2004-03-24T07:58:00.000-08:00

I am starting this review on Tuesday the 15th of March; we've been in Argentina (and a day and change in Uruguay) since February 21. I guess that since the trip here was both the longest in my life, on a plane, and the first in business class (well there was a fluke upgrade from Calgary to Ottawa but this was ticketed as such and much, much longer), I should write about that.

Calgary-Toronto was not very special but was comfy enough, not a wide-body, the seats were those typical biz class ones you always see and scowl at while you're trying to find your coach seat on a 4-hr flight on a 737. However the 767 seats to Sao Paulo- wow. We could almost recline flat, very nice. The flight was almost an hour late taking off because of some computer problem but as we had a 5-hr layover in Sampa we were not worried. Still, the delay made for a lot more time on that plane and was not really made that much more pleasant by being in biz because we didn't really get any service until we took off, so we had a good but very late (like midnight) dinner. Sleeping was pretty impossible for me despite the seats because of discomfort from constant turbulence and announcements to fasten seatbelts. SO we arrive in Sampa at about 11a, not very fresh, wander around the one small terminal where we were sequestered as en route intl travellers, visit the hot and not very comfy exec lounge... and then discover our flight to BA is delayed by 2 hours. So we end up there for almost 7 hours despite the delay in TO. That was one of the most trying times on this trip yet. But we did finally arrive, after a crap flight in coach with not very good food on Varig, almost 3 hrs late into BA and of course- our remise is not there for us! I throw a fit- WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO? We've rented an apartment and the remise was with the agency and now how do we get in touch with the agency to get into our damn apartment? I am overwrought from 27 hours of travel and cannot handle this. Brian retains a level head, we decide to get a taxi there and see if by some freak chance the agency contact is at that apartment building. After I lock myself in the lobby of the wrong building, we find the right one and, miracle of miracles, the agent's boyfriend, a German guy, is there waiting to let us in! We love our apartment, 27 hours of tired disappear, we have a lovely dinner at a pizza place called Romario, we marvel and marvel and are happy here. First impressions are of a kind of Paris or Rome and those impressions endure, but it's a lot more complicated than that. After about 3 and a half weeks here I can talk about this amazing place in a lot more detail, some pretty, some ugly, all worth the trip.

PEOPLE

Among all the big cities that I have been to, within memory, this is perhaps the most monocultural, given that all the immigration outside of that within South America (as with the many recent immigrants from Peru, notable for their aboriginal features) was in the late 19th and early-ish 20th centuries, from the UK, Germany, and especially from Spain and Italy. Consequently most of the people we see look, for lack of a better word, European, nothing at all like the mestizo strain so common in Mexico and the rainbow we see on Brazilian television. We are staying an a rather upscale area and we see the very occasional Asian (from what I can tell always Chinese) face but little else in the way of racial or ethnic diversity. Except from tourists, I have heard no languages other than Spanish and one brief notice of Mandarin, but this was in a Chinese resto (a good one, very thin on the ground here, good Chinese I mean). Having said all this, BA has eked out a distinct and interesting version of European culture in a lot of ways, which I'll get to below, and I suppose that Argentina is indelibly Latin American, although this aspect is not very apparent to me, in part because of all this white skin- swarthy and handsome but still European. Brian says I fit in here and aside from my too-casual dress style, I suppose that I do.

The people here are generally good looking, very little in the way of overweight (America would come as a shock to them in many ways, one being how many more fat people are there), and the men are generally outstandingly gorgeous, to my taste at least. All are tanned, with dark hair and features. Good stuff. They dress in a style that I would compare to French Canadians, and almost never wear runners... it's charming but they seem to tolerate the heat better than I do too. I don't feel outcast but would find it hard to ape this style. Dress (or dressy) shoes with no socks are worn with shorts. Women? Fashion victims, no other way to describe them. Stilletos on hiking trails, that sort of thing.

BEHAVIORS AND CULTURE

One of the greatest challenges that I was steeling myself for was the Argentines' famous love of tobacco and it is in some ways even worse than I had feared, but the good news is that I have tolerated it better than I thought I could.

