About the weather…

 Today, we fly home, but in the afternoon, so we had time for a nice breakfast - with champagne to celebrate Joe’s birthday!

 And even time for a long walk through the pretty neighborhoods of Recoleta and Palermo.  As I mentioned when we arrived, Buenos Aires is a very pleasant city to walk around.  And apparently to run around too:  As I was walking down the wide avenues and along the many city parks, there we’re A LOT of people jogging….. 

 The street that links Recoleta and Palermo neighborhoods is lined almost the entire way with parks.  They are all named for a specific culture or group of immigrants to Argentina.  The majority are owned and designed by the City itself to honor the different groups.   The choices of designs are interesting in this context:  The German one was (by far) the most ostentatious 

 While the French one had the nicest gum trees….  

 The Chilean one has the best playground, designed to resemble Mount Fitz Roy.  

The Japanese garden is the exception, as it is fully designed a maintained by the Japonese community of Buenos Aires.  It also is the most elaborate one, but was not opened when I waked by - so only took pictures looking in. 

The most famous structure though is the huge flower in the United nation Plaza.   The petals are supposed to open and close with the sun, but it was not working right now (Now that I think about it, I think that was the case too when we came 12 years ago….  So not sure how often it actually does work…)

 Our flight back was unfortunately not direct:  There is some construction going on at the international airport in Buenos Aires, and they can’t land the really big jets.  So there are no direct flights anywhere to the US.  We went through Lima, Peru, which was fine - the LATAM Lounge in Lima is very nice….  But it means that it took longer to get home, although everything went very smoothly.  We were welcomed back by another view of the Manhattan skyline (top picture) and by a nice display of leave colors over Queens….

So - about the weather:   We have been exceptionally lucky with it on this trip:  We had been warned that the weather was very variable in Patagonia, and that we should expect anything from some sun, rain, fog, hail and maybe snow - wind definitely.  And that it would be hot in Buenos Aires and probably rainy.   None of that happened!  We had mild temperatures the entire time, with clear skies to admire the views, and practically no wind (other than right next to the glacier).  In Buenos Aires, it was delightfully cool and the rain that was  in the forecast for our last day never materialized.  Even upon landing back in NYC, the weather was beautiful!  

Las pampas!

 

Today we travelled north of Buenos Aires on the Pan American highway for about 80 miles (we could have continued north and eventually end in Alaska, which would have taken a while but sounds cool!), out of the city in into the province of Buenos Aires - think Washington DC and Virginia - its a very similar status,  except the citizens of Buenos Aires city can vote for representatives, while people in DC cannot….

But I digress….  We were going to a horse farm in the pampas! When we drove from Puerto Natales to El Calafate, I mistakenly thought that we were driving through the pampas.  We were not, we were going through a large desert.  The pampas around Buenos Aires are very fertile land that, until the European arrived were covered with thick grasses - think the US prairie, minus the bisons.   This extremely rich soil was divided and given to Spanish farmers who became very rich and build all the fancy house in Buenos Aires.  Even today, the richest people are the landowners.  It is now covered with wheat, soy, cattle farms and horse farm.  There were no native trees, all the trees you see around Buenos Aires were imported.  

Of course, that involved displacing and killing whoever was there fist, and very few of the native population remains (about 1% of the total populations).  The ones that were not killed worked on the large estates and developed the gauchos culture.  Horses were new to them, but the developed a unique and very personal relationship with them, as well as a unique way of training them called “horse whispering”, more about that later.

We arrived at a beautiful estancia, run by a very large family:  the parents started it as a horse breeding farm, then added some guest rooms, and activities for visitors and a polo club.  They had 9 children (!!!!), 5 of whose run the farm and the polo club now.  

Today, the gaucho culture is no longer just the native people (for one thing, there are not enough of them left), but all the people who raise, run and breed horses.  So they put on a typical gaucho show for us, with races, games - including getting a very small ring on a stick on a horse a full gallop, which seems almost impossible to do, and yet, they did it.

The most impressive part of it though was the “horse whisperer”.  The native really took to the horses, and just related to them in a unique way -  they believed in a gentle approach (no bit in the moth for instance), and get the horse to do amazing things.  Here are just a couple of pictures, but they don’t really show how the horse and the gaucho related to each other.   It was amazing.

We had the typical asado meal - Argentinians eat a lot of meat!!!, accompanied by two very good guitar players and singers, playing Argentinian tune - including an old favorite of mine - my French friends will remember “je reviens” par Hughes Auffrey…

Then came back to the city early enough for a walk around the Recoleta neighborhood.  There is a very large craft fair every week end in the park and I strolled around.  There were lots of people, locals and tourists, some were just sitting in the park enjoying the beautiful weather, some strolling under the magnificent gum trees (I do love a huge grand tree!).  It was very enjoyable.  As I said, Buenos Aires is just a lovely city, and it feels very safe.  It is also really clean!  We are in a fancy neighborhood, and this is a city of 15 million people, so I’m sure it’s not that nice everywhere, but the large center is just great.  

The concierge at the hotel recommended that I go to the “El Ateneo” book store, which I thought was an odd recommendation - but, Buenos Aires is in fact famous for how many book stores it has and that one is just amazing!  It’s all in Spanish, so I did not buy anything, but it is well worth seing.

