Livingstone, Zambia, March 21st
Before I get stuck into writing
about the various stages of our African overland adventure, I want to finish up
describing the last stage of our South American journey, eleven days spent
in Buenos Aires and Uruguay. It was a
different style of travelling than we had done up until that point: no bicycles, a largely urban setting, hotels
instead of our tent, and culture and history rather than nature as the main
focus.
We left Asuncion at 1 pm on
Wednesday, February 3rd in a biblical downpour. At the bus station, the TVs were showing
scenes of flooding in some neighbourhoods of the capital, reminiscent of the
devastating floods a month earlier. Our
bus left late, with my bicycle packed in the luggage hold after the usual
last-minute negotiating and bribing with the luggage guys. It’s amazing how the easiest, most elegant
way to get around becomes so tedious, difficult and fraught with hassle as soon
as you pack the bike in a box and try to get it on public transportation. I had to pretend that I had spent most of my
Paraguayan currency in order to get a discount.
And no sooner were we underway than we went through the Argentinian
border and had to unload the bike and luggage for customs: more negotiating, half-truths and bribes to
the luggage guys there. I think
Argentinian luggage handlers at the borders must make an absolute killing out
of the obligatory tips which they extort from passengers.
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| Buenos Aires Art Nouveau architecture |
After that, the bus trip was
quiet and very long. We retraced our
previous bus trip south along the flat floodplain of the Parana (the
Argentinian side of the Chaco), then continued along the river towards the
metropolis. We were in comfy seats and
slept most of the way. The next morning
I woke up in the Buenos Aires suburbs, dozed off again and woke up definitively
as we drove past the huge soccer stadium of River Plate, one of the two biggest
clubs in the country. We raced past one
of the two airports, Aeroparque, and the port, and quite suddenly we were in
Retiro bus station, the nerve centre of transport for the entire country. It was very early in the morning, and we sat
in an overpriced café slowly waking up and making plans.
I ended up leaving Terri with
wi-fi and a second cup of coffee and lugging my bike the (considerable) length
of the station to a left-luggage place, then heading out into the city to find
a place to exchange dollars for pesos.
As I walked out into the early morning commuter rush, across a small
park towards the tall buildings of the Microcentro, I felt as though I was in
New York City. On Calle Florida, the
pedestrian heart of this business district, I passed dozens of dubious
characters shouting “Dollars? Cambio!”
before finding a slightly less shady guy who led me to a Chinese shop where I
got 14 pesos to the dollar. I was
unsurprised to find that the new president, Macri, had not gotten rid of the
cambio guys when he got rid of the artificially low official exchange rate back
in December. I retreated to Retiro to
pick up Terri and we set off on foot towards the apartment we had rented for
the first two nights. We walked back
along Florida and its Belle Epoque buildings, then turned right up Hipolito
Yrigoyen to find the Loft Argentino serviced apartments.
I don’t often rhapsodize about
places that I stay, but I loved the Loft.
It wasn’t that expensive (about US$32 a night in the most expensive city
in the most expensive country in South America), and gave us a big space to
spread out our stuff. We had a bathroom
and a king-sized bed in an air-conditioned bedroom upstairs and a kitchen and
living room downstairs. The rooms faced
inwards onto a courtyard and were remarkably insulated from any noise from the
street outside. Best of all, every
morning we went across to the breakfast room and enjoyed a sumptuous spread
while leafing through copies of the morning’s newspapers. I couldn’t believe how good a deal it
was. We only had two nights booked, and
they were booked solid over the weekend, but we decided to go to Uruguay for a
few days and then return. We made
reservations for our return, and then set off to explore Buenos Aires.