I've realised how much we have come to take smoke-free spaces for granted in places like the US and Canada, because the idea here is embryonic. Of course the most contentious place for smoking in Canada would be restaurants, and there we've made progress to the degree that we can, depending on where we choose to eat, never ever encounter smoke in a resto. In BA the opposite is almost inevitable. Smoke is unavoidable, and "sector no fumadores" is mostly an ineffective joke. Case in point: We had disappointing pizza at a very pretty place on Friday night, a dinner marred by this intestinal thing we both seem to have picked up in Iguazau (for the record the water in BA is completely safe, as it is in Colonia, Uruguay), and the fact that we sat in the nonsmoking area- completely surrounded by smoking tables. It was unpleasant. People walk through malls with a cig in hand, they wait in line at McDonalds with a cig in hand, they smoke all over the airport, where the thick smell of smoke in the area where we picked up our first cab made our panicky arrival that much less alluring... We have found precisely one completely smoke-free cafe (a veggie place), but most restos do not have any accoms for nonsmokers and those that do, don't have meaningful separation. Smoking is lifestyle here, cigs are VERY cheap, and it's just not a good situation.

On the good side: BA is congenial and Portenos are a social lot. It is at first a bit threatening and then totally endearing how they sit in front of their apartment buildings- and in the city, EVERYONE lives in apartments, moreso than in any city I've ever encountered; the detached house is for certain suburbs and the country- and chat with friends and passers by day and night. We've seen gaggles of people chatting up, maybe drinking beers or yerba mate (the local tea, brewed very very strong) at noon and at 2 in the morning. Conversation seems to be what Argentinians DO. You don't sit alone and watch TV; you sit in your porch and encounter the world (of course I'm oversimplifying, but in knowing the language and surrounded by a dense crush of 10 million countrymen, it's inevitable that this lifestyle would dawn on them).

Portenos are at once great pedestrians and horrifying drivers, and the two coexist in a kind of easy peace that amazes me- it amazes me that more pedestrians are not killed here. BA is a great walking city; just today I walked miles from the ferry terminal (we had spent the night in Colonia, more on this below) back to our apartment and it was a pleasure all the way. We do not encounter anything approaching a "bad" neighbourhood anywhere along the stretch from the harbour to our neighbourhood and points further north and west of us; all is safe, all is walkable. But crossing the streets is an event. Cars do NOT stop for pedestrians. It's best- it's necessary to survive- to wait for a break in traffic, at which point everybody jaywalks, often in full view of police, or one waits for the logjam created when a taxi (there are more here than anyplace I've ever been) stops to pick up or drop off passengers. Then you cross. If you see a car approaching an intersection, under no means assume it will stop or even slow for you. Let it pass.

I could not possibly write all my noticings here but I did want to include some gleanings related to class. There is unquestionably much poverty here and the economy is in rough shape; for us, this makes for a city that is at once world class in most respects but also ridiculously, embarassingly affordable. A ride on the subway costs about $.30 Canadian, an espresso is perhaps $.80; this lovely one-bdrm apartment is costing us US$470 for an entire month. But Portenos are acutely aware of the recent drop in the value of their currency, their lagging economic stature and the fact that where they once deployed Rome and Paris as their comparators, they are inexorably Latin American now, and the best they can do is say that they compare very favorably to places like Caracas and Mexico City. They are very unhappy and pessimistic and will tell you this, and one thing they will say is how much more acute poverty is. We did not see this at first; I commented that I see more beggars in Calgary than in BA. Then I started to notice how destitution is expressed here. There are not many beggars, because this is not how the very poor manage. Beggars are inevitably single mothers with children, and it is heart wrenching to see them everywhere, especially in front of our local supermarket. More often we see them hawking stuff: towels, disposable razors, collapsing laundry totes, bandages, all sorts of cheap merchandise. We have also encountered, every night, the recyclers. These are kind of like the bottle guys in Calgary, who pick up recyclables in their shopping carts and take them to the bottle depot. But those in BA are very different. Garbage appears to be put out and collected daily here; the recyclers mine every garbage bag on the curb and take what they can, placing them in giant bags of their own, some on two-wheeled carts, and a lucky few have trucks. And unlike the bottle guys, we are not talking about single men here. We are talking about entire families, children who appear to be three or four going ably through the trash with Papi. It would be utterly fascinating if it were not so outrageously sad. And as I say, we see them out every night. So that is one of the faces of poverty here, and it's ugly.

