Buenos Aires — delving into the soul of the city

—Col. Harold Grady, St. Louis, MO

When the rat race gets too hectic, the travel bug bites me and I yearn for exotic places and faraway lands. However, for 2004 my wife, Donna, and I were in a quandary about where to travel. We crossed Europe off our list because of the weak dollar there. Likewise, the many problems in the Mideast and Asia narrowed our choices to just a few dollar-friendly countries.

Travel experts claimed Argentina was one of the safest and cheapest travel bargains in the world due to the peso collapse. Further, Argentines are some of the friendliest, most hospitable and fun-loving people in the world.

We checked out the Argentina guidebooks and videos, which fertilized the imagination. We were sold!

The plan

Donna and I signed up for a 9-day trip to Buenos Aires starting March 24. We usually travel “off season” for better prices, fewer crowds and cooler weather. This trip included round-trip air from St. Louis, a 4-star hotel, buffet breakfast daily and a city tour of Buenos Aires. The cost of the tour, offered by Varig Brasil Airlines (phone 800/468-2744 or visit www.varigbrasil.com) was an affordable $1,049 plus tax.

In addition, our thirst for adventure included a dinner and tango show, a cruise to Colonia, Uruguay and a “Gaucho Festival” tour that included lunch, music, dancing and a ride with the gauchos (cowboys).

We invited fellow members of the International Travel Club of St. Louis to join us. (For information on the club, see page 87.) We were excited when 15 members signed up. As travel junkies, we take pride in traveling light with just one carry-on bag each, horrifying our travel companions. So, armed with passports (no visa required), high hopes and Tootsie Rolls, we were ready for Argentina.

A bad start

At first, everything went wrong. The trip started out as our worst nightmare — flight cancellation in St. Louis, rerouting, poor flight connections, lost baggage and a computer glitch that knocked six members of our group out of their confirmed seats into standby status. When we finally arrived in Buenos Aires, I was in a sour mood, sensing something else was wrong. That’s when our guide announced our hotel was overbooked and we all must move to a different one. Egad, what else could go wrong?

Our sense of dread gave way to optimism, however, when we discovered our new hotel was actually in a better location, closer to downtown shopping and entertainment. The Bisonte Palace Hotel ($55 double) was a 4-star, 10-story, modern building with 62 clean and comfortable rooms, an extremely helpful staff and outstanding buffet breakfasts.

I changed some dollars at the hotel and was surprised to receive nearly three pesos per dollar instead of one. The peso had taken a sharp 60% drop, pushing half the population into poverty. However, it resulted in tremendous bargains for travelers with dollars. Also, we found out that nearly all the shops in Buenos Aires accept dollars. That was good news.

Buenos Aires intro

In bright spirits, our fellow travel warriors piled into the bus for the city tour. Apparently, nobody suffered terminal jet lag, insomnia, hangover or culture shock. Our beautiful guide, Gabriela Giannini, with 15 years’ experience, welcomed us to Buenos Aires, the “Paris of South America.” The ninth-largest city in the world, it is one of the most exciting.

My first impression was that Buenos Aires must be the most European city outside of Europe. It’s a beautiful city with wide, tree-lined boulevards, sidewalk cafés, mansions and neighborhoods that resemble those of France, Italy and Spain.

The guidebooks claim it is home to more than 6,000 restaurants, discotheques, cafés, nightclubs, dance halls and theaters. For museum lovers, I counted 20 in Buenos Aires. It also has big-city traffic, grime and crime but is considered a safe city.

Downtown

Downtown Buenos Aires revolves around a major landmark, a 221-foot-tall obelisk which towers over the downtown area. It sits at the intersection of Avenida Corrientes and Avenida 9 de Julio (claimed to be the widest street in the world). Corrientes, “the street that never sleeps,” was jam-packed with bright lights, nightlife, bars, bookstores and most of the 50 movie theaters located in the downtown district.

