Tigre

Tigre shouldn’t mean tiger, it should mean “place of stark contrast to surrounding area”.

To go there, you hop a train from Retiro station at the north end of downtown in Buenos Aires. It is a 50 min ride and for some insane reason, only costs 1 peso each. It’s an inadequate fee for an air-conditioned spacious train. But in my experience everywhere in the world except English speaking countries have public transit systems are just that, public and therefore publicly funded. Nominal fees apply.

We purchased our first BA Herald. An English paper that is available at all news stands. Apparently at one time there were as many as seven English newspapers. A sign of how things change. The eventual decline of the British due to turbulence in argentine politics and economy followed by war in the Falkland Islands has reduced English presence to just a pequena (small) amount.




Tigre is built on a large delta, an example of which is in the picutre here, and is the oaisis for local cottage faring Buenos Airians. This picture doesn't relaly show the volume of canals that exist at Tigre but gives you the right idea.



The place is very clean and well kept compared to it’s adjacent city. The canal running through town is picturesque and reminded us of a larger version of Henley on Thames in England.



There were boats for tourists to take a canal tour and many smaller boats for individuals. We took a boat ride through the canals to discover that there were all sorts of rowing clubs and resorts and cottages on the water.







The pace was teeming even on a “holiday” (nothing was open in BA even the McDonalds were closed). There was even a theme park that was the size of the Stampede midway. It was huge and every corner was packed with rides. We didn’t go to the theme park, it was closed, but the boat tour circled part of it giving us a pretty good idea of the size of the place. I think if our friends had been with us in BA and we had a full day to go back, we would have gone to the theme park.





It turned out to be a pleasant New Year’s Eve day. We returned to spend the night, exhausted, in our little apartment enjoying our own champagne and sitting on our balcony. The fireworks were a sight. I think there are official fireworks we couldn’t see as there were some tremendously loud explosions but the neighbors all did their own shows. Every minute for an hour to 1:00am, there was some sort of local explosions lighting the sky. These weren’t your corner store variety fireworks (though they were sold at the corner store which I can’t believe), these were fireworks that cleared 10 storey buildings with massive shows of light. There must be many “visitors” to the hospitals on those nights. It’s a bit of a wild culture down here. You can see it in the protests that occur daily in some part of the city regarding employment, politics, health, or any minor issue that a few people can get worked up about. People here are very passionate. Even the national drink mate, is extremely personal, or at least used to be. Over time, it has moved out of the strict confines of close family and the home to the security desk at the mall or individuals sitting at a park bench. You see it everywhere and, especially when we were in Colonia, they all had it with them everywhere they went. In the big city of BA, it’s far less common to see people walking with their thermos clutched between their arm and their chest with a gourd in their hand. But as you leave the “sophistication” of the city, you get into the rural culture where the mate is trump. We wouldn’t be allowed to bring our own beer for instance into a restaurant but no one would stop you from bringing your mate. It isn’t available on any menu. Yet, at home, our coffee, which plays a similar role, is available everywhere.

Jardín Zoológico

Our three year wedding anniversary. We spent the afternoon at the Jardín Zoológico, the majority of the time spent feeling bad for the poor upkeep of the large mammal exhibits. At the turn of the century, the zoo grounds were palatial in building design. These structures remain, but their age hasn’t been hidden. In the pens, the animals looked bored stiff and hot. The saddest was the polar bear, which had a small pool not big enough to swim even a lap in. The zoo had a fun petting zoo and the smaller ungulates looked quite happy to eat the pellets you could buy to feed them.



The feeding did persist to other types of animals all over the zoo and sparks a debate. On one side, the provided food is controlled for quality and content suggesting it is probably better than the potato chips that would otherwise be thrown at the animals. On the other hand, people just keep buying and feeding more and more food unabated. For the larger animals, this likely isn’t a problem but the food, sold in giant buckets, is fed to everything from otters to birds. I have a hard time believing that their diets are adequately controlled by this. It’s all just shades of gray anyway. We kill and eat animal everyday without concern so, considering the alternative, zoo’s are pretty good places.












This goat floored me. He just kept standing on top of the log.

Dear, I need to buy some skin cream at the mall....you need anything?

The zoo had a dragon theme as an exhibit. I think it refered to mythical animals in contrast to the real animals at the zoo. The interesting thing was that they contrasted the incarnations of dragons throughout all different societies. It was really neat seeing the ways dragons were portrayed around the world.

Oops! a little too close! It didn't hurt, don't worry.

Opera del Pampa

We departed Colonia somewhat reluctantly as the weather had determined it was time for us to go. There wasn’t much to do in the rain so we went back to Buenos Aires. This time, we used a ferry service called Colonia Express, which was joyously lacking the lineups and craziness of the Buquebus. Bizarrely, we did not go through any customs and just had to have some of our luggage scanned. So, instead of wandering around Colonia in the rain, we shopped in trendy Palmero in Buenos Aires, which is a district kind of like the Kensington area in Calgary, only way bigger but not any cooler (I think Kensington is nicer).

