Buenos Aires

This is a bit back to front, because I was in Buenos Aires before Uruguay, but that´s how the mood took me. This post was going to be an account of the scenery around Tupiza in Bolivia, but the computer here is just too slow on the photo CD. Maybe I´ll move to another Internet cafe later.

As previously mentioned, I arrived in BA in glorious sunshine with the Hampshire Harlequins. I left them to the perils of their 4-star hotel and hied me to a centrally located hostel.

It was a Sunday, so my first sortie found useful things like supermarkets closed, while the pedestrian mall of Avenida Florida had boutiques and souvenir parlours open for business. Not everyone took that view. I met some Grammar Lions (Golden Oldies hockey players from Auckland) who were excited at the prices of leather jackets. Their enthusiam was rather wasted on me, because I have no desire for leather clothing.

The intersecting Avenida Lavalle is also pedestrians only for several blocks, and here I located plenty of eating houses. I would not starve. A number of these have employees standing in the street handing advertising to passers by.

This wasn´t too bad, but lurking in the shadows were other distributors of literature, trying to lure the visitor into bars and clubs. When I relate that the first one I accepted carried a picture of a woman with nothing on you will understand which industry these pests were in. Thereafter I declined all handouts.

Monday dawned wet, so I limited myself to the central sights near the hostel. In the cathedral there are not only side chapels with attendant saints, but the last resting place of General San Martin, liberator of Argentina from Spanish rule. From the information around his tomb you would get the impression that he also freed Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. But in Peru and Bolivia all the credit is given to Simon Bolivar. Where do I get an unbiased history of South America?

It was at San Martin´s grave that I encountered more Golden Oldies, this time from the Dutch Over-65s team. However, we respected the signs requesting silence. We contented ourselves with smiling our recognition and shaking hands.

Outside the showers persisted. I took a couple of photos of the Casa Rosada (the US president lives in a White House, the Argentine one in a Pink House) before following a sign to an ethnographic museum. This turned out to be a department of the university and mainly, if I understood the signs correctly, a research facility. The signs were clear that it was not open to the public on Mondays.

However the route took me past the Iglesia de San Francisco, which was open. Unusually, it had no gold leaf or other bling around the alter. Instead there was a large wall hanging, a tapestry I think. Since photography was not forbidden I tried to hold the camera steady enough for the long exposure necessary in the gloom.

Tuesday was better weather so I elected to follow the Lonely Planet walking tour. To get to the starting point I took the Subte, BA´s underground railway. I did not make the most efficient journey as there are two stations named Callao, which strikes me as an unusual way to arrange a rapid transit system. I later found there are two named Independencia as well.

The walk starts at the Recoleta Cemetry. I thought this rather odd until I got there. It is a necropolis, where the residents are interred beneath or inside little houses, or palaces if you are rich enough. I had seen a couple of these from buses in Paraguay but this was the first time I had ever seen one up close.

I was pounced on by a lady as I arrived. She sold me a map of the cemetery, with a recommended route and the most interesting memorials marked on it. This was very useful. I must have spent two hours or so meandering round the "streets". Some of the little buildings are quite sumptuous and others are falling into ruin. Presumably the latter belong to families who have died out or fallen on hard times.

Evita´s tomb gets a lot of visitors. She is in the Duarte family tomb, while her husband, the former president Juan Peron is in a another, less prestigious, cemetery. However, many of Argentina´s ex-presidents are amongst the Recoleta residents, together with military leaders, writers, scholars (not many of them that I could see) and artists. The biggest tomb belonged to a banker.

Back amongst the living, the walking tour took me past the Engineering School in an odd, but doubtless perfectly sound, building to a huge artwork. A gigantic silver flower, possibly meant to be a lotus, stands in a large artificial pond. At night the petals close, although the postcards I bought suggest that they do not close very tightly.

Apart from a wander round a pretty church, there was not much of note in the rest of the tour. The BA Design Centre is not my thing and the Law School building was not nearly so interesting as the Engineering School.

In the afternoon I had my final encounter with another Golden Oldie. It was Rose from the Hampshire Harlequins enjoying a little free time between a hectic schedule of post-hockey tours.

Wednesday was an altogether different day. No more churches or big buildings, I set off for an ecological reserve. I intended to pop in to the South American Explorers clubhouse, but when I got there it was not due to open until 1pm. Too bad.

The reserve is accessed from a fairly busy street. It´s about 100m to the gates. The layout is very roughly a figure of eight sytem of walking tracks around a couple of lakes. I did not make notes from the helpful signs, but I think the circumference is between 4 and 5 km. It took me hours, and I didn´t go all the way round.

Although it is only 100m from a major city, the birdlife is astonishing. I will not bore you with a full list, but I added 20 ticks and met plenty of old friends, too. There was also one bird I saw twice, both times very clearly, but could not locate in the field guide.

At one point early on a local birder opened a conversation. His English was a little better than my Spanish, but bird talk does not feature in the phrase book. He particularly pointed out where to look for a bird called sietecolores (seven colours).

Amongst the information boards was one that illustrated some particularly colourful birds. They included my megatick vermillion flycatcher and the sietecolores, which I could look up and translate as the many-coloured reed tyrant. I did catch a couple of glimpses of scarlet, but the only one of the colourful birds that I actually identified was the masked gnatcatcher, which sports nice blue wings.

The city was hosting a convention of dermatologists, 15,000 of them according to a delegate I spoke to. He was a Brazilian medical student called Guilherme. He and several other students were staying at the same hostel. Guilherme does not plan to specialise as a dermatologist himself, but the student registration was very cheap and his tutor recommended that he go.

Apart from speaking very good English, polished in part by staying with relatives in Manchester, Guilherme plays the guitar. One evening there was a very enjoyable singalong in the hostel, although most of the songs were in Portuguese and known only to the Brazilian students. He did throw in a couple of Beatles numbers and we discovered that I don´t know all the words these days.

We have swapped email addresses to swap news and hopefully maintain contact until either Guilherme visits NZ or I get to see Brazil.

The dormitory had bunks three-high so there wasn´t a lot of space. I made the mistake of packing while sitting crouched on my bottom bunk. This didn´t do my back a lot of good, so I set off for the fast ferry to Uruguay in some pain. However, the anti-inflammatories calmed things down and I am fine now. Which brings us up to the point where the Uruguay post started.