Trans Americas 2009 - The Blog

The blackout curtain trick worked and I woke up at 9am to the sound of Jim still snoring. I quietly showered and went down to breakfast without disturbing him, and when he came down to breakfast about half an hour later looking refreshed he said what a good idea closing the curtains was...

With a full day in Buenos Aires and nothing much to do I arranged to go out sightseeing with Nick, Simon and Late Guy around lunchtime, giving me the remainder of the morning to chat to Tracy and to sort out my packing. Our focus for the sightseeing trip was La Recoleta cemetery, which sounds awfully morbid but wasn't really as the cemetery is more like a bizarre city of the dead than the usual mass of gravestones. Buried within the walled “city” are the most influential and important Argentinians from the late 1800s onwards, including several presidents, scientists, poets, celebrities and, its most famous internee, Maria Eva Duarte de Peron, otherwise known as Evita. And it really is a bizarre place, with individual mausoleums decorated with statues of angels mourning the dead, or pointing the way to heaven...





Outside one was an angel giving a “Gerald wave” which made us giggle...





We wandered round this strange place for a good hour or so, marvelling at the money some families must have spent on places to store their dead folk, here in this most exclusive part of Buenos Aires. Evita's mausoleum was not very elaborate, but attracted by far the most attention and was one of the very few with fresh flowers...





After her death in 1952 her body disappeared as the military dictatorship tried to suppress the people and made it illegal for anyone to possess images of her or her husband (Juan Peron, the former president). In 1971 it was finally revealed that her body had been buried under another name in Milan and she was exhumed and kept in Juan Peron's home in Spain before he finally returned to Argentina in 1973, and Evita's body was then returned to Argentina and finally laid to rest in La Recoleta. It is little wonder therefore that this is the mausoleum that attracts by far the most attention...

After touring the cemetery we went and ate a delicious lunch in a pavement café under a blisteringly hot sun. A cool tuna salad and some very cold beer was most welcome, as was the opportunity for some more people-watching. With today being a national holiday in Argentina, there were plenty of people out in their finery, from “ladies who do lunch” to lovers wandering hand-in-hand (making me homesick again) to families out for a stroll in the sun.

Once suitably recovered from the walking Nick and I wandered back to the hotel, a further hour-long walk through the city that first involved crossing the Avenida de 9 Julio, the world's widest road, which fortunately has plenty of pedestrian crossings...





Once back at the hotel I spent some more time online chatting to Tracy before it was time to re-assemble downstairs to meet Pertti's girlfriend who had flown in from Finland and then head out to dinner with a large portion of the group. Yet another Argentinian “all you can eat and a bottle of wine each” meat restaurant, this time with the largest grill I've ever seen. There were 2 serving grills, each of which must have been 8ft long, and then a huge grill that extended the full length of the restaurant where they were cooking up whole herds of cows, flocks of lamb and broods of chickens...





They also had a very large salad bar, so at least Max got to eat something too...

Once full to bursting point we settled the bill (about £13 each) and caught taxis back to the hotel with the intention of going to the nearby Irish Bar. Only that was closed due to the public holiday so we had to settle for a final beer in another bar before calling it a night around midnight.

And so that's almost it. Tomorrow I leave for my flight home, and should be back Thursday afternoon... the journey is almost over...