One must-see attraction is the Plaza de Mayo, the historical heart of the city. It includes the Casa Rosada (Pink House), the presidential palace; the Metropolitan Cathedral, where palace guards protect the remains of General José de San Martín, a national hero, and the Pirámide de Mayo, an obelisk commemorating the revolution in May of 1810, marking Buenos Aires’ independence from Spain.

It’s not possible to gaze at the presidential palace without feeling the ghost of Eva Perón (aka Evita), who made fiery speeches from its balcony in the 1940s. Here, protest marches and demonstrations are born or killed.

A protest march is still held on the plaza every Thursday at 3:30 p.m. by The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, an organization that protests the kidnapping, murder and disappearance of their loved ones during the “dirty war.”

The war took place from 1976 to 1983 and left an estimated 10,000 people unaccounted for or presumed dead. You can feel the pain of history from these mothers crying for information of their loved ones.

Who’s who

On the bus again, we hopscotched all over the city, from La Boca, the most colorful neighborhood in Buenos Aires, to La Recoleta Cemetery, a must-see attraction that is a haunting study in history and architecture and is a veritable “Who’s Who” of Argentine aristocracy. It’s also a great place to explore the legend of Evita and rub shoulders with ghosts of the past. The ostentatious mausoleums and spectacular statuary of giant angels and grim reapers will amaze you.

We found Eva Peron’s black marble mausoleum and discovered that Evita still lives — at least in the hearts and minds of the locals. Although she died of cancer 52 years ago at the age of 33, people still place flowers daily at her mausoleum.

Across the street from the cemetery is the best place for people watching from Recoleta’s sidewalk cafés. Recoleta is the city’s most fashionable shopping and residential district, oozing with Parisian charm, designer boutiques, upscale apartment buildings and mansions. On weekends, arts-and-crafts fairs with street performers attract the crowds.

It started to rain, so we ducked into La Biela café for coffee, snacks and our favorite pastime of people watching. We chatted with the locals, who claimed La Biela was actor Robert Duvall’s favorite spot when in town. Reportedly, Duvall is a pretty good tango dancer.

It’s all about the tango

You can’t visit Argentina without seeing a tango show. Our group went to a dinner-and-tango show ($45) at La Ventana (The Window) in the San Telmo district. A 7-piece band featuring bandoneon (a type of accordion) music and tango dancing was spectacular. So were the dancers.

Cameras blinked like fireflies at the beautiful dancers gliding sensuously across the floor in gorgeous costumes, their arms flashing, legs intertwined and hips swiveling into quick kicks. At times it looked overly dramatic and stiff, then the magic would set in and I’d get thoroughly lost in the music and dance.

We learned the tango was Argentina’s national dance, born in Buenos Aires’ brothels on the waterfront more than 100 years ago. However, it was once considered so obscene that it was banned.

Most tango music is melancholy, about suffering over lost love or poverty. My waiter said, “We love the tango because it makes us forget our problems and the economic collapse.” You see the tango everywhere in Buenos Aires, in nightclubs, shopping malls and on the street.

Bring on the gauchos

A highly recommended optional excursion was the full-day “Gaucho Festival” tour ($45). It included a 50-mile bus ride into the Pampas countryside to a large ranch for plenty of food, drinks, folkloric music, wagon rides, horseback riding and a demonstration of gaucho horsemanship. It’s a great escape from big-city hustle.

At the Santa Susana ranch, we were greeted by the gauchos, offered empanadas (meat pies) and drinks and given a tour of the 5,000-acre spread. The air was spiced with the odor of barbecued steaks. I could hardly wait for the dinner bell and the mouthwatering steaks, chorizo (spicy sausages), salad, locro (corn-based stew) and chimichurri sauce (picante, olive oil, pepper and garlic spices) plus flan for dessert. We toasted each other, eyes brimming with sentiment and good fellowship. This was followed by folkloric music and tango dancing with audience participation that delighted everyone.

The gauchos intrigued me the most, each with their bombachas (baggy pants), boots, wide-brimmed hat and a dagger worn at the small of their back in a silver scabbard under a broad belt with a silver buckle. In the ol’ days, gauchos were known for their gambling, horsemanship and knife fighting, but those days are gone and the gauchos have mostly disappeared.

