Corrupt Cops and Defiled Corpses

As all things must come to an end, we finished our trip by spending a week and a bit in the capital, Buenos Aires, a metropolis of roughly three times the population of New Zealand. So this will be our last blog posting, written from the grey drizzley climes of Vancouver where we are staying with my cousin Glyn and currently trying to find jobs and set up a new life.

Needless to say we were pretty busy during our time here exploring the city and getting used to the extreme nocturnal time frame of the Portenyos (folk from Buenos Aires). Our first stop was the Evita Museum, set in a former halfway home that she had set up in a rather plush part of town. On our way we passed the botanical gardens complete with it's large population of contented stray cats which were cared for by the local community, there were little shelters and piles of cat biscuits spread throughout the park. Having not seen either the musical (I cant stand Lloyd Weber) or the movie, neither of us had much idea of what Evita Peron had done or why she was particularly famous, so the museum was an eye opener in terms of the politics of the time, all the social programs she set up, and the wierd corpse napping and defilement of her body after she had died of cancer.

Later in the week we visited the Recoleta Cemetery, which sounds rather morbid but was actually pretty cool. It is basically a small city of crypts for the elite, famous and historical of Buenos Aires dating back to the early days of the city's history. It is filled with crypts in various states, from the brand new which resembled a Prada-ish high fashion store to the deteriorating plaster and bare brick of the neglected. Everywhere there were ornate carvings, grieving marble statues and intricate stained glass messiahs. The key attraction was Evita's grave which was surrounded by punters trying to get a sentimental photo of her modest crypt battling with the nosy types who kept getting in the way by peering in through the heavily tinted glass to try and spy the coffin itself. I was more fascinated by all the gothic carvings and statues, and spent most of my time wishing I was a better photographer with a better camera.

A true South American experience that we had foolishly put off until the end of our trip was to see a live football (soccer) match. When we arrived we started asking how we might get tickets to the upcoming Boca Juniors (one of BA's top club sides) home game but we were consistently told we would need to join a tour group because; A: it wasn't safe for tourists to go to the rowdy games by themselves and B: because there was no way we could get tickets otherwise. These tour group tickets were typically around five times the original price of a ticket, and who needs a guide at a football match anyway? So we figured we would try and buy tickets at the gate on the day with some other folk from our hostel. By the time we finally found the ticket booth we learned that we had just missed out on gate sale tickets and after wandering around hopelessly trying to find a nearby pub that showed the game we thought we may as well try our luck with the dodgy scalpers in the streets surrounding the stadium. We asked a guy who appeared to be quite drunk and who promised us he had tickets and we began to follow him towards the stadium. He soon got "nabbed" by a cop and scarpered while the cop told us of the dangers of buying fake tickets from scalpers. The cop, who was obviously in on it from the start, then offered to sneak us into the game for a price. He handed us dodgy tickets and then led us through all the ticket checks to the turnstile where the ticket guy grabbed our dodgy tickets and helped us jump over the turnstile. We were a few minutes late to the match and stuck right in the "dangerous" supporters zone but we had made it in! The atmosphere of the game was fantastic especially when Boca took the early lead, the stadium was filled with chants and shaking fists but it never even came close to becoming violent or dangerous. Boca eventually lost 2-1 to Estudiantes and the crowd left feeling disappointed, apart from us because we had a good story to tell...

The area surrounding La Boca is meant to be also quite dangerous but also has a quaint arty, working class, area of tango bars and art stalls. Unfortunately I think we arrived there a decade too late because it had been converted into some kind of tourist hell. Although the few streets of the caminito were very colourful, it was packed with naive, middle aged tourists with shorts, sandles and expensive cameras and annoying street hawkers trying out their english and trying to annoy you into going to their restaurants. Outside these few streets (in the "dangerous" working class areas) the streets reverted to a normal city setting. About the only genuine part of this spot was the pungent smell eminating from the 100 year old stagnant water of the old harbour.

The highlight of Buenos Aires for me was our trip to the School of Trapeze Art for a, aerial theatre show that we had seen advertised. Its a little difficult to describe and we weren't able to take any photos but this was possibly one of the coolest shows I have ever seen. The show was done almost entirely with UV light effects and with the performers clad all in black. This took the focus of the show away from amazing acrobatic tricks that the performers were doing and blended to whole thing into one great spectacle. While we sat back in couches below the action, there were dayglo pois and people abseiling down dayglo sheets and crazy visual effects made simply with a huge curtain of fabric. It was all very Cirque du Soleil and very, very cool.

