BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA (DAY ONE) – NATURE RESERVE WALK
Today, we arrived in the capital of, and biggest city in, Argentina; Buenos Aires. As with many large ports, pedestrian access is restricted, meaning that everyone has to be ferried to the cruise terminal building via a shuttle bus. With all the cargo container activity going on, it’s probably for the best.
The first thing we did, as we walked through the terminal, was to buy Tracey a new hat (again). As always, when passing through a cruise terminal, I turned on my phone to search for any free wi-fi networks, and was disappointed to discover that there was none – how mean! With a lack of any means to check for emails (our Three 3G Data card doesn’t work in Argentina), we grabbed ourselves one of the free maps available from the information desk, and stepped out into the blistering 35+degrees heat.
This being Argentina, it isn’t wise to mention the Falklands (or Malvinas). As I understand it, the order in which we visit these next few ports is crucial; we have to go Argentina first, then to Uruguay, then to The Falklands – if a cruise ship has visited The Falklands first, or your next port after Argentina is The Falklands, then there’s a high probability that they won’t let you in.
The first thing we were confronted with, once we were free of the terminal, and the hordes of taxi drivers vying for our trade, was the extensive on-going road works. I don’t know what it is that they are building; it looks like a new ring road, or underpass, but I’m sure it’ll be nice when it’s finished. In the meantime, the long queues of stationary traffic were pretty horrific.
We walked along the outer edges of the road works, on our way to an Ecological Park, which is basically a large Nature Reserve, situated a little further along the coastline. When we finally got there, we took advantage of a free water point, where we could fill up our water bottles, drink deeply and even cool down our steaming heads under a makeshift outdoor shower. Just up from here, we would have popped into the small building that has signs telling us it was an information centre. Unfortunately it was was closed. In the windows, we could see hundreds of bees flying about, and round one end of the building, a mass of bees seemed to have taken it over altogether.
As we walked, we saw birds galore; Tracey was in her element. The birders from the ship had also found their way there (although, they had taken a taxi), so everyone was happy, spotting many different birds, and a couple of huge iguanas. On exiting the park, in another adjacent green area, where we bought some cold drinks from a vendor there, we also saw two magnificent Harris Hawks perched in a tree.
It remained stiflingly hot the whole way, and even though I love a bit of wildlife spotting, I was struggling to keep up with the energy and enthusiasm of the birders, and was more concerned with trying to stop my brain from dribbling out of my ears. The air was so humid that I just felt soaked and drained in equal measure. By the time we finally made our way back to the terminal, we’d walked about 8 miles in total.
Back in the terminal building, we bought cold drinks from a small cafe there, who also gave out the password for free wifi. Unfortunately, it didn’t work – not at all – it allowed me to connect to it, but told me that there was no internet access, even after disconnecting and reconnecting, and restarting the phone several times.
Miffed with the lack of decent free wifi, we headed back onto the ship, where I discovered that I had been bitten quite badly. I always say that if there are clouds of mosquitos about, you should stand next to me, because they’ll always devour me first.
We finished the day off with a movie night (A Quiet Place), and had planned to preview all our photos with a bit of a slideshow. However; a minor disaster resulted in Tracey’s camera card being totally cleared of all its photos. This caused a bit of a panic as, at that point, Tracey hadn’t had a chance to back her photos up from the day, so the slideshow was promptly abandoned as I scratted around the various programs I keep saved on a hard drive in case of such problems, looking for a solution. Both of us were rather amazed by the ferocity and speed at which the files were deleted off the card, and dismayed by the subsequent lack of an ‘Undo’ to reverse the action (which is available to PC files). After several false starts, I eventually managed to persuade a program to undertake a successful restore; a procedure which took several hours, long into the night.
Leaving the laptop to chug away at the restore, we headed upstairs to watch a spectacular lightning storm that lit up the sky over the city, before having a final cup of tea and turning in for the evening.
