I won't even mention our airline adventures because you've had them yourselves. Or if you haven't, your day is coming.
Sometime during the night we crossed the equator over the Pacific and then turned inland. When I opened the shutter on our window, there were the Andes spread beneath us. This section is next to one of the world's driest deserts. The sight was one of the highlights of the trip. On the other side it was green summer.
TRAVEL BUREAUCRACY
There is an American customs/immigration presence in the airport at Halifax which is nice because we no longer have to go through it when we make our first stop in the US. All the searching is done by normal Canadians, but once you get to the Americans it's another story. They all seem to be trying to live down to the reputation American border police have of being surly and offensive. I got a lecture about how I should carry an American passport. In case I ever want to be taken hostage.
When we left Cuba and Costa Rica we had to pay an exit fee. We didn't need visas to enter Argentina, but we had to pay a “reciprocity fee” to allow us to enter the country for the next ten years. You have to show the receipt with your passport to get on a plane going to Argentina, and everywhere else you show your passport. Also we had to be photo'd and thumb printed when we entered the country and when we left to board the ship. After that the people on our ship handled all the immigration paperwork. You do NOT need a yellow fever vaccination to get into Uruguay, for instance.
But enough of that. On with the travelogue.
BUENOS AIRES, DAY ONE.
The hotel sent a car to the airport for us. I actually had the experience of someone standing around holding a sign with my name on it in the airport. The driver didn't speak English. I had tried to learn some Spanish before going to Cuba and Costa Rica only to find everyone there spoke English. Not so in Argentina. While you may never be out of sight of a Starbucks, it is very much outside the Anglophone sphere. (I like to think that on this trip I progressed from "no hablo Español" to "no hablo mucho Español." ) Our driver stopped at one place to show us where the pope had lived when he was the local cardinal.
View from our hotel room. Buenos Aires has
3-13 million people, depending on
whether you count the suburbs.
Traffic: As we got into the city the traffic got thick. It was almost all commercial vehicles, buses and cabs. Lots of cabs, and all of them are required to be painted black and yellow. I watched in front of our hotel on Friday afternoon, and it seemed as if half the cars in BA are cabs. On Saturday there was very little traffic at all. Drivers are probably not as bad as in Costa Rica, but I sure wouldn't want to be a courier there. Cabs are cheap, too.
At the hotel I asked the woman at the front desk if there was a bank nearby where I could change money. She wrote an address on a piece of paper and told me if I went there I would get a better exchange. The official rate is 8 pesos for a US dollar, but there are lots of people on the streets selling pesos for less, and while it is strictly speaking illegal, it's accepted for people to buy “blue dollars.” I went into a storefront a few blocks away and got 13 pesos per dollar. Of course there was always some confusion about how much we paid for things, since we didn't know the exchange rate of the dollar to the US dollar. But things seemed reasonable to cheap. A litre of beer was about $1.15 US. Dinner of steak, salad, desert and ¾ of a litre of wine was $48US. We took two taxis at a total of about $7.50.
Our first afternoon we cabbed up to Cemeterio de la Rocaleta to see Eva Peron's tomb. Eva's body had a tough time. She was embalmed and was supposed to go on display. They were building a monument larger than the Statue of Liberty to house her, but Juan was overthrown and had to leave Argentina. The military dictators didn't want her around to be a reminder of Peronism. She went to Italy for a while and when her body was found, Juan and his new wife took it to their home in Spain and kept it in their dining room. After Juan returned to Argentina, she was laid to rest in her family's mausoleum (Duarte). And that brings us to the cemetery.
Imagine a town with wide streets and narrow alleys, trees and cats sunning themselves on the grass. Only this is a town of the dead. Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world until the Great Depression and a lot of the money went into celebrating the dead. Tombs range from the very ornate to the mildly ornate. Many have glass in the doors so that you can see the coffins and/or urns inside. Some are well kept up and others are neglected.
Sometime during the night we crossed the equator over the Pacific and then turned inland. When I opened the shutter on our window, there were the Andes spread beneath us. This section is next to one of the world's driest deserts. The sight was one of the highlights of the trip. On the other side it was green summer.
TRAVEL BUREAUCRACY
There is an American customs/immigration presence in the airport at Halifax which is nice because we no longer have to go through it when we make our first stop in the US. All the searching is done by normal Canadians, but once you get to the Americans it's another story. They all seem to be trying to live down to the reputation American border police have of being surly and offensive. I got a lecture about how I should carry an American passport. In case I ever want to be taken hostage.
When we left Cuba and Costa Rica we had to pay an exit fee. We didn't need visas to enter Argentina, but we had to pay a “reciprocity fee” to allow us to enter the country for the next ten years. You have to show the receipt with your passport to get on a plane going to Argentina, and everywhere else you show your passport. Also we had to be photo'd and thumb printed when we entered the country and when we left to board the ship. After that the people on our ship handled all the immigration paperwork. You do NOT need a yellow fever vaccination to get into Uruguay, for instance.
But enough of that. On with the travelogue.
BUENOS AIRES, DAY ONE.
The hotel sent a car to the airport for us. I actually had the experience of someone standing around holding a sign with my name on it in the airport. The driver didn't speak English. I had tried to learn some Spanish before going to Cuba and Costa Rica only to find everyone there spoke English. Not so in Argentina. While you may never be out of sight of a Starbucks, it is very much outside the Anglophone sphere. (I like to think that on this trip I progressed from "no hablo Español" to "no hablo mucho Español." ) Our driver stopped at one place to show us where the pope had lived when he was the local cardinal.
