Return to South America

Returning to Buenos Aries was nice and felt a bit like returning home, where an abundance of great steak and wine await. I arrived at an interesting time as the whole city was just about shut down in mourning because the ex-president (his wife is now the president) had passed away the day before. This made it particularly interesting to get to my hostel tkaing twice as long as usual. In fact instead of taking half an hour to walk to the hostel, today it took me half an hour to cross the plaza! This is what happens when 150,000 people turn up to parade at the parliament and pay their respects. In fact the guy is so highly thought of here that they have even cancelled the soccer games for the next two weeks, think about how rare that is!

With a three day memorial procession the city was really stagnant not really starting again until the Sunday markets, leaving everybody with a quiet and somewhat inconvenient couple of days. This however did not stop me from taking in the fantastic steak, wine and a tango shows on offer at my favourite plaza in San Telmo. The next day it was off to meet Swainy at the airport and show him around the city with the first stop being my favourite plaza for a steak, wine and tango lunch. Luckily he seemed to like the plaza too and it provided a nice welcome to the continent. After this I played tour guide showing him around the city and heading to apparently the best restaurant in San Telmo for another steak. Whilst the lunchtime steak was pretty good this was incredible with the inch thick piece of meat cooked perfectly. The nice thing is here they believe in simplicity so they use nothing but salt and fire to cook the steak. After a perfect steak and a bottle of good local wine we were both ready to call an end to the day. The next day was more walking around showing the city to Swainy and letting him recover from jet lag, we also took in the city at night which offers up a slightly different look including a ridiculously pink parliment!

The following day it was off to the Tigre delta where the cars are replaced by boats and water taxis are the only way up and down the river. The first thing that became apparent was the lack of noise with the constant traffic of BA miles away. After a brief stroll around the peaceful little town we took a short trip on one of the old timber boats to one of the bigger islands, giving us the opportunity to walk around the river and take in the interesting style of living here. The style is a lot more relaxed than they in BA with people a lot less rushed and the tourist paths going through people’s yards. The amazing thing was to see how green the town was with everything from the lawns to trees in full bloom and some of the trees even cut back to stumps to control the growth. The water here runs straight down from the rivers of the amazon and thus carries with it a lot of minerals that produces a cappuccino colour river but an incredibly fertile delta.

For dinner I introduced Swainy to the Argentinian BBQ, which consists of various cuts of meat presented on a sizzling platter. This was again top shelf and with a couple of beers complimented our location on the river beautifully. It was time to head back to BA afterwards as we had decided to take in a quiet colonial city in Uruguay tomorrow.