Buenos Aires is a very European city and very keen to prove it; with grand buildings, over-priced cafes and lots of statues and parks. We mainly spent our time wandering through the centre, through markets, parks, churches, and generally exploring the suburbs. Bizarrely the city's main attraction was its cemetery. I thought that Buenos Aires was on the coast, but apparently it's a river, just so wide that you can't see the other side.
You can tell it's a new city by the huge avenues for the traffic. The main avenue through the city had 18 lanes of traffic, but through all the residential blocks it was single lane, crazy one way systems.
Our hostel was on the edges of San Telmo, the remaining heart of the old city. Best for tango the book says. Best for great steak is what we found as Phil completed a hat trick of steak dinners.
We went to a tango lesson and show. In retrospect a dance lesson at the start of the trip may have resulted in the premature end of the trip. However it all went well - I still have all 10 toe nails. Phil also discovered that a number of men are worse dancers than he is, even given explicit instructions and a count in...6,7,8.
We're now in Ushuaia, still in Argentina, at the end of the world, the very southern tip of South America. It was a 3 and a half hours flight from B.A. It has the look and feel of a frontier town and the prices of a big city. It also has a disproportionate number of shops selling amethyst penguins for the cruise ship market.
Today we went into Tierra del Fuego National Park, 10km from the town. We walked up Cerrado del Guanaco, a viewpoint high on a ridge, with a climb up of about 900m. The walk said fine views of the surrounding mountain ranges and across the peat bogs. I don't know why I was surprised to find that I had to walk across/through/in the peat bog to get to the view point. The views were worth it and we got to see a guanaco (wild llama) and a beaver. The beaver had no fear of humans and continued with his gnawing and dam building even though we were only 2m away (beavers were introduced for fur but have gone feral).
Next we're joining a trip through Patagonia up to Santiago, Chile, which promises more mountains, glaciers and some wild camps, which I suspect won't have internet access.
