Category: Argentina

So what do you do if you unexpectedly find yourself back for one last weekend in your favourite place on the entire continent?

We couldn’t quite believe we were back. As the taxi took us across town to Palermo I started to think about all the bonus stuff we were going to be able to do. The lovely little hotel we’d booked into at the last minute was on the corner of Carranza and Gorriti, which wouldn’t have been an ideal location for a first time visitor to the city, but was perfect for us–stumbling distance from all our favourite bars and restaurants, around the corner from Olsen and the No Brand shop, and a short walk across the tracks to Palermo Soho.

Of course we couldn’t leave BA again without revisiting La Cabrera, home of the finest steak in town, so one of our first tasks was to book in for dinner. We also booked in for Sunday brunch at Olsen, and I went back to the No Brand shop (where the girl behind the counter recognised us) to buy their El Che T-Shirt. It was like our own personal BA Greatest Hits compilation.

We didn’t feel under any obligation to do any more tourist stuff, but did tick one final item off the list by visiting the Carlos Gardel museum over in Abasto. It was very interesting and, I thought at the time, very reasonably priced at just a peso. It was only much later that I looked at the tickets and spotted that we’d been charged the Entrada Residente, the price for locals, which made me very happy…

But all good things have to come to an end. And there is, after all, only so much steak you can eat and only so much Mendoza Malbec you can drink. And so our weekend came to an end and we left Buenos Aires for good on the night bus. We were heading 1200 kilometers north, where Iguazu falls, Brazil, and the last three weeks of our journey were waiting for us.

From San Antonio it was just an hour on the bus to Buenos Aires, where the apartment in which we were planning to spend the whole of August was waiting for us. I had a wallet full of US$ to pay for it, and we were ready to stop lugging the backpacks around for a bit.

Actually, getting the cash to pay our rent had proved to be something of a challenge, as Argentine ATMs impose ridiculous limits on foreign cards. Some of them won’t let you take out more than 320 pesos in one go (which is about fifty quid, and doesn’t go very far when you need to get a month’s rent plus deposit). I got some of the cash while we were in Chile, where the limits are a bit more sensible, although that in itself nearly caused us some problems. At one machine in Santiago, I withdrew about £250, or 250,000 Chilean pesos. The machine chose to dispense this as 50 CH$5,000 notes, an amount so big that it could barely fit through the cash dispensing slot, resulting in Sal and I frantically grabbing at the jammed notes to try and pull them out before the machine closed up again. When we had got them out, I could barely shut my wallet, so I took the centimetre thick wad of notes straight to the casa de cambio and swapped them for 5 US$100 bills…

When we’d tell people that we were planning to stay in BA for a whole month, we tended to get one of two reactions. There are the people who understand why, and then there are those, like the Irish guys we horserode with in San Antonio, who would just look at us aghast and say “A month? Really? What are you going to do?”

Just the other day, we were chatting to some fellow gringos at the Boca Juniors match who’d opted for the latter response. “What have you been doing?” they asked.

“Um. Well. Loads of stuff…”

Perhaps our minds have been warped by all the amazing steak and wine we’ve had. Of course we really have done loads of things in BA, and being in our little place in Palermo, away from all the tourist crowds, has just meant that we’ve had the freedom to take our time. We gradually ticked off the tourist stuff, though, like Recoletta cemetry (eventual home to Eva Peron), the colourful streets of La Boca, the Casa Rosada (presidential palace), the Plaza de Mayo (where the mothers of the “disappeared” gather every Thursday to protest about the murder of their children during the military dictatorship in the late 70s and early 80s), Puerto Madero (the renovated dock area), the Costanera Sur ecological reserve (where we hired bikes and rode along the Rio de la Plata), the races at Palermo Hippodrome (where Sal successfully picked the second placed horse in every race, which would have been great if she hadn’t put all her bets on for the win…), MALBA (the modern art galley), the fine and decorative art galleries, the ballet, tango and that Boca game…

But actually, no, we really spent the month eating.

With so many fine restaurants to choose from, especially in Palermo, we never needed to go to the same one twice. And I can’t stress enough just how good Argentine steak is. Even when it’s not amazing, it’s still head and shoulders above anything I’ve ever had anywhere else in the world. There are many cuts to choose from, but for us it was all about bife de lomo (tenderloin), ideally served jugoso. And as our time in Argentina came to its end, I started to think about my own personal top five…

Top Five Steaks

(5) Don Julio, Guatemala 4691, Palermo

This place has been around for years, and you can see evidence of this in the reviews written on the labels of the wine bottles that line the walls. When I asked how big the cuts were (as we’d made the mistake of not sharing one elsewhere) I was invited over to meet the chef and view a tray packed with raw steak in all its different forms. Mine was excellent, but Sal’s was just a little too done, so this place only makes it to number 5 on the list.

(4) El Solar del Convento, Caseros 444, Salta

This was where we had our first real Argentine steaks, and they were among the best.

(3) Zarza, San Antonio de Areco

After a couple of disappointing meals in Rosario, it was great to get back to some quality cow. The little place we picked for dinner on our first night in San Antonio didn’t look like anything special, but turned out some truly wonderful steak.

