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Published: March 19th 2009
Tango on the streets
In an area called San TelmoSo after a very very long bus ride we eventually made it to Buenos Aires. I instantly fell in love with the place. From the stunning architecture, the cat park!, the tango and street music everywhere you turned to the cute boutique shops and busy vibrant atmosphere, it had everything you wanted and so many things to do and see that our 4 days wasnt really enough.
They are unsurprisingly quite big on Eva Peron, so the afternoon we arrived, we visited the Eva Peron museum, a place that idealized the woman, she really could do no wrong!! We also went to see the cemetery where she was buried. It was like no cemetery I had seen before, hundreds of elaborate crypts side by side, of such a grand size it was like walking around a small town, some actually had doorways and rooms! It was definitely a competition on who could get the biggest grave. Surprisingly Eva Perons grave was one of the smallest, pretty understated in comparison to the others.
The next day was spent mostly around the San Telmo area. Full of markets, tango dancing and bands playing on the streets, such an amazing experience, so
much fun and this is where I got my Argentinian hat, a trilby like hat that was quite the style in BA but also made me feel a little like a gangster.
Tango was the big thing in BA. Unfortunately I wasnt there long enough to start up a tango class, but did try to attend a Milonga. This is basically a big hall fall of older folks dancing slow tango with each other, so not really my cup of tea!. But on the last night we went to see a Tango show. I could not believe people could dance like that, legs everywhere and moves at the most incredible speed, very impressive! Am thinking this is definitely the dance to start learning.
After our brief stay in BA we took a boat over to Uruguay, to a small quaint place called Colonia. Just to get another stamp really, and also to get some beach action. Unfortunately this was rather lacking. It poured with rain the first day, torrential rain, in a place where all there was to do was go to the beach. So we sat in a bar instead, and waited for the rain to vanish,
which it never did until the next day. We got some beach in the end, but the water was brown so not the most pleasant! But a great sunset to end the day and our very brief time in Uruguay.
Next was a couple of bus journeys to an area called Carlos Peligrini, to visit the wetlands of Argentina. We were hoping to see some animals after our failure to get to the jungle in Bolivia. We stayed in a basic but nice hostel where we were the only guests in the middle of nowhere, the sort of place with one restaurant and one bar and thats about it. Simple really! We had two boat trips organised by our hostel out into the wetlands and saw up close and personal, caimans, crocs, capybaras (very cute large rodents!), deer and heaps of various birds, it was a real birdwatchers dream. We also went on a monkey trail walk and saw a big family of howler monkeys, the noisiest bunch of animals, but very cute swinging about in the trees and not really caring about us down below snapping away on our cameras. It was a great 3 days of animal
watching and ticked one of our final boxes of things to do in SA!
The next part of my blog is the final part to my SA trip, from Iguazu Falls to the Rio carnival in Brazil, what an experience!!
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