Back in Buenos Aires: Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur

I’m back where I began this journey through Argentina—Buenos Aires. For those following along, you might have noticed that I didn’t publish anything yesterday. In my final post from Iguazu, I told you that was likely to happen for, well, reasons.

Of course, if you’re one of the few people who arrived here after being sent to this specific page by a search engine, you wouldn’t have read that. However, if so, the fact that, upon discovering this journal, you didn’t immediately jump to the first entry and then read through all of the 419 posts that preceded this one before returning here is insulting to me. I expect an apology.

This trip is rapidly drawing to a close. I’m here in Buenos Aires for two nights, including last night. Then I fly home tomorrow. This morning’s activity was a walk to and through Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur.

When I do a circle tour around a country or a portion thereof, I usually spend most of my time in the starting/ending city at the beginning of the trip and then spend just one night there at the tail end before catching my flight back home.

On some trips, I might be able to catch a connecting flight from the city before that to get back home without a stop in the originating city at the end of my trip, but I prefer taking trains within a country, and they are sometimes to places without commercial airports. That would leave me fraught with anxiety nearly to the point of cardiac arrest over whether I’d make a connection a that would have to start with a train.

Here, trains weren’t a practical option to get where I wanted to go within Argentina, so I took flights within the country. Even then, I worry about making a connection from an internal flight to an international one when there’s only one of the latter per day, as is the case here.

What’s more, both the flight out of Buenos Aires to my next stop within Argentina, Córdoba, along with my flight back to Buenos Aires from Iguazú, the last of my Argentinian destinations outside of Buenos Aires, used a different Buenos Aires airport, one much closer to the centre of the city, than the international airport my flights from and to Toronto arrived at and leave from. So, a flight from Iguazú to Toronto with a connection in Buenos Aires (or anywhere else) wasn’t a doable option even if I could get over my debilitating angst over a missed connection.

I decided on two days back in Buenos Aires rather than my usual one in an arrival/departure city because I read that there are a lot of strikes and protests in Argentina and I should be prepared for the possibility of flights being delayed or cancelled on the day I expected to travel.

I booked all of my internal Argentine flights well before leaving Canada. Because I didn’t yet know if I’d love, like, dislike, hate, or be neutral about Argentina, I wanted to reduce the risk of missing the one direct (but not non-stop) flight back home should I get held up in Iguazú because of a flight disruption

That being said, I took five internal flights in Argentina during this trip. Every single one of them was bang on time.

Enough about my flight connection angst. Back to this morning.

The walk from my hotel to the closest of the two Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur entrances took about 40 minutes. A few blocks of that was along a pedestrianized shopping street.

Along that street, I saw a unique species of bird. There were at least two or three of them on each of the blocks I was on, and for a couple of blocks, there were even more. One or two of the blocks had probably six to eight of them spread out in the block. I suspect that if my route took me farther on that street, I would have seen more.

The birds stood on their two feet or, where available, perched on a seat, ledge, or railing.

They all chirped the same song, with only the slightest difference in intonation. They each sang their short song, paused for a few breaths, and then repeated it—and on, and on, and on.

I think I can accurately reproduce their call phonetically. It went: “Cambio, cambio, cambio.” (The last “cambio” had more of a singsong to it than the first two.)

If you want to get a general sense of the shape of this species, look in a full-length mirror.

You probably figured out by now that I’m talking about some humans, but they did all repeatedly chirp that same call.

“Cambio” is the Spanish word for “change.” They were all eager to exchange their Argentine pesos for the American dollars of passersby.

I don’t remember if I included it in these pages before now, but I meant to mention on an earlier post that either one or both of my guidebooks, or maybe it was the Government of Canada travel advisory website, or maybe multiple sources, warned me to use only official currency exchange offices or banks, not one of the currency exchangers on the street. Based on what I read, some of them take your legitimate dollars and exchange them for counterfeit pesos.

Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur

When I wrote about Puerto Madero during my first stint in Buenos Aires, I mentioned an ecological reserve on the other side ot a couple of lagoons from Puerto Madero (or maybe the reserve is considered to be part of Puerto Madero; I’m not sure). That ecological reserve is the 350-hectare Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur.

According to the English pages of the reserve’s website (with some grammatical errors corrected by me), “The reserve is the unplanned result of an abandoned project to build a new administrative centre for the city by reclaiming land from the river. While the project was dropped, happily, the city was left with a unique space that was taken over by nature. The area was declared a nature reserve in 1986 …”

I did a circuit walk around most of the park and took a couple of offshoot trails.

The side of the reserve farthest from the main part of Buenos Aires is bounded by a large body of water. I would have mistaken it for the Atlantic Ocean had the guide on the Tigre tour I took in the early days of this trip not mentioned that the Rio de la Plata (Plata River) is the widest river in the world and many people mistake it for the ocean because they can’t see to the other side. I couldn’t see to the other side, but I checked Google Maps. I was relatively near the mouth of the river, but not yet at the ocean at that point. According to that guide, it’s still a freshwater river at that point.

The Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur is beautiful, with lots of trees and other plants. Wide trails form long and short circuits through it, with a few offshoots from them.

I saw several butterflies fluttering around the park. Many, but not all, of them were monarch butterflies.

My guidebook recommended that if I have binoculars, I should bring them to the reserve because there’s some great birdwatching there, with more than 300 species spotted.

I didn’t have binoculars, nor did I see any interesting birds. However, at one point on my walk through Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur, I saw four or five people clumped together looking into what I thought was a field of interesting vegetation. One person in the group had binoculars, and another had what was either a camera with a very long telephoto lens or a bazooka. I’m not sure which, but I hope it was the former.

They stared intently into the alleged field, but I couldn’t see what they were looking at.

About that interesting vegetation, the park has a lot of one species of plant with long, spindly stalks and a large feathery end at the top. They were quite attractive. At a couple of points, I looked across the supposed field and was able to see the tall, modern towers of Puerto Madero behind a lot of green vegetation, including many of these plants. It was a gorgeous sight.

Among the signs posted at the Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur, one was repeated identically at several points throughout the park. It had a stylized illustration of a snake followed by a bunch of Spanish text, and, I at first thought, no English.

When I first saw the sign, I—foolishly or wisely, depending on your perspective±—didn’t bother using Google Translate to try to figure out what it was trying to tell me. However, I looked at another instance of the sign much later and saw that it did indeed have some English, but in a much smaller font that I hadn’t noticed before.

The sign had a headline of “PRECAUCIÓN,” with a smaller, lower-case translation below that saying “Caution.”

Below that were two short paragraphs in Spanish, followed by two sets of bullet points separated into subheads above each section.

Then, below that, in very small print, was the English I missed when I first saw the sign. It said: “Snakes inhabit this reserve. If you see one, keep your distance. In case of a bite: Stay calm and avoid unnecessary movement. Notify the reserve staff, who will call emergency services. Do not apply a tourniquet or suck out the venom. Do not apply ice or any substances.”

Yikes! Snakes! And not just any snakes, but snakes that require the calling of emergency services if you’re bitten by one of them. If I’d read that upon first entering the park, I would have turned around and walked, nay, ran out quickly without ever seeing the park.

I used the words “alleged” and “supposed” to describe the field because I’m not sure it was a field. In addition to the lagoons that separate Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur from the inhabited part of Puerto Madero, there is a large internal lagoon in the park, according to a map of the park. What I thought was a field may have been that lagoon.

As I was about to leave Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur through the exit I hadn’t entered by, I noticed a deck jutting out and over the “field.” I walked to the end of the deck I saw what looked like uninterrupted, lush green vegetation of a few types. But when I looked closer, I saw the tiniest of slivers of water showing through some minute gaps between some of the vegetation.

I think they were, in fact, aquatic plants, but so tightly packed that it looked like a field. While standing at the end of the deck, I looked at Google Maps. It told me I was standing a little piece into the lagoon.

Oh, about the trails through Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur. They were wide enough that a car or small truck could easily drive along them. And tire tracks suggested some occasionally do. But private vehicles aren’t allowed in the park. In the about three hours I was there, I saw only two vehicles, a government-labeled pickup truck and a police car. The latter wasn’t racing through the park, but it was moving faster than I thought it would have driven if the officer(s) inside were carefully scrutinizing activity in the park. Maybe the police were heading to arrest a ne’er-do-well snake for the premeditated bting of a park visitor of the human variety.

A walk through Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur was a delightful and relaxing way to spend the morning. That is to say, it was relaxing until I read about the snakes. From that point on I was a trifle on edge for the rest of my time in the reserve.

Many people had the same idea. They probably didn’t read the snake signs either. A lot of visitors walked, jogged, cycled, or sat in the park when I was there. However, the park was big enough that it wasn’t crowded.

You may wonder why a lot of people were out on a weekday during what would normally be working hours. For the second time during this three-week trip, I was caught unaware by a national holiday. I only learned that when Google Maps told me that some of the sights I was considering for this afternoon might be closed or have different opening hours for Malvinas Day today. I should remember to do more research about local holidays before future trips.

By the way, Malvinas is what Argentina calls the Falkland Islands. The holiday commemorates the veterans of the Malvinas (Falkland Islands) war.

Um. I’m a citizen of a country that’s a member of the British commonwealth, Canada. Plus, the head of state of my country holds several separate job titles simultaneously. The one under which he serves as Canada’s head of state is the King of Canada. His other independent job titles include King of Great Britain and king of a few other countries.

Nevertheless, I’ve enjoyed Argentina and the people here have been great even though we often didn’t understand each other. So I have only one thing to say about the Falkland Islands(Malvinas) war: No comment.

By the time I left Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur, it was getting late for lunch. I have a wee bit of a story to tell about lunch, but I’ll save it for my afternoon post.