(2) El Desnivel, Defensa 855, San Telmo, Buenos Aires

The steaks were so big in El Desnivel in San Telmo that we really should have shared one between us, but we made it through the whole juicy lot of it somehow.

(1) La Cabrera, Cabrera 5099, Palermo Soho, Buenos Aires

We had to wait maybe 90 minutes for a table at La Cabrera but it was worth it. Definitely the best we’ve had. In fact, I’m getting hungry just thinking about it…

Una Problemita

Life in BA wasn’t all a bed of thick juicy steak, though. We did have a couple of dramas along the way. I’ve lost count of the number of museums and other tourist sights that were closed for renovations, we didn’t get to see the inside of the famous Teatro Colon (which is closed for renovations that are taking two years longer than they were supposed to) and we were turned away from more than one restaurant that couldn’t fit us in (including one that was completely empty but apparently fully booked).

Oh, and we managed to get ourselves locked out of the apartment, which was fun.

We were heading out for Sunday lunch at a posh Scandinavian restaurant called Olsen, that’s over in Palermo Hollywood and famous for its Sunday brunch. We’d been turned away from there the previous Sunday but this time we had–gasp–a reservation. As we stepped out of our apartment, I turned to put my key into the door that had just slammed shut behind me, but the key wouldn’t fit in.

We had two sets of keys, and when we were in, we tended to leave one of them in the lock on the inside. One set were in my hands. Had I left the others in the lock on the other side of the door, thus preventing me from putting the ones I had into this side? It was the only possible explanation I could think of, making this very definitely my fault. Oops.

After bothering our very nice neighbour, and arranging to meet Eduardo, the building’s doorman, a few hours later, we went off to what turned out not to be the pleasant Sunday brunch we’d been hoping for.

“Is there a key on the other side?” asked Eduardo, when we met him later. “Then I think the only way in will be to poof!” he said, making the sound and action of a door being broken open. We went up to see what he could do anyway, and after a bit of poking about with a screwdriver he had a brainwave.

Our balcony door was open, so he could simply climb through our neighbour’s window, jump onto the balcony and open the door from the inside. Simple.

Oh, except for the fact that our apartment was on the eighth floor, there were at least 2 metres between our neighbour’s window and our balcony, and it was a sheer drop down to the cold, hard street below. Eduardo decided that this was no problem and went off to get what turned out to be the world’s flimsiest bit of rope with which to tie himself on.

Luckily, after some discussion, we managed to persuade Eduardo that this was not such a sensible idea (at one point I gave the rope he’d tied to the neighbour’s window ledge the slightest of tugs and the “knot” he’d tied came instantly free in my hands), and suggested that he might phone us a locksmith…

And so, several hours later, we finally got back into the flat. We weren’t actually there to see how the locksmith–described by Eduardo as “the best in the area”–had managed to get the door open. His default technique had been to take the key that we had, line it up with the lock, and bash it with a screwdriver in an attempt to force it in. After twenty minutes of this, our landlady and her husband had turned up–just back from their holidays and clearly exhausted, poor things. She took us over the road for a coffee while the locksmith and his son, who was subsequently drafted in to assist, battled with the door.

But we got back in eventually. And it wasn’t even my fault. There was no key in the other side. The lock had just decided to die, and we were the ones unfortunate enough to be stuck on the wrong side of it when this had happened. Just as well, I guess, that Eduardo hadn’t risked his life to get inside, as even if he’d survived the drop, he’d probably have just ended up stuck in there for the rest of the day…

We spent a few days in Rosario before heading on to a little town called San Antonio de Areco, just an hour out of BA. Sal wanted to go horse riding, and so it seemed foolish not to stop in gaucho country to give it a go. As we had an apartment booked for BA, we decided to blow out on a nice hotel and jumped on the bus.

Unfortunately, when we arrived in tiny San Antonio, it seemed like it wasn’t going to be as easy as we’d thought to get up on a horse of some kind.

“Oh no, you’re too late,” said the man at our hotel, looking at his watch, when we asked about the possibility of horse riding in the morning. “The farm will be closed now. Maybe we can call them tomorrow. But I don’t think so.”

Oh. So off we went to the tourist information office in town.

As my Spanish vocabulary doesn’t quite cover horses and horse riding, and as we were in a tourist information office, my opening gambit to the lady behind the desk was “¿habla usted ingles?” but her reply was just a curt “no”.

So I stumbled through in Spanish trying to explain what we wanted to do. But no, she said, there was no horse riding to be had here. Maybe we could call these ranches out of town. By this point she had switched into the English she didn’t speak, and she went on to tell us that you couldn’t really go horse riding because it’s too dangerous. And the insurance costs too much.

Oh. So off we went away from the world’s least helpful tourist information office. We knew from our hotel search that there was at least one ranch in town (curiously not one of the ones she’d told us to call) so we walked over there.

And there we met a friendly chap called Juan Manual, who laughed at our story and told us that horse riding would be no problem at all, that there’s no such thing as needing insurance in Argentina, and that the reason that the lady at the tourist office hadn’t told us about them was probably because he’d recently interviewed her for a job at the ranch that she’d not been given…

And so off we went the next day.

It turned out to be surprisingly good fun, although after four hours in the saddle, I realised when I got down that there’s a reason why John Wayne walks like that…