Buenos Aires 2
Day 3 - Thursday 12th January
Although physically present in Buenos Aires, we spent the first 24 hours waiting hopefully for our bodies and minds to catch up. Thankfully, on the second morning they did. We awoke invigorated and ready to explore a city still wallowing in World Cup success. The only problem was that due to our body clocks lagging even further behind, it was only 5.00am…
Two hours wait for breakfast was followed by another two hour wait for our pre booked No1 TripAdvisor personal tour of what turned out to be a small portion of the huge Buenos Aires.
The charming, knowledgable and engaging Ana arrived promptly in a car that appeared to have been last used in a demolition derby and we plunged into melee of weaving noisy traffic.
I learnt more than I can remember but way less than the city has to offer. Realistically, it would take months of immersive living in to even start to get a feel of what the place is really about. So all I can do here is to share a few highlights and not try to recreate a whole Lonely Planet guide. Some bits might need fact checking as Ana’s words per minute exceeded my information download speed!
We started off with retracing our route of yesterday along Avenida 9 de Julio ‘the widest avenue in the world at 140m’ (Ana admitted that actually an avenue in San Paulo Mexico was wider but hey). It is very wide and rammed full of cars, buses, taxis and anything else that pumps out noxious fumes except when Argentina win the World Cup and then it is rammed full of over one million people in blue and white football shirts with no 10 on the back. The detritus left behind by the mob is still evident as are some of the party goers that haven’t managed to find their way home yet.
In 1937, the wide avenue was completed at the expense of many architecturally significant buildings. The legal battle for their demolition, political in fighting and a general lack of funding all added up to a fifty year construction programme.
The obelisk at the centre of the avenue commemorates the country’s declaration of independence after finally seeing the Spanish off in 1816.
Buenos Aires is said to be the architectural love child of Madrid and Paris and our next stopping place Plaza de Mayo was surrounded by French and Spanish style opulence built mostly between the 1850s through to the late 1920s which seemed to prove the point.
Many key events in the history of the country have taken place in Plaza de Mayo (too many to list here and, as I say, it is not my intention to compete with a travel guide) which primarily celebrates the war for independence starting in 1810 under the leadership of San Martín, one of the military heroes of South America.
What moved us most from Ana’s story of Argentina was the plight of lost children from the dark and surprisingly recent military dictatorship by Jorge Rafael Videla. During the ‘Dirty war’ between 1976 and 1983 right wing death squads in the form of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (Triple A not to be confused with what you put in your torch!) hunted down and kidnapped anyone suspected of association with any left wing group. The resistance to this regime was lead in Buenos Aires by a group of women called The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo who wore headscarves to look like nappies in representation of the children of imprisoned women that had ‘disappeared’. Under great sufferance, the group demonstrated annually for justice and information on the missing.
After the end of the regime in 1983, the movement continued to campaign for the leaders of the Junta to be brought to justice and continued to search for the lost. The new democratic government did acknowledge that a total of 6000 people had been illegally abducted and horrific stories came to light of ‘death flights’ where people were routinely dumped into the ocean from aeroplanes. The real figures are claimed to be nearer to 30000 in addition to the unknown number of children born in captivity and the Mothers still meet every Thursday at the Plaza de Mayo in the Hope of reunion with someone lost.
Since 2005 and the advent of DNA, many victims have been recovered from mass graves and re buried but more satisfying is that, to this day, people are being found that can link themselves back to lost and are able to reunite with their families.
A very big bloke on a very small horse. Not a realistic depiction but an error that arose from the two parts of the statue made separately to a different scale! The mistake was not realised until the two were brought together for assembly. Whoops!
At the foot of the statue, a pile of rocks have been cast in as a protest to the governments draconian lock down measures during the Covid 19 pandemic. Each stone has the name of someone that perished.
In the background is the government building called the ‘Pink House’ that originally had its walls painted in line and pigs’ blood for the pigment. The balcony is the scene of many a National speech, most famously perhaps by Maria Eva Duarte de Perón aka Evita.
On next to the colourful and edgy district of La Boca, the birthplace of Diego Maradona and home to the football team where his career started The Boca Juniors.
The stadium, La Bombonera, is now a huge concrete lump squished into some back streets and looks to me like a crowd disaster waiting to happen! The cheery bright yellow and vibrant blue team colours are said to have come from the flag of the first ship that entered the port after the team had started. In case you need more clues, just think Ikea! Images of Diego are abundant, he was a god in this town and for most of Argentina. Apparently though, his heritage was not considered of any merit and when he tried to buy a house in the famously expensive and exclusive embassy district of Recoleta, he was refused.
The enormous growth in population of the city that went up from 90,000 to over 1,500,000 in a fifty year period from the 1880s was chiefly driven by the export of beef that in turn was revolutionised by advances in refrigeration. Nowhere was this growth more noticeable than in La Boca. (Meaning ‘mouth’, the name refers to the opening of the river Plate).
The houses of this barrio where built with the cheapest materials by the enpoverished migrant workers that were flooding in from Italy and Spain. Left over paint from the port’s barges to brighten up the hard life in a poor neighbourhood. A tradition that has continued to give the neighbourhood its distinctive style. The building in the photo clearly needs a bit of a touch up.
The vibrant area is apparently to be avoided at night once the street markets have packed up and the gringos have mostly gone off to party somewhere else or to bed.
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The last place to visit on our city tour was the cemetery which may seem a bit of an odd place to go but held a fascinating set of stories and the final resting place of Eva Perón. Huge ostentatious structures lined the tight grid of paths and made the whole place like West Brompton cemetery on steroids!
It had been a great trip around some of the key places in the city and left us satisfied that we had seen as much as possible in the few hours available to us.
Ana left us back near our hotel to embark on her two hour journey home to the suburbs where she hoped that the wheels of her car would not be stolen again!
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We were exhausted now but mustered the energy to step out once more to find food. Avoiding the famous (and uber expensive) steak houses we opted for a more modest establishment that we felt might be trying a bit harder and were not disappointed.
Steak chips and salad washed down with a bottle of Malbec between us. A perfect Argentinian meal for two hungry, weary travellers especially at £10 a head!
The prospect of us getting messy in Buenos Aires was considerably hampered by a number of factors not least of which is that we seem to have both turned into old fogeys that prefer a nice comfy bed rather than painting the town red. So with a 3.00am start in prospect to get down to Ushuaia, we went straight to bed