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Published: July 16th 2010
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Hello everyone,
After a great few days in Montevideo, Uruguay, I went back to Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Argentina It’s the second largest country in South America after Brazil with almost 40 million inhabitants, many from Spanish, Italian and German descent. Compared to the rest of Latin America, general living conditions are good in Argentina and the country is well developed. I was impressed by the excellent highway system in and around Buenos Aires. Yet there is enough poverty around and you’ll definitely encounter this in the capital. Kids without shoes with their dirty feet and clothes walk around the metro (Subte) asking for money, people sleeping on the street, under bridges (in Uruguay too!) and the slums than can be seen from the railroad and the highway. Because of its size Argentina has many different landscapes and vegetation. Prices in Argentina tend to be high, it’s not “very” expensive but definitely not cheap! Still, I found it to be a bit cheaper than Uruguay. The money used here is the Peso Argentino (AR$). 1 US$ = 3,92 AR$ these days.
Buenos Aires With its 13 million inhabitants, Buenos Aires is by far the largest city and capital of
Argentina, and the third largest city of Latin America behind Mexico City and Sao Paolo. Arriving by plane at night was great! The city is big, full of lights; it was impressive how huge the place looked like from the air. I stayed at Paula's house in northern Buenos Aires, where she lives with her father. Her father was glad to have me around, was always friendly and kind!
Locals of Buenos Aires are known as “Porteños”, disliked by many Uruguayans who say that Porteños are full of themselves and arrogant which they experience due to the many Argentineans going to Uruguay for holidays. And yes, many are like that, but not the majority! Argentineans have a bad reputation across Latin America for being full of themselves which is probably because they’re economically more advanced than most Latin countries.
I arrived from Montevideo late in the evening and Paula picked me up. I didn’t do anything that evening. The next day I was ready to explore Buenos Aires, mostly microcentro (downtown) and the area around it. It’s a nice city, full of life, I loved it! Very modern, it is a very crowded city, lots of traffic, lots
of people walking around. The pedestrain shopping streets of Florida and Lavalle are always busy and full of people. Also crowded are the train and metro stations. The metro is called “subte” which comes from “subterraneo”.
Of course I visited the famous Obelisco and the Avenida 9 de Julio, which is the broadest avenue in the world! The Obelisco is an obelisk built on the place where the Argentinean flag was raised for the first time and is almost 70m high. Another great area was Puerto Maderos, which is an old harbour area but completely rebuilt into a nice residential area with apartments, restaurants etc.
To move around, Paula told one once how to get in microcentro and back; it’s easy and cheap! The train and metro system are both good.
Nightlife in Buenos Aires is very good, enough places to choose from. On Saturday night I went out with Paula and some of her friends. In B.A people arrive at the clubs at 2AM or even later! Even after 4AM there were people arriving, while in Curacao at 4AM almost everyone left already!
La Boca, a neighbourhood in the south-east of Buenos Aires, is also worth visiting.
Its colourful houses attract many visitors who come and spend a couple of hours in the area. Obviously this makes it very touristic and expensive. But still charming! Here I met two girls travelling from St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands! Like me, locals always think that they are from Brazil when they see them. When I say “Curaçao”, they immediately say “ahh, sos e Brasil!” hahaha! Some restaurants in La Boca have little tango shows which are nice to see. Also many artists show their art works on the street for sale. The Bombonera stadium, home of the famous Boca Juniors football club, is located in La Boca.
El Tigre & the Paraná delta Tigre is a town of about 40.000 people which used to visit the delta of the Paraná, where the river flows into the Rio de la Plata. The delta consists of many islands, most of them built. The delta area is very big. There are no cars in the delta, only boats. At first I thought that most houses were just vacation homes, but people actually live here! Kids go to school in the delta, with the boat too, people go to work etc. Many
work in Buenos Aires since the area is located just 30 to 35 km north of Buenos Aires. I went to El Tigre with Paula, took a boat and went through a part of the delta. It’s a very nice and unique place. In the summer its very crowded with national tourists. It’s so calm and quiet, and just out of the busy capital. We got off on one of the islands where we sat down at a restaurant and had some good, but expensive food. After relaxing and eating we walked a bit, took a boat back to El Tigre where we met with Cecilia, Paula’s beautiful cousin, and we visited the Mercado de Frutos: it was a very busy market, they weren’t selling much fruit though, hahaha, that’s what you’d expect after hearing the name of the market. On our way back to B.A there was a loooong traffic jam on the motorway.
Puerto Madryn Located 1500km from Buenos Aires, further south in the Patagonia, Puerto Madryn has around 70.000 people and is a well known place where people come in the winter to do whale watching. In the summer it’s busy with Argentinean tourists. I flew
into Trelew, located about 50km south of Puerto Madryn to spend three days here. These are the southernmost places I’ve been to on the globe so far. Oscar and Cristina picked me up at the airport. I met them in Curacao earlier this year, by coincidence. They came to me to ask something and there we stayed, talking for about 2 hours. A few days later I picked them up and suggested them a place we could go for a drink. The own a small hotel in Puerto Madryn and I was invited by them to come and stay a few days. During my stay I didn't see them that much as they had a lot of things to do, and they own a building in Trelew where they rent spaces to businesses.
Puerto Madryn is located in a gulf, a bay, called Golfo Nuevo. The entrance to the bay is not very wide and this is the reason by whales come to the area in the winter...the water is very calm compared to the open sea.
The weather was not that good while I was here. It was cold everyday; the first day very windy which makes it feel
like it’s colder. Sand was blowing everywhere. This day I visited the Ecocentro with Cristina, which is like a museum about marine life in the southern Atlantic. The next days were rainy, but it wasn’t raining constantly, there were enough sunshine between the isolated rain showers and the wind was much calmer. So I had time to explore the place, walked around town, along the boardwalk where I had a talk with some teenagers asking me where I was from etc. They have vacation from school now, so they were hanging on around a monument in town, others were playing football on a small court and on the beach. There is a long pier in town, called “Muelle Luis Piedrabuena” which is free to access. When the sea tide is high, the whales come close to the pier. From the pier I saw many whales; many times they appear above water. It was hard to photograph them since most of them were quite far off the pier but sometimes there we very close to the pier. Sometimes they showed they’re whole tail above the water! I never saw whales before so it was a great experience! The wind on the
pier was stronger, which wasn’t fun....it felt “very cold”!
That’s all for this blog entry. Next is Chile!
Take care,
Elton
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Carmen Wagir
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Altijd leuk om jouw reizen mee te mogen beleven Elton! :-)