I could go on for pages about issues of behaviour and the like but I'll incorporate these into other topics. There is nothing I treasure more on vacation (besides, perhaps, getting good nights of sleep and indulging in afternoon naps!) than in getting to know and, if it's good, to enjoy the local cuisine scene so let me talk about that now.

FOOD AND DRINK

We live in Calgary and given Alberta's rep for steak a visitor may expect that there is little in the city, resto-wise, besides steakhouses, but nothing could be further from the truth; in fact Brian and I have lived in Cowtown almost 4 years and have not yet been to a steakhouse. So when I read about Argentinians' penchant for beef (well for all meat, but especially beef) I poo-pooed it as tourist cant and wanted to check out beyond the stereotype. Well, remember that this place is a monoculture? In those sorts of cases, the stereotype is accurate. There is simply not the sort of diversity in peoples in BA to facilitate much diversity in dining options and so what you have here is a well-developed, well-entrenched and often delicious but very limited set of dining options. It's not all about beef, but it is all about a sort of quasi-Italian cuisine that offers much in the way of meat at the ubiquitous parillas (think "grill"), pizza, empanadas, pasta, and that's about it. All other ethnic cuisines are thin on the ground; we have not found a single Thai or Viet place yet (but are looking for that tonight in Palermo Viejo, an area that is supposedly thick with ethnic options- we'll see), one dedicated sushi resto with almost nothing except salmon options, which I don't like anyway and which is, despite our very favourable rate of exchange, more expensive than in Calgary (and with no spicy tuna rolls and no unagi, why even bother?), one Indian place that per our guide is the only solely Indian resto in the city (and this is a huge city, ten times the population of Calgary), many Chinese places but only one that I really like (one was an all-you-can-eat place but it had next to no actual Chinese options, no steamed rice, but a great assortment of Argentine desserts!), and we have even had difficulty finding a single Mexican place even though I was under the impression that that cuisine was quite popular here- not so, nothing like the US. Mexican is the cuisine most often mentioned here when we note (or complain, to be honest) the complete lack of spicy food here. Brian resorted to buying hot chili peppers at the grocery, letting them dry out and cutting them up and taking them in a little envelope when we go out. Even ground black pepper is often not on the table! So the cuisine here can be monotonous and bland.

So how am I suriviving here, seeing as almost every meal we have at home, whether prepared at home or eaten out, is spicy? Well, there are some things that are done very well here, and I have focussed (or tried to) on those delights. First, I am an espresso freak and am thrilled to find a city where "coffee" means "espresso" by default, where even the lowliest take-out has a massive three- or four-group espresso machine (new, these would cost between 15 and 20 thousand in Canada), and when you order a "cafe" you get a usually perfect demitasse of espresso, a little cup of cold sparkling water and a couple little cookies, you feel like a king, in a cafe with invariably tremendous character and charm, and you pay less than one Canuck dollar for that. It is amazing.

Second, the pastries and the ice cream here are unique and top-notch. The most important local pastry is the alfajore, two crumbly cookies that sandwich a thick luscious layer of dulce de leche, a kind of caramel spread that finds its way into a lot of things here. Also everywhere are medialunas, sweet little croissants. But what I have come to worship is the helado, or gelato, or ice cream, prepared as per Italian gelato, at a perfect less than freezing temperature, like frozen custard... I always say that I visit Vancouver so often because I am hooked on the gelato there (and by North American standards, Van is amazing for its range of gelato places), but BA has it beat by light years. There are heladerias on almost every block and the scene appears dominated by three chains: Freddo, Helarte and Frahel, with many indies as well. Dispensing the stuff is a kind of art form where the artiste scoops the ice cream onto your cone (which is often a cone shaped like a small bowl, or a shot glass) with a paddle and shapes it into a peak, hands it to you with a tiny plastic spoon shaped like a little shovel, and off you go. The flavours I've come to love are crema Americana ("sweet cream" like that at Cold Stone Creamery) and dulce de leche granizado (caramel ice cream with chocolate chips), Sorbettos are at every ice cream place as well, they call these "aguas" (waters) and they are outstanding, especially the pineapple. If I could survive on espresso and gelato I would be happy here!

