June 28, 2020

Alluring Argentina

By roads-rus

Being housebound, I am spending too much time making a list of my best travel experiences.  It’s getting fairly long, so I will have to limit it to the 10 or 20 best if I choose to put them into words.  Argentina, the 8th largest country in the world, is showing up often on this list.

Patagonia comprises 400,000 square miles of Argentina.   It covers roughly the part of this oversized country south of the Rio Negro all the way to its southern tip.  Patagonia is a magnificent part of the world with majestic mountains and large green lakes that Ruth & I have seen little of because I wanted to focus on Tierra del Fuego for some reason.  This gives us reason to go back if travel there becomes possible again.  At the present time COVID-19 makes this forbidden.  There have been 57,731 cases of it and 1,207 deaths with 2,461 new infections as of June 27, 2020.  Like many other places in the world, COVID is on the rise in Argentina, and the US State Department is advising no travel to it for now.  Argentina is said to be one of the safest countries in Latin America to visit when international travel is possible again.  It was not considered especially safe when we were there, but we had no problem.

Being a huge city, Buenos Aires has much poverty and a reputation for petty theft if you don’t pay attention to your surroundings.  We were wary and explored much of the city without incident.  We especially liked touring its oversized opera house, the Teatro Colon, seeing the Pink Palace called the Casa Rosada, visiting the cemetery in Recoleta, strolling Buenos Aires’ imposing avenues like the impossibly wide Av 9 de Julio, seeing a tango show in San Telmo, and going to the port of Tigre.  We did not know it at the time, but many tourists visiting Argentina cross the broad Rio de la Plata from Tigre to visit Uruguay.  We talked to some of them when we went to Colonia, Uruguay, several years later. The crossing of this wide, tide-influenced river is a very good idea.  We did not find the art and history museums in Buenos Aires especially enticing except for the Museo Evita.  Many were strong on Argentinian history, if you are so inclined.  Buenos Aires restaurants are among the best in the world, and if you’re a meat eater, its parillas (steak houses) provide gargantuan portions.

 

Tomorrow I will write about our favorite places to visit in this gigantic country, like Ushuaia, Salta, Patagonia’s Peninsula Valdez, and Iguazu Falls.

Hank

About roads-rus

Since the beginning, I've had to avoid writing about the downside of travel in order to sell more than 100 articles. Just because something negative happened doesn't mean your trip was ruined. But tell that to publishers who are into 5-star cruise and tropical beach fantasies. I want to tell what happened on my way to the beach, and it may not have been all that pleasant. My number one rule of the road is...today's disaster is tomorrow's great story. My travel experiences have appeared in about twenty magazines and newspapers. I've been in all 50 states more than once and more than 50 countries. Ruth and I love to travel internationally--Japan, Canada, China, Argentina, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, etc. Within the next 2 years we will have visited all of the European countries. But our favorite destination is Australia. Ruth and I have been there 9 times. I've written a book about Australia's Outback, ALONE NEAR ALICE, which is available through both Amazon & Barnes & Noble. My first fictional work, MOVING FORWARD, GETTING NOWHERE, has recently been posted on Amazon. It's a contemporary, hopefully funny re-telling of The Odyssey. View all posts by roads-rus
This entry was posted on Sunday, June 28th, 2020 at 9:02 pm and posted in Great Destination. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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