Buenos Aires - Day 1 - Tigre Delta

Saturday 3rd May

After brekkie we walked about 30mins over to the river delta side of the city and visited the ferry terminal to book our tickets to Colonia, Uruguay for tomorrow. The ferry cost us Arg$360 (about NZ$160), so pretty expensive - but the trip was so worth it.

On the way back to the central city we stopped off at Galeria Pacifico (an upscale shopping mall) to have a look around and find some lunch. It is a very flash mall, complete with indoor fountain and frescoes on the ceiling, and very up-market, high-end stores - so we felt a little out of place in our traveller's clothes. The main point of our visit was to go to the food court and find some lunch, so we headed down the marble staircase, and into a huge array of yummy lunch options (everything from burgers to gourmet Japanese food was on offer). We ended up sharing a rustic, but good hot beef roll and fries, and then it was time to hot foot it back towards central BA to meet up with our tour guide for our tour of the Tigre Delta.

The Tigre Delta is 35 km north of BA city, and is basically a river delta that used to produce much of the fresh fruit and vegetables for the BA region, but it now a weekend and holiday haven for the BA upper-classes. Our tour guide - Gladys - looked like she was stuck in an 80's time warp (big glasses, old-fashioned pants suit and lovely purple cable-knitted jersey), but was lovely and a wonderful guide and spoke fluent English and Portuguese (as well as Spanish of course). There was about 15 in our group and Andrew and I were the only ones who spoke English (the others spoke Spanish and Portuguese). We started off in a bus which took us north through the city and into the leafy outer suburbs. We then stopped and got on the Tren de la Costa (the Coast Train), for a short trip (all of 20 mins - woohoo!) to the Tigre station. We then re-joined the bus and toured around the Puerto de Frutas (the Port of Fruits), which is famous for its large market selling almost anything from food to household goods to crafts and plants and garden supplies (Tigre is renowned for its plant nurseries). Then we drove around to the Rio Tigre, where we departed on a boat cruise of the Delta.

It was fascinating cruising around the Delta and seeing all the holiday houses (most kinda equivalent to NZ baches), with each house having it's own little jetty, and it was obvious there was a bit of competition to see who could make their jetty look the best. Like wealthy NZer's own a bach at the beach, wealthy Portenos own a house on the Delta where they come on weekends and holidays to escape the city. So, needless to say some of the houses were very flash, while in other areas were the locals still live some of the housing was very basic. There are no roads or bridges around the Delta, so everyone gets around by boat, and there is a supermarket boat, a school bus boat, a hospital boat and taxi boats.

The area is very picturesque, despite the muddy red/brown water, and appeared to be quite laid back and relaxed. Definitely a nice place to chill out for a while. Back in BA city, we went to La Casona del Nonno (just down the road on Calle Lavalle) for dinner and I had fabulous ravioli, and Andrew had spicy "Hellfire Chicken" - and then came the best dessert I've had in SA - Volcan Chocolate - a fudgy choc pud, with liquid choc in the centre with vanilla ice cream and choc sce - yummmm! We'll be coming back here again me thinks.