Buenos Aires otra vez

Playtime at a bar in Palermo Hollywood with our Swedish friends Anna and Elias.  We met them at the Iguazu falls.  You guys are good at Jenga, look at the huge tower!!!

 Torre de Babel.  It's all made out of books.

 Cementerio de la Recoleta. This is not just any cemitery, it's THE cemitery in Buenos Aires and it's a town of itself.  Important people like Evita are resting here in their tomb-suites.

 

Avenida 9 de Julio has 12 lanes.

 Plaza de Mayo

 The white circle on the ground around the statue is the 'circle of the mothers'. The white head scarves painted on the ground are the symbol of the mothers.  There's some history to it that we learned while on a really interesting, free city tour organized by the hostel. 

Here's a short explanation:

Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo is an association of Argentine mothers whose children "disappeared" (meaning taken away) during the Dirty War of the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. In 1977 a few mothers started to meet at Plaza de Mayo as a demonstration for their lost sons and daughters and to demand information from the government about the location of their children. Most of the sons and daughters were tortured and killed, their babies were adopted by people withing the government. At that time, standing in groups of more than two people was not allowed in public places. So the police told the mothers to "move along" (the Spanish way of saying this is literally walk around), so they started walking in pairs around the Plaza. They were walking in a circle, wearing white shawls on their head to recognize each other. Some children of the "disappeared" women were found and identified thanks to the association. The women are still meeting today, on Thursdays.

LA BOCA:

La Boca is an area at the river mouth consisting of a few very colorful streets. It's a super touristy part of Buenos Aires, but it's still fun to take pictures with all the bright colored houses.

Argentinian flag made out of Legos at the airport. 

I can't believe it, we were really leaving on time. A volcano in southern Chile started spewing smoke and ash, so surrounding airports and also the Buenos Aires airport were closed for days.  Maybe the rain on our last day in South America helped, or the air above Buenos Aires just cleared up by itself, I don't know. All I know is that we got super lucky because the airport opened the evening before our flight and we left on time just like nothing had ever happened.

ADIOS ARGENTINA!!!

Argentinian Soccer (fútbol)! Gooooaaaaal!!!

"Boca Juniors" is the local, and very popular, soccer team.  We heard that the games were pretty crazy and worth going to, but we didn't want to pay the tourist package price for tickets.  We ended up meeting someone else at the hostel and decided to just go and see if we could get tickets there.  We got tickets and were waiting for about an hour in line to get in.  Then they just stopped letting people in.  They said it was full.  I think they just let too many people sneak in.  There were hundreds, maybe even more than a thousand people waiting to get in and most of them had tickets.  The police told us to try another entrance.  We did and they also told us the same thing.  This went on for about an hour as we made our way around the stadium few times.  Then we saw some local kids who told us we'd have better luck at a back entrance.  They were right.  After waiting a bit, they let some people in, including us.  We were in!!  Or maybe not, there was another blockade inside.  So yeah, we waited again, then FINALLY we were let inside.  And I'm sorry, I have to mention it, the concrete stairway going up to the bleachers was completely flooded and not from a plumbing leak...nasty!

Once inside, the noise and energy was crazy.  The meter thick concrete pillars holding up the stadium section above us were actually swaying.  No joke.

And the guy we went with followed some local down into the crowd because he said he could get us closer.  The guy was too pushy, so Christi and I decided to pass on it.  We stayed up a little higher and watched the game from there.  We could still see fine.  We saw our friend later and he told us the local guy ended up pulling out a knife in the middle of the bleachers and taking his money and camera. 

Iguazu Falls

The "Cataratas del Iguazu" are located at the very northern edge of Argentina, at the boarder between Argentina and Brazil.  The falls, as a whole, are the second largest falls in the world by looking at the water flow (Niagara falls has the largest average annual water flow) and the expansion of the area of the falls (Southern Africa's Victoria Falls has the widest curtain of water). Iguazu would be wider but it's split up in about 275 separate falls along 2.7km of the Iguazu River. Some of the individual falls are up to 82 metres in height, though the majority are about 64 metres. Enough facts. Just being there and seeing them felt amazing and unreal, like we were in a fairy tail or movie or something.

