Category: Argentina

Just outside of the Buenos Aires megapolis, an area of 13 million inhabitants, the endless apartment buildings disappear. So does the Parisian architecture, the ice cream shops, the fancy stores. It’s all replaced with endless open space, the land of the gauchos. Or at least it used to be. Now it’s not, because as we learned on our “Dia del Campo,” or day trip to an estancia in the pampas, there are no more gauchos in the country. Apparently Argentinian president Sarmiento decided that all the gauchos were lazy good-for-nothings and pretty much killed them all off. Not a nice thing for him to do. But in the end maybe a good business move.

Because as we all know real cowboys don’t really care for city folk, aren’t very civilized, and don’t exactly consider themselves tourist attractions. If they were still roaming the pampas, rounding up (or stealing, depends on who you talk to) cattle and living their freestyling lives, there wouldn’t be a place for bus loads of tourists to go and pretend to be cowboys for a day. And that my friends would be a true shame.

On our BA Free Tour of Recoleta (just as excellent as the Center Tour), our guide Sol asked us what the most touristy thing we’d done in BA was, and I didn’t even have to think two seconds before responding “Dia del Campo.” It involved a tour bus, a guide that spoke into a microphone, a song and dance show, a 20-minute horse ride…

We had wanted to get out of the city and experience a bit of the country life, but we didn’t have the time to go too far from the city or to stay for an extended period on an estancia, so we did what millions of BA tourists do–a day trip to an estancia wehre they pretty much play cowboy. It was cheesy. It was silly. I wouldn’t particularly recommend it. But, you know what? I had fun anyways. The empanadas were delicious. The lunch was abundant. The horses were friendly. The riders were skilled. The other guests were friendly and fun. And watching Jeff and my parents dance (though not together) was just plain awesome.

Since the Argentinian economic collapse of 2001, Buenos Aires has had a reputation as a great bargain for travelers. Despite the fact that eight years have passed since the collapse, the reputation has remained, though the reality of the situation is that Buenos Aires is no longer the bargain basement of cities. The collapse, while sending large numbers of the country’s citizens plummetting into poverty, acted as a calling card for millions of tourists…and the money they brought with them. As a result, the low prices slowly began to climb as hotels and restaurants filled. Now, prices are no longer as jawdroppingly low as they once were. A double room at a hostel will set you back at least $20 a person and a double at a decent hotel is hard to find below $70. Dinner is likely to cost about $10. And tango shows can cost as much as a Las Vegas or Broadway show.

But before all you budget travelers cross Buenos Aires from the list, let me tell you that it’s really still quite the great deal. Dinner might be $10, but you’ll get a really amazing (and huge!) steak (or two!) for that bit of dinero. Hostels and hotels might not be cheap, but if you’re staying for at least a week, you can rent an entire apartment for two people for about $35 dollars per night. And as for things to do, many of the city’s highlights are free or inexpensive. In an earlier post, I highlighted the Free BA Tours, but that’s just the beginning.

You could also spend a day at the Hipodromo, as we did on our first Monday in town. As a Kentucky native, horse racing is in my blood, and with my parents in town, I couldn’t pass up a chance for us to see the ponies run in a different country. We found that admission to the track, which was conveniently located in the Palermo neighborhood (where our apartment was), was free, and bets could be placed for as little as one peso (about 28 U.S. cents). Though I’m not quite sure we ever figured out exactly how to read the board, and though the Hipodromo doesn’t hold a candle up to Churchill Downs, we still had a great time, cheering on our picks while standing so close to the track that we probably could have reached out and touched the horses. Only two things could have made it better: 1) A winning bet and 2) Racing hippos.

A fun and inexpensive way to fill another day is with a trip to Tigre, the delta town just 35 kilometers from Buenos Aires. It’s easily reached via commuter train, with a roundtrip ticket costing a whopping 2.70 pesos. Once there, you can check out the fruit market (though go early, because much of it shuts down before its posted closing time of 6 p.m.) and take a stroll along the river, past fancy rowing clubs, nice houses, and plenty of cafes and restaurants. Of course, to really experience the delta you need to hop abroad a boat. Don’t worry, you won’t be hurting for options. There’s everything from pricey lunch cruises aboard giant boats to the wooden boat public launches. A 17 peso ticket will take you half-hour down the river on the public launch to the island community of Tres Bocas. There’s not much to do there besides circumnavigate the small island on foot, but the boat ride itself is worth the trip, as it’s a very scenic environment.

What else? Well there’s the Museo Nacional Belles Artes, BA’s fine arts museum, which is completely free, as are the tours of the Congress and the Casa Rosa (the President’s office). There’s the Eco Reserve, another completely free site, that’s great for a stroll or a bike ride, with the chance of spotting birds, butterflies, lizards, and other wildlife while practically downtown.

