a seven month sojourn: Buenos Aires

We arrive in Buenos Aires to a hot sunny day and baggage delays. After 45 minutes standing around the carousel, the locals start up a slow clap that builds into a foot stamping, raucous chant that echoes down the arrivals hall. Welcome to the city of public protest.

Artwork befitting of grandad's basement drinking den

But after this delay, nothing else can upset our week here and we love the place. So much so that it's moved to number 1 on our cities to live list.

Our accommodation couldn't have been better - an old stone manor on the fringe of a leafy inner-city suburb. A great find by my brother who did well to book something that met all the requirements for the ten of us. Built in 1916 and now run by the owner's grandson, the house and fittings have been carefully looked after to keep the original feel (opening the wardrobe I half expect to find Narnia). Thankfully there were some modern touches - a flat screen telly broadcasting RWC.

Breakfast at corner cafe

Our week is spent ambling around the streets and parks of Palermo, enjoying the pastries, coffee and sunshine. After 2 months of traveling by ourselves it takes a while to adjust to the group dynamic, but it's great to spread the planning duties around and be able to share our time here with my family.

Floralis generica

Recoleta cemetery - free for the living

Calatrava's Puente de la Mujer. From some angles it supposedly looks like two tango dancers locked in embrace. We couldn't see it, but a beautiful bridge all the same.

Museo del Bicentenario

Our last few days are set aside for my cousin's stag night (and hens night for the ladies), whose wedding is the following week in Brazil. The stag, who is inexplicably allowed to disappear during the afternoon to run errands, seems to escape the punishment owed to him (or perhaps he didn't? recall struggling here 3 weeks on).

What we fail to recall at the time is that my brother-in-law, fresh off the plane from NZ that morning and thrust straight into the pub, doesn't have a key to our house. Somehow we find ourselves in separate taxis heading in opposite directions across the city - he's outlasted the rest of the house despite being awake for 24 hours straight.

So it's with surprise that we see Cam come down the stairs for breakfast the next morning. Arriving home alone at dawn, speaking no spanish, with no bearings of the city and only a business card to mark the address he scales the 8 foot high stone wall, another similar sized wall fencing the internal courtyard and then two stories of trellis to reach his balcony. Peter Parker would be impressed.

We leave BA wishing we could have had more time, but excited to be heading to the tropical temperatures of Iguazu. We splash out to travel on the Rolls Royce of all buses - Tutto Letto class, which means full recline seats, movies on demand, wifi and hot meals served with champagne. For half the price of flying and none of the airport hassles, we can't recommend highly enough!

Taken from the boat behind this one. The camera went straight into the dry bag afterwards and the boat charged into the falls.

We spend a day at each of the Argentinian and Brazilian sides of the falls, as well as a short tour of the Itaipu Dam (which is the highlight for me from a geeky engineering perspective). But the falls live up to the hype too. We were told that the water levels were relatively low, but it was still an impressive display. It certainly felt like enough water when they parked the boat underneath.

The boat close to saturation point

Itaipu Dam - the largest hydro dam in the world. 8km long and produces 14, 000MW which is enough to meet the needs of all of Paraguay and a quarter of Brazil. Hard to think how something of this scale is built (the face of the dam shown here is 65 stories high).