New Continents - Part 9

 

We landed back in Buenos Aires late in the afternoon (see above) and we came into the "internal flights" airport which is right in the middle of the city, the view is quite different from the "international airport" which is out in the sticks, a little like landing at London City airport rather than Gatwick. Anyway, a quick 20 minute taxi ride delivered us to our hotel which was in the Recoleta district (the posh part of BA)

Our plan for the four days was to explore the main sights of this (rather large!) city, we had several things lined up including a couple of bike tours, some Tango dancing, an Argentinian BBQ and some serious R&R at our hotel, we checked in, dumped our bags and headed out into the early evening to track down some dinner!

The next day we got up early and walked to our pre-designated bike tour meeting point, picked up our chariots (completely manual, no battery power for us!) for the day and met our guide. The route was around 15k stopping off at points of interest and for lunch. We set off mid-morning under a blazing sun and blue skies, in a snake of around 10 bikes with our guide at the head, it felt like a school trip. We saw many things, in the picture above you can see the memorial to Eva Peron (Evita) it looked rather ragged and in need of a bit of TLC, clearly Evita isn't as popular as she used to be! Moving on we also saw the memorial to the Falklands war, an interesting stop, it seems to still be a fairly big deal in Argentina and the monument was overseen by uniformed soldiers (see below), we rather awkwardly watched them change the guard.

After many more statues and monuments, some rather lovely shaded parks, the rose gardens and some scary traffic riddled city streets we ended up at the Recoleta cemetery where Eva Peron is buried. It cost 20 bucks  to get in and see her so we didn't bother (once you've seen one bit of inscribed marble you've seen them all) however the old Spanish church (1732) that's there alongside the graves was pretty interesting (see below) and also free to explore.

After the tour had ended we all retired to one of the many pubs next to the graveyard (it's a popular tourist spot) and had a nice cold beer. It had been a great tour and we decided to take another (around a different part of the city) the following day.

That evening we got dressed up and caught a taxi to the Palermo district and an intimate Tango show. Held in a little room/bar with a piano, the show kicked off at 7pm when the doors were shut and mobile phones switched off (I like events like that!) the dancing was amazing and the musical accompaniment excellent, unlimited wine too so everyone was in good spirits by the end! Photography wasn't allowed during the show itself, however I snapped this one (below) at the end to show how small the venue was, the dancers were the two people on the LHS, the others were pianist, accordion player and singer. 

After the show we decamped to a local restaurant and were treated to a 9 course tasting menu of (mainly meat!) various Argentinian dishes cooked over open fires (see below), it was a great evening and we were all pretty much pooped by 11pm and ready for our taxi back to the hotel!

The next day we bade farewell to our traveling companions (they were leaving two days before us) as they headed back to the airport, Heathrow bound. This left my wife and I alone to finish off our South American tour with two days of exploring BA and availing ourselves of our hotel's rather splendid facilities. More in the final part.