Argentina Part 1 - North & Central, 23 - 34 Degrees South

We crossed the border from Chile into the North Western corner of Argentina, heading for the city of Salta - which sits pretty much right on top of the Tropic of Cancer, taking us out of the tropical region we have been in since arriving in Mexico City back in April.

Like any self respecting visitors to Argentina, our first port of call after dropping our bags at our hostel was a steak house. Slightly bewildered by the wide array of cuts of meat on offer on the menu, we decided to go with the waiters recommendation of the ‘Parilla’, accompanied of course with a couple of bottles of red wine from the nearby Cafayate vineyards. The Parilla as it turns out, is a hot grill plate that is presented to the table filled with various cuts of the meat - including steak, chicken, sausages and ….intestines and offal…not entirely all to our liking, but the actual meat elements were superb! First Argentine steak lesson learnt.

As it turned out it was some sort of bank holiday weekend and a lot of Argentines from Buenos Aires had come up to Salta for a long weekend break, turning what is apparently usually quite a sleepy city into a pretty lively hive of activity…well, in the afternoons and evening at least, Argentines don’t really have anything to do with the mornings, particularly at weekends. The Argentines are apparently always up for a party and it was quite amusing to see almost as many people in their 60’s as there were people in their 20’s still out until the bars closed up at about 6am.

We sampled some more steak while in Salta, going for a safer bet of a more traditional fillet and rump cuts - which were unbelievably good - cooked to absolute perfection and enormous to boot. Usually you couldn’t eat such a huge slab of meat, but when it is cooked this well is this succulent you could go on eating it all night. The wine here is also a total revelation to us Brits, so used to paying a ridiculous premium on a bottle of wine in a restaurant vs. what you would pay in the supermarket - because over here the price in the restaurant is pretty much the same as the supermarket. Often we have found that a bottle of decent wine in a restaurant is roughly the same price as two beers.

Salta has a really nice feel to it, nice architecture, a cable car up one of the surrounding hillsides for views over the city and very friendly locals - always trying to strike up a conversation. We were still with our Mexican friend Antonio at this point and his fluent Spanish came in handy on a number of occasions, due to yet more regional dialect difficulties we were experiencing here…Argentine Spanish is very different to all of the rest of Latin America - again, just as we thought we were making some head way with the language, another curve ball is thrown at us!


Our plan was to hire a car from Salta and drive ourselves the couple of thousand kilometers south east across Argentina to Buenos Aires, though the cost turned out to be prohibitive, so instead we took another 12 hour bus down to Argentina’s second city, Cordoba. Antonio on the other hand opted for the 20 hour bus direct to Buenos Aires, as he was on a bit of a tighter time frame than us, having a PhD in genetics to get back for in Oxford…it’s always good to travel with our intellectual equals!?! ;-)

In Cordoba we really started to feel the European way and influence that Argentine cities are famous for and funnily enough it had that certain ‘2nd city’ feel about it that Birmingham has. While here we took a bus out to the small town of Alta Gracia, a little suburb where Che Guevara grew up, his old family home now having been converted into the National Che Guevara museum. Che Guevara is one of the three key Argentine National heroes alongside Maradona and Eva Peron, images of the three of them are everywhere. Wandering around his old family home, now adorned with artefacts from his childhood, his infamous Motorcycle Diaries era & his revolutionary guerrilla activities in Cuba, the Congo and Bolivia, made for a really fascinating day - free entry as well, which is always a bonus for us fare dodging travellers…

After a few nights in Cordoba sampling yet more of the fine steak and red wine selection on offer, we headed further south east on our final stop before reaching Buenos Aires, the city of Rosario.

Rosario is famous for two things as far as we can tell, one of which is that it was the birthplace of Che Guevara and the other is it is the site of the Argentine Independence monument, the ‘Monument A La Bandera’ - which features on the 10 Peso note. After making a visit to La Bandera and to yet another Che Guevara statue, we made our way on to Buenos Aires.

There is a saying that goes - ‘Argentina is a nation of Italians, who speak Spanish, dress like they are French and think they are British'.  Whilst this is obviously not strictly true, it does give some indication how strong the European influence is here - nowhere more so than in Buenos Aires.

We decided to base ourselves in the Barrio (district) of San Telmo, known for it’s artistic community, street markets, antique shops, traditional café culture and street Tango performances…oh, and an inordinate amount of dog shit over every pavement - someone needs to introduce the pooper scooper to Buenos Aires, SOON! Oh yes, and bags of rubbish (which is not unique to San Telmo, it is BA wide) - every night the entire city put their rubbish bags out on the street, the dogs and homeless people (of which there are also an awful lot of in BA) tear all the bags open, taking out anything of interest, whether it be food scraps or plastic bottles etc, that can be recycled for cash, leaving the debris scattered all over the street. Throughout the night - every night, a team of rubbish collectors and road sweepers scour every street in the city and clear up the mess, making things nice and tidy again for the following morning…apart from the dog shit, obviously. Something tells me the City Council’s refuse collection policy is not exactly top of their agenda - there is surely a very simple, better way than this though!