We have had some wonderful dining experiences here despite the monotony of cuisine; in BA we loved the pizza at Romario (four visits!), especially the pie with mushrooms, garlic and piled with fresh basil; the ourageous buffet at Cocina y Cia, which includes lots of Middle Eastern options and an amazing desert table - it is en par with the Banff Springs for a buffet and costs AR$18 for dinner, or about C$8 each; very nice continental cuisine at Scetta in Recoleta, the most expensive meal we have had on this trip, it was still a great bargain at AR$100 or about C$45 with a bottle of a very good local wine; and from the market we have had some very nice local peaches and plums, a treat in our "winter." In our trips to both Ushuaia and Iguazu we had very wonderful resto experiences, in fact I found a lunch at a Spanish place in Ushuaia calle Bedogon Fueguina to be the best meal I have had on this entire trip- very surprising for someplace so remote. In Puerto Iguazu, the great place was called La Rueda, and I must mention Chez Manu in Ushuaia for the food and the spectacular mountainside setting and view.

Aside from the challenges of smoke, one frustration in dining out in Argentina is how late the locals choose to do so. We have not found a resto that opens for dinner before 7 (aside from fast food, and even some of them don't), most open at 8, and of course these are almost empty until, say, after 9. We have adapted pretty well, but are often the first ones in the resto, sequestered in the absurdity of the nonsmoking section or, if we are lucky, on a patio or next to an open window.

ARCHITECTURE AND SPACES

BA might not offer anything really iconic (like the eiffel tower or empire state building) in the way of architecture, but I find it almost achingly beautiful. I would describe it as Parisian; the streets are lined with apartment buildings of, say, five to ten storeys, and some are modern but many (including our own, which has an old-fashioned cage elevator!) are from the 1920s and 1930s, with endearing little cornices and the like that spell "Paris" to me. You cannot walk on any block in this city without finding some beautiful detail to marvel at .... the huge shuttered windows, the balconies, the trim, the curved elegance at street corners, the resplendent balcony gardens that these apartment dwellers have eked out for themselves. It inspires awe, for me; no spectacles, but nobody lives in the CN Tower, much as I love it. There is so much grounded beauty here. I will miss the view from our balcony here, the view of other balconies, of the gardens in the sky.

Green spaces are precious here, very much peopled day and night and verdant with huge trees, flowerbeds and statuary; there are some really grand parks, my favourite being the Plaza San Martin, situated right at the eastern end of the downtown (I find downtown interesting and packed - PACKED - with people but at turns filthy and ugly too) and an amazing change from the "centro." A 20 minute walk to our north is a huge parks complex with the zoo, botanical garden, Japanese garden, and other escapes, all shaded and with just breathtaking green. The botanical garden houses a huge number of feral cats! They appear healthy but I would not try to play with one. I've never seen anything like this, not on such a scale at least- these cats are without fear, same with the many stray dogs we saw in Iguazu. BA itself does NOT have stray dogs; it has dogs treated like royalty and accompanied by walkers trying to manage up to 15 of their companions- at once! We have seen this so often now that it doesn't even merit notice, but it's a shock to see these walkers at work the first few times.

There are many malls in BA but they are, all those we have seen, firmly "urban" and very much part of the surrounding landscape, as per Eaton Centre or Banker's Hall. These are either new and modern or retrofits of old buildings (one was the old fruit market and it looks like the Galleria in Milan, just stunning)... so I don't feel terribly guilty about eating so often at the fast, clean and predictable food courts there. The chains there, aside from McDonalds (all of which encompass very authentic "McCafes," which are hugely popular and, believe it or not, 100% smoking) are ones I had never seen before, all Argentinian, so again I don't feel any guilt about taking this as research experience...

NATURAL ENVIRONMENT AND WEATHER

We are of course in the southern hemisphere here and as such seasons are the opposite from home; we are approaching the end of summer here. March is supposed to be the rainiest month, but the weather has been almost endless sunshine here and almost none of the intense heat and humidity that often plagues BA (its climate is probably comparable to DC or perhaps NYC in summer, from what I've read). Almost every day has seen highs of about 24-30 and overnight lows of 16-20; our place is very nicely air-conditioned but aside from the noise outside it would probably be possible to sleep with open windows and a fan. Insects are not a major problem here, in fact we are on the 9th floor and have no screens on our windows here- unthinkable in most of North America. The sun is intense as one would expect.

