We spent day 19 missioning it out to Tigre, a small riverside holiday town (suburb? What even is it?) just outside Buenos Aires. And by missioning, I mean the most chill mission ever. We got the regular train from Retiro, the main transport hub of Buenos Aires, and the hour-long ride cost us a total of $0.50AUD each. One of the best things about public transport in Buenos Aires is the huge number of buskers that play in stations as well as on the subways and trains themselves, so we were well entertained on our journey by 3 guys moving through the carriages with a sweet setup consisting of vocals, drums, and guitar with an amp on wheels. Once we alighted at Tigre station, we immediately began regretting the loss of the sweet sweet train air conditioning. We wandered about dazed and overheated until we stumbled upon a tour office where someone who spoke English was able to sell us tickets to a multi-lingual boat ride through the rivers of the delta. This is what we came for, as Tigre is the main hub of many small towns and island dwellings scattered through a huge river delta emptying into the huge Rio de la Plata river which separates Argentina from Uruguay. The hour-long boat rides only cover a tiny area of the delta closest to Tigre, but we still managed to get a glimpse of the way in which people live on the waterways, each house with their own dock (no roads connect the dwellings, each only accessible by boat).
And we're off...
Past the fancy rowing club people and their canoes
There was a "for sale" sign outside this awesomely coloured house, and we had a pretty serious discussion about whether we should can the rest of our trip, become river people, and challenge tourists to banjo duels a la Deliverance
Riverside amusement park which we didn't go to, seeing as our last theme-park experience wasn't exactly trauma-free (we were at Dreamworld 2 days before people died there. One of the rides we went on had the first set of breaks fail, but luckily the emergency breaks caught us)
After the boat ride, we stopped for lunch at the riverside fruit market, where there was curiously little fruit being sold, but for some reason huge quantities of homewares (I saw a couch on sale for $20AUD, then a small cushion a couple of stalls over for the same price. What even is this place?). As our boat ride came with a free hop-on-hop-off tour bus around the city, we elected to take this for the sole purpose of feeling some breeze as the semi-open-air bus drove around. Luckily, the last stop on the bus was the train station, and we were able to quickly escape into the sanctuary of air conditioning once again.
It's a sweaty river Jeremy!
Riverside marketplace
No comments:
Post a Comment