Suddenly: Argentina
The upheaval of the week after my last post seems distant now, but it was pretty chaotic at the time and I didn’t have a chance to post about it while it was happening. To cut a long story short, two weeks ago we tried and failed on a Monday to postpone our Friday flight to Buenos Aires; flew from Riga to Rome on Tuesday; Wendy changed airports straight away and flew to Geneva for a meeting on Wednesday, returning to Rome that night; and in the end we took the Argentina flight anyway and by Friday night we found ourselves in the welcoming apartment of our friends Seb and Diana, not exactly sure how we had gotten there or what lay ahead of us in our attempt to ‘complete’ the South American continent that we abandoned midway through Bolivia four years ago to take jobs in Doha.
We spent five days in Buenos Aires, but we had quite a few things to buy, we wanted to spend time with our friends and relax a bit, so we didn’t spend as much time exploring the city for pleasure as we would have liked. We spent half a day in San Telmo for its Sunday market, enjoying the street tango, puppet shows etc, and visited the Plaza de Mayo and around. Beyond that we didn’t see that much of the city, but we know we’ll be back in due time anyway as it’s sort of the crux of this South America trip – I have a flight to Vancouver from B.A. at the end of January, and if we’re able to return after that and last until the middle of next year we still have our return flight to Rome from Buenos Aires in June.
From the capital we took an overnight bus to Puerto Iguazu, and even though we bought the cheapest tickets (for class semi cama, or semi-bed), it was the most luxurious bus I’ve been on in 70+ countries. You get served food on board (while DVDs of 1980s music, a throwback to our time in the Philippines, are shown on the numerous televisions), there’s an exceptionally clean bathroom, and the seats recline a fair way – it’s basically the equivalent of business class on a plane.
The Iguazu Falls that straddle the Argentine-Brazilian border are generally considered the most impressive waterfalls in the world, but unfortunately our visit was a pretty massive disappointment. It rained and hailed (yet again) on the day we went to the Brazilian side of the falls and had been raining the previous several days, leaving us with poor visibility (sometimes we would look out from a viewpoint and literally not be able to see the falls at all), and the water completely brown (think of the waterfall at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory). We went to the Argentine side the next day, but the Garganta del Diabo (Devil’s Throat) lookout point – the biggest highlight of both sides of the falls – was closed because of high water levels. The boat trip on the river below the falls to a small island was also cancelled for the same reason, so in the end we didn’t even bother entering since there was not much else left to see and we knew we would be bitterly disappointed again.
We left Iguazu on Monday, stopping briefly at San Ignacio to see the ruins of a Jesuit mission in the jungle. These centuries-old missions are scattered throughout the region in modern-day Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, and while the best ones are said to be in Paraguay, we both need visas to enter and figured it wouldn’t be worth the $90. San Ignacio is considered the best of the four missions in Argentina, and we thought it was quite interesting and well worth the stopover.
Getting back on another insane luxury bus in the afternoon, we journeyed out of the northeast of Argentina to the completely different landscapes of the northwest, and 19 hours later found ourselves in our current location, the colonial town of Salta, which will be our base for exploring the colourful rock formations and indigenous villages of the region over the next few days. Though, since some New Zealanders we became friends with at the hostel last night got robbed this morning by an Argentine staying in their dorm, it hasn’t been an auspicious start…
Tags: Argentina, Buenos Aires, Iguazu, robbed, South America, Willy Wonka Waterfalls
Nick