Global Health Adventures: Buenos Aires

After an incredible weekend at Foz do Iguaçu, my vacation plans next took me a bit further south to Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina. After arriving on a Monday night and taking a taxi into town to the hostel where I was staying, I was a bit tired, but still ventured out for dinner. I stayed right in the heart of the city near one of the famous landmarks, the Obelisco. One of the major streets in town (about 18 lanes wide) was right near my hostel, and it was quite the contrast to the narrow crowded streets of Fortaleza.

I hoped to see much of the vity of Argentina in a short time, and so I elected for a slightly unconventional method of touring the city. I didn't want to do the whole tourist bus tour of the city, but wanted to see more of the city than I could by walking, and so instead signed up for 2 half day bike tours of the city for Tuesday. The morning tour would be in a large group visiting the southern parts of the city, while the afternoon turned out to be a private tour of the northern parts of the city. Biking proved to be a great way to the city, and I highly recommend this tour group if you ever find yourself in Buenos Aires (www.biketours.com.ar). As the first ever tourist to complete two bike tours in a day, I was even given a free official biketours T-shirt which I now proudly wear :)

The mornign tour began by visiting the memorial to the soldiers who died in the war for the Malvinas Islands. You might better know this war by its other name, the war for the Falklands. Argentines refer to the islands by a different name than the British. We then continued to the old port, Puerto Maduro which now has been converted to fancy restaurants. Then we headed to the ecological park inside the city, which overlooks the Rio de la Plata, and followed this with a trip to La Boca, a very colorful neighborhood and home to one of Argentina's most famous soccer teams, Boca Juniors. After a snack break, we continued on through the Microcentro region passing many plazas, including Plaza de Mayo. Finally, after 4 hours of cycling, we returned to our starting point, where I immediately prepared for another 4 hours of cycling through the northern neighborhoods of the city.

The north included cycling through Palermo, a beautiful neighborhood with many green parks (something else we lack in Fortaleza). After Palermo, we continued through the district where all of the foreign embassies are located, and proceeded to Recoleta. Recoleta is home to Recoleta cemetary, where many of Buenos Aires most wealthy citizens are buried. I found the extravagance and expense of this cemetary to be a bit absurd, as it seemed to be almost a small city. Finally, we rode back through portions of the Centro passing a number of museums, some of which I visited on my last day in Buenos Aires.

On Tuesday, I elected to get back on the bike, this time with a different bike tour group for a 25 km north along the river to a colonial town called Tigre. Near Tigre is a large river delta with many narrow channels and houses located on small islands, with the small rivers serving as the roads of the delta. On the way to Tigre, we passed through many quaint small towns, and were able to look back on the large city of Buenos Aires. Arriving in Tigre in early afternoon, we jumped into kayaks to spend a few hours kayaking in the delta region. After a close encounter with a large ferry in the channel that nearly toppled my kayak in its wake (the channel was shallow, but I would have gotten soaked of course...), we returned to land and returned to Buenos Aires by train. That night, as I did each night in Buenos Aires, I was able to have some of Buenos Aires' famed steak, which is quite cheap and quite good.

On my last full day in Buenos Aires, I saw several museums, and rendezvoused with three of my UVA classmates who were in BA studying Spanish for a month. We had dinner in the Puerto Maduro area late, and I then headed back to the hostel to get an hour of sleep before my very early flight back to São Paulo for a connection to Florianópolis, the final stop in my vacation. Buenos Aires was an incredible city with many great parks, wide streets, and a much safer, laid back feel relative to Fortaleza, and I definitely enjoyed my time there.

Malvinas (Falklands) War Memorial