 |
| Evita on the Avenida |
After a filling and inexpensive
Asian buffet lunch, we caught the Subte, Buenos Aires’ excellent and
inexpensive (5 pesos, or 35 US cents) subway out to a shopping mall to buy
tennis tickets. I had noticed that there
was an ATP tennis tournament the next week in Buenos Aires, with Rafael Nadal,
David Ferrer and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga among the featured players, and I was keen to
spend a day watching pro tennis for the first time in 16 years. I used to go to a lot of tournaments; between
1990 and 2000 I probably averaged a tournament a year, including trips to
Wimbledon, the Australian Open and the US Open (twice), along with smaller
tournaments in Toronto, Sydney, Santiago and Madras. We also knew that the Rolling Stones were
arriving in Buenos Aires to give three concerts and, although tickets were
probably sold out, we wouldn’t mind seeing them live either. As it turned out, tennis tickets were
inexpensive and plentiful, while Stones tickets were rare and almost US$300 a
person, so tennis was on but the Rolling Stones were not. We then retreated back into town to Calle
Florida to get our boots professionally shined and for Terri to do some
window-shopping. While I was having my
boots done, Terri wandered off to have a look at shoes in a nearby shop and,
presumably on the way there, somebody opened the top compartment of her daypack
and stole the wallet inside. Welcome to
the big, bad city! BA has a well-deserved
reputation for pickpockets and for more violent crime as well, and Terri got
off lightly; perhaps $50 in cash and her NZ bank card. She decided that we would regard it as a
“city tax” paid by the unwary. We
finished the shoe shining, then walked back to the apartment so that Terri
could make the tedious call to her bank to cancel the card. We nipped out to Carrefour, bought a small
fortune in groceries and cooked up some excellent steaks, washed down by some
equally excellent Argentinian wine.
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| Protest outside the Casa Rosada |
Friday, February 5
th
was a great day of exploring the bustling metropolis of Buenos Aires. After filling ourselves up at the breakfast
buffet, we strolled towards the centre along the Avenida de Mayo, crossing the
Avenida de 9 Julio, the broad Champs Elysee-style boulevard that features a
huge obelisk in one direction and an immense mural of Evita Peron on the side
of a building on the other. Portenos
(the Argentinian term for a native of central Buenos Aires) strolled by looking
elegant, and the city looked at its best under cloudless blue skies. Public transport buses rolled by along 9 de
Julio, and at the end of Avenida de Mayo we detoured into the beautiful
Cathedral, once Pope Francis’ church, before coming out into the Plaza de Mayo
and its elegant buildings. Here, during
the dark years of the military dictatorship, the mothers of the people who
disappeared during the Dirty War (mostly tortured and murdered by the army and
then buried secretly, or else thrown out of helicopters into the ocean) held
weekly protest meetings. They were the
only people who dared stand up to the junta publicly, and they were an
immensely important force of moral suasion in convincing the army to hand over
power after the Falklands fiasco. The
day we went there, the Plaza was a buzzing hive of protest again, this time
over the arrest of a left-wing activist in the province of Jujuy. Peronists, labour activists, Falklands
veterans, students and citizens of all sorts, from all over the country, had
come to establish a protest camp in the square, right in front of the
presidential palace, the Casa Rosada.
Riot police had established a line of barricades to dissuade the crowd
from storming the palace gates, but otherwise it was a peaceful scene, with
marquee tents set up for lectures and folk dances, and vendors selling hats and
handicrafts. We admired the grandiose
architecture of the Casa Rosada, then headed out behind the palace towards the
harbour of Puerto Madero.
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| Aboard the Uruguay in Puerto Madero |
It was a blisteringly hot day,
just as we had experienced for the previous few weeks in Paraguay, and it made
for a long sweaty walk to the Costanera Sur.
Along the way we detoured to visit the SS Uruguay, an Argentinian naval
ship which had played a key role in the drama of the Nordenskjold Antarctic
expedition in 1902-04. We had had a
lecture during our cruise on the MV Ushuaia about this expedition, and had
visited one of the key sites, Esperanza, where some members of the team had
waited out a very long winter and summer waiting for rescue after their ship
was crushed in ice and sank. It was the
Uruguay which came to the rescue, and walking around the ship and peering at
the old black and white photos, it was though we were suddenly back on the
Antarctic Peninsula where we had spent such memorable days back in November. The views from the ship along the waters of
Puerto Madero to the yachts and condominium skyscrapers of the new developments
beyond were sweeping, and reminded us that for all that Argentina has had a lot
of miserable economic news over the past few decades, there are still a lot of
Argentinians who are living a comfortable, or even gilded, existence.
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| Fancy yachts and buildings, Puerto Madero |
After all the urban bustle and
architecture, culture and history of the first part of the walk, the Costanera
Sur was a welcome change. It’s a nature reserve,
tucked between Puerto Madero and the waters of the River Plate estuary, and it’s
a surprisingly good place to go birdwatching.
There were dozens of species of birds to be seen, particularly waders
and waterbirds bobbing around in the long ponds along the road.
