Day 198 - El Calafate to Buenos Aires
Trip Start
Sep 02, 2007
1
199
243
Trip End
May 01, 2008
Buenos Aires,
Argentina
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
We were woken up early (for the umpteenth successive morning), this time by workmen banging noisily across the street. There's a lot of building work going on all over Patagonia and El Calafate is no exception. I would say that this town has been better executed than the majority though, with nice wide streets with a Swiss heritage feel and plenty of trees, flowers etc to sooth the eye...
We lay in bed moaning about the workmen for a while, then had showers and headed to the restaurant for breakfast. The place was dead, so we felt a bit bad being lazy but still thought we'd have no problems securing our (paid for) brekkie at 9:30am.
Eventually Katie found a member of staff to harrass and was perplexed to say the least when he told her that it was now 10:30am and they'd stopped serving breakfast! I guess we had the watch showing the wrong time since we crossed the border yesterday, which is really clever.
Katie was behaving a bit like ET before he knew he was going to be rescued, which normally suggests that she absolutely, positively must have breakfast! I never have brekkie back home and have rarely had it while travelling, so I let her go off and find something while I did some emailing etc.
When she got back it was time to leave for the airport, so we got the dude behind the desk to order us a taxi, which proceded to arrive 20 minutes late.
This meant that we would arrive at the airport only 35 mins before the plane was due to leave, which had me sweating, but Katie was convinced it would be a tiny airport, so no problemo...
When we arrived the departures hall was packed with people, the LAN queue particularly, which was of course the airline we would be taking. We could only see one LAN flight on the board, so our first thought was that everyone in the line must be on the same flight as us, so we would be absolutely fine.
Just to make sure, Katie asked the family in front of us what flight they were taking and we were a bit worried when they said the 4pm to Mendoza! Maybe the rest of the queue was on that flight too and here we were stuck right at the back with half an hour until the plane LEFT, let alone started boarding!
Katie went to the front of the queue, enlisted the help of a local fluent in English and checked that we would be ok to make the 12:10 flight even though it was 11:40 and we were right at the back of the queue. She wasn't convinced that the LAN bloke understood her, but she said he was extremely relaxed about the whole thing and said don't worry, you'll be fine...
We also breathed a sigh of relief when the aforementioned family in front of us realised that they were actually not flying with LAN after all and got into the queue next door instead!
This time the girl in front of us was going to BA (Buenos Aires) on the same flight, as were the people behind us, so we relaxed and waited.
In the end we made the flight without a problem, it arrived a bit late anyway, although we did have our new corkscrew confiscated by the drones in security.
He tried to explain how dangerous a corkscrew could be to hijackers, while I tried to explain that I wasn't convinced that anyone has ever had a section of their skull removed in quite that manner.
As you all know it's always pointless arguing with security, so I threw it in the bin, called them all muppets under my breath and walked upstairs to the departure lounge.
The flight was great, we took off right next to a big lake...
...climbed and then banked steeply to fly in the opposite direction, and continued in blue skies until we landed in Buenos Aires about 4 hours later.
We collected our bags, negotiated a taxi queue (where no one seemed to understand the concept of queueing, seemingly believing that it was perfectly acceptable to push past whoever was in front of you, or leave the queue entirely and try to get into any of the taxis waiting by the kerb!), paid some homeless dude who helped Katie with her bag - and there was me thinking what a great idea it was to have "staff" helping you! - and enjoyed the journey into the centre.
A journey which should have cost us 20 pesos according to the books somehow cost just under 40 pesos. I HATE getting taxis from airports! I was even checking his route on the map the whole way, so he must have cooked his meter or something, but what can you do?!
Katie had reserved us a double room in a place recommended by a newspaper we picked up a few days ago. It was right in the centre of the city and seemed a nice place: big rooms, free internet PC, well-stocked kitchen (shock horror) and more importantly friendly and helpful staff. Well, the girl who checked us in was at least... There were no tvs in our room though, which we had been getting used to over here!
Once in the room we relaxed after our flight before venturing out into the baking sun to explore this beautiful city.
We walked a few blocks down to Plaza 25 Mayo, which commemorates the Independence of Argentina on 25th May 1875.
At the southern end of the plaza is the presidential palace, which is better known as the "pink palace", not because the Argentinian President is that way inclined, but because the walls are a kind of deep coral colour.
It was from this palace that Eva Peron ("Evita", the former first lady) gave her impassioned speeches to tens of thousands of her adoring subjects; it was for these speeches that she was loved by the country. Her husband the President benefitted from this national love affair with his wife and was a very popular ruler here.
After a few photos we headed to Avenue Florida, the main (pedestrianised) shopping street, which ran for about 20 blocks north towards Plaza San Martin.
The streets themselves were the most contemporary/commercial that we've seen anywhere in South America, there was even a Zara! I never thought I'd be happy to see one of those, but it did remind us of London, which was very welcome.
We even grabbed a quick bite to eat in a McDonalds, such was our longing for a bit of home!
I trawled through many of the sports shops looking for a Boca Juniors shirt and/or a River Plate shirt, while Katie must have looked at about 200 pairs of "Havaianas" flip-flops!
Katie bought some white ones to replace the pair that she's worn all over the world since 1st September 07, while I vowed to keep looking for football shirts as none of the shops seem to have the River jersey in stock. Bit weird.
By now it was starting to get dark, so we wandered back towards the hostel.
We were both knackered and not particularly hungry, so decided to buy some food from the supermarket two blocks away rather than heading somewhere more expensive with no appetite.
After our gnocchi with sauce and bottle of Malbec, we were both even more sleepy so had a relatively early night and looked forward to a full day of sight-seeing tomorrow.
Lots of love,
Al & Katie xx