View from our hotel room. Buenos Aires has
3-13 million people, depending on
whether you count the suburbs.
Traffic: As we got into the city the traffic got thick. It was almost all commercial vehicles, buses and cabs. Lots of cabs, and all of them are required to be painted black and yellow. I watched in front of our hotel on Friday afternoon, and it seemed as if half the cars in BA are cabs. On Saturday there was very little traffic at all. Drivers are probably not as bad as in Costa Rica, but I sure wouldn't want to be a courier there. Cabs are cheap, too.
At the hotel I asked the woman at the front desk if there was a bank nearby where I could change money. She wrote an address on a piece of paper and told me if I went there I would get a better exchange. The official rate is 8 pesos for a US dollar, but there are lots of people on the streets selling pesos for less, and while it is strictly speaking illegal, it's accepted for people to buy “blue dollars.” I went into a storefront a few blocks away and got 13 pesos per dollar. Of course there was always some confusion about how much we paid for things, since we didn't know the exchange rate of the dollar to the US dollar. But things seemed reasonable to cheap. A litre of beer was about $1.15 US. Dinner of steak, salad, desert and ¾ of a litre of wine was $48US. We took two taxis at a total of about $7.50.
Our first afternoon we cabbed up to Cemeterio de la Rocaleta to see Eva Peron's tomb. Eva's body had a tough time. She was embalmed and was supposed to go on display. They were building a monument larger than the Statue of Liberty to house her, but Juan was overthrown and had to leave Argentina. The military dictators didn't want her around to be a reminder of Peronism. She went to Italy for a while and when her body was found, Juan and his new wife took it to their home in Spain and kept it in their dining room. After Juan returned to Argentina, she was laid to rest in her family's mausoleum (Duarte). And that brings us to the cemetery.
Imagine a town with wide streets and narrow alleys, trees and cats sunning themselves on the grass. Only this is a town of the dead. Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world until the Great Depression and a lot of the money went into celebrating the dead. Tombs range from the very ornate to the mildly ornate. Many have glass in the doors so that you can see the coffins and/or urns inside. Some are well kept up and others are neglected.
No, it isn't a church at the end of the block. It's someone's tomb.
Many tombs have windows in the doors and you can see that inside they are storage rooms for the dead, containing a number of coffins and urns.
Buenos Aires is pretty flat and we walked back to the hotel, stopping off at a bar where we had a common Argentine bar food, a kind of beef schnitzel and a couple of litres of Imperial beer. We also stopped at El Ateneo Grand Splendid bookstore, made inside a theatre which became a movie theatre/radio station/recording studio. There are much better pictures of it on line.
January 31, 2015
BUENOS AIRES, DAY TWO
As I mentioned, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world at one time, and they poured a lot of that money into architecture. We walked from our hotel in the Congresso district along the Av. de Mayo and saw some fine examples.
Mostly it's impressive, though at times it gets a little out of hand....
Our hotel was behind the congressional building. In fact, you could see the back of it from our room.
It happened that we were in Argentina during the eye of a political storm. A week earlier there had been demonstrations at the Plaza de Mayo downtown, in front of the Casa Rosada, the president's office. It was quiet while we were there, but when we came back to Uruguay there were hundreds of thousands protesting again. There's no shortage of political signs and spray paint. |
There are several blocks of park and statues stretching out in front of congress. I especially
liked the guys on the clock in the background.
liked the guys on the clock in the background.
Where Av. de Mayo crosses Av. 9 de Julio, you can see an outline picture of Eva Peron on the side of this building. (There's a similar portrait of Che Guevara on a building in Havana.) On this island in the very wide avenue is a statue of Don Quixote. The juxtaposition seems a little odd from this angle:
I don't know if he is pointing her out or threatening her. The tourist at the lower left certainly seems interested. While we were waiting to cross the street here, we were approached by some tourists who warned us they had been robbed a few blocks away--on a main street on Saturday afternoon. That night when we asked at the hotel for recommendations for dinner, we were advised not to walk at night. This, by the way, is the world's widest street.
The Plaza, facing away from the river; and the Casa Rosada as seen from the Plaza. There's a balcony above the main entrance where the Perons and others played to the crowds.
DAY TWO, PART TWO
Plaza de Mayo is where people go to demonstrate. The mothers of the "disappeared"--those who were killed by the military dictatorship in the 1970-80's--come here every Thursday, and veterans of the Falklands war have a permanent camp there.
Plaza de Mayo is where people go to demonstrate. The mothers of the "disappeared"--those who were killed by the military dictatorship in the 1970-80's--come here every Thursday, and veterans of the Falklands war have a permanent camp there.
There's no escaping Juan and Eva. In a gallery in the Casa Rosada are portraits donated by various Latin American countries to Argentina. In another gallery are busts of the Argentine presidents, and to their credit the Argentines haven't smashed some of them, because there were some real rotters. Upstairs there's a photo display of famous Argentines. Notable by his absence was Jorge Luis Borges.
Teatro Colon. By the time we got there we were too exhausted to go in. It was HOT.
And that's it for Buenos Aires. We only had a day and a half there but saw quite a lot. I'll probably have some observations on Argentina in general later. Next: Tierra del Fuego.