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| Me with the Bull of the Pampas |
Office workers from the tall buildings nearby
came out for lunch at the various food trucks parked along the road, and we
joined them, eating delicious churrasco sandwiches for an unbeatable price (about
35 pesos, or under US$ 3) and watching the birds. After a while, we decided to penetrate
further into the reserve itself (so far we had just been wandering along the
perimeter), but we found that there was a Formula E electric car race in town,
and their racecourse blocked access to the park, which was closed for the
day. We watched a bit of the practice
session (those electric cars can accelerate amazingly well, and make very
little noise) and admired the statues of Argentinian sporting greats that lined
the walkway: Fangio, Vilas, Pascual
Perez, Sabatini, Ginobili and others. I
had my picture taken with Vilas and my teenage idol Sabatini.
We headed back towards town via
the ferry terminals for Uruguay. The
prices that Buquebus were asking for the following day’s departures were
astonishing: just to Colonia (the port
on the other side of the estuary), they wanted 1800 pesos (US$130) each! Cursing their prices, we walked to Retiro and
bought night bus tickets instead for 590 pesos (US$42) instead. Finally wilting under the heat, we walked
back to our apartment and had a luxurious apero dinner of cheeses, meats,
bread, salad and more good wine, happy with our day at large in the big city.
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| Horned screamer, Costanera Sur |
The next day, February 6
th,
we left our luggage in storage at the apartment and headed out for another full
day of exploring on foot. This time we
headed towards the upmarket neighbourhoods of Recoleta and Palermo, past
luxurious apartment buildings and chic cafes.
Unlike Santiago de Chile, the wealthy have not abandoned the downtown
core of the city, and it felt very vibrantly urban and chic, like New York or
London or Milan. Our destination was
Recoleta Cemetery, where the great and good of BA society were buried for a
century and a half.
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| Raul Alfonsin's grave, Recoleta |
There are dozens of
graves of well-known figures—presidents, generals, scientists, writers,
sportsmen—but the one tomb that everyone heads for is that of Evita Peron, wife
of President Juan Peron, subject of Andrew Lloyd Webber musical immortality,
icon of the populist left and the most famous Argentinian (aside, perhaps, from
the Pope, Lionel Messi and Diego Maradona).
She is still a potent symbol for the aspirations of the poor, and her
image and name are everywhere, including all over the protest camp in front of
the Casa Rosada. The cemetery breathes
Italianate luxury, with gorgeously carved funeral monuments and mausolea. Evita’s grave still boasts lots of fresh
flowers, but some of the lesser-known graves from the past were overgrown with
weeds and had broken windows. My
favourite graves were those of Raul Alfonsin, the first post-military president
in the 1980s, and Luis Federico Leloir, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry in
1970.
 |
| The tomb of Evita Peron |
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| Funerary monument, Recoleta |
We lunched in a little pub just
outside the cemetery, and then set off on foot through the succession of wooded
parks that lead through the neighbourhood of Palermo, making for a great place
for cycling, running and walking. We
later heard that Mick Jagger had been out alone on foot along the same path
that morning, tweeting photos along the way; the local press were devoting
pages and pages of coverage to the Stones, more than you would expect for a
visiting head of state. We eventually
turned off the tree-lined avenues, past the rather dumpy-looking zoo and went
up the Botanical Gardens, where we spent a happy hour wandering in the shade of
the trees and watching the colourful butterflies in the butterfly garden. A quick supper in a Lebanese restaurant, then
a Subte ride back to the apartment to pick up our bags and another Subte ride
to catch the bus to Montevideo.
The bus ride was easy and
uneventful, although when we got off the bus at 1 am, we didn’t realize that we
hadn’t been stamped out of Argentina, only into Uruguay, and spent the next
three days worrying that Argentinian immigration officials would give us a hard
time on the way back. (They
didn’t.) We woke up at 6 am as we pulled
into Montevideo bus terminal, and once again spent a couple of hours relaxing
and enjoying good, fast, free public wifi (a rarity in Argentina, but common in
Uruguay) as we searched for a place to stay and for affordable ferry tickets
back to BA. Seacat Colonia offered us
tickets for Wednesday afternoon at a much more reasonable US$ 22 per person, so
we snapped them up quickly. The bus
station was the cleanest, safest, best-organized bus station we saw in South
America, a far cry from the menace of Santiago or the chaos of Retiro. No hotels online seemed very cheap, so we
decided to walk into town and find a place on our own. It was a pleasant 40-minute stroll through
Saturday morning streets, past big apartment buildings that had seen better
days, into the centre of town. Half an
hour of searching turned up an acceptable hotel at an acceptable price, as well
as explaining the dearth of rooms: it
was Carnival season in Montevideo, and tourists from Argentina and Brazil were
flooding into the city for the party.
 |
| Palacio Salvo, Montevideo |
Showers, a quick lunch and a
wander through the old town followed. I
liked the Ciudad Vieja, although many of the buildings were in a state of
advanced disrepair. My favorite building
was the hyperbolically grandiose Palacio Salvo, like something out of a 1930s
futuristic movie. We rented bicycles and
rode along La Rambla, the coastal road, for 15 km, past the flashier suburbs
where the upper middle classes live in beachside apartment buildings. It was good to be riding a bicycle again and
to get around to interesting neighbourhoods.