For Tessa the highlight was the weekend designers fair that we stumbled across in the centre of Palermo. Essentially they set up stores with spaces for individual clothing designers to exhibit and sell their wares. Even the bars in the area clear out their dancefloors to pack the place out with racks and racks of trendy, cheap clothes. We were both whipped into a strange shopping frenzy by this discovery and jostled our way through the packed out fair to pick through the endless racks of cheap designer clothes. Tessa says "it had clothes". Insightful...

The central area of town was worth a look around. We walked past the roman parthenon style engineering school and found ourselves at the pink house, the argentine presidential palace. Nearby was the moshpit of Av. Florida, the main shopping street which was so crammed with streams of people that we had to start adopting road rules just to get through the crowd. We wandered up to the congress building past the monolithic obelisco. Outside the congress buildings were packs of professional dog walkers wrangling handfuls of tetchy hounds.

One french guy we met happened to have spent the last three years living in Wellington, just around the corner from our old place in Newtown, and spent a month working at Tessa's old work!

We met some great folk at our hostel and went out on the town in San Telmo on a few occasions. We went out for parillada and wine with our new found crew, and I foolishly ordered the ribs which turned out to be much much bigger than my head. This sheer amount of meat wrote me off for the rest of the night and put me on a week long meat detox but Tessa kept partying till the not-so-wee-hours. We also found a cool jazz bar with delicious platters not far from our hostel which had a live band every night and by the end of the week we were pretty much regulars.

But just as we were getting settled into the groove and grind of the life of a traveller in Buenos Aires, the time came for our flight out to Canada. We were both excited to be starting the next chapter (and to not have to pack our bags again for another arduous bus ride) and also a bit sad that our adventure had come to end...

SO this brings to an end to our story. The blog comes to an end here, I hope you've all enjoyed reading it, your comments and emails have kept it going. I could keep writing about us settling into normal boring lives here in Vancouver but that just wouldn't be as much fun, would it? Sleep tight and don't have too many nightmares about lightning strikes, giant condors, creepy shaman and burning roadblocks. Thanks for joining us through the blogging medium on our adventure. If you want to keep in touch you can reach us through facebook or post a comment on the blog and I'll get back to you.

That is all.

Surreal

With a day of bus riding, Wilson celebrated his birthday in style. We had planned to catch up with Hannes, a guy we met in Cordoba, at Iguazu so we quickly legged it there to meet him only to find he couldn´t make it. Once we arrived in Iguazu we went out for "parillada" (argentine barbeque) and wine at a fancy restaurant in town. The meat fest was delicious and included all the usual goodies like steaks, blood sausage and intenstines as well as a few unidentified parts that we thought may well be cow anus.

Iguazu is located in the most northern point of Argentina, wedged in between the borders of Paraguay and Brazil. Its famous entirely for the enormous waterfalls. After spending a day relaxing by the pool at our hostel, we got up early hell bent on exploring the trails and tracks around the falls.

Our day turned out to be remarkably surreal in many ways. We were regretting our sunny day by the pool as the dark clouds were increasingly ominous but we hoped that it would clear up. All hopes were dashed shortly after our arrival at the falls park by multiple rolls of deep booming thunder. The good thing about this was though that the weather was keeping the crowds away and for a short time in morning we made the most of exploring the complex with barely another soul in sight. The place felt deserted but it meant that the birds were out in numbers and we saw a wild Toucan up close.

The falls were absolutely astounding. The huge volume of crashing water is spread across hundreds of falls dropping onto plateaus or pounding straight down the 60m drop. Despite the grey clouds I went crazy taking panoramic shots to try and capture the beautiful scenes. As the rain began to spit down we took the boat over to the island between the two main sections of falls only to find the island was chock full of birds of prey. There were dozens in almost every tree eyeing us up and wondering if we were going to die soon and become their lunch. Very spooky.

