Buenos Aires, Uruguay, Iguazu

Christy arrived Saturday night, December 12th, and we left the next day for our flight to Buenos Aires. The flight was about 4 or 5 hours long, which made me realize how far away Buenos Aires is from Lima! We arrived in Buenos Aires in the evening and looked for a hostal as soon as we got there. After walking around for a little while we finally found one that was in my prices range, Hotel Piedad. It was nothing special, but had a lot of character. The man who worked there, José, was always there and was a really friendly guy. Also, the bathroom that Christy and I shared had a shower head in the middle of the bathroom with no shower curtain and a drain in the middle of the bathroom floor! We stayed in the hostal the whole week, so it turned out to be a good choice.

El obelisco, cerca de nuestro hostal

We woke up on Monday planning on walking around the city and planning for the week´s activities. We went to the Plaza de Armas and walked around the inside of the Cathedral. We then tried to go to another church, but it was closed for renovations. We saw the outside of Argentina´s white house which is actually called the pink house, La Casa Rosada. After having lunch at a little cafe we walked down the popular Florida Street where a lot of people come to shop and then walked into a big, high-scale mall called Galería del Pacífico. We later walked over to the ferry station to look into ferry rides to Uruguay and then we went to the bus station to buy tickets to get to the Iguazu falls for later in the week. That night we went to Cafe Tortoni, the oldest cafe in Buenos Aires, to see a tango show and have dinner. I tried a typical steak dinner which was tasty, and the show was really cool. I had never seen tango before, and it was a really interesting dance.

Christy y yo en la Plaza de Armas con la Casa Rosada

Tango en Cafe Tortoni

On Tuesday we woke up and walked back to the ferry station to go to Colonia, Uruguay for the day. We took the 3-hour ferry, although there was a 1-hour option. When we got to Colonia it was really cool to just know that I was standing in Uruguay! I never thought I would end up going to Uruguay in my lifetime. Colonia is a really cute, quaint town on the coast and we spent the day walking around, shopping a little, and sitting by the ocean. We climbing a little light house to get a view of the area and later when we were walking along a tiny little beach we started finding a bunch of pieces of sea glass. I used to collect sea glass when I went to visit my grandfather in Cape Cod, so I collected a bunch and brought it home to give my mom and grandfather. We had a nice fish lunch in a restaurant near the water. At the end of the day we returned to Buenos Aires by ferry. The one bad thing we noticed about both Colonia and Buenos Aires is that there a tons of mosquitos, so we were glad to be inside on the ferry ride.

Christy y yo en Colonia, Uruguay

On Wednesday we woke up and went for a run in the city. We had a later breakfast and then made our way to the bus station. We left around 1:30pm on our long journey to the Iguazu port, where we were planning on just spending the day seeing the waterfalls and then coming back the next night. The bus ride was certainly an adventure! It ended up being 6 hours longer than planned due to unplanned stops and a car accident along the way, and in total it ended up being 24 hours! By the time we actually reached the waterfalls we had a little more than 2 hours to see everything. The Iguazu falls are in a national park so we had to walk through that to reach the falls, and we arrived there sweaty and tired. The falls, however, made the dreadfully long journey worth it. They were beautiful, and much larger than the Niagra Falls, which I had seen years ago. We got to walk under the falls to see the view of all of the and then over the falls. There was a pathway that literally went right over the falls, near the points where the water falls over! It was so scary but really cool to see the falls from that angle. There was one other path to see the falls that you need to get to by train, called La Boca del Diablo, but unfortunately we did not have time to see this part. After that we had to go back to the bus station to catch the 18-hour bus ride home, arriving back in Buenos Aires on Friday around 11am.

Las cataratas de Iquazú desde arriba

Las cataratas de Iguazú

On Friday after we ate a nice big lunch we showered and relaxed a little bit. We walked in the afternoon to the port area of the city, called Puerto Madero where we walked into an ecological reserve that had a nice view of the city. The port area was really pretty and we ate dinner at a cafe overlooking the port at sunset. After walking around we decided to go out to a bar to see what the night-life is like, although we were not really up for going out dancing since Argentinians supposedly go out very late. We had a glass of wine and then went back to catch up on some of the sleep we lost on those bus rides.

Puerto Madero

On Saturday we went to do our laundry and then started walking towards Recoleta, a nice area of the city with markets, museums, and other sites. As we arrived there it started downpoaring horribly and we had to take cover in the doorway of an apartment building for a while. It was pretty rainy for the whole day, so we decided to change our plans a little and go to a museum. We went to the Museo de Bellas Artes and saw a lot of really beautiful art from around the world. After we walked to the Recoleta Cemetary, which is a huge cemetary full of giant stone tombs above the ground! There are many little lanes of tombs and many famous people are buried there, including Evita. After we took a taxi to another part of the city called Palermo. We were going to try to see the Botanical Gardens there, but they were closed due to rain. Instead, we walked around and then went to a really nice mass at a pretty church nearby. We had pizza for dinner in Palermo before heading back to bed.


On our last day in Buenos Aires, Sunday, we woke up to make it for a tour of the Pink House, the president´s palace. We got to see a bunch of different rooms inside and even the inside of the president´s office! The president of Argentina is a woman, which I found very interesting. After that we went to a Sunday street market near the plaza and had so much fun browsing through the tons of items sold by the street vendors. After having a lunch near the market we headed back to collect our things at the hostal and then went to the airport, heading for the next destination of our journey: Chile!