Montevideo sprawls a long way along the coast, and we were nowhere near
the edge when we turned back. We stopped
at a lighthouse and gazed out to sea. It
was noticeably cooler than in BA, and there was a hint of rain in the air. Uruguay is most visited by Argentinian
tourists for its beaches, and we had thought of going further east to explore
them, but had been put off by weather forecasts of rain. We rode back to town, had a disappointing
pizza for dinner and were in bed early, wiped out by the night bus.
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| Montevideo coastline by bike |
Monday, February 8
th
was a fairly lazy day, as we slept in, then made a late start on exploring the
old town, via a stop in the fashionable Facal café (Terri was surprised and
somewhat horrified that Montevideo does not boast a single Starbucks
outlet). We had an afternoon snooze that
somehow lasted until 4, then went out to the wonderful Andes 1972 museum which
commemorates the survival story of the Uruguayan rugby team that crashed high
in the Andes in 1972, and which provided the story for the movie Alive. It was done very tastefully and thoroughly,
and the proprietor’s enthusiasm was infectious.
We wandered out into the streets, had a steak sandwich in a little café,
then watched a crowd of mostly older Montevideans dancing the tango in a main
square. It looked very elegant and
fitting for the country that produced Carlos Gardel, the greatest figure in the
history of tango.
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| Very nice Uruguayan wine, Colonia |
The next day we had some time
before our afternoon bus to Colonia, and we spent it wandering through the old
city again. We tried several museums,
but they were all closed for Mardi Gras, so we ended up just walking, ending up
in the lovely atmosphere of the Mercado Central, a tourist mecca full of
seafood restaurants. We sat and drank a
glass of quite quaffable Uruguayan wine (we never even knew Uruguay produced
wine) before heading back to pick up our luggage, catch a city bus to the bus
station and then take an intercity bus to Colonia. Once again we snoozed away the afternoon,
lulled by the rocking of the bus. I
think our bodies were finally recovering from the exertions of our months of cycling
and hiking.
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| Sunset meal, Colonia |
Colonia proved to be a very
pretty colonial gem. It was founded by
the Portuguese back in the late 1600s to keep an eye on the Spanish just across
the River Plate estuary in Buenos Aires.
After decades of conflict, the Spanish took over the city in the 1780s. In the confusion of post-colonial South
America, Uruguay changed hands a few times between Argentina, Brazil and
independence before finally settling into a role as a buffer state between its
two giant neighbours. Colonia had a
number of colonial-era buildings and ruins, but most of the buildings are slightly
more recent, with a flavour of an early 20
th century retreat for the
rich. The little cobbled streets of the
old town make for lovely walking, and the views from the lighthouse, all the
way to the skyscrapers of downtown BA on the horizon, are wonderful. We ended up eating a tasty steak dinner in a
waterfront restaurant, watching a spectacular sunset light show on the horizon,
a memorable ending to our too-brief visit to Uruguay.
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| Back streets of Colonia |
The next morning we strolled
around the old town in greater earnest, visiting the ruins of the old
governor’s mansion and the old city defensive walls. I sat and sketched the lighthouse, and then,
after a lunch that consumed our leftover Uruguayan pesos almost exactly, we
headed to the ferry dock for the long and tedious process of going through
Uruguayan and Argentinian immigration procedures. Despite our worry, the Argentinians didn't mind that we had no exit stamp from Argentina from a few days previously. Once again we snoozed most of the way (it was
actually a bit of a rough crossing, and sleeping probably prevented
seasickness). We stumbled off the ferry,
stood in another long line to put our luggage through Argentinian customs and
came out at cka place we couldn’t identify.
