Ever aware of how little time we now have left the Chris and Emily team are making a concerted effort to indulge and make the most of our remaining days. Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina has proved a perfect place to play! The city is ultimately civilised, fashionable, fun and due to the weak peso, very cheap. Dangerous combo...
Having resisted the opportunity to shop since Chiang Mai (and because we looked like complete "bums" in comparison to the extremely well-dressed locals), we decided to buy some new clothes. It turns out underneath our cool, hardened "we-only-need-two-pairs-of-trousers-for-an-entire-year" image we are complete shop-o-holics! Like something out of a daytime TV makeover show we looted the high street stores to dress ourselves head to foot. The country has an excellent cattle industry so there's very good quality leather everywhere. Style and taste are foremost in Argentineans' minds so there's very trendy "clobber" to choose from. As a result we have now tripled our luggage and are currently trying to work out how to get the bags to the bus station this afternoon. We are considering two taxis! We joke not. Even more shocking - we have discovered and confirmed that Emily is in fact a female! May not sound so surprising to you, but make-up, handbags and high heels have now made a sensational debut in her new look - watch out. She may soon begin to paint her nails or get a Brazilian!?
We have to admit though, it was really nice to get dressed up and wear nice clothes for a few days. We can't deny that our two pairs of travel-trousers each are getting pretty grubby and there are some unidentifiable stains which just won't go away. Chris has a big tear in his trousers and Emily has blue ink on one of her 4 shirts... We don't smell too good either!? We are currently referring to each other as Scummy 1 (E) and Scummy 2 (C) (a close second!).
As if the bags weren't already a problem to fit into the cab, we decided to weigh ourselves down a bit too. You see, there's a thing here called "Tenedor Libre" which means an "all-you-can-eat" buffet. In the UK and many other places "all you can eat" very often means that the food is fairly limited in choice and not fantastic quality. However, here in Argentina things are very different. For around three to five pounds you can have unlimited amounts of superb meat, fish veg and salad on a par with top restaurants at home. Needless to say, today's lunch was a bit of a marathon! We have chosen to interpret "all-you-can-eat" as an absolute must rather than just a suggestion or possibility. At the bottom of this update is a list of the food which we ate today. We decided to list it only at the end so as not to interrupt the flow of this otherwise compact update.
Argentina has recently experienced their currency collapse, virtually overnight the peso became worth only one third of its previous value. Sadly this economic disaster has made things hard for many locals but has opened up great possibilities to travelers like ourselves. It feels a little bit sour benefiting from a country's misfortune but we're sure we'll get over it, and at least we are bringing money into the country.
The indulgence has been fun but we'd have felt guilty not taking in some sights and getting a feel for the culture. With our very short two weeks here we only had time to take a side trip to see the Iguazu Falls in the North. After sitting on a bus for fifteen hours in relative comfort, (comparable to business class on some airlines), the scenery changed from temperate to sub-tropical forest. The falls, inside a national park are one of South America's highlights. Although not as tall as Niagara for example, they are spread out over quite some area and offer a spectacular variety of views. There's a thundering section where thousands of gallons of water plunge eighty metres every second into a bowl of spray and mist. There are picture-perfect scenes where the falls just spill over the square edge of an upper river, into the surrounding forest and beautiful rainbows formed by the mist below. Add to this a plethora of smaller cascades hidden in the alluring flora and fauna and you have a unique place to visit. In all there are 270 falls. Also, there are many animals to look out for in the wild: coaties (a cross between raccoons and badgers?!), toucans, vultures, lizards and hundreds of multi-coloured butterflies. Wow!
Back in Buenos Aires our culture-fill came from seeing a bit more of the city and meeting some damn nice locals. Turns out Emily's friend Sean Graham from Geneva now lives here. He kindly drove us around, showing us the things that we are supposed to see as tourists as well as the hip n' groovy places to shop and play. He's half English and has lived all over the world so helped us to get up to speed with the way things work here. And then he almost killed us with the best ice-cream we've ever eaten (tiramisu, banana split and mascarpone) although he was very blase about it all. Argentina apparently has the best ice-cream in the Southern hemisphere and he eats the stuff all the time. He's used to it, nothing special. We beg to differ!