We only have so many free nights in BA and so we’re making efforts to see things both day and night usually reserving the mornings to email and sitting by the pool. So, we booked seats at Opera del Pampa in the evening. The show was located at La Rural, an exhibition site long used for rich landowners to show and sell cattle. The grounds are impressively large and showcase the wealth that once drove the economy of Argentina to being one of the richest countries in the world.

We walked to the grounds in our rather dressed-up attire strutting our stuff through some of the slightly shadier streets in our neighborhood. It started with a social style mingle before the show with opportunities for pictures and touring the exhibits and booths while being entertained with wine and empanadas.

The show itself was held in a large outdoor stadium with seating on either side of a large ring and a stage on one end.

Opera del Pampa is about the history of Buenos Aires and Argentina, performed with narration and music, en espanol. Fortunately, we had studied some of the history ourselves and could loosely follow). There are dancers and singers and actors but the riders and their horses steal the show. Their skills are impressive. The riders re-enact battle scenes with cavalry charges that, with a little relaxing of the mind, take you away from your seat in the stands and place scarily in the middle of it all.

One scene depicted a group of Indians seeing soldiers off in the distance. One rider, while still on his horse, had it gently lower it’s backside down to the ground and slowly work its way in a deft motion eventually lying on its side on the ground with the “Indian” crouching beside it. This was what I thought, an astounding maneuver with a horse I had never seen before.

Theatrics on the stage.



A little too much dancing.



Soldiers on teh charge!!!



The old west....Argentina style.

At the end, there was a huge parilla barbeque that we wished we had attended. The big dinner after the show was an option but seeing as how we were uncertain about what the show was going to ammount, we erroniously opted against it. The thing we learned from this is that when you are on holiday in a difficult and expensive place to get to, you should opt in for everything you can.

Voyage to Colonia

The trip to Colonia started well. We were up fairly early, caught a cab within seconds, and had a leisurely ride to the Buquebus ferry terminal. However, the quick part finished then and there. After a few minutes in one non-descript line, it appeared we needed to be in the long, long line over there.

We got there at 8:30am. The lineup wasn’t that long, maybe 50 people? To cut to the chase and not make you wait while reading this. We spent over an hour just to get our tickets for the 10:00 ferry.

Time check 9:45. We’re now in line to pay.

Time check 9:55. We’re now in line to check bags.

Time check 10:05 (we should have missed the ferry) We walk up the stairs to what we think will be the boarding ramps and nope, it’s the impossibly long lines for customs to Uruguay, or maybe it’s actually customs to leave Argentina. We’ll never know.

At the start of all of this standing in line business, we heard a fellow with an Irish accent talking in front of us. However, he had Air Canada tags on his bags. Turns out he lives in Toronto and has spent a ton of time in Calgary. He’s in the chemical supply business selling test tubes and what not. And I guess they need those everywhere. We passed the time discussing world politics, Buenos Aires, Argentina…..

Finally we set foot on the ferry, already wearied from our journey through Argentine logistics. The ferry left around 11:00 and took about 3 hours to reach Colonia - the last long part of our trip. The other ferries that were no longer available only take 1 hour….

Colonia is a pretty little town on the edge of the Rio de Plata. It was built by the Portuguese to spy on the comings-and-goings of the Spanish in Buenos Aires, circa 1700. The port is a World Heritage site, with cobble streets and stone-work buildings sloping down to the water. We enjoyed the peace and quiet of a sleepy town that looked lost in the past. Old, rusted out antique trucks and cars were still rambling down the street right next to the horses and buggies hauling wood and other things. Oddly though, a few short blocks from this old centre, was a newer shopping mall and other luxuries of the present. We had a memorable dinner at a quirky little restraint called “El Drugstore” – though it didn’t resemble one, it may have been one?

The next day, we were intending on going for a horseback ride and had even placed a deposit the day before but alas, it was raining fairly substantially and the weather report off the internet didn’t look good. We still went up to the place we booked the excursion because even if we weren’t going out, we still needed our deposit back. We decided to bum around a bit and wait and see what happened. Another of our plans – renting a scooter was washed away by the rain as well. It eventually started to clear and we ended up going anyway. We were picked up by a truck with a middle aged man and his dog which of course, reminded Brooke of Kula. We rode on benches built into the back of the truck which gave us a great but rather unsafe view of Colonia.. The operation was pretty down scaled. I think it was a fellow who owned just a few horses and had his kids guide a few tours here and there. The whole thing was 700 Uruguayan pesos each and at 20 to 1 that’s only 35 bucks. The kids took us on a ride through the trees zig-zaging around in semi parallel tracks in order to elongate the ride. It was pretty fun once we hit the beach. The horses were very responsive and wanted to run at a moments notice. We wondered if we might need this after passing a man camping by the beach polishing his rifle. It all worked out to be the best horse ride we’ve ever done together….the only horse ride we’ve done together.