Some Excursions from Buenos Aires

Monday, November 06, 2023
San Telmo, Buenos Aires, Argentina
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.
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