The city has some very attractive continental architecture, errrmm as well as attractive people. We're not sure how they do it because we would look pretty rough if we partied as hard as they do! It's perfectly normal to start the evening at about 10:00pm, dance until 4:00am and then get up for work at 8:00!.... Late starts appear to be all the rage. We treated ourselves to a "cena-show" last night, which involves a nice intimate meal at a restaurant with Tango dancers prancing around a stage in among the tables. Dinner kicks off in a gorgeous restaurant at 10pm but the entertainment doesn't get going till about 11:30 when most Brits are tucked up in bed with some Horlicks! Wow, was it worth the wait! The Tango is stunningly sexy and the masters of it are incredibly skilled as well as acrobatic. They show complete commitment and involvement which is good, because some of the moves could go very wrong in the steps of the half-hearted. The dance is known and performed world-wide but this is the place to see it! Sometimes you are even lucky enough to see people performing it in the cobbled streets of the city in broad daylight just because they feel like it. And then something terrible happened: the dancers approached our tables and tried to get us to dance. We think not! The quickest excuse we could think of was to look a bit green and sick and hold our tummies while shaking our heads. This wasn't hard to do as by that point we'd necked two bottles of red, so the lovely dancers smiled politely and moved on. Close one!
Last Sunday we went to the Recoleta area and ventured quite by chance into the enormous cemetery there for Argentina's most elite and richest honorable members. Not a blade of grass to be seen - almost all of the tombs were made of marble and built into large cathedral-like chambers. They're mostly family graves and are all interlinked by paved stones and flash walkways. Really fancy! We saw Evita's grave too (Eva Peron) although her husband didn't quite make it into the cemetery, he's buried next door. Also of interest and in the same area was a hippie's market which other than selling funky jewelry and clothes was just a great place to people-watch. It's based around a small park and we just sat down and watched in awe as Buenos Aires did its "thing". This thing is hard to describe. We guess it's more a "feeling" than a thing, really. It involves street performers and acrobats, lots of musicians and also many dancers. Imagine living in a world where no one is self conscious and everybody just does what they feel like doing without caring what others might think?! In the middle of the park were a group of musicians playing, and then a whole bunch of people just dancing like mad. They couldn't help themselves, not a single person stood still! It was the coolest thing, everybody just getting jiggy and laughing and having a ball. Excellent! We hear that Brazil is very much like this everywhere, but we'll have to wait another few days to find out. Our last flight before heading home is to Rio, on the 15th.
We're sad to leave Buenos Aires after some memorable time here. However, it's high on the list of places that we'd like to visit again. For now we are off to Mendoza and the wine region of the west.
We do appreciate the holiday offers that have been coming in though. You can all appreciate, we're sure, our need to maintain a healthy level of sight-seeing and new places to explore after this year. A good one from Zaz for Cornwall in August, and a rather exciting offer to the Yemen in September for Em's parents' 30th anniversary. Very nice! Keep those coming.
Hasta Luego!
Scummy 1 and Scummy 2
List of what we ate for lunch:
Waldorf salad
Other salads including eggs, cucumber, lettuce, watercress, tomatoes, carrots, aubergine, broccoli, brussel sprouts, coleslaw. - Steak with garlic sauce (E), onion and chilli sauce (C)
Smoked ham (jamon serrano)
Sweet and Sour Pork
Onion Rings
Calamari
Potato mash
Pumpkin mash
Cannelloni
Fried Cheese slabs
Spinach balls
Spring rolls
Sweet and Sour Chicken
Beef
Dough balls
Beans
....and for desert:
Chocolate roulade swiss roll
Tiramisu
Chocolate mousse
Grapes
Burp!