Spare any Change? Not in Argentina- February 15-24

Montevideo lies east of Buenos Aires across the Rio de la Plata. If you want a better visual, go to Google Maps ® or Earth ™. To get from Montevideo to Buenos Aires, there are normally two economical ways: by boat or by bus. However, in the days of tree huggers, by bus is not so easy. This is not because buses and cars pollute (buses are actually about as fuel efficient as it goes), but because some Argentines got it into their head to block the border crossing between Argentina and Uruguay in protest of two paper mills being built by Finnish and Spanish companies along the Uruguay River, the Rio Grande of Argentina and Uruguay (with fewer swimmers). But why the protests? Is there some concern for the pollution from the paper mills? Yes, paper mills do pollute, as your nose tells you as you drive by one. Were these paper mills deemed environmentally safe by the WHO and WTO because these paper mills are using newer technology? Yes. Did the International Court at The Hague rule in favor of Uruguay that these mills were okay to build? Yes. Does Argentina have old paper mills along the same river that pollute a lot? Yes. Can Argentines sometimes be stubborn, arrogant and think they´re more important than everyone else? They give New Englanders a run for their money, but unlike the latter, I still like them.

As the Rio de la Plata is the widest river in the world[1], the boat ride across is no taxi ride in Venice. There’s a high speed catamaran direct from Montevideo to Buenos Aires that’s three hours, but the more economical and popular option is to take a two hour bus ride east to the town Colonia in Uruguay, and from there take a shorter ferry ride to Buenos Aires as the river is much narrow there (you still can’t see the other side of the river from Colonia). The fast catamaran makes the trip in an hour with the biggest wake I’ve ever seen (I’m by no means an accomplished boater, so that statement doesn’t carry much weight). Once we arrived in BA, “the Paris of the Southern Hemisphere,”[2] we checked into the hostel where Jeremy Bittlingmeier Martin was staying, who had arrived a few days before us. Jeremy is studying in Montevideo with me and came to travel for a few weeks before. Unfortunately, the hostel gave us the boot the next morning because we hadn’t paid for more than one night, so we spent the next two hours calling every hostel we could. Since it was a weekend and we were a group of five now, after calling 20 hostels with no luck we started with hotels and struck gold with a nice and really cheap hotel with an insane deaf man working at the desk. While calling 20 hostels and not having a place to sleep is a little stressful, the whole thing was a blessing in disguise, and I was perfectly happy to get out of the last hostel that was run by assholes. The bros shared a triple and the women a double, and the private bathroom equipped with a bidet was a much needed break from hostels, which while most of them had bidets, you only want to share a bidet with so many people…

The first thing I noticed about Buenos Aires was that there are a lot more Americans. Other than the few Americans I had been traveling with, I hadn’t met a single American during my six weeks in Brazil or Uruguay, but I met several in the first day in BA. Hold it, the first thing I noticed was the number of beautiful women walking the streets and in the nightclubs. Brazil has a lot of beautiful women, but wow, the scenery in BA is spectacular, even though Lizz and Sage might try to tell you otherwise[3]. That night we went out with two girls from BA named Lucy and Maia, whom Lizz and I met while in the northeast of Brazil. We spent the next few days walking through the neighborhoods and markets of Buenos Aires, passing through the rustic/artsy San Telmo, trendy Recoleta that is also home to the famous but creepy graveyard where Evita Peron lies, ritzy Palermo, sketchy Microcentro, colorful La Boca (home to the famous Boca Juniors) and revitalized Puerto Madero, the Pearl District of BA (sorry if you’re not from Portland for that one). In addition we consumed a large amount of steak at a very low price. Every restaurant serves several cuts, and the steak is always very good. Argentina is home to the expansive Pampas, which provide a lot of space for a lot of cows to graze, walk around aimlessly and whatever else it is that cows do. For health or environmentally conscious folk, I don’t think “free-range” is in their vocabulary here, because they know no other way to raise cattle. With so many restaurants serving great meat, where did we eat lunch while in Puerto Madero? Hooters. Great views. Wings. Beer. Nothing else must be said.