And of course, there are the many fascinating neighborhoods each with their own highlights—the Sunday market in San Telmo, the many parks of Recoleta and Palermo, and the colorful Caminita area of La Boca, for starters.

Though there are plenty of things to spend your money on in Buenos Aires (and many of them well-worth it), you don’t have to empty your wallet to have a good time. It’s a city for all budgets, a city for all tastes, a city that you definitely ought to put on your list.

But there are free tours of Buenos Aires, and quality-wise they are about on par with the steak. In other words, they are pretty damn awesome.

I wasn’t expecting that. When Jeff, while surfing the Internet for things to do in Buenos Aires, announced that he’d found a free tour of the city, I scoffed. There had to be a catch. Free…but only if we stayed at a certain hotel. Free…but boring as sin. Free…but we had to listen to a two-hour presentation on kitchenware first. But no, Jeff assured me, there was no catch, and to top it off, there were all kinds of glowing reviews of the tours on the Internet. Hmmm.

Though I was still a bit skeptical, we (Jeff, my parents, and I) decided to go ahead and give the tour a shot, since, well, we had nothing to lose. If it wasn’t any good, we’d just wander away from the group and declare our trip over. So at 11 a.m., we made our way to Plaza del Congresso where we met our tour-leader Gaston, a young local with impecable English thanks to a few years in the U.S., and a big group of other English-speaking travelers (from the U.S., Canada, Ireland, England, Australia, and South Africa). Our tour was to be of the central downtown area of Buenos Aires and was scheduled to last 2.5 hours. As Jeff and I had already been in the city for four days, many of the sites were ones we’d already seen, but as my parents had just arrived the day before, it was all new to them.

In the end, we all had a great time. We saw the main sites of the city center—the Casa Rosada, the Congress, the Obelisk, and other buildings of interesting historical and/or architectural interest—and learned the requisite facts and figures about them.

But what made the tour really notable wasn’t the fact that it covered all the standard tour sites for free, but that it included all of them plus more. The highlight of the tour was the insight it gave into the culture of Buenos Aires. We learned things on our tour that we didn’t find in our guidebook and almost certainly wouldn’t have learned on an official tour that we paid for.

For instance:
*The reason coins are so darn hard to come by is that the bus companies, which only take coins, hoard them and then sell them on the black market.

*All the seemingly random lines you see throughout the city are lines of job applicants. Oddly enough the only other thing people line up for are buses.

*Private insurance covers one plastic surgery a year. No wonder people here are so attractive!

*Over 60% of Argentina’s population lives below the poverty line.

*While officials give the inflation rate as less than 1%, it’s actually over 10%.

*To become an Argentinian citizen, you must only live in the country for two years.

Any question, any curiosity, we had, Gaston answered. He was both incredibly knowledgeable and completely entertaining. And in the end, I’m pretty sure he made more money than he would have if the tour had had a price, as we all tipped well and then dispersed to explore the city closer on our own (with his tips on what was worth more time and what wasn’t, as well as with his phone number in hand in case, as he said, we wanted any advice on things to do or places to go). And now I feel obligated to spread the word…if you want a great tour of Buenos Aires check out BA Free Tours. You’ll definitely get your money’s worth.

(In addition to the city center tour, they also offer a tour of Recoleta, which we plan to take on Tuesday. I expect it to be just as good, but I’ll be sure to update to let you know.)

As we made our way around the Valles Calchaquies, from Salta to Cachi, Cachi to Cafayate, Cafayate back to Salta, most of what we seemed to see was the vast emptiness of a difficult but stunning landscape. There were a few small established towns, places with a market and a restaurant, running water and electricity, and in the larger ones maybe even a bank and a gas station. As we explored these larger towns, I’d find myself wondering what brought people here, why anyone would choose to try to settle in such a place. I imagine the majority of the people that live there now live there because their parents lived there and their grandparents before them. It’s home. But what about the first settlers?

What really struck me, however, wasn’t the towns. They were livable, certainly. Many were beautiful in their own way. They were the perfect spot, in fact, for people who prefer their independence, their space. What struck me most were the places between towns where people seemed to live. More frequently that I could have imagined, where I could see nothing but cacti and towering rock formations, people would hop off the bus, their bags of goods from town in hand. I’d try to watch them to see where they were going, but our bus would always zoom on before I could even spot the faintest outline of something I’d consider a destination.

And as we bumped around the loop from Cachi to Cafayate on gravel roads hardly suitable for driving, I’d look out the window of the rental car we were riding in and see small houses near absolutely nothing. They were mainly straw and adobe huts, unfinished, absolutely basic. I’d marvel at them and then, without fail the first question my brain would form would be “What do these people do out here?”