That said, San Telmo is actually a really nice area. It is one of the oldest Barrio’s in the city, full of classic European influenced architecture and cobbled streets. If you can take your eyes off the pavement long enough to not get a boot caked in dog shit and look up, the buildings are really quite ornate and intricate. Every weekend they have an art, craft and antique market in the streets of San Telmo, centred around Plaza Dorrago, with live Tango performances and street musicians bringing the place to life. After spending the day browsing the markets and taking in some of the café culture at a place called El Federal,

which serves excellent food and drink at low budget traveller friendly prices, and at the weekends a succession of local singers make an appearance performing acapella versions of classic Latin songs, we hooked up with some friends again and headed out to the Barrio of La Boca to take in a professional Tango show.

 La Boca is the area of the city where Tango was originally invented and the show we went to see - simply named ‘La Boca Tango’ started in an open air theatre set, light heartedly telling the story of how Tango came about in the first half of the 20th Century. The show then moves into a cabaret club, where the group of live musicians and singers provide a soundtrack for the dancers, who put on an amazing show for the best part of 2 hours. The musicians and vocalists are a show in themselves, guys in their 60’s who have clearly been doing something similar to this all their lives, all virtuosos in their own right, the lead instrument of the band being the squeeze box accordion player. The dancers were absolutely first rate as well. We were expecting a sort of slow and sultry Tango throughout the show and whilst there was elements of this, there were also some really fast paced technical dancing, made to look completely effortless by the dancers who barely broke a sweat.

The La Boca barrio is not only the birthplace of Tango, but also home to the infamous football club, Boca Juniors - the Argentine working class majorities team of choice and former club of Maradona. So on the Sunday afternoon a group of us went along to ‘La Bombanero’ stadium to watch Boca Juniors vs. Godoy Cruz. Argentina’s international reputation as a football crazy country is well deserved and going to see a match between one of the big clubs - namely either Boca Juniors or River Plate, is as much about watching the crowd as it is watching the game (particularly if like us, your not exactly ‘football crazy’ yourself) and the crowd didn’t disappoint. The goal mouth ends of the stadium are still standing room only and we were in the opposite end to the main hardcore Boca Jrs supporters - known as ‘Jugando 12’, or ‘The 12th Player’ - and had a prime position to watch the constant stream of banners, ribbons, fireworks, flares, drumming and singing that goes on during the match. Fans are allowed to freely scale the fences within the stadium to hang up their banners, any opposition banners being removed by the home supporters as quickly as they are put up.

The match itself was really entertaining, far fewer instances of pathetic diving and dirty tackling than you see in your average European game, we were lucky enough to see 5 goals - though unfortunately Boca Jrs were on the loosing end of a 3-2 score line.

Buenos Aires is no exception when it comes to the Argentine tradition of starting things late, most bars don’t get going until at least midnight and most restaurants don’t start filling up until around 10.30pm. However, one thing that is at complete odds to this tradition has turned out to be one of the hottest tickets on the Buenos Aires nightlife scene, takes place every Monday night between 7-10pm and is called ‘La Bomba Del Tiempo’ (Time Bomb). When we turned up at about 6.30pm with the group of people we were hanging out with, the queue was literally around two blocks to get in. A few thousand people turn up to a place in the North of the city called the Konex Centre, a disused industrial warehouse, with what must’ve once been the lorry loading bay now converted into an open air concert venue, with a huge steel staircase coming down from the adjacent buildings into the centre of the courtyard acting as a stage. The show itself is 3 hours of a group of around 15 top class percussionists, creating improvisational rhythms from the instructions of a series of ‘conductors’, somehow managing to communicate their rhythm patterns to the percussionists to perform. Intermittently other musicians are brought out to join them, such as guitarists and trumpet players, who improvise along to the rhythms - all combining to create a pretty amazing live show. It feels like being at a festival largely due to the fact it’s open air and the few thousand people there are all going crazy - then at 10pm it’s all over for another week and the hordes of people spill out onto the streets looking for the next place to head onto. Definitely one of the best, most atmospheric live gigs we have been to in a long time - for anyone in BA on a Monday night it is an absolute must.