The climate is humid continental but the plants, trees and flowers make it look rather mediterranean or perhaps someplace more relentlessly humid and hot, like Atlanta, The major street in our part of town is Avenida Santa Fe, it's choked with cars and people and shops, but like many streets in this part of town, it is completely lined with massive, shady trees that appear to be some variety of maple. I cannot express how beautiful the combination of blue sky, sunlight dappled by this canopy of trees, the gorgeous architecture and the bustle is.

NOTES ON USHUAIA, IGUAZU AND COLONIA

We made three side trips on this journey; four days/three nights at either end of the country, Iguazu in the far northeast (on the border with Paraguay and Brazil) and Ushuaia on Tierra del Fuego, the most southerly city in the world; and one night in Colonia del Sacramento, in Uruguay, a one-hour "fast ferry" from BA.

We decided to book all of these trips from Buenos Aires after our arrival there, an idea that saved us money over what we would have paid from Canada (and we may still have had to make these arrangements through Argentine operators anyway; Argentina is really off the map in many ways and Argentinians travel in Argentina through Argentinian travel agents. They have a long way to go here to really serve the international market), but we definitely could have got better deals than we did get; as it was, Ushuaia cost us a total of maybe C$1200, Iguazu about C$1000, and Colonia was the bargain with no flight and only one night's stay, for about C$250. Most of that cost was for the ferry, AR$376 for the two of us. One peso is worth about 45 cents Canadian.

Ushuaia is a non-trivial 3.5 hour flight from BA, and in fact it's the longest internal flight you can take in the country. The arrival is spectacular, with vistas of water, mountains and a real end of the earth sensibility as you are in fact at one end of the earth, where human habitation is concerned. Our hotel was dismal but convenient (with no, nada, nonsmoking rooms; happily our windows did open and the smoking stench was pretty much gone by day 2). The town of Ushuaia deserves attention as a destination unto itself, perched on the hillsides with a real glacier at the top end and the Beagle Channel at the bottom; the architecture of these houses is completely bizarre; many are made from pilfered construction materials but they are strangely beautiful. Many roads remain unpaved trying to catch up with a recent population boom (per the census, Ushuaia is one of the fastest growing cities in Argentina, now comprising about 60,000). The weather was manic- it would be sunny and 16 one moment and then this gale would come in, the skies turns black and it would drop to maybe 5. Nobody carries unbrellas as the wind destroys them. But back to the town- it is a kind of funky paradise and if first glance was "unorganized and homely," we both came to love it. Two outstanding restos as mentioned above took some of the wild edge off and helped make for a lovely time.

But it was the scenery and excursions that made for a really amazing detour, worth every penny and the long internal journey. A tour of Tierra del Fuego National Park was just stunning- it is very much a rough park, nothing like Banff with respect to services (and as I'll discuss in a moment positively eclipsed by Iguazu) and we saw very, very few people, but we did see wildlife (including a very robust fox), and much incredible scenery. The next day, we took a chair lift to the base of the Martial Glacier- close enough to town for a cheap cab ride. It was exhilirating- terrifying, cold trip up, a big-ish hike to the cusp of the glacier, and then the reward of the view back down the mountainside with two mountains framing the harbour and the Chilean mountains beyond... I cannot express how magical this view was. That afternoon Brian took a cruise to see a penguin colony; I took a nap. We returned the next day ecstatic about this trip.

Iguazu was the following week. It entailed a more gentle 1.5 hour flight and is about due north from BA in Misiones province; Puerto Iguazu is at the crux of two rivers, the Parana and Iguazu, and from just a few hundred metres from our hotel you can stand at a spot above the river called the Tres Fronteras (three frontiers) monument and see, seemingly almost close enough to touch, Ciudad del Este, Paraguay and Foz Iguacu, Brazil. Two cities that are each dangerous in their way and not recommended to visit, but it's an amazing spot and very much deep in the jungle. Our hotel was the Esturion which I mention to advise nobody to stay there ever. It was gorgeous, set into a hillside with a nice pool, beautiful bar and resto and rooms that would not look out of place in a modern boutique hotel. But in a jungle you need AC- you need lots of AC, and the central air in our room was just nonexistent. It seemed that they had a system where a fan blew over cold water pipes that were not cold- it was hell, much too hot (nights one and two) and completely breeze-less, opening the very nice screened patio doors would have done nothing. Night two I did sleep fairly well; day and night three were mostly overcast and rainy and so the door remained open and we both slept blissfully- but for what we paid, we deserved much, much better. Add to this the fact that we were, as it turned out, at the opposite end of town from the park, and that the hotel had ZERO info on the town, local attractions, or even, for heaven's sake, a shuttle to the falls (for that you pay AR$25 for a taxi or take the city bus- a funky and efficient but stifling hot and almost one-hour option). Oh, and the local water is not potable but they did not tell us this- we had to ask. These problems made for a trying time but was it worth it?

