentina whilst he is still loved by the fans many don´t think too much of him as a manager, I guess we shall see how Argentina do over the coming four or so weeks in South Africa.
We did tour the stadium, it cost us about $10 I think and lasted around 90 minutes. The stadium I was amazed to see is quite old and has vast amounts of standing areas in it. I went to football games as a kid where you could stand, but that was many years ago, I haven´t seen a non all seated stadium in years, I can imagine it would be quite something to see a game there being amongst the 55,000 fans (a little less than
half standing). On this particular day we got to see some Boca and Riverplate players on the pitch performing for a Pepsi commercial. It was quite fun to see them going over the same routine, unfortunately I didn´t recognise the players. As I said the stadium I thought was old, the changing rooms looked ancient and the whole thing looked like it should be knocked down and rebuilt, not so sure it´s that easy though as it is publically owned, or so I believe.
On another day we visited one of BA´s most important monuments, the Independence obelisk on what I think is probably the widest road in the world, well it´s definitely the biggest I have even seen, ´Avenida 9th Julio´. The obelisk is pretty damn big, probably the height of the Spike in Dublin if any of you have seen that, it symbolises the official date of Argentinean independence that being July 9th, 1816. Hence the raison d étre for the name of the road also being 9th of July and as I said it´s damn big, with at one point nine lanes of traffic (yes I said nine) going each direction, so eighteen total (at other
points it´s down to six lanes each way I believe). It must be over a hundred meters wide and took a good couple of minutes to cross.
If La Boca is the poor man´s area of BA then Recoleta is the rich man´s area and within it is the most incredible graveyard. I know it sounds a bit morbid to go visiting a graveyard but it is quite the tourist attraction, plus it meant we got to walk through a little bit of Recoleta and see the wealth there. The graveyard has a big red wall that must be eight foot at least all the way round it and it has some of the most amazing graves within it. They are like mini houses or family mausoleums that you can look inside and see the coffins of family members, which I admit was a bit eerie and weird. Some of these mausoleums are amazing sites to see, some are really big, grand and regal almost. Apparently the area has become quite the place to be buried and only the rich can afford it, if the living members of the family cannot keep up rental payments then they literally turf
the coffins out and flatten the mausoleums, amazing.
Without a shadow of a doubt the most famous, but certainly not the most regal, of all the mausoleums in the Recoleta graveyard is that of one Eva Peron, Evita. On the day we visited there was a queue of twenty or so people to walk past her and her husbands mausoleum and apparently it is sometimes much bigger and on this day there were many many flowers and bouquets outside her mausoleum, this might have been due to her birthday or anniversary of her death we are not sure, but I can tell you it was quite the sight to see.
All the time whilst we have been in BA we have trying to figure out where we want to go in South America and a general route for doing it. I would say even now having been in South America for three weeks we still haven´t got it down cold just yet but after discussing it in BA and spending quite bit of time in our hostel room looking at the Internet and in the rough guide we have a general plan and we are amending it on
route. So whilst in BA we decided that our route would be to visit Uruguay for a week or so from BA, then come back to BA to get a bus to Rosario, then Cordoba, then Puerto Iguazu (all in Argentina) before heading into Paraguay, then to Salta (in Argentina) up into Bolivia and then across into Chile at Putre and head South from there to Santiago maybe via Mendoza (again in Argentina though on the other side of the Andes) or via the Lake District (in this case not in the UK) but south of Santiago in Chile. We have flight from Santiago to Lima in Peru in early July and will explore this area along with Ecuador and possible Columbia then. Unfortunately due to its size and that it would take forever to get anywhere in it we have had to sacrifice the idea of going to Brazil, we will have to save that one for another time.
Now I am not sure how it happened but somehow Tracy and I decided that as we are going to be in South America for nearly four months (and not going to Brazil where they speak Portuguese) that it
would be a good idea to learn a little Spanish. With this is mind we signed up for a one week Spanish course, costing $150 each, in Montevideo in Uruguay.
So having spent five days in BA and not actually achieving that much due to jet lag but knowing we would be coming back in a week or so when we might see a few more things we took off to Montevideo. We caught the ´Buquebus´ boat from BA at 8am meaning we had to be there to check in at 6.30am, meaning we got up too damn early for my liking. Once again though the staff at the hostel got us a taxi and came out to make sure it was the right one before we got in. The service at the hostel, remembering it is a hostel, was first class.
Montevideo The boat across was fine, it took three hours and this was the quick one, but being that is was the quick boat, it meant we couldn´t go outside as it was almost like a hovercraft or semi speedboat. It cost far too much though at 300 Argentinean pesos, that is over 50 pounds,
(or $80 USD approximately) I guess we should have booked earlier and not the day before.
In Montevideo (the Uruguayan capital) we stayed at an old hotel, called Arapey, where the staff were not exactly the friendliest, they kind of just kept themselves to themselves and didn´t bother us, or try to make conversation with us, which I suppose to be fair was fine, but after the last place they seemed a little uninterested. The hotel whilst being old, again was fine, in fact if the owners took the time to renovate it a bit and give it a good paint job it could be beautiful inside. For us the key factor was that it was cheap, in fact it was cheaper than the hostels we looked into, it was quiet and it was pretty central too, only 10 minutes on foot to our Spanish course classrooms, which was a plus point, however we did lose electricity for a night and had to move rooms another night when it went again.
Montevideo itself, or at least what we saw of it, was pretty nice, much like many other capital cities it has big buildings and some monuments in
it but I personally didn´t think it was anything special, as I said it was nice, but that was it. We spent all five days there (or at least the mornings till 1.30pm) in our Spanish classes and then afternoons taking in a little bit of the local towns history via the museums, monuments and buildings generally, we also spent some time each day going over what we had learnt in the Spanish class and doing homework preparing for the following day.
The course was OK I guess, but I just felt it didn’t suit our purpose. The course (at Academia Uruguay) was structured such that it was an eight level course with each level taking two weeks and you´re working towards getting a certificate at the end of it saying that you can converse, read and write Spanish accurately to a certain level I guess. Which is all well and good, but I am just looking for a crash course to help me get by for few months which is what it was marketed as (or at least I thought it was) and what I thought I was signing up for, to give me the basics and the
confidence necessary, not a course where if I call something masculine as opposed to feminine by mistake or pick the wrong verb of two suitable verbs for the right situation I will be marked down for it. I wasn´t looking to attain a professional qualification, just a basic crash course in Spanish and this wasn´t it. I butted heads with our teacher (Gaston) more than once over this point, I guess the lesson to be learnt is to read the small print carefully and know exactly what you are signing up for.
Montevideo has a common feature with a couple of other places we have visited on our travels (namely Ho Chi Minh City and Tiananmen Square in Beijing) in that it houses the mausoleum of its founder, in this case it´s a gentleman by the name of “Artigas” however, differently to Ho Chi Minh and Beijing, the mausoleum houses the ashes of Artigas rather than a sarcophagus. I thought it was really nicely done and it is below independence square, which again is attributed to Artigas with a big monument of him on a horse. What I found really interesting though, was that, in stark contrast to Beijing
and Ho Chi Minh City, we did not have to queue to see the Artigas mausoleum, indeed I spent ten minutes in there and in all that time only one other person came in to view the ashes of the founding father. I later learnt, from Gaston (he was useful for something) and from visiting a museum, that Artigas was exiled to Paraguay where he died (at a later date his ashes were moved to Uruguay) and that some see him in Uruguay not as the liberator and founder of Uruguay but almost a traitor to it. Amazing, this may explain why no one was at the mausoleum when we were there, but then why have it in the first place? I perhaps need to do more research on this.
On the final day of our course we decided we had had enough of Montevideo (we had been there six days now) and shot off to Uruguay´s second city, Colonia Del Sacramento.
Colonia The city was founded by the Portuguese as a way to infiltrate BA with black market goods and trade in the 17th Century (I think), incidentally the Spanish founded Montevideo in response to this
before Artigas apparently liberated it all. Today the city is only a one hour boat ride across the Rio Del La Plata Strait to BA and three hour bus ride (that we took) from Montevideo.
In contrast to Montevideo, Colonia is a small, quaint town, with tree lined boulevards. With it being autumn time the streets were covered in fallen leaves which I thought made it look really pretty in the midday sunlight, the influence in the set up of the tree lined streets almost made me think it was French as opposed to Portuguese and it definitely reminded me of Luang Prabang in Laos.
We spent our time (three days) in Colonia wandering around the streets and the old city, which again was very pretty and peaceful taking in the whole ambience and scenery, eating some good food, visiting the lighthouse, also visiting the official old town gated entrance and a craft fair. Truth be told one day would be enough to wander round Colonia, but we had time to kill and on one of the days we were lucky enough to see a precession of old classic cars in the town centre, I thought it was
Calle los Suspiros, Colonia
A typical old street in the old townpretty cool and I think Tracy did too.
If I had one criticism of Colonia (and I have seen it in Montevideo and BA too, but more so Colonia) it is the amount of stray dogs, they are everywhere, it´s a shame because the ciudad is beautiful but for this.
At this point (May 19th) we returned to BA, via the one hour boat journey, to continue our Argentinean travels which I will let Tracy bring you next time. In fact Tracy will be bringing you all the blogs for the foreseeable future as the other reason (on top of the laptop being stolen) why this blog is now even later being posted than it was supposed to be is that since I started this blog for the second time I managed to break my right arm. It was a pretty bad break, I broke both bones in the arm and it required two plates and twenty one screws to fix both bones and I think I have about 60 Staples too. I am OK, the arm still works which was my first fear, I have some discomfort but it could have been worse I guess but it meant that I had to finish the last page or so of this blog using just my left hand.
Anyway that story is getting ahead of ourselves and I will let Tracy bring it to you in hopefully the not too distant future, so until when ever that is.
Cheers
Patrick.
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Chris Porter
non-member comment
Because we care......
How can you not tell us how you did it mate ?...... I can only assume it's going to be a paddy special !!? :-) (hey i am allowed to take the piss now as you have quite clearly said you're ok, does sound impressive though !!) ps. Does this mean you won't be needing your golf clubs back now ...... ok,ok, i'll stop now........but does it !?:-)