Quiet flowing water before it drops down the largest part called the Devil's Throat or "Garganta del Diablo." You can see the mist of the huge falls in the background of the picture above.

Standing at the top of the Devil's Throat is crazy. So much power! There is water racing down the cliff 260 degrees around you and you get soaking wet within the first minute standing there. It's a U-shaped, 150-metre-wide, and 700-metre-long cliff.

 Devil's Throat

 Garganta del Diablo

Lot's of Coati's in the area. No, the racoon like animals aren't shy at all. They are pretty sneaky in fact and tried to get food out of my backpack.

A different area of the falls.

 The background looks unreal, doesn't it?

 Rainbows everywhere : )

View from the island in the middle of the Iguazu River.

Rock formations, wine and goat cheese

This was the first part of our road trip with a rental car to Cafayate.  The landscape from Salta, via Cachi, to Cafayate is really beautiful, there are nice rock formations, cactus covered hills, and many kilometers of narrow dirt roads.

 Cornelia joined us for the two days on Ruta 40 and all of us got to enjoy some bumpy driving.  We made sure to honk before a tight curve.

Hey, we got our own monument: Las Torres!

 Cafayate is known for it's wines.  Especially the local white wine 'Torrontes'.  Semu was all happy about the Torrontes and Cabernet ice cream : ), local specialties.

 

 Mama goat at a goat cheese factory.

 Little baby cabritas.  They call them Cabritas Suizas (little Swiss goats)  ; )

From Cafayate we looped back north to Salta on a different road with even more crazy canyons and rock formations.

Salta, Argentina

Back in Argentina, we felt like we were in a different world.  Everything seemed so clean and organized.  As much as we liked being in Peru and Bolivia, we still felt much more comfortable in the organized and cleaner country of Argentina.

Plaza de Armas

The following pictures were taken at our hostel, the Backpacker's Suite.  And it was pretty sweet.  We liked their decorations, the in house bar, and the free dinners.

Food at a local parilla:

Semu claims it to be the best 'lomo' = 'filet mignon' he's ever had.  And cheap!  The huge piece only costed 6 bucks.

Bloody Mary's!

Meeting in the wild wild west

Tupiza is a small town surrounded by landscapes that remind you of the wild west.  Instead of the almost mandatory horse back ride to the sights, we took off on a little hike of our own.

 View over Tupiza from a hill nearby.

 It must get cold here. Even cactus are wearing beanies : )

 La puerta del diablo, the devils gate.

 Macho Valley

 Two coincidences during one evening in a small town in the middle of nowhere... At the hotel we ran into our Irish friend Tracy we met at Machu Picchu about a week earlier.  Waiting for her at a restaurant another familiar face walked in.  It was Cornelia, our Swiss friend that we met about 8 years ago in Costa Rica.  How random is that?  We hadn't seen her in over four years.  She didn't even know that we were traveling in South America and we didn't know she was either.

 

 This is the time table for the whole Bolivian rail road. To get to the boarder of Bolivia and Argentina, we had to catch the train at about 4.10am.

Our lucky charms, the Tucan travel group.  It happened that the Tucan group ate dinner and celebrated a birthday at the same restaurant that we were at, and Cornelia was part of this group.  They were all super nice and fun people and invited us to travel over the border with them in their truck-bus.  They were heading the same direction as we were and also needed to cross the boarder into Argentina.  Perfect!  This trip turned out to be really easy and hassle free for us. Very nice compared to our earlier Bolivian transportation.  They even had a great lunch routine.  As soon as we stopped to eat, a table and food was out and everyone started chopping up stuff for sandwiches.  Pretty tasty.  Nice view included.