Adiós Argentina

This is it. I’m about to catch a plane in Buenos Aires that will end this trip in Argentina and take me back home to Toronto. I’m posting this from the airport before my flight.

My flight doesn’t leave until late afternoon. So I had some time before leaving my hotel for the airport. I used that time to visit one guidebook-listed sight and do some wandering around near that sight and my hotel.

The sight was the Palacio de Aguas Corriente.

Because this is the last post for this trip, you’ll also find summaries at the end of this post of my time in Buenos Aires and, more generally, Argentina.

Palacio de Aguas Corriente

“Palacio de Aguas Corriente” translates to “Palace of Running Waters.” You’ve got to hand it to the people of Buenos Aires, Argentina, they give palaces to even non-sentient resources like running water.

The exterior of the building is magnificent. All four sides are roughly the same. The facades are ornately shaped red- and sand-coloured stone with lots of decorative elements attached. One exception to the sameness is that one side has a two-sided, sand-coloured staircase hugging and decorating the building.

Completed in 1894, it truly does look like a palace, but it was built as a waterworks. One of my guidebooks said this was to convey the importance of the purified water it used to hold. (The waterworks have since been decommissioned. The structure now serves primarily as an administrative building.)

But it’s not solely an administrative building; there’s also a small museum inside. Almost all of the text in the museum is bilingual, with versions in both Spanish and English.

Artifacts on display include parts of water pipelines, faucets, bidets, lots of toilets, a few of the enamelled ceramic decorative pieces from the facade, and some of the old administrative furniture and equipment.

One section of the museum has two soaring spaces with concrete walls and large, vertical pipes that were used to move water into and out of the giant cisterns below. I found this space grand, but raw in a retro-industrial sort of way.

Wandering Around

As I said, I also did some wandering around this morning. I’ll avoid too many generalities because I’ve got a Buenos Aires (and Argentina) summary coming up anon, and I already repeat myself way too much in these pages.

I walked along some pleasing streets, viewed some nice architecture, and sat for a spell in a very pleasant park.

In the section of town near the Palacio de Aguas Corriente, there are benches along the sidewalk. That, in itself, is not unheard of in cities (but far too rare in my hometown of Toronto).

What struck me was the nature of the benches. They appeared to be thickly cushioned, upholstered perches with an array of buttons pulling down the fabric, which looked like leather, and depressing the cushioning at those points, creating elegant creases. It looked like a fine piece of furniture that anyone of refined tastes would be proud to have in their home.

The benches don’t have backs, which normally causes me to condemn such street furniture. But my thought was, “Well, how splendid. Cushioned benches. The powers that be in Buenos Aires care about residents’ and visitors’ backsides, even if they don’t care about their backs.

When I first saw one, I assumed that someone had dumped a piece of furniture that they no longer wanted on the street to get rid of it. Then, I saw more identical benches. On closer inspection, I saw they were bolted onto the sidewalk.

I didn’t sit on any of the benches. They seemed too good for the likes of me. But after passing several of them, I tried touching one.

Looks can be deceiving. They weren’t tushy-comforting upholstered, cushioned benches. They were made of black-coloured concrete or some similar ungiving material. So, the city planners here don’t care about people’s tushes or backs, after all.

Buenos Aires Summary

I’ve become a fan of Buenos Aires, Argentina. There isn’t one thing I’d call spectacular, but there’s a lot of good and many great things to see and do.

Plus, the city has some lively and colourful neighbourhoods that are a pleasure and sometimes even a joy to walk through, such as Palermo, San Telmo, and, yes, La Boca, despite the warnings about safety in the latter neighbourhood.

There are also a couple of large parks and several smaller parks and public squares to provide a relaxing respite from the bustle of the metropolis.

As to the time I spent in Buenos Aires, I think I got it about right. Six nights on the front end and a couple more before returning home gave me enough time to take in the vast majority of the sights recommended by my various information sources that interested me.

I probably wouldn’t have been bored spending another day or two here, but it was likely sufficient.

There were day tours I could have taken out of Buenos Aires in addition to the Tigre tour I did take. For example, Argentina’s pampas are near Buenos Aires. Tour operators offer excursions that leave in the morning and return the same evening after visiting a cattle ranch and purportedly getting the flavour of gaucho life. That might have been interesting. So, another day in Buenos Aires could have been spent doing that.

(There are also horseback riding tours. But that didn’t interest me, so I didn’t investigate them further.)

In summary, I thoroughly enjoyed Buenos Aires, and I can recommend it as a destination. The only complaint is that I ate way too much steak here. It’s pretty much a staple and the portions are huge. And it’s delicious.

