Argentina 2017

After a very comfortable direct flight to Buenos Aires with Air NZ, we were transferred to our lovely hotel in the Recoleta area. The next day we enjoyed a morning city tour with many highlights of the city. I find this is a great way to orientate myself with a new city. First stop was the foreshore where there is an amazing moving sculpture called “Floralis Generico”. At 23m tall, it’s high technology system makes each of the petals (3500 kgs) open with the first sunlight and close at sunset. We drove past key architectural buildings and stopped in at some of them. The tour guide gave us a very interesting and detailed history of the city. We drove to the vibrant and colourful area of La Boca where we enjoyed some traditional food and explored the neighbourhood by foot. La Boca (“mouth” in Spanish) was once quite literally the mouth of Buenos Aires. It's located on what used to be the city's biggest port, where products, goods, and immigrants arrived by the shipload in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We even saw an artist starting to paint a new colourful mural on a building wall.

The afternoon was spent exploring the area from our hotel and in the evening we enjoyed delicious local food at an outdoor restaurant nearby.

The following day we went to the Recoleta Cemetery. This covers an area of 14 acres and has nearly 4700 graves/mausoleums. It is most famous for having the burial site of Eva Peron but also has presidents of Argentina, some Nobel Prize winners, a granddaughter of Napoleon and other well-known people. At the entrance we were approached by an independent guide who we then paid to show us around the place. I really recommend doing this. Had we just walked around on our own we would have missed so much interesting history of the various mausoleums we passed. The mausoleums were so varied in construction and very spectacular. We spent nearly 2 hours there before having lunch at an outdoor restaurant in the park and then walking through the city to visit the Modern Art Museum as well as an Art Gallery where there was an original Freda Carlo painting. Later, after another local dinner, we were very glad to rest after having walked nearly 10+ kilometres over the course of the day.

The following day we went down to the harbour and spent a couple of hours walking along the river looking at the historic boats and the architecturally famous “De La Mujer” bridge (Mother Bridge). We then walked to the Buquebus ferry terminal to catch the ferry for our daytrip to Colonia, Uruguay. The ferry trip was 1 ¼ hours each way. On arrival in Colonia we were taken on a tour of the area and then left to enjoy walking around the historic old town of Colonia for a few hours before catching the ferry back to Buenos Aires. Colonia is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is definitely a must-do as a day trip from Buenos Aires.

After a very early start the next day as we caught a domestic flight to Iguazu where we spent the next few days. On arrival we were taken to our gorgeous hotel overlooking the river junction of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina. We then travelled across the border to Brazil (going through border control) to visit the Brazilian side of Iguazu Falls. The Iguazu Falls flow between Argentina and Brazil and each side has a very different panorama and it is a must to see both sides. In a spontaneous decision on our way to walk the first trails, we opted to have a ½ hour helicopter flight over the area including a nearby hydro dam and the Falls. I strongly recommend this as it was a truly amazing experience. To see the Iguazu Falls from the air was such an amazing perspective before walking both sides of it. We later returned to the town of Iguazu and enjoyed a dinner at a local restaurant.

The following day we travelled to the Argentinian side of the Falls. Our day included walking trails to the head of the Falls – called The Devil’s Gate, travelled on a small railway to join a few different walking tracks to view different perspectives of the Falls, plus we went on a boat trip that went up part of the river and even went under one of the Falls. While not the biggest (single) waterfall in the world, Iguazu Falls combined waterfalls collectively make it the largest waterfall in the world. Depending on the rainfall in the area, there can be over 300+ waterfalls at any one time.

The following day we flew back to Buenos Aires to stay another couple of days before leaving for home. We had a daytrip to the Tigre Delta – a coach trip to Tigre, stopping off at a number of places along the way, free time and lunch in Tigre, and finishing the day with a boat trip that passed a number of amazing holiday homes on small islands and then travelled back down the delta (largest in the world) back to Buenos Aires. Overall, a wonderful trip with a good mix of urban and nature experiences.

NB: From personal experience, choose your accommodation wisely. Like a number of big cities worldwide, the location of your hotel is really important for personal safety. Our last 2 days were at a quite famous hotel in the 1980’s in a different part of the city to our first accommodation. While the main street of our hotel was reasonably safe with a lot of people around, on the first occasion we ventured down one of the side streets we felt quite unsafe and quickly returned to the main street and our hotel.