It's a long flight down to Buenos Aires, and there was no stop in Brazil which sometimes happens. Just under 13 hours, but modern planes are a lot more comfortable in terms of cabin pressure and so on, and leaving at around 10pm on Saturday after a fairly decandent and lengthy lounge experience we ended up sleeping really quite a large part of the way. We landed at about 8am local time and as we only had hand luggage were in a bus to the city pretty rapidly.
The bus dropped us near the famous Pink Palace, the official residence of the President of the Repulblic. To Mrs L's frustration I started birding immediately - it would be a long slow walk to our hotel, about a mile away in San Telmo. And all for just 11 species, one of which was a Pigeon! Oh and House Sparrow, so in fact just nine species which were of interest. Eight if you also kick out Nanday Parakeet which shouldn't really be there. For the sake of completeness here is the list - Picazuro Pigeon, Eared Dove, Black Vulture, Crested Caracara, Rufous Hornero, Brown-chested Martin, Rufous-bellied Thrush and Rufous-collared Sparrow. This just screams South America, I was so excited.
In the event the walk took us just under an hour as I birded as Mrs L breathed in the architecture of Buenos Aires. We were able to dump our luggage at L'Adresse Hotel near Parque Lezama at around 11am. This was a clean hotel with a great breakfast and, just like me, a slightly trendy vibe. It was also nicely positioned near a street market, and lots of bars and restaurants. After a quick change of clothes we headed out for a walk and some lunch, which we found in a covered market, the Mercado de San Telmo. This was absolutely heaving with all manner of locals and tourists, a complete scrum, but this is what we wanted, vibrant noise. Life!
We spent the rest of the afternoon walking around this area, taking it all in. Parque Lezama held a few more species, including Great Kiskadee, Chalk-browed Mockingbird, Screaming and Shiny Cowbirds, Red-crested Cardinal and Creamy-bellied Thrush, but actually birding took a back seat as we wandered the streets admiring the art, browsing in shops, having a cool drink here and there and generally enjoying being on holiday. And this was just in a small part of the city, we had yet to hit the grand avenues and monuments.
In the evening we had our first steak. For the uninitiated Argentina is all about steak, but you have to pace yourself. You could end up becoming a vegetarian if you overdo it, so we made sure to only eat meat on alternate days. When I visited Buenos Aires in my thirties I had no such self control and just went mad to the point of really getting sick of it. I remember coming back and only wanting salad. We found a well-rated Parilla that I now cannot remember the name of and ordered a huge slab.
"Could we have some red wine please?"
"No."
"Er, what?"
"No. There is no red wine. In fact there is no wine today at all."
The walls of the restarant were covered in wine. Shelves and shelves of it. There were boxes of wine stacked on the floor. On the stairs. Around the top of the walls were decorative rows of empty bottles, and behind the bar there was more wine. In fact you would struggle to see more wine in a wine shop.
"What about that wine there?"
"There is no wine."
It turns out that it was the day of the Presidential election, and on such days no restaurants are allowed to serve alcohol. Perhaps they are worried about drunken polling? Or Malbec-fuelled riots? But they didn't tell us this, and surrounded by wine on all sides involved in a somewhat existentialist conversation it was rather confusing. I guess they felt that would be a bit complicated to understand and to simply say no wine cut to the heart of the matter and avoided any discussion. But what a disaster! And we only found this out once we had ordered the food, had we known in advance we might have turned this into a salad day, but such is life. The meat was as fabulous as we expected, but boy would I have liked a glass of red!
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