Guest Bloggers--John and Tenaya

Hello, it's John and Tenaya, Ken's sobrino and his novia, visiting from Seattle. Our trip was a mere 12 days--six nights with Ken and Helen in Buenos Aires, punctuated by two nights in Iguazu Falls (in the north, where Argentina borders Paraguray and Brasil) and three nights in Bariloche (a Swiss Alps aesthetic-obsessed town in the Andes foothills of northern Patagonia).

We've been looking forward to contributing our guest post since we read Charlie's, but now that Ken and Helen have chronicled so much of their ex-pat journey from F.O.B. (or, more precisely, F.O.P.) to Porteño, we've had to think a bit harder about what uniquely to contribute!

Ken and Helen were wonderful hosts, but because they've already have done a great job covering daily life in Buenos Aires, this post will focus on our travel beyond District Federal.
Internal flights. Semi-cama or full-cama, we didn't have time for overnight bus trips, so took domestic flights to go to Iguazu and Bariloche. Friends from Seattle who are spending a year in Cordoba (Argentina) warned us away from Aerolinas Argentinas, which has a reputation for scheduling twice as many flights as it intends to fly.

We opted to fly Lan, a Chilean airline which flies many intra-Argentina routes. Lan proved to be a great airline, with three flights on time and one just 20 minutes late, a far better record than we've experienced flying between Seattle and San Francisco on Alaska and Southwest. The airplanes (brand new!), service, and food were significantly better than on domestic American carriers (see the picture of Tenaya displaying our snack boxes of cheese crackers, lemon cookies, and Havanna brand alfajor). Amusingly, on one flight John bungled drink order in Spanish and "lost" his Spanish privileges--for the rest of the flight the flight attended continued to communicate with Tenaya in Spanish and John in English! Moral: Fly Lan.

Igauzu Falls. Spanning the border between Brasil and Argentina, Iguazu Falls is wider than Niagra Falls and rival Victoria Falls. The falls are an incredible natural wonder, but they are a self-contained international tourist destination and not really an Argentine cultural experience. Iguazu National Park has incredible infrastructure brings visitors to breathtaking viewpoints at the lip of the falls, but it's difficult to do anything else! Incomplete maps and the lack of a central information center frustrated our efforts to see wildlife (including the dog-sized rodent known as a Carpincho and the Toco Toucan), but we eventually managed to figure out a rushed, but nice hike in the sub-tropical forest on the Sendero Macuco.

Bariloche. Argentina's Lake District is in the Andes foothills in northern Patagonia. Bariloche is its largest city. Beautiful mountain and lake scenery, with a few interesting physical differences from comparable beautiful mountain and lake areas in the United States (e.g., there�s bamboo in the alpine forests, and deciduous forests are located between the evergreen forests and the tree line). Like Iguazu, Bariloche and the surrounding Lake District is very, very touristy. Indeed, tourism appears to be the primary industry in those parts. But it's different from Iguazu; the tourism seems to be largely domestic travel by Argentines, so even the touristy aspects of the area seemed more genuinely Argentine than they did in Iguazu.

Driving. We rented a car in Bariloche so we'd have the flexibility to drive around the mountains and go hiking on our own. After coming to Buenos Aires and watching the local drivers, we were a bit nervous about this, but we gave it a shot. We had a reservation with Budget. At the airport in Bariloche, there was no Budget counter, so John went to the Hertz counter to see what their prices were (for whatever reason, car rental companies don't require credit cards to secure reservations). Hertz's rates were higher than what we had reserved with Budget, so we asked where Budget's counter was. The woman at the Hertz counter told us that Budget is in town, not at the airport, but to look to see if they sent someone. For those of you who have rented a car in the United States, you're no doubt aware rental car companies do not "send someone" to pick you up. But this is Argentina. Indeed, Budget had sent someone with our car, delivered to us at the airport. He gave us a tutorial on how to put the car in reverse (pull up a ring, much like the 1984 Volvo wagon John learned to drive on), wrote down his cell phone number in case we ran into problems, and made sure we have the proper papers to drive into Chile in case we wanted to (we didn't even try). So, like Lan, fantastic service--far beyond what we are accustomed to from American rental car companies. But the car? Not so much. We reserved a midsize car because it wasn't much more expensive than the cheapest model, and we thought it would get us something a few steps up from an econobox. What we got was a tiny Chevy Aveo with removable radio, ~80K kilometers on the odometer (very high for a U.S. rental car), no power steering (lots of fun pulling out into traffic from a parallel parking space), and a trunk that could cause a concussion to the unwary.

We learned by observation that parking on sidewalks is normal, that lanes were merely suggestions, and left turns are *sometimes* made from the right lane (yes, you signal left, but move right and stop to wait for all the traffic to pass....). We were feeling good until we went to go get gas on our way to the airport. We pulled into what seemed to be the last gas station on the airport side of town. The attendant came over, looked at the car, and told us that we needed a "NAFTA" station, something this station didn't have. To John, NAFTA is the North American Free Trade Agreement because he wasn't listening when Tenaya told him that gas was called "nafta". As it turned out, we passed no "NAFTA" stations before reaching the airport (with no time to spare), but the Budget guy just charged us 60 pesos for a tank of gas, which seemed fair. We're still wondering what was sold at the other fuel station--we didn't see any references to diesel.

That's our $.02 on aspects of Argentina Ken and Helen have yet to see. We've had a great time and look forward to coming back in a few years so we can see all the parts of the country we couldn't make it to in this 12 day trip.