It certainly wasn’t the ferry terminal we had visited before, and we
were completely disoriented, underneath a huge expressway. A bit of random walking and we finally
figured out that we were just beyond the edge of Puerto Madero. We tried unsuccessfully to find a cab (there
was stiff competition from the hundreds of fellow passengers) and ended up
walking the familiar streets back to Loft Argentino. We were tired, but looking at our schedule,
we realized that it was our only chance to go see a tango show. Many were quite expensive, but they involved
an entire evening of a fancy meal, all-you-can-drink alcohol, a tango lesson
and finally the show. There was a more
reasonably priced show without any of the add-ons just ten minutes’ walk from
our apartment that we had checked out previously, so we quickly showered and
headed over, arriving around 9:30 for a 10:15 show. We had the bad luck to hit the one evening of
the year that they had a special early schedule for a special group, so we
hopped on the Subte and headed to another show, the Gardel. There we found tickets for the show only (no
food, no booze, no tango lesson) were still US$ 96, which seemed far too high,
so we returned tango-less to the apartment and turned in for the night. Buenos Aires seemed to be a study in
contrasts in terms of prices: either
really quite reasonable, or incredibly expensive, depending on how far in
advance you bought tickets.
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| Pablo Cuevas unleashes a backhand |
Thursday, February 11
th
was Terri’s last full day in the city, and the day for which we had bought
tennis tickets. After breakfast we tried
to register online for the EcoBici free bicycle rental service run by the city,
but failed. We walked into town and
spent a long time finding an EcoBici office, filling out forms and then going
to a municipal office to get the magnetic cards. It took forever, and we were late arriving at
the tennis. The first match was still
going on, and we sat, baking in the furnace-like heat, high in the stands
watching Pablo Cuevas dispatch Santiago Giraldo. Next up was the tenacious clay court terrier
David Ferrer who handled local hope Renzo Olivo. After a break for supper, we trooped back in
for the night session. First of all the
Italian veteran Paolo Lorenzi beat another Argentine, Diego Schwartzmann, in a
highly entertaining three-setter, before the main event of the evening. Rafael Nadal, cheered on by a suddenly full
stadium, had little difficulty beating the Argentine veteran Juan Monaco,
although his once-fearsome clay court game didn’t look up to his usual
impeccable standards, with lots of forehands sailing long. There was a murmur in the crowd at one point
as Guillermo Vilas and Gabriela Sabatini wandered in to take their seats,
Argentinian tennis royalty. We came out
at 10:30 to find the trains finished for the day, so we ended up catching a cab. Again, for a long (10 km) ride, the fare was
a reasonable US$ 9.
 |
| Pleased to be back at a pro tennis tournament |
Friday, February 12th
we set off after breakfast to use our hard-won EcoBici cards, only to find that
the system has a few flaws, like a complete absence of bicycles anywhere in the
city centre. We eventually gave up and
walked to the Costanera Sur, where this time the park was open and we were able
to walk the interior pathways looking for birds. There were plenty to be seen, and it was good
to get some exercise, although the heat was like a hammer. We emerged after a couple of hours, had
another tasty churrasco sandwich and then headed back to the apartment, via
some last-minute shopping on Calle Florida for leather belts for Terri. I escorted her to Retiro, saw her onto her
bus, and suddenly was alone in the big city.
 |
| David Ferrer, the Energizer Bunny of tennis |
I spent the last three days in BA
cocooned in the air conditioned comfort of the hotel, writing blog posts,
sorting through photos, napping and watching the rest of the tennis tournament
on TV. Nadal and Ferrer lost, surprisingly,
in the semifinals and the young Austrian Domenic Thiem looked impressive
winning. I did venture out one day to
the Bellas Artes museum, where an impressive collection of Old Masters and
Argentinian paintings provided a couple of hours of aesthetic enjoyment. And then, all too soon, on Monday, February
15
th, I was on a flight back to Ottawa on my bike after three and a
half months in South America and Antarctica.
It was a wonderful adventure, and I look forward to exploring more of
the northern half of the continent on my next visit!
 |
| Waiting for Rafa |
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| Terri at her first-ever tennis tournament |
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| Rafael Nadal, showing off the forehand that ruled tennis for a decade |
As for my final take on Buenos
Aires and Uruguay, I really, really enjoyed Buenos Aires, despite its crime and
obvious social problems. It has a
confident urban feel and provides culturally rich city living to its huge
population and feels unlike any other South American city I have encountered,
an island of cosmopolitan sophistication.
Uruguay is an interesting country, very socially progressive (legalized
marijuana, a very early welfare state) but a bit non-descript compared to
Argentina. If I went back, I would
concentrate on the eastern beaches before heading off to Brazil.
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