It is nice that when you fly from Iguazú to Buenos Aires, you can cross the border from Brazil into Argentina before you even get to the airport. The even better part is that they have little drive through booths on the Argentinian side so you just pass all your passports out the window and it is done so quickly. Another bonus of driving to the Argentinian side was that our flight to Buenos Aires was domestic, so we flew into Aeroparque (Jorge Newbury) that is right in town by the river.
After a false start of being dropped at the wrong hotel, easily done since it had the same name as our correct hotel, but luckily was only around the corner, Buenos Aires was easy to settle into. There certainly was a European feel to the place and you could sometimes confuse whether you were in Paris.
Our constant search for good food and wine continued and was easily fulfilled here, particularly if you like meat. With a recommendation from the local guide Maria Casiraghi, we trundled off to Fervor Restaurant where we could choose 200g, 400g or 600g portions of steak. Given that we didn’t have any Argentinian pesos and you are generally recommended to only use cash it is useful that the restaurants will even change US dollars at a better rate than that officially given.
Alejandro met us for our half day tour starting with the Recoleta cemetery, just around the corner from our hotel. It was interesting seeing the array of mausoleums and the state they were maintained. If you wanted your own, you need to look in the real estate section of the newspaper. The busiest mausoleum was that of Family Duarte, which is where Eva Peron’s final resting place is. There were many more interesting mausoleums and we could have easily spent hours in there taking photos, we did have intentions of returning later without our guide, but as usual, returning never seems to happen.
We were supposed to have a car to drive us around, but it never turned up, which actually was more useful for us because we had to get taxis around the place with Alejandro and got a better idea of the cost and the situation with tipping.
The Pink Palace and Plaza de Mayo was our next stop where we learnt more about Argentinian politics and the Thursday mothers with their headscarves images painted on the ground.
La Boca was amazing for colour but it was annoying for the amount of tourists and we weren’t allowed off the tourist streets. There were tango dancers every few hundred metres trying to get tourists to come get photos, I never actually saw them do any tango, which I would have more happily given tips for than a posed photograph with ourselves. We did a stop in the new wharf area with a lot of new buildings, the Hilton and very little interest to us and then were set free to fend for ourselves.
Given that we were in Foz du Iguaçu for Fiona’s birthday, we delayed her birthday dinner until we reached Buenos Aires and could go somewhere amazing. Really it was just a convenient excuse, but we found Tarquino. What an amazing place with amazing space, fabulous wine, exquisite food and brilliant service. It deserves it’s whole own post to explain how fantastic it was, plus another visit for photos.
Our time by ourselves involved a lot of walking, we’re pretty useless at catching taxis or public transport and as long as it is within 5km, we’re happy walking. Sometimes it was a bit hot and we didn’t cover ourselves with enough sunscreen, but we were much better at finding places that interested us that way. San Telmo was a great area to meander through with a variety of street art, cafes, and Mercado San Telmo that housed an amazing food market with butchers, fruit and vegetable stalls, bakeries and Coffee Town, which actually had flat whites on the menu that tasted great.
We had also been recommended to go to Bar El Federal with it’s ornate wooden bar and fairly good food that enabled us to clear up confusion as to whether a Lomito or a Lomo was a grilled steak sandwich. Turns out the Lomo is the grilled steak sandwich and the Lomito was a cold ham sandwich, I doubt you’d need many guesses to figure out which one was better.
One of the foods that you hear of associated with Argentina is Empanadas. Around the corner from our hotel was a great chain, but the best place we found was La Cocina, that was walking distance from our hotel. It was a small, rustic looking place with very little seating, mainly it was locals coming in to pick up and take away. The flavours were great and the empanadas pastry was thin and perfectly cooked, they are a great gourmet alternative to the good old pie.
Travelling with iPads and having wifi in your accommodation has meant that you can keep searching for things to do and this lead to Clare finding Graffitimundo street art tours. There was the option of a North or a South tour, we did the North tour due to time constraints. It started in the afternoon near Palermo, which was definitely the shopping district of Buenos Aires, well decent shopping, so it was probably lucky we weren’t staying here. Our guide, Sofia, explained the history of graffiti and street art in Argentina. It was interesting that street art and graffiti are generally accepted as a way to communicate, whether it be writing your name, a message to someone, political propaganda or creating an art piece. Some works had been commissioned by the city council and many had been private commissions from seeing an artist’s work. The tour finished at Post Street Bar that is owned and run by artists, but unfortunately was only just setting up for opening when our tour finished, so we wandered off to a wine bar called Pain et Vin. With a name like that you would expect two things, good wine and great bread, and they lived up to both.
So many people and websites etc had recommended La Cabrera, that we had to try getting in there. Our best technique for getting into restaurants is turning up early, in South America that means 8pm, so generally we get a table. The reviews we had read advised against ordering sides and I tried to listen, but since we were having steak it would have been rude not to get their fries too. When our meal arrived I could certainly see why people had said this, little containers just kept coming, but no fries, so am glad we ordered them. The only problem with arriving early and getting a table straight away is that we missed the free bubbles (or beer) that they gave to the people waiting for a table.
We had a fabulous time in Buenos Aires and there are many things and great places for food that I haven’t mentioned or in enought details, but many of them deserve their own individual posts and I doubt I’ll manage that while I’m travelling, so these brief mentions will have to suffice for now.
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