We landed back in Buenos Aries for our second visit of the South American adventure. The first visit only lasted about 15 hours but we did manage to get in a tour of the main sights before heading to the airport, so we were looking for something different on this visit.

The trip up from Ushuaia using Flybondi had been surprisingly incident free. After our previous experiences, we were relieved the find the flight on time and we landed in Buenos Aries on schedule, tired but with the evening to look forward to.

We then encountered the Howard Johnson hotel chain, in particular, their hotel naming convention. Now I get the need for branding and consistency but do the hotels have to have almost the exact same name?

Howard Johnson Hotels

So after a long day we got an Uber from the airport to Howard Johnson by Wyndham Buenos Aries, which it turns out is  hidden away in a shopping mall. After walking around in circles trying to find it, we finally found the hidden entrance, waited 10 minutes while a couple of other customers faffed about before it was our turn.

The receptionist  looked at our reservation and laughed, “You have the wrong hotel”, firstly I didn’t like having to wait anyway, but when he chose to laugh it really did agitate me so I let Wooksie deal with it. It was the first time the pace of our South American adventure started to catch up with us.

Turned out we were at the Howard Johnson by Wyndham Plaza Buenos Aries Florida, when we should have been at Howard Johnson Plaza by Wyndham Buenos Aries Lima, a mile away, a simple mistake to make I’m sure you will agree, and in fact, a naming convention almost designed to cause trouble for innocent customers.

So, we called another Uber for 4 persons, and the driver turned up in a VW Up which is hardly a 4 seater. It patently wasn’t big enough to take us and our bags comfortably but I wasn’t giving in that easy, we then had a stand off as he wanted to cancel the trip but after another very dirty look from me we piled into the car with two big bags on our laps, and finally we made it to Howard Johnson Plaza by Wyndham Buenos Aries Lima.  We then discovered that Buenos Aries shuts down on a Sunday night, so there was no big night out for us so a light dinner and a good night’s kip.

Culture options.

For this trip to Buenos Aries we wanted something a bit different, we had already done the city tour so wanted to see a different side of the city. Wooksie was adamant that she wanted to experience the traditions of Tango, we had touched on it in Boca, so we decided we would go to a see a Tango show.  We also had time in the day for something else so we decided to do the  tour of the street art in Palermo, and in particular the Soho district.

In the morning, we went for a stroll in the spring sunshine around the parks and the around Porteno backstreets, was good to feel the sun again after Patagonia and Ushuaia in particular.

We are not particularly arty, in fact, not arty at all, so the walking tour of the street art was a bit left field for us, but it turned out to be one of the absolute highlights of the trip. We had a really nice, paced walk around the back streets of this famous suburb and you could really feel the buzz, I would imagine nights out in that area would be a lot of fun, there was even an Irish pub.

Street art in Palermo

The street art itself was brilliant. If we had wandered around the streets ourselves, we would have missed so much, not just the art but all the history and buildings that make up the area. Bright vibrant colours on all the walls, apparently vandalism is defined as someone who damages someone else’s art.

Nearly all the walls had artwork on them, from artists all over the world who had come here to leave their mark. I now know the history of graffiti, not to be mistaken for murals of course. It was difficult to really capture all the vibrant colours in the photos as there were so many of them, so I created this video to capture them all.

The time flew by with a great tour guide and interesting company in the group, but before we knew it, we had to bail out and head back to the hotel for our big night out at the Porteno Tango show a few blocks from our hotel.

We got ourselves ready in our least scruffy T shirt and jeans for our big night out. Just before we headed for our night out in at the Tango (at 745 pm) I received an email from Antonio Jungle Trekking that said our  accommodation was double booked and offering me their very basic accommodation, no aircon, shared bathroom and a night camping in the jungle – I couldn’t believe what I was reading and it is fair to say it poured cold water on our  evening at the Tango, you can read the full story in our Cautionary Tale blog.

Wooksie started to come to terms with possible unravelling or Jungle Trek in Manaus and at least started talking to me again in rather clipped phrases, one of the terms she used sounded similar to  anchor.

A night at the Tango

Thankfully, our arrival at the Porteno Theatre went without a hitch, the booking was all in place so no problems to navigate, the welcome was warm, and we were directed to our dining table which had a great view of the stage. 

We then found ourselves in the company of another English couple touring South America in the wake of the BBC Race Round the World, exactly the same as us. So, we had much to talk about, and tales to tell of our adventures and experiences and the pre-show dinner and drinks just flew by.

A word on the dinner, the food at the theatre was as good as anything we had enjoyed at restaurants and the Merlot was really good quality, it was relatively expensive but was good value for money.

In the UK we don’t really do show things, it’s not really us but this was a great experience. The whole Tango experience was different to what we expected, the dancing was more akin to what I would have expected in Paris with café culture scenes.  I think we were expecting Flamenco dancing, which we now realise is associated with Brazil 😊.

Even though the Tango is associated with Argentina, it clearly has its origins in France and Italy with other European influences, a bit like the whole of Argentina really. So, this was the last act in our Argentina adventure as the next day we headed to Brazil to continue our adventure.

We had a wonderful time in Argentina and I’ve documented the little surprises about the country and what to expect if you decide to come here.

The pictures tell part of the Tango story, but I put them all together to make a little video of the night, which I hope you will enjoy.