It was shortly after this that the inevitable happened and the heavens opened completely and let loose an intense tropical downpour. We were almost blasted into the river as we headed along the catwalk towards the enormous Garganta del Diablo and when we arrived we could barely differentiate clouds from waterfall spray. Many of the other tourists wihtout jackets, bought matching white plastic rain ponchos and it seemed as though the place had been invaded by laboratory scientists. The last bizarre thing that happened this day was, as we were soaked and freezing and on our way home to the hostel, we ran into some guys we know from uni, Dave and Spud. After a massive double take we found out they were travelling with four other kiwis around latin america and would also be heading to Canada afterwards... coincidence huh? This encounter also doubled the number of other New Zealanders we have seen on our trip.

The next day we went back to the falls to see what it was like when we weren´t facing a waterblaster. The weather was fantastic and accordingly the tourist hordes were back in full force. The worst thing about guided tours is that all these people who would normally move around to different parts of the park at different paces are all stuck in one place at one time and we got stuck right in the middle of three of them! The guide always walks around with a coloured umbrella and everyone in their party has a little name tag with their guides name, so there were all these old men walking around with name badges saying "Shirley". It was pretty much tourist hell while we were stuck there.

But we managed to get away from the rude, pushing, thronging crowds and found some cracking views of the waterfalls. On the complex of boardwalks it was possible to get really close to the falls and feel the spray and watch the birds flying in and out of the cliffs.

Losing our Memory

Awright, so we changed scene completely from the idyllic lakes of northern Patagonia for the sunny spring vibe of Rosario, which is a few hours west of Buenos Aires. This only took 26 hours of bus travel, the longest haul of our trip. What I should clear up now is that there are no photos of Rosario as we foolishly left the memory card at the hostel when we left! Rubbish eh?

Anyway, I´ll try and describe it as best I can and maybe you´ll be able to picture it. We happened to arrive on the national "Day of the Student", and being a beautifully sunny Sunday afternoon, the riverfront park area, which stretched for miles along the length of the city, was packed with around 20,000 students sipping maté, shooting the breeze and just generally hanging out and enjoying the weather. This seemed like a pretty good idea to us so we pulled up a patch of grass and soaked up the vibe. We spent the next few days exploring the city on bikes, heading to the sandy river beaches, and shopping for some low-crotch, alladin-type, babucha/hammer pants for Tessa.

Another overnight bus only just brought us to Resistencia in the north (we very almost missed our stop!). We found ourselves in the poorest place we had yet visited in Argentina, (the bus terminal was located next to a sprawling shanty town) and also certainly the least touristy. The folk at the tourist office seemed to think it a real treat to actually get to talk to some tourists and people were constantly asking us where we were from. One kid of about 17 stopped us in the street to try and sell us something or get us to sign up to something; the conversation went a little like this:

Kid: Where are you from?
Us: New Zealand
(Kids eyes get real big and a look of sheer confusion crosses his face)
Kid: What?
Us: New Zealand. It´s a country in the southern hemisphere, near Australia.
Kid: What?
Us: New Zealand. Like the All Blacks and rugby (this often works in these sorts of situations in Argentina)
Kid: I... I don´t understand.
Us: New Zealand. Its a country.
Kid: I don´t... I don´t understand. (He´s getting a little panicky at this stage)
Us: Maybe you can look it up on a map. (And we left it at that)

So Resistencia decided one day that it would be the sculpture capital of Argentina. Its not as though there is a thriving community of sculpturers and artists in Resistencia, they had to get them in from other parts of the country, but its pretty cool all the same. Of the 530 sculptures dotted around the city on every street corner, park, and median strip, we managed to see around 100 of them. They range from tiny wee brass figures on podiums nestled behind trees on the footpath to giant monstrosities that are lit up at night. It definately added some interest to an otherwise fairly quiet town.

From Resistencia we went for a short trip over the river to its twin city, Corrientes. We were a little curious to see what the town was like after reading a particularly unprofessional outburst in the lonely planet guide book that went something along the lines of "F*ck Corrientes!" It was actually a really nice town with a great waterfront area along the river which was busy with people sipping maté, walking dogs and enjoying the sunshine. We arrived at the bridge just in time to catch the very pretty sunset.

We walked into town for some dinner and found out why Resistencia was such a sleepy town. All the young people go to Corrientes and on a Friday night they invade the centre of town. It was a madhouse, we had to try and push our way through hoardes of teenagers loitering about and filling all the restaurant tables to drink soft drinks. After pushing and shoving our way around for an hour, we hadn´t found a single decent place to eat so we gave up on the madness and settled for the quiet life of Resistencia.