Road Trip - Rosario

Public transit no more. We're taking our lives into our own hands. We've rented a car and we're going to Rosario, Cordoba, and Santa Fe - in that order.

Driving in Buenos aires wasn’t something I was looking forward to. It looked like a disaster and it is. The chances of having a fender bender would intuitively be high but the reality is that you don’t see any smash-ups. It is like the drivers are all geniuses at keeping within inches of eachother but not touching. There are no sudden moves – that would cause inevitable failure of the system. Slow and steady veering and an occasional “honk” to say “I’m here beside you” seems to keep everything in control.

We arrived into Rosario within around 4 hours. It likely should have been shorter but we took a “rosario” turn-off from the highway (autopista) and ended up on slow two lane country roads for at least an hour. Incidently this isn's the first time we've done this. We did this before when we were in Germany last spring by accident. We knew, kind of, that we were on the right highway to Mainz but we saw an exit sign for Mainz on it that said to turn off. So we did. It went through every tiny crap German town on an exhausting, not so wonderful snake through the country side. Indeed, it got us all the way to Mainz…..at about 50km/hour. If we had stayed on the Autobahn like our maps told us, we would have shaved three hours off the trip. This was a repeat. And a treacherous one at that. The high way had no shoulder and many slow trucks.

Many of the large trucks down to the little vans had stickers on their back that showed the permitted speed they could travel at. So, when you got behind a huge truck with an “80” sticker, there was usually a long line behind him of potential passers. What exacerbated this was that someone in their shit car with a death wish would just pass the whole line of cars as if you weren’t waiting to pass anyway. So, not only did you have to deal with timing up your pass, you had to continually shoulder check that someone wasn’t asininely passing you too!It turns out that driving in Rosario is a game....of cat and mouse. In the city centre, where it's all on a gridwork, almost all intersections are unmarked. As you approach an intersection, you look both ways and if you are closer to the intersection than anybody else, you gun it and bolt through. There's no room for caution. It's a game of dare you had better not lose.

The big highlights of Rosario include the monument to the Argentinian flag and the beach. The monument is quite startling - huge and beautifully architected. It’s quite a thing to see and, if you take the elevator to the top, you get a great view of the city.






The other thing to do, is the beach. We started with a cloudy day our second day, so we tried to see the few museums in the city. However, they were all closed till the end of February….just because. The weather did however change it’s mind and we got a beautiful sunny afternoon. We went to the pay beach; it was 4 pesos to get in and it was a nice place. We were nearly the first to arrive at the beach as it was a weekday and likely people had put the idea of going to the beach out of their minds. I can only imagine what the place is like on a crowded day. I think we may have had the nicest day possible.























The sun got very hot and even though we had applied plenty of sunscreen earlier, I ended up burnt to a crisp. I hadn’t got burnt yet so it was bound to happen. You don’t see it coming. Well, I guess you do if you take 2 seconds to think about it....... but hey, we're on holidays, no thinking!





























Rosario was overall a nice place but not because of any one thing. The beach was nice but the water was muddy, the flag monument was pretty but oddly located and really only architecturally interesting, and the main shopping pedestrian mall was just like any other one. However, I think we missed one major part of Rosario- the night life. It could be a really fun place to party and meet people. We didn't. Unfortunately, you can only fit in so much. It reminds you that every city tends to have something to set it apart. Why? I guess it has to do with identity just as in people. If we were all the same, we wouldn't like it very much. In fact, I would like myself as much as I like anyone else. In terms of survival of the fittest, that wouldn't really work would it? It would be kind of a communist setup.

I think Rosario used to be an important port city of some sort. Perhaps it still is. We saw many large ships sailing up river past the beach. These were massive boats and there were ones docked at the port near the Rosario city centre.

We didn't really get anything here except a tan at the beach. But what a nice beach day we had!


The monument almost takes your breath away. Being in Argentina, you are always surprised by something. Juxtaposition is the only adjective one needs. Even in the first photo below, you can see an amazing monument with perfect lines and finish yet it is overlooked by rather drab and common apartment buildings. That said, it was a quiet day the day we went there and one couldn't help but feel the presence of grandeur.

This was taken from the top of the tower. One picture is a wide,
wide angle and the other is a zoom all the way across the River.

One last thing that amazed us was the odd coupling of certain foods. The culinary wonder below is a base of breaded fried pork overlain with an assemblage of cream corn, pickled leak, canned pineapple & peach, topped with a scatter of maraschino cherries and sauce of a thousand islands. Even more amazing is that is is called the Papakea. This has special relevance to me as it was the name of the the complex in which my grandparents owned a condo in Hawaii. Now, Papakea is not a common word so I can't even guess where this plate got it's name.