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Published: September 29th 2008
Well, I suppose it would be fitting to talk about this weekend. I spent a large chunk of it outside of the city, and now that I think about it this was the first time I’ve left since Iguazú, which now that I think about it was only a month ago. Lots of sudden realizations here. That’s all of course as long as you don’t count the few minutes that I spent on the other side of avenida General Paz when I went to Mataderos. You all can figure that out for yourselves.
So this weekend officially started, I guess, on Saturday (though Friday may as well have been a weekend day as well). Regardless though, I “awoke,” meaning I opened my eyes and gave up the night-long struggle to fall asleep, at 7:40 and checked my cellphone for the time, whereupon I noticed 6 missed calls from a number I didn’t recognize and a text message I didn’t know who. But I trusted the message, because it told me that for the regatta today I had to be at the diques at 8:00, rather than midday. So in utter insomniacal disarray I arrived there by about 8:10 without having drunken any coffee. What actually happened there doesn’t really have much of anything to do with Argentina particularly, so I’ll just say that my partner’s and my race was much earlier than I had expected it to be, that it was way too short (just 400 m, or half a dique) and that we had a bad start despite rowing very well and strongly the entire time, and that this start for us made the difference between 2nd and 3rd place. Also I’ll say that I obtained a lovely dark blue jersey with a gigantic ford logo on the front.
Anyway, so I was home barely 3 hours after had I had awoken, and it was time to head to Tigre. The story here is that there was an organized FLACSO trip there this weekend, and that due to the regatta I had arranged with them to travel independently to the hotel. So a bus, a train, and a boat ride later, I was there.
To elaborate: Tigre is a town a bit to the west of Buenos Aires. It’s situated on an immense delta where, among many many others, the rivers Lujan, Tigre, and Paraná converge to form the ocean-like Rio de la Plata. Interestingly enough, I’m pretty sure Rio Paraná is also one of the rivers on which Iguazú falls is situated, about 1000 km to the north. So anyway, due to all these rivers there is a fantastic and immense delta, with literally thousands and thousands of islands separated by channels, rivers, and streams of all shapes and sizes. And basically it’s heaven, more or less. The town itself is very nice and has a famed fruit market which is a vestige of a time when people used to bring fruits cultivated on the islands to the port to sell. The islands, though, are covered with all kinds of beautiful, often excentric, houses many of which are such that you can’t really believe you’re actually seeing them. Not many gigantic decadent mansions, though there are certainly some. It’s like a different style of luxury, the type in which you can spend your whole day in your backyard drinking beer and eating asado and waving at all the boats that pass by, or paddle up the river to your neighbor’s backyard and do the same thing. Or for me, preferably, swimming in the creeks and trekking through the dense forests that seemed to cover everything. The many evergreen trees seemed reminiscent of home, but the brown water seemed for some reason utterly typical of the Amazon. The water around us was full of all types of boat, including a shocking number of rowing shells. Tigre is basically the epicenter of rowing in the area (the little rowing there actually is) and I quickly lost count of all the rowing clubs on the river.
So the boat turned out of the tiny rio Lujan and onto the wide Paraná, and soon I was there, barely two hours later than the rest of the group.
After washing the sweat and dust of the road from my body in the swimming pool, I went on a disappointingly short but still pleasant kayaking trip in the little creek that separated ours from the neighboring island. Other notable activities from this eminently pleasant day were:
-“Trekking,” as the spanish speaking people called it, which entailed a 20 minute walk along the small path through the beautiful forested/swampy area of the island, with a guide who told us all about the plants around us and imitated some of the local birds. At one point he also made us all stand still and “listen to the silence” for a minute, which was cool because one could actually hear the water flowing all around us.
-At that point it was just about teat-time (or “merienda, as they call it.” So from that point on I spent the rest of the afternoon until dinner on the patio in front of the hotel eating medialunas and fruit and drinking coffee and orange juice (in quantities large enough that the women serving the coffee started to laugh at me), talking with people with surprising ease, and just watching the river and the impressively gigantic ships that frequently passed by and reminded me how close the ocean actually was. Dinner was also wonderful and involved principally wine, pasta, spectacular omelettes, and karaoke. I sang “imagine.”
The next morning it was cloudy and I think considerably cooler. I decided to wake myself up by swimming in the chilly pool, but encountering Carmen there gave me the bright idea the we should swim in the little creek. So after a fairly easy job of convincing her of this, we did, enjoying thoroughly the current and the pleasant layer of squishy mud underneath the water. I was extremely tempted to strike out into the Paraná, but a watchful hotel employee, probably wisely, prohibited that.
Afterwards I sat for a few hours eating equally embarassing amounts of the breakfast which was identical to the merienda of the day before, trying to use hot coffee to rid myself of the strangely persistent chill of the river. The only thing that sufficed to this end, however was a spirited game of fútbol. Then we ate an absurdly long and kind of weird lunch (I’m not wild about “tripa” for one thing, before it was time to catch the boat back to Tigre. It was pouring rain by this point.
So the trip ended on a slight bit of an anticlimax, but was overall indisputably spectacular.
P.S.- Comment, you fools!
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lauren moore
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flasco application
dear you ! It is lauren moore, your adventure's sound lovely, but they make me wish my paper work was more complete. The deadline is wednesday, it is monday, ahhhh. Anyway, have a great time! I am extremely jealous. It sounds incredible.