Advertisement
Published: November 5th 2012
Edit Blog Post
So we started our day with a 3 mile hike to center city to meet up with a tour group for our final BA adventure. We ended up with a relatively small group with a guy from Holland, a woman from Swizterland, a guy from Mexico and yours truely. We decided on the "south city" tour since that was the only part of the city we weren't able to explore by foot.
This took us to the Puerto Madero which an up and coming portion of the city right on the water. Filled with lots of modern high rises, it looks like you've entered an entirely new city. Past this we rode by the Ecological Reserve, which is the portion of BA which use to be underwater, but is now overrun by vegitation and made for a cheap and easy green space for the city. This also is a good place to dump dead bodies, or so the (not so) conspiracy theories of the 1970s dictatorship is known for. Abby wanted to go on a body hunt but I told her to keep moving.
Next we entered La Boca the greatest tourist trap ever. This is the poorest part
of the city known for it's brightly colored buildings. The buildings are these colors because in the early 1900s yellow fever (no not that kind Abby) struck the southern part of BA and drove the rich people north. La Boca was left for the poor, and in an attempt to clean up their city they repainted all the buildings. Since they were too poor for classic colored paints, they ended up with lots of various smaller cans of brightly colored paints. Now this extremely poor area has transformed into a booming tourist spot where you can grab a beer on the street and walk around the smaller streets where the Tango was invented. We also learned the Tango was first a dance between men to show dominance and then later introduced to the prostitutes to stir up business. Walk 1 block too far and you've entered a war zone where the tinest hint of flash will get you mugged so we were careful to our cameras and jewelry stowed.
This was also the location of incident 1, Abby blows out a tire.
Next we visit La Boca stadium, home of the local soccer team. Their colors are yellow
and blue, and the story goes that there were originally 2 teams here, and in an attempt to combine the two they had a match where the winner got to stay and the loser had to assimulate. Once a winning team was decided, they annouced that they new colors would be of the flag of the next ship to enter the La Boca port, which just so happened to be Swedish, hence the yellow/blue colors. Who knew?
Next we visited San Telmo, where Abby had incident 2: broken chain. Here we saw another park and the only Russian Church in BA.
Finally we braved the cobblestone and ended our tour in La Plaza de Mayo.
After our tour, Abby and I walked to Aguanda home of BA's best empanadas...and although the beer might have helped, they were pretty amazing.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.143s; Tpl: 0.057s; cc: 8; qc: 43; dbt: 0.0707s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb