April 29th 2019: Tango

From San Martin de Los Andes where we were staying for 4 days we drove part of the 7 Lagunas ruta again to do the walk to this beautiful waterfall, Cascades Nivinco. The start of the track was a bit of way finding fun together with a group of Argentinians who also totally missed the obscured sign to the track....and looking at the number of footprints along the river we weren't the first....

Anyway, nice easy walk to two beautiful waterfalls in fact, of which only one can be viewed from a secure place but if you ignore the sign a clamber a bit further you see the second one which is even more stunning. Good lunch spot on the river as well before heading back.

In the background you can see the mountains with probably the first dusting of snow of this year - autumn started with a full day of rain the day before, pretty unbelievable a day later.

We arrived at the start of Spring 2018 and now we're into autumn and have traveled for 8 months on May 2nd - time has gone fast living the life of 'dolce far niente' :-). This is Hans next to fresh puma tracks on the beach of one of the lakes you could only see by walking down. We thought o well why not let's check it out quickly; it ended up being steep down for 30 minutes and steep up again haha but nice photo!

Along the 7 lakes route you see will see many stunning lakes and some nice waterfalls as well. The trees are just starting to change colour. We were a bit too early for the full red autumn colours which must be just amazing. There we lots of blackberries to be picked though along the road, so we filled up our tupperware a few times, so nice!

We stayed in San Martin a few days longer to meet up with James (our dear friend Jane's lovely youngest son) and his girlfriend Sasha. As we knew the weather was about to change again and they only had that rainy day to explore, we decided to offer to play tour guide for a day and drive the Lagos ruta again but now the other way around.

No punishment in doing the same, because it's stunning and we had lovely company! Very nice to catch up with James and to meet Sasha and hear about their travels and lives in NZ. It's awesome they got to explore a bit of Chile and Argentina together. This was our lunch spot  at Valle Encantada again, where we also enjoyed some very fresh asado meat from a few local caballeros. They were having their wood fired Gaucho lunch close to us and loved to chat with us about rally racing, futbol, basketbal and rugby.

After another drinkies stop and some nice photo opportunities we ended the day with a lovely meal at the only (and first we've seen in SA) restaurant in San Martin that served vegetarian and gluten free options. It was nice for us as well to not have to eat meat for a change.

The next day it was time for us to leave the Andes behind and start our three day journey to the other side of the country, to Buenos Aires! En route we visited a small dinosaur museum where this skeleton was on display that was discovered close the the local river in this area. Pretty big fella as you can see. We checked out its footprints on the riverside as well.

After a very long first day of driving with lots of road works and big trucks making the driving quite slow we found a basic hotel with a good evening meal half way. The next day the driving was a bit better and we  decided to drive to the coast in one hit so we could have one day 'at the beach'. It was a bit more driving but very nice to walk on the beach again, here with nice rock formations.

We were in luck with a local easter weekend fiesta presenting live music and traditional samba dancing at the end of the day. The night was terrible as the nightclub located about 20 meters from our hotel room decided to have a trash metal band start their gig at 2.30 am in the morning.

Normal for Argentinian standards, where people go for dinner at 11 pm but at 2.30 am we'd been asleep for about 2 hours when we were literally rocked awake by this barrage of noise - there is no way you can call this music. So the third day of driving was tiring, also because of lots and lots of potholes that are so deep it will blow a tyre. No repairs in sight, but there will be a sign that wil tell you that the next 55 km of road is bad and full of potholes.

Around 4pm we arrived in Buenos Aires where we checked into our airbenb in Palermo, a hot and happening neighbourhood. Enjoying the gorgeous autumn weather on Sunday we walked from our apartment north to the large parks area in Recoleta which is just lovely. So many Portenos (inhabitants of BA) were out and about with their families walking, biking and having picnics, great atmosphere. This particular Porteno probably had a bit too much too drink the night before and was fast asleep with his chin on the rim of the fountain. And yes, we did check he was sleeping and looked ok otherwise.