I could and did order other, less artery-blocking dishes. Chicken and pork are common. Fish and seafood weren’t menu highlights—and seafood was rare on menus, but I did have fish a couple of times.

I’m glad I came to Buenos Aires. It’s a place I’d consider coming back to if time and money allow.

Argentina Summary

I’m conscious of, and have probably mentioned this before, that while there might be one or two specifics that disappoint me to one extent or another, overall, these summaries usually overwhelmingly have at least positive and usually very complimentary words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs to say about trips I’ve just completed, with few negatives. It’s not that I’m not sufficiently discerning. I’m probably not, but that’s not it.

It’s not as if, when trying to decide where to go on one of my trips, I tape a map of the world to a wall, blindfold myself, and throw a dart randomly at the map. For one thing, I’m a klutz. Even if the map filled the whole wall, I’d probably still miss it. As impossible as it may sound to someone who is not me, I’d likely end up puncturing myself with my throw. And I wouldn’t try it with anyone else in the room without first checking that my insurance would cover my liability for that other person’s grievous injury.

No, I get a sense of where I want to go because of something I’ve read or heard about it, or perhaps some common stereotypes about that place. Then, I’ll look at a guidebook or two to see if there are interesting and/or beautiful things to do there. If it’s still a place I want to visit, I then use a guidebook or two to pick out specific destinations within the country or region that look like places that one shouldn’t miss.

With this research as a guide, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I express positive vibes about the places I visit on a trip.

All of that is a way of not so much foreshadowing as blatantly saying that I enjoyed this trip. My time in Argentina was time well spent.

I won’t say any more about Buenos Aires because you have the summary in the section immediately above to refer to.

I loved Cordoba as a warm, friendly and relaxing place to spend some time. Apart from Buenos Aires, I spent a day longer there than anywhere else on this trip. I didn’t regret that.

I then moved on to Mendoza. At first, I wasn’t particularly taken with the city, but it grew on me. Every street—every street—in the core is densely tree-lined. It’s almost like a city within a forest, despite being quite urban. I could get used to that. In fact, I did get used to that in the little time I spent there. And it’s a great base for day or multi-day tours beginning and ending in Medosa. Full-day and multi-day trips head up into the gorgeous mountains. There are also winery tours that are usually much shorter. Mendoza is the primary wine region of Argentina. I took a half-day winery tour and a full-day trip into the Andes out of my Mendoza base.

Moving on within Argentina, I next went to Salta. I loved it. Its core is very compact, human-oriented, and easily walkable, with lots to see and do. There are day trips from Salta to places that are allegedly beautiful. But they leave even more obscenely early than the ones from Mendoza, so I didn’t take any. You might want to take one or two if you go and you don’t object to leaving your hotel before they turn on the world.

That then took me to my last stop before returning to Buenos Aires to catch a flight to head home, Iguazú. This brought my one disappointment on this trip. Puerto Igauzú is a nothing town. Sorry, Puerto Iguazú, you just are. Nevertheless, the hotel I stayed at in the nearby jungle, and even more so the Iguazú Falls and Argentina’s Iguazú National Park, more than made up for it—by a wide margin. They were stunning. Completely.

Visiting Iguazú presented me with an opportunity to easily leave Argentina on this trip. The Iguazú River forms a border between Argentina and Brasil. The falls are split between both countries. And there is another Iguazú town on the Brasil side. I didn’t go because I didn’t want to bother investigating whether I needed a visa to go to the Brazilian side.

As to the length of the whole trip, on every trip, I usually reach a point when I’m ready to go home, no matter how much I enjoyed the trip. That typically comes at or a little after the three-week mark. This trip was just a little over three weeks. I didn’t hit that point. So I could have stayed longer and not regretted it. Probably only a couple of days longer. But still, a little longer.

Argentina is a big country. I didn’t see nearly all of it. For example, I didn’t get to Patagonia, which is supposed to be gorgeous. But I read that, while you can fly into Patagonia, getting around the region involves a lot of driving on bad roads. Hence, I probably would have had to rent a car to get around. I don’t enjoy driving at the best of times. Driving on sketchy roads would probably put a dent in my enthusiasm. Plus, I think people tend to go to Patagonia to do some hiking and sleep in tents. Um. No.

There’s also the far south of Argentina to explore. It’s close to Antartica and cruises to the frozen continent depart from there. I came to Argentina to ride out the last of winter back home and hope to return to only a few weeks more of cold weather back in Toronto. So, an almost-Antartica few days wasn’t what I was looking for.

To close this, I think I planned this Argentina trip rather well, both in terms of locations visited and time spent, which is surprising because I never do as much research as I should.

Until next time and next place. Happy travels to all of us.