To the end of the earth
Tuesday, March 21st, 2006Uruguay was just the tonic I needed. I visited the picturesque town of Colonia, just across the river from Buenos Aires for four days. Historically it was the port the Portuguese used for smuggling into Buenos Aires and it retains a beautiful colonial feel to it with cobbled streets and colourful buildings, just the place to chill out after the partying madness of Bs As.
Dining car on the cobbled streets outside El Drugstore restaurant in Colonia
There´s a certain friendly vibe to this place where the car drivers stop for you to cross (there´s no traffic lights, they´re just happy to stop) and everyone walks around with their flask of hot water and their cups of mate (pronounced ma-tay), a herbal tea with which they´re all obsessed, just like the Argentinians.
I intended to visit Montevideo for a day at the end of the week but having got up to find it raining I decided against a wet miserable day in the city and instead settled into an afternoon of playing cards and drinking wine with a few of the others in the hostel, eventually sorting out a BBQ and party for most of the other guests in the evening.
Friday saw me back on the ferry to Buenos Aires where I arrived into the thick it with paddy´s day kicking off. Bs As has something like the fifth largest Irish community outside of Ireland, and it seemed like half of them were in the hostel, needless to say it was destined to be a heavy session from the off! Red wine was not the ideal way to start the day but what the hell, we moved onto the area with the irish pubs later and then eventualy out into the street which had been cordoned off for the cellebrations.
Saturday night I headed down to the big Sonar Sound festival, where the people who organise the big electronic/multimedia music festival in Barcelona each year were holding a one off night in Buenos Aires. Highlights were Plaid, a french band called Calder (a bit Death in Vegas with a Joy Division bent), DJ Yoda (gone up quite a lot in my estimation as he´s certainly developed his audio/visual skills beyond his early student mashup stuff) and finally the headline set from Laurent Garnier which was a stormer. Come 8am we found ourselves in a club that caters to the sunday morning crowd to finish ourselves off in style with the sun shining onto the terrace while we danced facing a view of the bay outside. It was a blinding weekend all in all and a very apt way to wave goodbye to the party capital that is Buenos Aires.
Yesterday I got a cheap flight down to the very south of Argentina, the sourthern-most city in the world called Ushuaia, right down on the tip of Patagonia – looking at a world map I´m finding it hard to contemplate I´m right down here. The area is called Tierra Del Fuego, translated as the land of fire from back when the early explorers sailed by and saw the fires lit by the indigenous people. These were the days before they cared to land and take over the place in the usual colonial style. Today the place is a ski resort when in season (which unfortunately it isn´t) but it´s also the jumping off point for trips to Antarctica, as well as a national park for trekking and boat rides around the icey waters to cheack out the wildlife.
View of Ushuaia
This place is one hell of a contrast to where I´ve been up to now, and the area promises to be a lot more natural beauty and healthy trekking than the mental partying that preceded it in Brazil and Buenos Aires.
Ed