Buenos Aires, Argentina (2)

Buenos Aires is a city of barrios, or neighbourhoods. Each neighbourhood has its own distinctive character, characters and allegiances. There are 48 neighbourhoods in BA, although a famous tango song claims there are 100 -- a poetic exaggeration.

La Boca is a colourful, artistic working-class neighbourhood, and probably quite unsafe at night. In La Boca, Caminito is a brightly coloured street museum and traditional alley with artists, crafts stalls, tango dancers (for a fee), and lots to eat and drink. There are also a lot of tourists, but it still feels authentic. This was the area originally settled by poor Italian immigrants, bringing their food, wines, stories, music and memories from the old country, and creating new traditions and art forms like the tango. (Although another neighbourhood, San Telmo, is most explicitly linked with the tango.)

La Boca is the home of Boca Juniors, one of the two soccer teams in BA that inspire fierce loyalties. (The other is River Plate. Football team names are in English, not Spanish, as soccer was introduced to Argentina by England.) When Boca Juniors FC was started, there was fierce debate about the team colours to choose. The solution? It was agreed that the club would adopt the colours of the first ship to sail into BA on one particular day. That ship was Swedish, so the colours of the football club (and associated paraphernalia) are now Swedish blue and yellow.

We stayed in Recoleta, an upmarket neighbourhood in the north of the city. Recoleta is famous for its cemetery --- in fact, a city of the dead, with avenues of mausoleums. Wealthy families buy their piece of ground, and build a fancy tomb, and then all family members are interred there in layers below the ground. There's a definite social cachet to having your own mausoleum in Recoleta.

Eva Perón is buried in Recoleta, in her Duarte family mausoleum. It's the only mausoleum that always has fresh flowers on it. The story of her burial is almost as turbulent as her life: first (in 1952) she was embalmed à la Lenin and Mao, then her body was hidden in Italy to hide it from anti-Perónists, then it was shipped to Spain, where Juan Perón was in exile, and finally back to Argentina in 1974. Her body was then restored and displayed again to the public. Graphic details about the restoration are available, including the fact that her feet were in a bad way because the corpse had been stored standing up. In 1976, when the miltary coup took place, she was finally buried in Recoleta. A relief to all, and most of all to Evita, no doubt, who I'm sure was keen to have some rest after standing up for 22 years.

There's also social cachet in visiting Confiteria La Ideal, the oldest coffee shop in Buenos Aires --- another one of the lovely buildings from the boom time of 1912.

The typical BA breakfast is coffee, croissants and dulce de leche. We had dulce de leche doughnuts as well. Dulce de leche is made by heating sugar and milk, to make (literally) milk jam, and it's eaten in Latin America like jam, with toast or croissants --- or doughnuts. If you're going to make it by boiling condensed milk, then keep going until it's very, very dark.

Want to learn to tango? Here are some instructions.

We're heading out now to the pampas. The pampas are vast fertile grasslands, which stretch as far as the eye can see with nary a hill or mountain in sight. Traditionally the pampas were cattle country --- indeed, this is what made Argentina wealthy. Cattle are still farmed but, in a nod to modern trends, farmers are growing huge quantities of soybeans on the pampas.

About 120 km north of Buenos Aires is the small town of San Antonio de Areco. It's the 'capital of tradition'. In November every year, it holds the Tradition Day gaucho festival. Gauchos --- Argentinian cowboys --- ride their horses in a grand procession into the town. The little town is full of preserved buildings ...

... and a church dating back to 1730.

Not far from San Antonio de Areco is the Estanzia El Rosaria de Areco. An estanzia is a ranch, and we are here for asado --- Argentinian barbecue. Okay, also for some gaucho displays and traditional singing and dancing, but mainly for the barbecue. And beef empanadas.

The owner of the ranch, a very urbane and gregarious man known as Pancho, hosted the day with charm and wit, telling us that 'Argentina is a lovely country, but it's anarchic'. Laws? What laws? Pancho and one of his sons are lawyers, so I guess they'd know. His family has owned the ranch for 25 years and they regularly host tourist groups like ours, but their main business is breeding, raising and training polo ponies. Pancho and his wife have 9 children: three of their sons are professional polo players who live overseas.

Polo is big business in Argentina. There's a horse breed called (wait for it) Argentine Polo Pony, recognised internationally for its speed, agility, durability and ability to learn quickly. Polo ponies have to change direction at speed, accelerate and turn, and cope with other horses close by. A polo pony takes 5 years of training before it can be sold, so there's a lot of investment in the animals and a long lead time before recouping any investment.

The flags represent the nationalities of the people in the audience: mainly Americans and Canadians, with a few British and Australian tourists --- and one South African couple. Two couples, if you include us dual citizens.

Five of the gauchos put the ponies-in-training through their paces, competing against each other in each event. It all happens at full speed, so these videos are brief.

One traditional competition requires the gaucho to ride at full gallop and pin a ring the size of a wedding band on a stick the size of a pencil. The ring is hanging from string on the metal frame in this picture.

Then it was time for asado. Lots of asado. When everyone was replete, it was time for the singing and dancing, which we all watched like stuffed pythons.

I think there was a lot of snoozing on the drive back to Buenos Aires.

Finally, here is a photo of one of the most interesting sculptures we saw in BA. The silver flower moves as it follows the course of the sun during the day; its petals close at nightfall and open at sunrise. Now, does this feel like a city in crisis?

¡Adios y buena suerte, Buenos Aires!