La Boca

Woke up this morning bright eyed and bushy tailed ready to tackle the city with verve…! Yeah, I can’t back that up.  We all pretty much woke up bleary-eyed and feeling like wrung out dish rags.  Long-haul flights and drastic time changes will do that to you – every. single. time.  We breakfasted at the hotel and decided to jump on the HoHo (Hop-On, Hop-Off) bus to get a feel for the place with minimum effort.  We have a walking tour booked for tomorrow, so we were trying to see different parts of the city that we wouldn’t see tomorrow.  The one area that wasn’t on tomorrow’s itinerary was the bright and colourful La Boca neighbourhood, so we decided we would ride the bus there and make sure we jumped off to have a poke around.

The primary HoHo terminal in Buenos Aires just happened to be directly across the street from our hotel, so we didn’t have to go far to get our day started.  Lined up, bought some tickets and jumped on the next bus.  Unfortunately, the upper deck wasn’t covered like they usually are and there is no way I was going to spend a few hours in the midday sun, so we sat downstairs which limits your ability to view the architecture.

La Boca is a barrio that has a strong European flavour about it – having been settled quite early in the city’s history by Italian immigrants largely from the Genoa area.  It has some winding little pedestrian areas called the Caminito, where local artists are creating and selling their arts in markets and shops.  It’s well known for its colourful houses that have been built up for tourism over the last few years and it attracts a lot of visitors who are interested in tango, local art, food and culture.

The buildings here are old timber and corrugated iron construction, but they have been brightly painted by the bohemian community that lives in the area.  Other than these few very colourful streets that are decidedly touristic, the wider area is quite poor and unfortunately known to be a high crime area. It’s a very funky little barrio though and well worth checking out – with lots of markets, cafes, souvenir stores, people dancing the tango at midday, and a cool buzz about the place. Everything that stands still appears to have been painted in bright colours creating a very festive and cheerful atmosphere.  The markets are full of bright and interesting souvenirs as well, with lots of artwork and plenty of toruisty stuff.

We had a good look around, found a cafe for some overpriced lunch and watched the tango dancers strutting their stuff intently in the front of the restaurant. After that, we hopped back on the HoHo bus and head back uptown to see some more famous buildings. I’m not a big fan of HoHo buses in general – the droning of the guided audio tour tends to be a poor quality and not very engaging commentary that just about sends me to sleep, but it is a nice way to meander through a city and get a feel for a place.

We stayed on the bus until it took us full circle back to our hotel, where we all had a bit of a kip before heading out for a late tapas dinner.  We ended up at a great little tapas restaurant a few blocks from the hotel called Tancat Tasca – the food was delicious and the sangria was excellent too.

After that it was back to the hotel – we were all exhausted from doing what, I don’t know.  Probably the flight still catching up with us.

Buenos Aires Bound.

Well, we are off once again… this time to see a man about some penguins.  Antarctica!

Trish and I keep pinching ourselves – I can’t believe we are actually doing this.  Antarctica is on just about every traveller’s ‘Bucket List’, and it’s usually one of the hardest ones to tick off.  Apparently, Antarctica sees only 34,000 visitors a year, which is not a lot when you consider Disneyland gets around 44,000 visitors a day.

Anyway.  We had an uneventful transit – unless I count the quite severely damaged suitcase that greeted me in Buenos Aires.  Seriously, every corner was dinged in and it looked like it had been used to play football on the tarmac, but thankfully the bottle of port inside was safely intact.  I’ll be having words with Air New Zealand about that – a decent Samsonite suitcase is well around the $300-$400 mark and they just throw your shit around like it doesn’t matter at all.  I’d never buy really expensive luggage that was ever going to be checked on a flight.  But c’est la vie.  It turned up, which is better than the other most common travellers’ luggage problem, which is standing around the luggage conveyor belt wondering where the hell your suitcase is.  🙂

Border control and customs were uneventful too – well for us… saw the most ridiculous thing I have seen at any immigration control desk (with the exception of Russian immigration officers signing official paperwork for Chinese tourists by putting a pen in their hand and pretending to sign on their behalf, that is) in a long time. There was an over-coiffed, overdressed, overly made-up American lady trying to get through passport control and she was being asked to put her right thumb on on a scanner but was unable to comply – because of crazy long acrylic fingernails!  And by ‘crazy long’ I mean 3″ long fingernails?  She was literally unable to lay her thumb flat on the scanning pad.  The lady customs officer was unimpressed and took the issue to her supervisor – we could see them all laughing over the ridiculousness of the situation behind some frosted glass.  And those of us still standing in the queues were wondering if she was going to be refused entry to Argentina because of her fingernails!  Eventually, the customs officer came back and processed her with very ill temper without the scanned fingerprints – my guess is she wanted to come out and hand the silly woman some scissors…

Anyway, we got through the airport with minimum hiccups, a little guy with a sign bearing our name was waiting for us just outside – always love that, and it was off to find our hotel. We are staying at 725 Continental which is really well located in the centre of the city, and has huge rooms… 14′ ceilings and a bedroom about 5m x 5m, which felt like a startling contrast when compared to the shoebox we encountered in Shinjuku after walking off our last long-haul flights into Tokyo!

We were all a bit stuffed, so we pottered around a bit and went for a walk down Florida Avenue to find something for dinner.  Stumbled upon a local restaurant called Havannas, with a guy playing easy listening tunes on a saxophone and Italian food… so naturally we walked in and ordered empanadas – as you do.

Early night tonight and hopefully an easy day tomorrow.