Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Buenos Aires (Monday 10th Nov - Sunday 16th Nov)
We arrived in Buenos Aires Monday evening after a long day bus ride from Cordoba. We have been trying different bus companies but to be honest there is not much between them and their pricing policies are identical. Our hotel ( Grand King) was located right in the centre of the city and a perfect base to discover the city.
In a city like BA there are some "must do" activities. Some of these are free but some of them come at quite a cost. This was always going to be a difficult week for a tight fisted old b***** (Gwen's words) like me. However I cheered up a bit when after a week in Argentina I realised I'd been using the wrong exchange rate and things were not as expensive as I first thought.
In the first few days we did all the predictable must do tourist things such as
·Visit the Recoleta Cemetary - full of Mausoleums to the great and good of Argentina - including Eva Peron.
· A tango dinner evening. This was a mixture of dancing, singing and instrumentals. Gwen enjoyed the whole show but it was not really my cup of tea. Dancing and dinner were fine but I found the singing difficult and all a bit tedious.
·Bus tour of the city. This was thrown in free when we bought the tango evening tickets. We visited all the more interesting districts of central BA including Recoleta (the posh bit of BA), Palermo, San Telmo, Puerto Madero and Boca.
·An enjoyable half day bike tour of Palermo and Recoleta (yes again ). Sounds a bit scary but we kept mainly to parkland areas and quieter side streets and our guide made sure we did not get lost or killed. Fortunately BA is very flat so the 3 hours were not too strenuous.
·Daytrip to Uruguay! The lovely small town of Colonia in Uruguay is only an hour away by boat from Puerto Madero. We had to go though customs there and back but still managed to have lunch and spend a couple of hours walking round the town.
On our second last day we were back in the lovely Palermo district. It's an affluent area full of parks including the Botanical Gardens (not a patch on Edinburgh), the Zoo plus boating lake with pedalos etc. (see video). Palermo is also the home of Argentinian Polo which was introduced to the country many years ago by the british aristocracy. These days Argentina is the leading nation and most of the best players come from there. We accidentally discovered that the Argentinian Championships were taking place in the local stadium. We hung around watching the wealthy go in when we were approached by one of them asking if we would like some complementary tickets. Obviously we said yes please and finished up watching one of the matches. Since you ask it was between Pilara Piaget and Indios Chapeleufu 11 Jumeirah Culu Culu. We watched the first few chukkas before we headed back to the centre via SUBTE (tube) to see the new James Bond film (rubbish).
However the highlight of the week was reserved for Sunday, our last day in the city. Boca Juniors had a home match 5.20 kick off against another BA team Velez. Apparently Boca members are unhappy about the number of tickets being bought by tourists for their home matches. You can only buy tickets unofficially through an agency and you pay through the nose for them. Our guide for the match, Santiago, picked us up at our hotel about 3.00. Money changed hands surreptitiously in the hotel lobby (600 pesos per ticket - cant quite bring myself to write it in pounds stirling -well OK £120). We joined another 10 people and headed for the ground. We were all given season ticket swipe cards with Spanish names on them. We were told to walk casually up to the turnstyle and swipe the cards but not draw attention to ourselves. Unfortunately only one card worked (Gwen's). Santiago disappeared and returned with some new ones. They all worked apart from mine - so now everyone was in the stadium apart from me. An official then asked me to explain where I got the card from. Before I could mutter something I was dragged away and given a third card and told to try another turnstyle. This time success and after 15 minutes lost in the stadium I eventually rejoined the group
The match itself was good but it was the atmosphere in the stadium that made it for me. The Boca fans were singing and chanting non-stop for over two hours (see video clip) It was all good humoured and the fans took the 3-2 defeat well.
I had been looking forward to visiting BA after getting good reports from several guide books and Dave B. It's a great city with plenty to do and so far the only one in South America I would be happy to visit again
- comments