Cooling down in Buenos Aires (8-14 May 2012)

A traveller’s life is very busy, therefore I haven’t been able to write about our stops in Buenos Aires and Ushuaia yet. Luckily we’ve got some spare time today since we’re on the way from Ushuaia to Puerto Natales (via Rio Grande and Punta Arenas) which takes about 16 hours by bus… I’m now catching up on writing whilst we sit in a little café at the bus stop in Rio Grande (12 hours to go).

So, Buenos Aires: (the long story here, link to photos at the bottom of this post)

After about 22 hours of travelling we arrived in Buenos Aires rather tired but very happy. We had six nights there which meant that we didn’t have to feel pressured to run around all day to see everything. So we were able to sleep in – at least we thought so. We had heard before that Buenos Aires is the city that never sleeps. But we hadn’t realised that this also means that it’s the city that doesn’t let you sleep. It must be the loudest city on earth! Supposedly we stayed in a quiet area but even there the noise from the street only went down from about 5-7am. Other than that the hostel (Chillhouse) was great and we’d definitely recommend it.

We spent the days in Buenos Aires walking through Downtown, San Telmo, Recoleta and Palermo; ate some great steak; and had a much needed Argentinean history/culture/language lesson. Buenos Aires is a massive city and we only saw a tiny fraction of it (the ‘tourist’ section, as far as we understood a lot of the other areas aren’t really safe to visit). What we saw was quite impressive and the architecture around these areas showed how rich Argentina once was (one of the richest countries in the world in the early 1900s). The old, big buildings with high ceilings in some of the areas reminded me of Barcelona and Berlin but the buildings in Buenos Aires seemed to be much more opulent. The main street in the city centre had a very communist feel to it (with about 10 lanes each way), reminding me of another side of Berlin... Other areas looked very similar to Köln (the newly renovated harbour area looked like Rheinauhafen and the shopping mall could be the twin of Hohe Strasse) and Brisbane (the brown river :)). Our definite favourite in Buenos Aires was the cemetery in Recoleta. It was fascinating to walk through the different lanes of vaults and a bit creepy to look into the ones that haven’t been able to hold up that well over the years…

Also fascinating is what you experience when you only speak about 20 words of Spanish… So far the highlight was probably when I tried to find out how much it is to rent two bikes. In VERY broken Spanish I asked the guy at the bike shelter “Cuanto cuesta dos bike” – since I had no idea what the word for bike is. Unfortunately I also had no idea what the guy responded. The only word I understood was ‘no’. I quickly retreated defeated, so taken aback by his response that I didn’t even try to find out what he had said. Two days later we found out that the bikes are free…….. Oh well.... we’ll get there eventually…  

  

So overall we had a great time in Buenos Aires but I’m afraid we don’t love the city. It was just a bit too loud, busy and dirty for our liking. It was a great place to start our trip through South America though, with moderate temperatures and friendly people who were always willing to help us hopeless travellers.

We’ll be in touch soon with updates from Ushuaia and Torres del Paine - where we'll be hiking around the national park for the next three days.
 

Hasta luego,

Charly (& Rich)

More Photos:
https://picasaweb.google.com/109362659982164453049/BuenosAiresBest_of02?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCMnivIKwpZf8oQE&feat=directlink