This is a post to be filled in later with more information, but just letting you know that we arrived safely from Quito to Buenos Aires on the 9th (after a relatively irritating overnight flight from Quito to Guayaquil to Santiago to BA, all on one flight number including a few hours sitting in Santiago airport...and lasting 10 hours with only one meal...grr).
The city of Buenos Aires threatened to stress the heck out of us - with a population greater than Australia - but we managed to cope relatively well. Day one (after said torrid overnight flight) we wandered our way to the barrio of San Telmo, an old antiquey district, with an an amazing Sunday flea market - in which participating stallholders were adorned in the most bizarre of costumes...from a cat to a rubbish bin, to a bumblebee...and street performers from mime artists, to tango dancers, afrucan drumming bands, small children marching in formation...and we were already feeling so strange to begin with...
(thankyou to the people whose blog pages these are stolen from, we didn't take our camera around with us for a few days)
We had three or four days in BA before we headed south to Ushuaia, so we were determined to get a little bit of a sense of a tradition that the city is known for, its Tango Argentino. Day two found us in another of BA's old districts, La Boca, home to tango itself (and the Boca Juniors football club). A district of amazing culture and history, with a few tourist-lined streets of corrigated-iron clad terraces painted gaudily multicoloured, which sit in quite underprivilieged surrounds...we managed to get lost on the way, which added to the experience. Two very helpful (but bemused) bus drivers later, we were sitting munching an empanada and sipping some red while watching couples tango along the street. Thus inspired, we headed home to organise a lesson for that very night, followed by a trip back to La Boca for dinner and a (serious...very serious) Tango Show.
It was in La Boca, in its famous "Caminito", or "little walk", that we made the acquaintance of the social justice fighter known as "El Hormiguito", or "The Little Ant".
What an exhausting ferw days...probably as exhausting to read as it is to write, let alone to be there...Somewhere in the above include a few more wanders around town, another tango lesson, grocery shopping, cooking and LOTS of handwashing (did we mention the temperature - a lovely 27 degrees or so, so things actually dry!)
Next stop - Ushuaia!
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