The weather forecast finally had 2 days of good weather—warm
and sunny—for the weekend and we decided to take advantage of it. On Saturday Morning, we headed over to
Uruguay, to Colonia del Sacramento, for the day. We took an Uber and caught the 8:30 ferry
down near Puerto Madero for the 52 Km crossing of the Rio de la Plata. The actual crossing is only just over an
hour, but the entire process takes about 3 hours, with all the queuing,
immigration and customs checks. But it
was a very smooth ride, for which Carol was very grateful.
Colonia is a nice little town. As its name would suggest, it is very
colonial in its style, in contrast to Buenos Aires, which had most vestiges of
its Spanish colonial past stripped by a President in the late 19th
century, to be replaced by all things French.
There is a nice Old Town on the waterfront in Colonia, with lots of bars
and restaurants, a lighthouse and lots of interesting buildings. It takes a little getting used to, when looking
out at the water, that it is very, very brown—not even a hint of blue, even on
a bright blue-sky day. We just wandered
around through the old town and a bit of the “downtown” area, which was not
terribly interesting, except for the very tree-lined streets.
At “A La Pipetua”, we had a very good lunch
of seafood paella and “bif de chorizo”, the favourite cut of steak from Buenos
Aires (not to be confused with chorizo, which is the pork sausage, which is also
very popular). Of course, we got sticker
shock with the price of lunch—everything is MUCH more expensive in Uruguay, but
still not quite up to Toronto prices.
It’s just that Argentina is so cheap!
Later, we lay on the grass by the water for a while, just soaking up the
warm sunshine, and then finally wandered back over to the ferry terminal to
catch the 6:00 ferry back to BA.
For Sunday, we booked a tour through GetYourGuide to visit
the Tigre Delta, north of Buenos Aires city, but in Buenos Aires Province. The delta is a maze of small islands where
the Rio Parana meets Rio de la Plata, connected by a series of large and small
channels, and is only accessible by water.
There are about 20,000 residents there, and there are bus and taxi boats,
ambulance boats, police boats, supermarket boats, garbage boats and also the
residents’ own boats plying the channels among the islands. The delta is also a popular weekend getaway
spot in the summer for porteños, the name for
Buenos Aires City residents. There are
lots of rental properties of all shapes and sizes, as well as recreos, which
are communal recreational properties, generally with cabins, a beach,
restaurant, pool, etc.. We walked down
to Puerto Madero again, to meet at the Hilton Hotel for our tour, which left by
boat from the edge of Puerto Madero and cruised north along the coast of Rio de
la Plata, giving an impressive view of just how massive and sprawling Buenos
Aires really is!
We then cruised through
the delta for a while before landing in Tigre City, on the mainland, which is a
huge contrast to the delta. Tigre is a
very bustling tourist town and the Puerto de Frutos (what was originally a
marketplace for citrus, which was one of the main crops of the area, but is now
a huge tourist market) was packed on this beautiful Sunday afternoon. We grabbed a bite to eat (empanadas) at one
of the several big rowing clubs in town.
Rowing and paddling are huge
sports in this area and you see people rowing and paddling everywhere in the
channels of the delta.
We stopped in our
small bus to see a couple of more sights in Tigre and then headed back via
highway in the bus and got dropped off in San Telmo near the far end of Defensa
street, which is the next street over from Bolivar, our street, but is home to
the Sunday Street Market in San Telmo, which we had somehow missed when we arrived
the previous Sunday (we had been up for more than 24 hours!). Basically, the whole street, 1.3 km, is closed
to traffic and is one big market. So we
walked most of it as we made our way back to our place. We tried to go back to Peron Peron Vivo, a
couple of doors away, for dinner, but they weren’t open for dinner, so we went
the other way, to a very local place, Nueva Esperanza, and had some decent, but
not great, bif de chorizo. Monday, we
are off to Puerto Iguazu to see the falls.
2025-02-08