Like the North American cowboy in the wild West, the legends of the gaucho were greatly romanticized. Nevertheless, watching the gauchos at the ranch demonstrate their horsemanship was like being a witness to history.

Shopping and sights

To my wife, the two most exciting streets in Buenos Aires were Florida and Lavalle, which were the two main pedestrian-only shopping streets. They were filled with shops, bars, restaurants, fashionable stores and music shops.

There were tremendous bargains everywhere. Shops specializing in arts and crafts, masks, colorful blankets, rugs, clothing and gaucho souvenirs were popular. We shopped at Galerias Pacifico (Av. Florida and Córdoba), where leather goods were an exceptional value.

For an example of costs, I bought a bottle of whiskey for $7 and Marlboro cigarettes for $1 a pack. Beefsteak at the grocery store was less than $1 per pound, and a good bottle of wine was $3.

Several other must-see attractions include the Teatro Colón, world famous for opera, ballet and classical music (don’t miss the backstage tour in English, $2.50); the Café Tortoni, near the Plaza de Mayo, the oldest and most elegant of Buenos Aires’ traditional cafés, and the Feria de San Telmo, held at the Plaza Dorrego on Sunday afternoons and featuring a flea market, antique fair and street performers. This is one of the best free shows in Buenos Aires.

Cruising to Uruguay

Most of the people in our group praised the cruise-tour of the Tigre River, including lunch ($45). However, Donna and I selected a day trip and cruise-tour to Colonia, Uruguay, including lunch ($97). Uruguay is among the smallest countries in South America and I wanted to see the historic Portuguese ruins on the Río de la Plata (River of Silver), designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

We breezed through Immigration and boarded our ferryboat for the 1½-hour crossing of the Río de la Plata, one of the widest rivers in the world, to the quaint town of Colonia, Uruguay. After a big steak lunch, our guide led us on a one-hour bus tour of Colonia, a colonial town of 26,000 people, followed by a one-hour walking tour exploring the historic Portuguese ruins.

This one-day trip was slow paced and relaxing, especially on the ferryboat return to Buenos Aires at twilight.

A night out

Two of our Argentine friends took my wife and me to El Obrero (Augustín R. Caffarena 64), a traditional Italian cantina in La Boca district, for a steak dinner and to help celebrate Argentina’s soccer victory over Ecuador that day. The people here are soccer crazy.

The walls of the cantina screamed for attention with its soccer trophies, photographs of local champions and a blackboard menu. Incredibly, the four of us finished off a mixed salad, steaks, potatoes and beer for less than $20.

The locals love to stay up late. Most eat dinner at 9 p.m. and think nothing of going to a disco at 2 a.m. until dawn. In my case, I get hungry around 6 p.m. and I found it difficult to adjust to the Argentine rhythm of staying up late.

Movie lovers can catch movies at midnight in downtown Corrientes or in the modern multiplexes which are popping up everywhere. My Irish eyes were smiling to see many American movies playing at local theaters. After the midnight movie, you can go to a disco or go browse in a bookstore.

Winding down

On our last night in Buenos Aires we joined our friends from St. Louis for a farewell party at El Palacio de la Papa Frita (Palace of French Fries, Av. Corrientes 1612), a popular local restaurant. My fellow carnivores ate steaks (naturally) with Neanderthal gusto. You won’t believe the cost — I had a salad, sirloin steak, French fries, wine and flan for only 19 pesos ($6.65). It was wonderful, but my double chin gave birth to triplets.

In summary, Buenos Aires was a city bursting at the seams with excitement, beautiful people, high fashion, fast cars and terrific shopping bargains. While our trip started out badly, Argentina was a wonderful experience. We made many new friends, not only with Argentines but with fellow members of the International Travel Club of St. Louis. We became more than friends, we became family.

We packed our bags with many happy memories of Buenos Aires. The trip gave me a new sense of respect and admiration for the people and culture of Argentina. My wife and I plan to return to join in Argentina’s bicentennial celebrations on May 25, 2010.