Buenos Aires

At 10.50am on 24th November we flew to Buenos Aires, arriving at 11am on 24th November - mad shit! We´ve been travelling for a while now and we are typically unprepared and have removed adequate planning from our list of things to do. Thinking that we´d save money by buying a South America Lonely Planet in Argentina, we didn´t get one from Australia and arrived in Buenos Aires guideless and pretty damn clueless on what to do next. Having heard of loads of horror stories about taxi drivers in Latin America, we were pretty nervous about getting to the city centre but we took the risk and jumped in an unmarked cab with a ´porteno´, a local Argentinian. Fortunately we didn´t get mugged, murdered or set up by the police and the taxi driver turned out to be pretty cool and dropped us at a pretty rustic hotel close to the centre of Buenos Aires in the Congresso.

First impressions were mixed. The hotel was a dive but that wasn´t a problem as we were used to that by now. The area that we were staying in was, according to the taxi driver, central of BA but I wasn´t too convinced as it was a bit run down and all I´d read about BA suggested that it was a pretty cosmopolitan city. BA is made up of about 7 main areas, all which are considered to be BA centre and we discovered that the place to be was the micro centre, so on day two, after acquiring a BA guide, we found a hostel called Portal Del Sur which was a lot more central. BA is a massive city and its streets go on for miles, literally. I´m generally good with orientation but BA confused the hell out of me and I got lost a few times, the first time for about 2 hours, in the early hours after using the internet, guideless and to be quite honest shitting my pants. The streets are criss-crossed, like a huge grid with long streets, some pedestrian areas and other streets heaving with traffic. On top of that, there are a few streets which traverse diagonally across all of the others, like ´Diagnol Norte´ and those are the ones that threw me every time.

We were in Buenos Aires for about a week and there isn´t that much to mention. It´s a city, just like any other city, same same but different and all that. There were a number of highlights such as some world class steaks, Pacha, La Cabrera restaurant, Pablo and Juan-Pablo and the Argentinian coach experience. I didn´t take in a lot of the normal cultural delights that most travellers go for but instead opted for soaking up the atmosphere, talking to locals, drinking vast amounts of coffee and trying to get by with the minuscule amount of Spanish I´ve picked up. That was what I was after really after the whirlwind travelling we´d done since Thailand and apart from the amount of money I spent, I would say I really enjoyed BA and I could have stayed there longer.

On some of the highlights..... We met Pablo and Juan-Pablo the second night we were in BA while looking for a club called Tobacco. The club was closed but but over the road there was a little art studio with a couple of heads protruding from the door trying to work out what we were looking for. Pablo owned Club Tobacco and Juan Pablo was the owner of the art studio and was preparing for an exhibition that weekend. Pablo couldn´t have been more Argentinian unless he wore a Che Guevara hat, dribbled like Maradonna and carried a perfect medium, head sized steak in his pocket. He was dark haired, husky voiced, passionate and a bit crazy. At 30 years old, he was 7 years Juan-Pablo´s senior who was from Chilli and had more talents than just about anyone I´ve met before. Juan-Pablo played perfect guitar, sang pretty well, had travelled the world to help film a documentary amongst an array of other activities to support his main love, art. That night turned out to be a memorable one. Our South American friends could speak just about as much English as we could Spanish, but courtesy of my pocket sized dictionary we managed to get by. We got drunk, talked cod shit and listened to Juan-Pablo play guitar and sing into the early hours. We went back to see them a couple of days later and met another few of their friends and it was a pretty good start to our time in BA.

La Cabrera restaurant is supposed to be one of the best in BA and was introduced to us by Kev´s friend Tom who I had never met before. Tom turned out to be a legend and helped us out loads during our stay in BA, he´s best mates with Danny Humphries from back home and you can tell that they´re from the same ilk straight away. We had dinner at La Cabrera with Tom and his colleague Mandy who also turned out to be an absolute legend, a really interesting character who is very well travelled and can keep up with us in the cod shit talking department. The dinner was awesome. Tom just ordered a load of food and top quality vino tinto. For starters we had easily the best chorizo I have ever had accompanied with some fine provoleta amongst some other sundries. The chorizo was different than what you normally get in spain as it was really succulent as opposed to the usually hard-ish version. Provoleta is essentially grilled cheese, hardly healthy but absolutely unreal. For the main course we had the biggest lump of steak you could imagine, not flat like you would get in the UK but a long, thick cut about 2 inches wide, 2 inches across and 10 inches long. Unreal steak up there with the best ever. It might sound a bit strange to list a restaurant visit up there with one of the highlights of the BA trip but the food, atmosphere and company really made it just that. I´m not going to say much about Pacha other than it was a club of the international standard that you´d expect from the Pacha brand. Courtesy of Tom we got full VIP treatment and partied pretty hard before heading back to Tom´s flat afterwards. Awesome night!

After about a week we decided it was time to move on and booked a coach trip to Salta in Northern Argentina as we were planning to cross the border in Bolivia shortly after. BA was an experience. It´s a city, not dissimilar to some of the other cities we´ve visited - it was fast paced, unforgiving, diverse and incomprehensibly massive. You could easily stay there for longer, just as Tom has, but it may or may not be for you. If you´re planning to make a go of living outside the UK then BA could well be somewhere to set up base but that depends on what you want. I guess after coming from the paradise islands in Thailand and the glorious East Coast of Australia it was a bit of a culture shock for me. I like the sunshine, a beach and the sea and it´s difficult to lift your head up out of the BA madness to get a piece of any of those things, even though if you look hard enough you can find them close by. That´s been a theme throughout the rest of my time in South America as I´ve struggled to really find somewhere that I could truly say has captured my heart as much as Thailand. All cities are different, but they´re all very similar too. They´re all made up of concrete, traffic, busy people and carnage. Pretty stressful after a while to be honest.

The coach journey from BA to Salta was about 20 hours, not long enough in my book as the first class coach treatment you can get in Argentina is exceptional. For next to nothing, we booked the best seats possible, ´super cama´ which offered fully reclining leather seats, blanket, pillow and an onslaught of rom coms on the overhead TV. The food was shit but the journey flew by and I didn´t really want to get off. That experience had to be savoured as the first class treatment in Bolivia was sub standard to say the least. Salta was the next port of call and we checked into a pretty rustic hostel close to the bus station and stayed there for a further 5 days or so while we chilled out for a but and planned the next stage of our trip.