On Monday we headed downtown with the subway to visit the Centro area. Just when we were walking up to the Casa Rosada, the government house, we heard a helicopter coming and noticed heaps of security police. Also saw a lot of Bolivians lined up along the gates and sure enough, the second helicopter unloaded Evo Morales, Bolivia's president. They love him - as we've written in earlier blogs he's been the president for 12 years and Bolvians either love him or hate him.

As in Chile, in Argentina you have a variety of police flavours which was again very visible in BA. The Federal police, the Regional police, the policia de Ciudad,  traffic police and the gendarmerie. You see all of them all the time, mostly driving around or standing around talking to each other. It's definitely a popular job in these countries.

In the afternoon after a lot of walking we did three more hours of walking with a city tour. As in other cities, this one was giving many insights in either buildings and their stories, but also in Argentina's political past and current economic situation. This is the Palaco Barolo, built by a very rich Italian immigrant, an admirer of Dante's narrative poem the Divine Comedy. There are 22 floors, divided in three sections representing hell, purgatory and heaven. The building is 100 meters tall, one meter for each verse of the poem. Unfortunately we didn't make it to a tour inside the building which sounded very interesting.

Argentina's  political past is - as in most SA countries - a turbulent one, marred with dictatorships of which the last and most brutal one was under general Videla between '76 and '83. Thousands of political 'enemies' (the majority young people that spoke their minds) 'disappeared'.  Their mothers became known as the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and started to march in 1977 on this plaza in front of the Casa Rosada every week demanding information about their children. They wore white head scarves to symbolize the diapers of their children and this symbol can now been seen on the Plaza de Mayo.

They were the first group to start an organized protest against the human rights violations and the two woman who founded it were sentenced to death by the Videla regime but they have continued their march each Thursday until 2006. It's such a powerful story, the 'grandmothers of the Plaza',  a second movement, are now still fighting to find their grandchildren.  Pregnant 'enemies' would be arrested but were allowed to give birth. Their children were adopted by childless regime supporters, after which the mother would 'disappear'. They have managed to find about 138 of these children who are now grown ups and who now know that the parents that raised them supported the regime that killed their mothers. Sends a chill down your spine when you think about finding yourself in a situation like that.

After this very long day we managed to drag ourselves to the subway to go to this 'must do in BA', Bomba de Tiempo. A large samba band that plays every Monday night in a former factory turned cultural space - pretty cool. As usual, we could have been the parents of almost everyone there but had a good time enjoying some moves and some beers. As we were already tired anyway we decided to check out the African music that supposedly was starting at 10 pm around the corner. We should have know that was just to get people in... They took so long starting that most people left at 11pm which was a shame because the music was nice, a combo of African and samba. At 1pm were were so thankful for Uber, illegal in Argentina but a safe and fast way for us to get 'home'.

Tuesday was 'visit a museum day' in Recolata again, such a nice neighbourhood. I was blown away by the Museo del Belles Artes - a very impressive collection of world renowned masters as well as modern art. Lucky us that is was open again, a few months ago it was still closed for restorations. I loved this very sad sculpture called the Funeral - looking at it you can feel their pain. There was also a section with Rodin sculptures, he had a strong friendship with Argentina and gifted one of the three castings that were made of his world famous 'Thinker' to Buenos Aires, where it's located on the plaza adjoining the National Congress.

The Recoleta cultural centre where old buildings have been transformed into exhibitions spaces and spaces where everyone can work, meet, hang out, play games and make art. Just awesome how the outside of the building is one big advertisement for good street art. Love it!

Inside a tram as part of the street art exhibition.

