A whistle stop tour of a surprisingly attractive city
Well technically it wasn’t a day in Buenos Aries, it was only half a day because the world’s most useless airline, Fly Bondi. They managed to cancel both flights, so we arrived in Buenos Aries 24 hours later than planned, and then the flight that did leave was 8 hours late, so we lost a big chunk of the day allocated for our stop over.
However, adaptable as ever, we still managed to make the most of it, had a good tour and stayed at a great hotel. Any hotel that isn’t a chain or wants to overcharge now calls itself a boutique hotel, but Fierro hotel was an absolute cracker. From arriving at reception at midnight and finding out breakfast is served until 3pm to entering the room to find a fridge with champagne and a wine cooler, it really was the real deal.
Our flight to the Bariloche was scheduled to leave at 1630, but it was Fly Bondi, so time and day don’t mean much, but we were on a tight schedule. We were up early for the city tour, we had booked with “Tours Buenos Aires” which didn’t start too great. The taxi picked us up at 8.45am and we were still sat in the cab an hour later. It wasn’t clear if this was caused by the infamous Buenos Aries traffic or he just got lost, but anyway it wasn’t good.
We finally met up with the coach tour, where we met Rosa, a lovely lady tour guide who seemed to have no grasp of time, which probably didn’t matter to the rest of our fellow tourists but was of critical importance to us, so the tour ended with us jumping off the bus and getting an Uber it ran so late.
We have more days planned in the schedule for Buenos Aries, so this was a great chance to get an initial feel for the place. After Rio, we weren’t too optimistic about the city, but Buenos Aries is a surprisingly attractive city. Unlike Rio, it has embraced its European roots and the buildings are stylish, in fact, you could be in any major European capital city, including the traffic chaos. Maybe it is the effect of being a nations capital that leads to the building having more status.
The tour headed to the Boca area of the city. This is the oldest part of the city where the trading ships from around the world arrived, it is also the home of the Argentine Tango culture with a rich and colourful history.
Republic of Boca
Within the “Republic of Boca” is the Caminito, this is a complex of streets that are dedicated to all things wonderful about Argentina. The houses are all brightly coloured and have murals of famous Tango artists or figures of famous Argentinians like Maradona and Messi looking down from balconies into the streets.
Argentina is famous for football, rugby and polo, so it came as a surprise that this is not it’s national sport, it is a game called Pato, which involves horsemen throwing a duck between themselves. To prevent cruelty to ducks, they now use a ball that has handles as is thrown instead, not many people know this!
The world famous football team Boca Juniors stadium is right in the middle of this area and provides a colourful backdrop to local streets, and with all the bars, one could imagine match days being quite lively, in this area.
Palermo
We then moved on for a tour of the city, many of the government and main buildings were designed by the French and the Italians and together they do make an attractive place to be.
There are numerous parks that give the feeling of spaces as your travel around the city, but in practice they seem to provide opportunity for racing circuits for the cars. The area of Palermo is one of the most attractive suburbs with lots of greenery.
Presidential Palace
There is a central square with the president’s palace and the balcony made famous by Eva Peron. It impossible to escape the legacy of Eva and her impact on the country, it is deeply embedded in folklore similar to Lady Diane in the UK and Marilyn Monroe in the US.
So, it was a brief visit, but it has given us lots of ideas for when we come back. We had planned to do the day trip to Montevideo in Uruguay. However, we discovered the day trip to Montevideo is 5 hours each way so isn’t really a day trip, so that is now off the itinerary.
Time to head to Patagonia for the next phase of our adventure.
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