We spent the next week in BA in a whirlwind of constant activity day and night - visiting some of the many art galleries dotted around the city, taking in some of the key sights such as the Obelisk, Avenida 9th July (reportedly the widest Avenue in the world with 16 lanes), the ultra Parisian Avenida 1st Mayo, La Palacio Rosario - or Pink Palace (which contrary to how it sounds, is not a huge gay club), but the Presidential Palace from who’s balconies the likes of Eva and Juan Peron delivered their speeches to the masses.

We went to another gig to see the Swedish group Loney Dear, strolling through the many parks and markets of Palermo and Recoletta, taking in the dockside of Puerto Madero - an area very reminiscent of both Liverpool’s Victoria Docks and the London Docklands, visiting the Recolleta Cemetery - a mini city within the city of huge

above ground tombs where Argentina’s rich and famous are buried, including it’s most famous resident - Evita Peron, visiting La Caminito in La Boca - the streets of brightly coloured corrugated iron buildings around the old port area, sampling many of BA’s restaurants and bars and generally spending way too much money!… not to mention constantly dodging dog shit - actually getting quite good at it by now I might add!

After all this activity, along with contending with the Buenos Aires subway system, which although is very cheap and simple to navigate, during the week makes London’s Central line look positively empty. People literally launch themselves off the platforms into the carriages as soon as the doors open to force their way onto the trains due to the level of overcrowding, we decided to take a break from city life and took a flight up to the border area between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay to visit the Iguassu Falls.

It’s very difficult to put the Iguassu Falls into any sort of words, but if just think of pretty much every superlative you can come up with you won’t be far off getting some idea of the absolute grandiose enormity of this incredible natural spectacle. The name ’Iguassu’ is apparently an old native word meaning ’big water’ annd big water there certainly is. We visited the Falls from two sides over two days, the Brazilian side on day one, crossing back into the Argentine side on the second day.

From the Brazilian side you get the wide panoramic views of the Falls that appear on most of the images of Iguassu and from the Argentine side you are able to get up much closer to some of the 275 waterfalls that make up the area. From the Argentine side you really experience the absolute power of the water, with boardwalks constructed so you can walk right across the fall area of the water.

The largest waterfall within Iguassu is known as ‘La Gargantua Del Diablo’ - or ‘Throat of the Devil’ and from the Argentine side there is a boardwalk that takes you out about 1.5km from the riverbank right to the edge of the area where the ground drops away and it really is an incredible experience. You feel strangely compelled to get a dingy and float off the edge, though clearly you wouldn’t stand a chance under the weight of this sort of force!

The whole area is a natural park stretching far wider than just the confines of the river and the falls. 

The surrounding jungles are full of Toucans, Racoons and many other mammals and birds. Quite how they ever get any sleep with the constant thundering of the water going on 24/7 is beyond us though...!

After about 4 days we returned to Buenos Aires, coinciding with Leanne, and the Irish girls’ - Ruth & Sue, arrival in the city. It was good to catch up and exchange stories over a few too many glass of the local tipple, Fernet Branca - slightly medicinal & Jagermeister like in taste. Of course, it also gives a nasty hangover, mixing nicely with the constant boom of the Buenos Aires traffic the following morning… so we made our way over to La Boca - which is only a hop skip and a jump over several piles of dog shit and a few rubbish bags from San Telmo, in search of some respite from the noise.

It’s always nice to return to a place once you have spent a little time getting to know your way around. Wandering around La Boca and the plazas and cobbled streets of San Telmo things were really starting to feel familiar (which is nice for the perpetual hobo’s that we have become!) - while at the same time always discovering another new restaurant, shop, café or bar that we hadn’t noticed before. Defensa street on a sunny afternoon with all it’s shabby charm, independent clothes shops, antique record stores and tiny art galleries feels a lot like the quintessential image of ‘swinging London’ in the ‘60s - naturally with a distinctly Latin flavour all mixed in as well.


We spent the rest of the weekend exploring some more of the night life options around Buenos Aires - managing to mistake a karaoke bar for what we thought looked from the outside like a good club. Some of the BA locals (or Porteno’s as they are known) were actually dancing to karaoke renditions - so we decided to do a group rendition of ‘Sweet Child ‘O Mine’ - the DJ thinking it would be amusing to change the song to Genesis’ ‘I Can’t Dance’ halfway through. Needless to say, our efforts were more than enough to stop the locals dancing anyway!

We topped our Buenos Aires experience off with one last steak meal - and as it turned out we really had saved the best ‘til last. A restaurant called ’La Cabrera’ in the Palermo district. Seven of us went along and under the guidance of the waiter, ordered 4 dishes off the menu which proved to be more than enough food to go around. The steaks were 600g joints of beef, cooked to perfection right through. Obviously all this was washed down with yet more fine red wine, and all came in at about £11 each - bargain!

Next stop - Patagonia...