As a resident of a highly developed nation, I have become practically programmed to expect that everyone “does” something. We are lawyers, accountants, doctors, writers, secretaries, bartenders, teachers, researchers, CEOs, plumbers, electricians, sales people. When travelers meet each other, within the early reaches of a conversation, the question of “What do you do?” almost always comes up. It is how we define ourselves and understand others.

But for many people in the world the luxury of “doing” something doesn’t exist. They don’t live in a world that tells them they can be anything they want to be, that they can do anything they put their mind to. Instead what they “do” is survive. They plant crops and tend crops and harvest crops, in the hopes that they have enough to feed their families. They maintain their homes, trying literally to keep a roof over their heads. They tend to livestock. They mind their children. They are often farmer, teacher, construction worker, doctor, and firefighter all in one. But if you asked them what they do, they’d look at you like you’re an alien. What do they do? They live, the best way they know how.

I’m not 100% sure what most people think when they think of Argentina—perhaps its the European style of Buenos Aires, the sizzle of tango, the melt-in-your-mouth taste of steak, the wilds of Patagonia, or the gauchos of the pampas—but I’m pretty sure it’s probably not cacti. In northern Argentina, however, that’s exactly what you’ll find: huge cacti and marvelous rock formations. And oh yeah, vineyards too.

Lying west and south of the major city of Salta, the Valles Calchaquies is a collection of towns (mainly tiny) at approximately the altitude of Denver in a landscape that looks like that of the American southwest. A road circuits through the towns, providing a splendid diversion for a couple of days.

We left Salta Tuesday morning on a bus that reminded us that as we move north we’re leaving behind the luxury of highly developed Chile and Argentina for the more basic offerings of the rest of South America. After stopping for about every single person on the side of the road as well as some bananas and a watermelon, we made it through the seemingly never ending suburbs of Salta and began to wind and wind and wind and climb and climb and climb our way through the Cuesta del Obsipo and the Parque Nacional Los Cardones. The narrow gravel road weaved through valleys surrounded by imposing scrubby cliffs.

Upon reaching altitude, the road leveled out and we revved our way through a sandy desertscape of giant cacti.

After 5.5 hours on this luxury liner, we pulled into the town of Cachi, which, though one of the largest towns in the Valles Calchaquies, is nothing more than a central plaza and about a block on each side. We set ourselves up in the hostel and then covered the town from side to side, end to end. This wasn’t our biggest accomplishment, however. No, our biggest accomplishment was securing a ride for the next day. Though we’d come on bus to Cachi, we weren’t going to be able to rely on the bus to get all the way around the loop. For some strange reason, 39 km of the loop isn’t accessible by public transportation. If you want to cover that stretch, you have two choices: walk or hitch. We chose hitch, but not the standing on the side of the road, thumb in the wind type of hitching. We chose instead the ask the other travelers if they have a car and want to give you a ride type of hitching. We got lucky and the first people we asked, a British couple, offered to take us not just the 39 km not covered by bus, but all the way around to the other main town, Cafayate. Great success!

Before hopping in the car with our new friends, we made a morning visit to the local church and then trekked up to the hilltop cemetery, which looked like something straight from the wild, wild west.

The spectacular scenery continued as we began our bumpy ride around the loop. Huge red rock formations jutted up from the ground, a couple of prairie dogs played roadside, and a few tiny, tiny towns existed seemingly in the middle of nowhere. We stopped time after time to take photos, never quite capturing the magnificence of it all.

A welcome stretch of paved road led us into Cafayate, which seemed like a big city thanks to the fact that it had a few blocks in each direction from the plaza. It’s also an important city, as it is, after Mendoza, the second largest wine producing region in Argentina. And so, after surviving a torrential nighttime rainstorm that turned the roads into rivers, we took advantage of the sunny day and the many nearby wineries to sample the local goods. The specialty of this area is not the malbecs and cabernet sauvignons that most people associate with Argentina, but a dry white wine called torrontes. It’s actually quite good, and that’s coming from a red wine devotee. Visits to three wineries plus a goat cheese farm (because what goes better with wine than cheese?) filled our day.

On our final day in the Valles Calchaquies, we hopped an afternoon bus, and then after 46 km asked the driver to drop us off in the seeming middle of nowhere. He obliged, and we spent the next five hours getting up close and personal with the wacky rock formations, including named ones such as the amphitheatre and the devil’s throat.

We managed to successfully hail down the evening bus and then spent the next few hours rocking and rolling back to Salta on a bus that seemed to have no shocks or struts. It was a treat I tell you, but not as much as the delicious steak dinner we had to cap off the night.

The Valles Calchaquies certainly might not be archetypical Argentina, but both Jeff and I agree that it currently holds the title for our favorite part of Argentina. Once we return in March for Buenos Aires, Iguazu Falls, and Mendoza—probably the most popular areas of this country—we’ll let you know if the title still holds.