Advertisement
Arriving in Buenos Aries fresh from a few weeks back in the UK I was amused to find myself somewhere that might as well have been in Europe. The drive from the airport meandered through leafy green suburbs, with nice looking coffee shops on every corner and where women in designer outfits pranced along with toy dogs... the really small ones that fit nicely into a large designer hand bag. Although not at all what I expected I soon found I was enjoying not having to haggle over the price of every single thing, experiencing showers with hot water and having a whole seat to myself on the bus.... it was all so completely different to my last 6 months in Africa and India.
As to Buenos Aries itself, well I really enjoyed it... once I'd gotten over how expensive everything was!! I was still working on Indian prices and so far I've found travel in Argentina and Chile to be similar in cost to travelling in Europe. I only had a few days in BA before my flight down to Ushuaia where I was meeting Ann and the others for our Antarctica adventure so was on a bit of
a mission to make the most of my time here. On my first day I hooked up with another English girl from my hostel, Lisa, and we headed out to explore the nearly suburbs of La Boca and San Telmo. Our first challenge was getting the bus to La Boca - finding a bus was easy enough, the problem lay in getting the exact change needed to buy a ticket - ticket machines only take coins which in turn are like gold dust with neither banks nor shops ever wanting to give them up... if you were lucky enough to get coins as change you certainly didn´t surrender them easily - 'Do you have 1 peso?' the shop assistant would say... 'No' you'd reply with a straight face whilst keeping your purse firmly closed so she couldn't see the little collection of them that you had going!
El Caminito and the few streets around it in the old port district of La Boca are known for their brightly coloured buildings - pinks, blues, yellows and reds, a tradition originally bought over by Genoese immigrants who painted their homes with left over paint from ships. These days it's all very
touristy, packed full with craft stalls, tango cafes and cute window boxes but we both quite liked it and having exhausted ourselves taking a zillion photos of windows and wall art (... or graffiti depending on your point of view) happily collapsed into one of the cafes for a drink and 'free' tango show... which turned out to be a audience participation show.... v amusing but I don't think I'll be getting a job there!
Back on the bus we headed back towards the district of San Telmo, only a short hop away from La Boca but a completely different vibe. The guide books warn you that La Boca is a rough area and not to stray from the El Caminito area less you get mugged or worse. San Telmo in comparison was much more relaxed and we spent a good few hours just wondering around - the central plaza with its cobblestones and tangoing couple, the quiet leafy backstreets, the central market which sold everything from fruit and veg to vinyl records and old postcards and the seemingly endless number of antique shops.
The next day Lisa headed off to catch a flight to Santiago and I
braved the local buses again, this time with an English guy, Martin. We started off in the rather posh suburb of Recoleta, known on the tourist trail primarily for its cemetery where Eva Peron was buried in 1952. The entrance to the cemetery sets the tone with its tall Greek columns, whilst inside main walkways branch off into narrow sidewalks all lined with large ornate marble mausoleums adorned with statues, angels, family crests and more. These are family mausoleums rather than individual ones, which perhaps explains why Evas was down one of the small narrow sidewalks - had we not being playing the game of follow the tour groups we would have completely missed it. It might sound a bit macabre but I find old cemeteries really interesting for the history they have to tell - one I recently visited in Kolkata was fascinating for that and the atmosphere created by dark, tree lined avenues with black crows flying overhead made it even more so. Here though there was no story to tell, just a name and date of death in an environment that with all that white marble really seemed quite sterile in comparison.
I'd had grand plans
of heading over to Uruguay for a day (which proved too expensive so I´ll save that one for next time!) or doing some of the many museums (which surprisingly for me I didn´t make it to any!) but as it turned out I spent most of the rest of my time here sitting in plazas people watching or relaxing in the parks of Palermo.... 'recovering' from my jet lag.... it's a hard life :0)
Next up, Antarctica!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.224s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 27; qc: 114; dbt: 0.1456s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.4mb
EdVallance
Edward Adrian-Vallance
Great blog, thanks
I lived in La Boca for 5 months back in 2005 and your writing and photos brought back fond memories. Have prices really gone up that much though? When I was there, everything was like three or four times cheaper than in Europe, food, drink, transport and accommodation included