Today, I am finally going to share some of my impressions about our trip to Argentina. I know it was our first stop, but I was afraid I would forget all the other places in Bolivia and Peru, as we stayed there longer, so I wrote these posts first (logic?!). Unfortunately, we only had 4 days in Buenos Aires and half a day in Salta, which is not enough time to say too much about the entire country. However, Buenos Aires was a great city to start in and I do think it was a good way to ease into our South America adventure. So, here we go…

Hola, Buenos Aires!

We were definitely thrilled once we finally set foot on South American ground – we’ve finally made it after months of planning, discussing where to go and what to do. As I mentioned before, it took us a while to figure out where we wanted to start. Really, there are so many countries that I wanted to see and it was a tough decision to make. Anyways, I feel like we made the right choice. So, when we arrived at the airport, we had a driver from the hostel pick us up, Its not that expensive and easy when you just newly arrive in another country. We stayed at the America del Sur Hostel which was located right in the heart of San Telmo, which is a good neighborhood to stay in, when you are ever going to go to Buenos Aires. It’s in walking distance to Plaza de Mayo and has a lot of restaurants and bars in the area. Plus, the girls at the reception where great and helped us out where they could.

La Boca

So, we arrived pretty early on Friday morning and arrived at the hostel around 9:00am. We got lucky, as the hostel offered a free walking tour around the La Boca area at 11:00am, so we decided to go to get a better overview of the city. La Boca is the old port area of Buenos Aires and lies at the river Riachuelo.

Just as a side note – It’s really up to you whether or not you like things like free walking tours or not. For me, walking and exploring by myself is totally fine, but I sometimes also like to take the chance to meet new people during these kind of things. Free walking tours are great, because they are mostly done by people that just arrived and are in the same situation as you are.

Anyways, we decided to to the walking tour and walked through San Telmo to a bus stop that brought us right to the entrance to La Boca. First things I noticed were the colorful houses that are all around the neighborhood – and lots of tourists. We were greeted by Tango dancers, people with souvenirs and, of course, the statue of the pope Franziskus (as we all know, he is from Argentina). In general,You can find lots of statues around the houses, such as the ones of Diego Maradona (yeah, he is like a national hero). We walked around the street Caminito and listened to our guide telling us all the important facts of the area and Buenos Aires in general.

We walked along the little streets, passing the soccer stadium La Bombonera, which hosts the Boca Juniors, one of the famous soccer teams in Argentina, passed street food grills and saw lots of tango dancing and opportunities to hang out and enjoy the atmosphere. The tour took around 3 hours and stopped right were we started, at the river at the beginning of the Caminito.

As we were divided in two groups (english speaking and spanish speaking), we were only a small group of people. Thank god, our guide was taking us back to the bus stop were we had to get off. And thank god, the girl from our group knew how to walk back to our hostel because we has no sense of orientation, this city is just huge and we just arrived. As we were all newbies to the city, we decided to have lunch together and exchanged some travel stories and things to see in other countries. Most of the people we met had already been to Peru or Bolivia, so it was good to get some advice here and there. The day went by quick and in the evening, all we did was getting food and drinking some beers with two of the guys from the afternoon tour. We were just too exhausted to go out or do anything else and we wanted to use the entire next day to explore the city more.

Downtown Buenos Aires

The next day, we had an early breakfast and wanted to see the main sights, as we had planned to go to Uruguay for a day trip the next morning. So we really only had one full day left to see the city. Simon, the guy from New Zealand that we met the day before, wanted to check out a famous book store in the city so we decided to all go together. He had been exploring before, so it was nice having someone with a little bit more sense of orientation with you. We walked up towards Buenos Aires downtown, if you can call it that, up to Plaza de Mayo, which is one of the most important landmarks of Buenos Aires every since the Buenos Aires was granted Independence.

Plaza de Mayo is surrounded by government houses such as Casa Rosada and Cabildo. Besides that, the Metropolitan Cathedral is right there, so everything is for you in walking distance. We got lucky, as the Plaza was closed the day before due to demonstrations (this happens a lot in South America), but we were able to walk around freely and look at everything.

We walked past Plaza de Mayo and into the shopping streets of Buenos Aires, were we were looking for Simons book store. Like in every big city, the streets are very busy and its overcrowded, but its still a nice experience to see all the vendors on the streets and passing different kinds of architectures. After visiting the book store, we continued our journey to Palermo. On our way there, we went to see the famous cemetery La Recoleta, as Eva Perón, first lady of Argentina, is buried there. It’s worth going, not because of her grave which is not very interesting, but the cemetery itself is just quite beautiful.

We walked all the way up to Palermo and then tuck the subway back to San Telmo, as we were all pretty exhausted from the long day. The dinner in the evening is not even worth talking about and I still feel kind of bad that we didn’t have one good meal while staying in Buenos Aires. That is not, because they don’t have awesome food, but because we’ve made the wrong choices to go to. But we all live and learn, right. Anyways, Buenos Aires was pretty cool to look at, its a huge city and I am sure I would have gotten to know and loved it more if we would have stayed longer. Therefore, i will definitely come back and spend some more time in the country, if I get the chance. As we had our day trip to Uruguay the next day, i will skip forward to our trip from Buenos Aires to Salta and from Salta to the Bolivian boarder, as Colonia deserves its own blog post.

Salta

Monday morning, we had a couple more hours to chill and walk around before we had to go to the airport to fly to Salta. This was one from two flights that we took while being in South America. 1. because its too expensive and so much cheaper by bus and 2. because we were on a tight schedule and didn’t have time to make our way up to Bolivia only by bus. We had half a day in Salta  as our bus was schedules for later in the night. We took a bus from the airport to the bus terminal to buy our tickets and then walked all the way up to the main square where you can find the General Arenales statue surrounded by palm trees and many, many, many restaurants. It’s probably one of the most touristy stops we have been to, which shows in prices and audience.

Even though the city is pretty small, there are quite some things that you can do. Even though, we were mainly just walking past the sights as we had our backpacks and were hungry, you can go visit the Salta Cathedral, you can take a drive on the Salta tram, chill on the little sea surrounded by palm trees or go for a walk. It’s definitely a city where you can stay for 1 or 2 days, I would have not stayed longer, even if I could have. But then again, thats a personal feeling.

That concludes our time in Argentina, as I said, not enough time, but I want to come back to see more of the country, as I heard to much good about it. In general I can say, it’s been one of the more westernized experiences. You do get an idea of the Argentinian culture, however I feel like I would have needed more time to explore more and get to know the people. Its definitely worth a visit, just plan more time in advance, so that you can also go and see cities like Mendoza, Rosario, etc.