In the afternoon we walked around the Recoleta Cemetery with another tour guide who told some good stories about the rich and famous families of Recoleta that own the mausoleums. It was dubbed as a neigbourhood in itself in the past because it's very big, has wide 'roads' lined with trees and the mausoleums are very tall to show of wealth and family history. This is also where Eva Perron is buried in the family grave of her brother in law Duarte - the story about her embalmed body being buried in Italy for 40 years, after that in Spain and finally returning to Argentina to be buried here is a fascinating but long one (Wikipedia!). It's mainly funny to see tourists walking around with question marks on their faces looking for this big mausoleum with the name Perron on it - which simply doesn't exists.  The mausoleums are meters deep and usually on the ground floor only fit one or two caskets. People are buried in double caskets, a metal inner and wooden outer to deal with the smell....luguber when you think about it looking at the caskets through the glass portals.

This mausoleum belongs to another famous family in BA, where the husband and wife clearly had nothing to say to each other anymore. The story goes that he was a well like local politician and she was mostly spending their money doing too much shopping. When the bank notified him one day that they were almost bankrupt he forbid her to ever spend any money again. Since as good catholics they couldn't get divorced and had a lot of children that needed to be looked after, as a punishment she vowed to never speak to him again which apparently was a promise she kept. He died first getting the nice statue in the chair and in her will she dictated she wanted a bust facing the other way once she was buried. So even after she died she would not have to face him ever again.

The very impressive Flores sculpture next to the Museo de Belles Artes. At the end of the day with the reflection of the sunset, just very cool.

A sculptured bench in the museum of modern art in the San Telmo neighbourhood that we visited on Sunday.

One of the palatial residential houses in Recoleta has been turned into a museum where they also stage exhibitions of modern art, which provided this interesting combination of white metal blobs in the old hall of the building. Cool mix of old and new.

After a Tango show on Wednesday we checked out one of the jazz clubs in Palermo and were lucky to have the last available seats to see these three girls perform. Loved it, modern jazzy version of the Andrew Sisters. Afterwards we wandered into this bar with live music - very nice after all these months of no music except for womad!

On Wednesday Hans was totally out of it, couldn't lift a limb and slept literally all day. Some kind of virus and way too much walking three days in a row! I was coming down with a very sore throat leading to a full blown cold ........timing is everything! Because we missed most of two days feeling rotten we decided to stay two nights more which luckily wasn't a problem to arrange.

Armed with paracetamol and toilet paper (super markets don't sell paper tissues), on Saturday afternoon we bought a ticket for the tourist hop on hop off bus. It was raining all day so it turned out to be the best option to still see something (and not walk!!). Not a great experience really but it did get us to China town where we walked around and had some (also underwhelming) lunch.

After looking at the Boca stadium from the bus we decided to get off in BA's newest neighbourhood Puerto Madero. That ended our rainy and my very snotty Saturday on a good note. Nicely laid out on both sides of the river, this is a waterfront any city should have. Maybe WCC can organise a business trip haha. Old harbour cranes lit up, the stylish Puente de Mujeres footbridge ( on the pano photo) in the middle and lined with little plaza's and cafes and restaurants. It reminded us of Sydney harbour and Melbourne riverside, just very nice.

At least our overpriced double decker bus ticket was valid for 24 hrs so on Sunday we headed to the San Telmo neigbourhood to check out one more museum and it's antique markets and street side tango. First of the bus into the Museum of Modern Art where we saw this cool painting turning out a sculpture work.

And loved this one, made of recycled old pallet beams.

San Telmo is lovely, narrow cobbled streets lined with shops and restaurants and lots of cool stuff. The markets are heaven if you wanted to shop for the Napier Art Deco weekend - anything you want they've got it.

The musicians were just setting up - too bad if you decided to park in this street on Sunday. But how cool does this look on a sunny autumn day - having red wine on the street with music to accompany that. This could have been anywhere in Italy - not for nothing the Italians are the immigrant group that have left their biggest mark on Buenos Aires.

We finished our San Telmo tour with lunch and a little bit of tango with this very lovely gentleman. That was about 30 years ago for me and on trainers, so a bit rusty to say the least :-).  Adios Buenos Aires - very glad we decided to visit!