One of Argentina’s current crises (it’s hard to keep track of them all), which is especially bad in BA, is a lack of change. Not change as in Barack Obama, but change as in coins. The current “change crisis” is due to inflation, which has caused the coins’ metal to be worth more than their face values. As a result, people hoard the coins and take them to Paraguay where they can sell the metal for a profit, leaving few coins in the Argentine economy. If you want to take a bus, which only take coins, the hardest part is not figuring out which bus to take but amassing a collection of coins to pay for your fare. One night when we wanted to take a bus, it took a good half hour for us to get enough change together. We were on a street full of shops and vendors, and the first shop I went into a flirtatious smile was all it took to get the cute girl working the register to give me two coins for a bill. Our luck ran out after that, and stores wouldn’t even sell us products because they didn’t have change, or didn’t want to give us change. As a last resort I ended up haggling with a street kid for 10 minutes and got him to give me a one-peso coin for a two-peso bill. I’m still holding on to the few Argentine coins I have for the next time I’m in Buenos Aires, minus the peso that Sage popped the middle out of to wear as a ring.

After two days, David and Jeremy took off for Mendoza to escape from the city, and Lizz, Sage and I followed three days later. We had time to see all the neighborhoods we wanted to see and on our last day took a train out for a day at El Tigre, the delta where the Rio Paraná (the river from Iguazu Falls) breaks up into hundreds of channels before emptying its brown, sediment laden contents into the Rio de la Plata. There’s a cute little town but the main attraction is taking a tour boat through the vast network of canals. That night Lizz, Sage and I hopped on a bus for the 14-hour ride through the Pampas to Mendoza, a city and province on the border with Chile and even more beautiful women than BA. While Brazil has a pretty good bus system and you can travel long distances in comfort, Argentina has got it beat. Our double decker bus was equipped with leather seats that lean all the way back along with a leg and foot rest, complimentary dinner, breakfast, wine and whiskey, and bad horror movies.

In Mendoza, there’s a lot to do, if you have the money. There’s hiking, backpacking, rafting, horseback riding, wine tours, lots of good restaurants and a good night life. While all these attractions are cheaper than in the U.S., most of them are still out of range of a really tight budget. We spent a couple days hanging around the city and talked to a few tourist agencies before David and Jeremy returned. Once the whole group was back together, we found a wine tour for a great price, and on the tour stopped at an olive oil plantation, and industrial winery and a family operated winery, which were all fantastic to see. Mendoza is the heart of wine country in Argentina, the largest wine producer in the world.[4] In the area around the city of Mendoza, there are over 400 wineries. If you can make it to Mendoza and like wine, you’re in for a treat for some cheap but tasty wine. We bought bottles at the family operated winery for six dollars that they sell for 60 dollars in the U.S.

For our last day, I was itching to get out of the city and into the mountains. While I love cities, I had been doing city after city for almost two months, and wanted a little change of scenery. Lizz and I decided to go to on a hike around Potrerillos, which the tourism information center in town recommended. Once we were on the bus they said to take, we had gathered that we would pull into a bus terminal or stop that said “Potrerillos,” from which we could ask around about a hike. No so. After a couple of hours, there weren’t many people left. We asked a group of people where to get off, and they said we were at the last stop, and there was only one more bus returning to the city that day. It turns out our destination was nothing more than a region, and there is no central town. We got off the bus with the group of friends, and with rain clouds bearing down on us, they invited us into their house where we hung out with them and waited for the rain to pass. They were incredibly nice but also very weird. When the rain passed, Lizz and I had time for a little stroll through the rural neighborhood before catching the last bus to the city (which of course showed up 45 min late).

Our time traveling together had come to an end, as David, Jeremy and I had a bus ticket to Santiago the next morning. Lizz had to head back to Florianopolis in a couple days for her next semester, and Sage stayed behind for another day with Lizz before heading to Valparaiso in Chile.

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[1] So says Jeremy Martin. I have yet to verify that statement on Wikipedia, but it works for me.

[2] I have never been to Paris, so I have no idea, I’m just quoting the Lonely Planet.

[3] They are just jealous.

[4] So said our wine guide. I have also yet to verify this statement on Wikipedia.