Hello Argentina
Trip Start
Dec 30, 2007
1
50
Trip End
Jun 22, 2008
Buenos Aires,
Argentina
Thursday, January 3, 2008
As is our custom now, we arrived in a new country in the evening after spending a day getting there. I'm not sure why we had to go to Buenos Aires via Lima, but I am sure there was a good reason. Perhaps it was a scenic reason, because the scenery en route was sensational. We flew for over an hour over completely barren desert, but part of that desert was filled with perfect volcanoes capped with snow, with white mountains in the background. We saw no greenery. At this stage the in-flight movie simply couldn't compete.
We had tried to book a place in BA because we had heard that it can get full in January. In fact BA was full - the place we had tried to book was full as were the other 15 or so we contacted next. By the time we found a place that could have us it was quite late, after 8. Not that you would know it. The sun was still high in the sky, and it felt like four in the afternoon. I still haven't got used to the way the day develops here. It doesn't really get dark until after 9pm, and this is not because of a long dusk - the sun is up and it is very hot. Gradually it starts to cool down and people start to think about eating at 10 or 11. It gets light late too, so that the BA day is skewed to the evening.
We arrived late on the 30th of December and instantly liked the place. San Telmo is a cute district with cobbled one way streets, heaps of cafes and hostels and antique shops. Tourists outnumber residents, but I could live with that for he time being, and soon started to feel like it might also be true for the whole of BA. Locals leave, and tourists flood, the place at this time of year. So although we could barely find a place to stay, the city was quiet.
There were no celebrations for New Year's Eve, although I am told that the locals come out at about 3am to start partying. I can neither confirm nor refute this rumour. Certainly, it was very quiet, until some impromptu unofficial fire works after midnight and I have never seen a city so quiet the following day. You could safely stand in the middle of major avenues to take photos (we tested this).
We thought this desolation might make it a good time to explore the city so we spent a hot day wandering around 'the Paris of South America'. Altogether, it is less pretty than I had imagined, though graced with many attractive colonial buildings and many parks with great fig trees to provide an escape from the heat. (I find Argentinian heat funny - it is frying pan hot in the sun, but pleasant in the shade, as though the air won't hold the heat without the sun constantly keeping an eye on it.) And it was very hot. We were tired and filthy when we got back to the hostel to learn that BA had no water. The two big headlines on the news (I can't understand the items but can read the captions) that night were 'without water in 40 degrees' (so I was entitled to find it hot) and 'tourists unsafe in BA' (to which my reaction was 'this has got to be a media beat-up', the city looked pretty good to us and I am sure that is not just because we were fresh from Venezuela).
Monuments are everywhere, often to people I am ashamed never to have heard of, although one that I do know gets at least his fair share (San Martin). In addition to San Martin are monuments to other independence heroes and Columbus. They usually take the form of massive sculptures of the hero concerned in heroic pose on top of a pedestal or of some dramatic scene involving horses. They are to be found in every park and at many intersections.
The strangest place in BA is the cemetery for the filthy rich, Recoleta. It is said that it is cheaper to live your life extravagantly at all times, than to be buried at Recoleta but I suppose that some people do both. The place resembles a Gothic town built for dwarfs or hobbits. The above ground bits of the crypts are modeled on churches and often have steeples, with chapels inside. The centre piece is an enormous tomb big enough to act as a small church. Steeples and domes are the norm, usually built in some grey stone, but sometimes in marble. The most interesting ones have fallen into disrepair, but I assume that they will not be removed to create space. Appropriately, there are a great many cats. Recoleta is being restored by four government departments. Yes, four. Hopefully they are levying the occupants to fund it.
I am no kind of grave yard connoisseur, but this place is interesting in its extravagance, even if most of the names mean nothing to me. I had heard of Eva Peron, but I find that cultish fascination hard to fathom so was not tempted to add to the flowers at her (relatively speaking) modest tomb.
The art gallery is interesting too, featuring a lot of Rodin sculptures (he appears to have been obsessed with grasping hands) and an inordinate number of portrayals of dead young men in the arms of an older man with desolate female at the side.
The most striking building in BA (well, that I saw) is the strangely named Palace of Running Water. It leaves the classic style Palacio San Martin simply nowhere. It occupies a small block and is made of red and greenish brick, but beyond that I haven't the architectural vocabulary to describe it succinctly. But it is very impressive.
(If your curiosity is piqued try googling 'Palacio Agua Corrientes'.)
We visited Caminito, a working class suburb where houses were made out of brightly painted corrugated iron. It is now touristy beyond belief but quite fun, with tango displays on the street and shops trying to sell you things you don't need (I did not succumb).
I started researching a new camera acquisition, following my trusty little one's unfortunate encounter in salt water. BA is not a great place to buy cameras, and the much gushed about mall (Gallerio Pacifco, with a painted ceiling like the Sistine Chapel) has just the one electronics shop. What kind of a mall is that? It sells clothes and other such nonsense, and I can't understand how it pays the rent. Fortunately I have managed to resuscitate mine sufficiently to render a purchase less urgent. But I am still open to suggestions - I need something lightweight enough not to be a burden when hiking and with enough zoom to take photos of wildlife, preferably running on AA batteries.
Good things about BA: great ice cream, convenient public transport, lots of dogs that aren't starving to death, and really cheap wine. But BA, the great party town that never sleeps? Maybe, but not around new year.
