We took Overseas Adventure Travel’s The Wilderness Beyond: Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego & the Chilean Fjords fifteen day tour, plus the four day Iguazú Falls extension along with my father in law, Oscar, and Julie’s cousin, Sandy.
The itinerary looks like this:
We decided to arrive a day early because the flight is long and because my former co-worker, Hernán, lives in one of the Buenos Aires suburbs and I wanted to get together with him. We stayed the night before our departure with some friends in Portland because our flight left at six in the morning. After flying to Minneapolis, then Atlanta, we finally arrived in Buenos Aires around 11:30 on the morning of the next day. One of Overseas Adventure Travel’s local guides met us and June, another person on our tour, at the airport and got us in to the hotel around one. We checked in and took showers and settled in a bit since we would stay three nights at this hotel.
We stayed at the ARC Recoleta hotel which had nice rooms that we really liked, and we slept better here than any of the other hotels. They also had an electric kettle and refrigerator in the room so I could make tea with milk when I wanted it.
After washing up a little we met up with Sandy. Bad weather in Texas meant that Oscar had missed a connection and would arrive the next morning.
We decided to walk out to the waterfront, a bit more than two miles from our hotel in the Recoleta neighborhood. It was quite warm and somewhat humid, but we were enjoying the fresh air and were happy to pass through a couple of parks on the way. There were a lot of trees that we did not recognize.
We stopped for a light lunch at Cafe Metro on Avenida 9 de Julio, one of the major roads of the city. Julie and I got some of our first real practice speaking Spanish here, and we were tripped up a bit right away by the unusual Argentinian accent where “pollo” (chicken) is pronounced “posho” instead of the normal “poyo”. We got a few laughs from the waitress in addition to some nice food.
We continued on to Puerto Madero, which was built as a port on the de la Plata river, but is now converted to posh restaurants, museums, and condos.
Eventually we arrived at the ecological reserve on the riverfront but it had closed fifteen minutes earlier. Surprisingly there was no nearby way to get a good look at the river. The few glimpses we did get made it look like the ocean because the Rio de la Plata is over thirty miles wide here. Between the disappointment of not really being able to see the water and the humid heat, we decided to get a cab back to the hotel rather than walk back.
Once back we stopped in at the nearby small grocery and bought some milk for tea in the morning and some drinks to enjoy on the rooftop patio of the hotel.
We went to Cala Pizza for dinner, which is just on the corner of the block with our hotel. We met Ted, who is also on our tour, there. We had some pretty good pizza and an interesting salad.
Finally we went to bed and slept for almost eleven hours.