We had our good bye reception this evening.  One member of our group wrote a song about our trip, and performed it, which was lovely.

We fly home tomorrow afternoon, so I’ll have some time to walk around some more in the morning.   

We leave Patagonia and make it to Buenos Aires

We left El Calafate for the last stop on our trip:  Buenos Aires.  

  The main reason to go there on this trip is that it is the only way to then fly back home, but since we are going there, we do have some nice activities planned.  We got a nice view of the Andes and on last glacier from the lake. (I think this is mount Fritz Roy - the one on the Patagonia company logo….)

 We arrived in Buesnos Aires early enough to take a quick “highlights” tour of the city - We had seen it in 2014, on our way to Antarctica and had in fact spend a few more days then.  But, it was over 100 degrees then, so while we did see a lot, we did not spend much time walking around…..

 It is a very walkable city, with wide side walks and cute neighborhoods  It is also remarkably clean and feels very safe.  We of course stopped at the main square to see the building from which Eva Perone gave her famous speech (top picture). It is fenced in right now because the pope is coming next week and there are a lot of preparations going on. They were also busy building the main stage where he will appear, and there are Vatican City flags everywhere.  

  We saw the memorial to the “disappeared”  (the symbols on the ground represent the head scarves that the mothers of the diss ape read wore during protests), the cathedral (which does no look at all like a cathedral from the outside, but does from the inside), 

 and the only Spanish era looking church.

 After that, we of course had to go to “la Boca”, the old port, with its colorful building of plywood and tin, which used to be the red light district and is now very touristy, but still cool to see.  The temperature was perfect for a stroll. (More pictures of La Boca at the end)

We ended at the new port - which is now the second old port, because they had to built one with a deeper channel.  So the new old port has been transformed into a very trendy neighborhood of restaurants, boutiques and fancy apartment.   It’s lovely.  

Diner at the hotel - off to bed early….  Tomorrow we go out of the city to see the pampas and a horse farm (I like this better than the city…..)

Here are a few more pictures of the old new port, La Boca, and a random church which I thought looked cool.

Up close and personal with the Perito Moreno glacier

 

The Perito Moreno glacier is the highlight of Glacier National park.  In part because is the one that is easiest to reach (you can drive to it rather than take a boat or go mountaineering), in part because you can get very close to the face, in part because they have built a series of walkway and platforms that make it easily accessible. For that reason, it is quite crowded - it was not unpleasant when we were there, but must be a traffic jam in high season.

But the main reason, at least until recently, is that it was a stable glacier:  It did not grow nor shrink for over 100 years.  So building the infrastructure around it made sense.   It did have a tendency to block off one of the channels out and then break though it's own front wall which means that regularly (every few years or so), it would create massive floods all the way down to El Calafate, with the level of the lake going up by as much as 60 feet.   There are now strong regulations about building along the lake for this reason, although it looks like these are no longer necessary:  Sadly, this "stable" glacier is now receding.....  like all glaciers.   The Patagonia icefield holds the 3rd biggest amount of ice in the world (after Antarctica and Greenland), so this is a big concern.

 But it means that you can really get a good view of the face of the glacier, and listen to its roar as the ice cracks and falls into the lake.  

Very hard to take a picture of that - or you’d have to do what some of the tourists there were doing:  setup a tripod and just sit for an hour or two.   We did not have the time for that, but I did catch a smallish splash.

We had the ultimate “lunch with a view” at the well name Glacier Restaurant.  

Here are a couple more pictures of the glacier. 

It takes about 1 1/2 hour to drive from El Calafate to the glacier.  Along the way, we got nice views of the valleys were vast ranches were built in the 1800’s and 1900’s.  The Argentinian government enticed people to move there by giving them good leases on large pieces of land, in an effort to prevent Chile from taking over the entire region.  The border is still somewhat disputed:  It’s either defined by where the water flows (water that flows to the Pacific is in Chile, water that flows to the Atlantic is Argentina), but there has been at least one instance of a settler rerouting a stream to change the border….  So now it is defined by the high peaks, but what’s in between is still a bit fuzzy…..

There were nice views of the lake and of the floating icebergs that go down its length.

 I saw a few of the Patagonian parakeets flying around from the bus, but failed to take their picture…. But I did catch this hare-  those were introduced by the Europeans and are everywhere, but I like them anyway.   Also saw these pretty geese near the glacier.  

  We went back to the hotel to get ready for a VERY fancy dinner in the town of El Calafate.   Since it was still so beautiful out, I chose to walk to town, and walk around.  The town is charming in a touristy kind of way:  It’s only purpose is as a stop for tourist to visit the national park or enjoy the lake - indeed before the park was created, it was really just a post for the settlers to stop on their way to the ranches, and then because a small sheep trading place.  It is now quite bustling, with many little shops and artisans. since I had some time to kill, I stopped by the “Ice bar” - which is exactly what it sound like: a bar inside a very cold ice chamber.   It was silly and delightful.   

 Dinner was exceptional - we did skip the second desert though because we could not eat another bite and it was way past our bed time….  Following are a few pictures )we did not have the grilled lamb, but these are in every window of every restaurant).