Buenos Aires, and another tour arranged by the same person as the last one. Still something of a larger group than I expected, but this tour did turn out to be a lot better. Basically we did a driving tour of some of the areas of Buenos Aires, and then stopped at La Recoletta cemetary. Kind of an interesting cemetary, all the sites are mausoleums, generally owned by families and then the various members of the family are interred in them. Our guide seemed to indicated that many of them also go down into the ground somewhat. We stopped at several different interesting sites in the cemetary, but of course the real reason most people go here is to visit the grave for Eva Peron. She’s buried in the tomb of her family (Duarte) instead of being in anything with the Peron name.
After that we drove through some of the city center area, and stopped in the plaza with the pink house (where the movie and the musical make it seem like Eva gave her don’t cry for me argentina speech, although apparently that actually happened in a different location). Didn’t get a real chance to stop here, because apparently they were setting up to close the square off for an announcement from their president about her having thyroid cancer that was just recently diagnosed. Apparently, with these major events, the police actually shut down the area in front of this building, and we could see most of the barricades already up. And apparently, once they shut it down, noone comes in or out until they’re done, so our guide was real concerned that we not spend too much time here or we could get stuck.
Next we went to an area called La Boca, which is the area of the town where the Tango originally started. Nowadays, it’s a place where a lot of local artists set up shop and sell their wares, and there’s a bunch of restaurants and coffee shops, many of which have tango demonstrations going on while you eat there.
Finally, it was back to the ship.
We’d actually arrived somewhat late to Buenos Aires, apparently we’d run into some traffic issues in the River Plate channel. It got us in probably a good hour later than we were supposed to, but thankfully our tour wasn’t scheduled to leave until a little later anyways, so it didn’t really affect us.
Oddly, it seems like there was a significant number of people that were disembarking the ship here, and then a fair number that were actually embarking the ship also. Not really sure how that worked out, but it appeared to be a reasonable number of people. And, when we got down near when we were supposed to be leaving, there were a fair number of people being paged to check in with the purser’s desk, implying that they hadn’t made it back to the ship yet. The captain in his pre-departure announcement explaining what we’d be doing, referenced that we’d be leaving as soon as the clearances from shore were done, even though there were a number of people that were still not accounted for. Apparently, the ship had an appointment for transiting the River Plate navigation channel, and if we missed it, it could cause us to get delayed by traffic in the channel, which could affect us getting to the next port. I think some of those people showed up, but I’m also absolutely positive there were at least 3 that never did. I’m kinda guessing it might be a little difficult to get from Argentina to the Falkland Islands easily too, so who know if they’ll catch up.