It’s time to leave the stark beauty of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Time to leave complicated weather patterns, but uncomplicated living. All the places we have visited from Bariloche on south have been my kind of town –at least in size. I don’t think I’m tough enough to survive the Antarctic winters, though! It’s a quick ride to Ushuaia airport, and while we are anally early the plane is more lackadaisical, departing an hour later than scheduled. It has taken the better part of a month to travel through Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego and only 3.5 hours to escape to the warmer climes of the capital, Buenos Aires (BA). Along the way, we fly over Golfo Nuevo, where, no doubt, the southern right whale mothers are still nursing their young. The weather in the Argentine capital is hot and sticky – people are wearing shorts and t-shirts – while we’re still in our winter attire and sweating bullets. Our pre-arranged bus transfer whizzes us through downtown BA to the seedier neighborhood of Constitucion. It’s Saturday afternoon and deathly quiet. BA appears to shut down over the weekend. Our hostel, the Garden House, lies behind two sets of barred doors on the upper levels of a grey non-descript building. Our room is a tiny, bare bones affair more in keeping with the stark landscapes of Tierra del Fuego than the glitz and glamour of BA.
Christi and I spend some time planning what to do and when, including securing her a Brazilian visa (at a whopping US$130!). I thought it might be fun to walk to the centrally located obelisk on the main thoroughfare, 9th of July. The manager of the hostel seems to think this is a very bad idea. We ignore his advice. The walk is decidedly seedy; there are a few vagrants around and the odd crack-head. It certainly isn’t the Champs Elysee/Washington mall experience I was hoping for, although the obelisk is remarkably similar to the Washington Monument. At this point we do take the hotel managers advice by switching to the Underground. Until we arrived in BA I didn’t even realize the city had a tube system. And it’s damn cheap – only A$1.10 flat rate fee per journey. Divide the rest of our day between Palermo Hollywood and Palermo Viejo. The older part is full of trendy shops and boutiques, which Christi finds exciting and I find boring with a couple of exceptions: the cupcake shop (designer cakes to eat with your designer coffee) and the stiletto shoe shop selling fancy, colorful spike-heeled shoes; you gotta love these Portenos! For dinner we head off to Palermo Hollywood and after much searching find some ethnic food: yummy chicken tika masala at the rather expensive Mumbai Indian restaurant.
Blog post by Roderick Phillips, author of Weary Heart – a gut-wrenching, heart-wrenching, laugh-wrenching tale
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