Tango Capital

Recycled Art
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Buenos Aires, we had been told many a good story of this capital city. We had high expectations and were not disappointed. Breathtakingly beautiful, great culture,fantastic restaurants and bars with an undercurrent of tango. We loved it. So much so that our first task on arrival, even before we found a place to sleep was to get our flight out of B.A changed. You see, we hadn't really thought this one through when we were route planning and we had a flight that left the very next morning to go to the southern most tip of South America. Very very foolish. However, we had a cunning plan, as cunning as a cunning fox! Spend several days in B.A. and then fly to El Calafate, a city in the middle of Patagonia rather than the far south, on the edge of some of the most stunning national parks in the World. It would have taken us a week of hard travelling to reach there from the Southern Tip. This way we could spend our time more enjoyably in B.A.  After a depressing attempt to change flights at the airport (loadsa money, not much extra time in B.A.) we got much better news at the LAN (Airline) office downtown. They sold our next day tickets to Ushuaia and bought us new flights leaving 6 days later (Sunday) to El Calafate...cost zero, zilch, nothing, nada. How cool. Muy Bueno!!

Tyrannosaurus Recyx
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Well chuffed we headed into San Telmo, a quirky old town district, packed full of restaurants, bars and hostels oh and antique shops. We found a delightful hostel called Via Via, upstairs above the bar of the same name. It was run by a really nice Belgian lady, with a result that most of the lodgers were Belgian too. It had a great vibe and was totally central in San Telmo. We headed out for a continental cafe style lunch and poked our noses in a few antiques shops.

An absolute man mountain with a crazy sense of humour. Legendary..

Reaching out..
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Tuesday, we explored B.A. We got used to the funky underground system with wooden carriages. Ancient, yes but quite reliable. You had to close the doors yourself! We headed out to some of the parks and stumbled across a cat oasis. It seems this cat park was an unoffical place where people dumped their pet cats. Consequentially there were literally dozens of feral cats there! People must also come here and feed them because they weren't that manky. Though we did see a fair few feathers so obviously the birds weren't clever enough to avoid this place. We petted a few gatos but they weren't really interested. In the middle of this park we discovered an art gallery with a rubbish art exhibition. Literally! The sculptures in the exhibition were made out of rubbish. Some were really good!

Bookworm
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I persuaded Claire it would be fun and not geeky at all to go to a Planetarium, it goes without saying that she hated it. The fact that the commentary was all in Spanish and the place was packed full of hyperactive schoolkids didn't help. For the record I quite enjoyed it... That evening we had facebooked Mel, and arranged to meet her and some people from her hostel. She had just arrived in B.A. and had a hot tip for the best parilla place, Desnivel. It more than lived up to its reputation with queues out of the door at 11pm and plastic chairs and tables. The food spoke for itself, steaks the size of bricks and oh so tender. Our waiter was a unique character. An absolute man mountain with a crazy sense of humour. Legendary..  It was cool to catch up with Mel, however our paths were only crossing briefly.

Dreads
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Wednesday, we had seen advertisments for the Bodyworks exhibition and were keen to fit it in. A really unusual exhibition that was massive in the U.K. The German doctor behind it had mastered an art of preserving real cadavers by plastification. Anyhow, its really really famous and was a delight to be able to view. It was fairly quiet in there and we managed to translate most of the infomation, improving our spanish vocabulary!

We had facebooked Dave, Timmy and Shep our Ozzie mates from the Salt flats tour. They had just arrived in town and were going to a footy game. We managed to get tickets as well and had a very entertaining evening watching local B.A. team River Plate vs Arsenal. I was very excited about the fact we were going to see an English team until I was set straight. There is an Argentinian Arsenal too. Boo.

Claire's Nemesis - The Planetarium
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The stadium wasn't full, but there were a lot of River fans going mental with fireworks, flares and loo rolls! For the record, River Plate were odds on favourites in this semi final. They lost on penalties, you could have heard a pin drop, well apart from the 300 or so away fans going beserk..

The Ozzie boys were determined to have a mad night out and headed off clubbin' we weren't that keen (must be getting old!) and headed to La Farmacia, a trendy restaurant in San Telmo instead.

It's not a lump of rock it's a meteor
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The rest of our time sort of blurred into fantastic food and drinking in the many restaurants and bars, visiting great museums and art galleries, shopping in street markets and getting kitted out with camping gear for our next adventure. Trekking in Patagonia! Oh and we visited an amazing cemetry, sounds a bit ghoulish but this place was like a small city with blocks and blocks of amazing tombs with streets with streetnames. The wealthy and famous are buried here including Eva Peron, if all you know about her is that Madonna acted her in a film then you're as ignorant as us!

Our evenings entertainment
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Another highlight worth mentioning was the tango show at Cafe Tortioni, Argentinians love their tango and the performers in this show were amazingly skilled. We had to book this show several days in advance because it's so popular, the venue was a brick walled cellar under the restaurant. Not too pokey but very atmospheric. We had to share our table with another couple from Brazil, so very little communication was possible! (Our Portugese is non-existant). The show was entirely in Argentinian (a very fast spanish dialect with lots of slang words) of course because English is not the most popular language in this country (remember the Falklands?) so we really only understood the body language of the performers. The storyline of the performance isn't important, the singing, dancing, live music and acting were all superb. A must do if in B.A.

El submarino @ Cafe Tortioni, Claire's favourite drink!
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On our last evening in B.A. we met up with Timmy, Shep and Dave again. Amazingly, Dave was also following a very similar route to us. In fact he was on the same flight as us tomorrow. We had to be at the airport for 5am so we all decided to stay up and not bother with sleeping for a couple of hours. We introduced the guys to Desnivel, always a winner! After some unsuccessful attempts to find a bar open we ended up at our hostel bar Via Via, the place was still busy when we left at 4am to sort our gear out. What a great city!

Church views
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Just waiting at the airport departure gates for Dave to turn up...