This would depend on whom you ask. I will say that the falls are so stunning as to defy description; they must be seen, not written about. Every new view affords a new waterfall, it seems, and the park is a wonder, one of the best laid out natural attractions that I have ever seen anywhere. It is probably equivalent to places like the Grand Canyon for must see, unique natural sites, and on that mark it was definitely worth it and would merit any cost- but as there are many other options, we would have done much better (and this goes for Ushuaia too) to have simply booked air and found a place on arrival.

Brian did proably three times the trekking that I did- there are fantastic opportunities for adventure on all sides of the borders and though he remained in Argentina he really wrung what he could from it. I really just wanted to get home, not that I didn't see much to love but... jungle not for John. Jungle bad.

From the wild to the refined... the one place I really wanted to see was Uruguay but given the costs of other trips and the fact that BA itself requires as much time as we could give it, we only made it to Colonia del Sacramento, which is across the WIDE Rio Plata from BA. You can take a 20-minute flight there or a ferry; there are fast (1-hr) and slow (3-hr) options. Given the relatively slight difference in cost, it was obvious that we should take the fast ferry; we even travelled in first class- which basically means better seats and a better, topside view- for a pittance more. It was fantastic... but nothing could prepare me for Colonia. I had heard it described as quaint but honestly expected it to be run-down and kitchy with nothing to see. I really just wanted to say that I had done it, and was mainly fascinated with the ferry ride. Well,Colonia was the high point of the entire trip for me. It is perfect; tranquil, verdant, just beautiful with the sweeping view of the sea and architecture like none I've ever seen. It goes beyond quaint to a kind of living museum, not a Williamsburg where nobody lives but what I imagine the colonial towns in Cape Breton are like. Add to this beauty, this surreal beauty as it was a Monday afternoon/night and we seemed to have to whole town to ourselves, the fact that we finally had a fantastic hotel- the Hotel Italiano, about US$60 for one of the most expensive places imaginable in this part of the world, and we did not haggle well- with a gorgous room, bed, bathroom fit for royalty and a pool- oh a pool tiled with dark blue tile and surrounded by gardens and foliage that made me feel like I was on some island in the Mediterranean. It was too much to dream. I want another visit here so that I can do Uruguay- Colonia, Montevideo and Punta del Este. I really want that.

It's Wednesday the 17th; I went to the zoo today and B went to see the Boca Juniors' soccer stadium (there are two major league soccer teams in BA, each with their own huge stadium, the Boca Juniors and River Plate; the RP stadium appears to be where most huge concerts are held). At this point we're happy to have some time apart! The zoo was actually very nice. As to other attractions, Brian's done more but I can say I've been to the Japanese gardens, the Evita museum, San Telmo for the antiques market and the only really traditional parilla we've been to, the ped mall on Calle Florida, Recoleta Cemetary to see Evita's grave among other amazing stuff, and a tango performance. On top of the side trips, just hanging out, and perhaps most important, acquiring the ability to communicate pretty well in Spanish, it's been a very full month.

DIBS AND DABS: SOME THINGS WORTH MENTIONING

1. By some chance occurrence, every one of the flights we've been on- and thus far that makes for seven legs- has been 100% full. We're due for an empty one.

2. Internet access is astoundingly plentiful here with cyberjoints on practically every block... they almost all also provide phone service, in fact I am sure these places started out as phone shops (think a little store space with ten or so little telephone rooms) and have expanded to offer computer access. It is ridiculously cheap.

3. Public school kids wear white lab coats over their clothes. I saw this in both BA and in Iguazu.

4. I was amazed to find today that whole coffee beans are almost twice as expensive here as in Canada. Why espresso is so cheap makes little sense...

Argentine (and Uruguayan) Travel Report