I was all set to give blood this morning, but apparently my Argentinian travel makes me ineligible. Most of Argentina is fine, but Iguazu Falls and Corrientes (home of the capybaras) are at risk for malaria, so I need to wait a year.

I'm a bit disappointed. There goes my good deed for the day.

About the last thing I did in Argentina was to take a bicycle tour of Tigre. We took a train, biked around, and then took a boat ride. On the way, there were some fantastic views of the whole city, whose downtown high-rises look splattered against the shoreline.


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After all my sightseeing, I did some sightseeing in Buenos Aires and did a little more tango. I took a few more tango lessons and tried to dance at a milonga, but it was really hard for me to work up the nerve to dance with people. My dance suckiness was compounded by my language barrier, so I only danced with one or two people in both the milongas ( Read more... )

Getting to Mendoza sucked. See, I had planned my trip to Ibera at the last minute, because I'd hoped to see capybaras at Iguazu. Then, when it came time to get my bus ticket from Ibera to Mendoza, it turned out that because it was a long weekend for Father's Day and Flag Day, all the buses in that direction were booked. After experiencing some ( Read more... )

The first glimpse of capybaras we got was from our boat. We saw ones that were far away and active, and close but lazy.


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After Iguazu, I went to Iberá expressly to see capybaras. Apparently, this wetland is about the only place in Argentina to see them. They were, as expected, the great highlight of my time in Iberá, but I'll save it for the next post. But before I get into everything, know that I've found going through my pictures to be too tiring, so I'm just ( Read more... )

My second day in Iguazú, I went to see the waterfalls as part of a group tour. On the way there, I met this guy.


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After hanging around taking Tango and Spanish lessons in Buenos Aires for a week, I went on a 1-week tourism trip through Argentina, with 3 stops. My first stop was Iguazú, the enormous waterfalls on the border with Brazil.

It's a jungle out there. No, really, it's a rain forest.


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As a day trip from Buenos Aires, I went to Colonia, Uruguay. It's a little town just across the "river" from Buenos Aires. (I put river in quotes because it's more than 20 miles wide there, and brackish.) There's a small historical area, and then quite a lot of laid-back but not exactly thriving town ( Read more... )

I arrived in Buenos Aires on Thursday morning, and I took a shuttle into the city's downtown. I was immediately struck by all the high-rise apartment buildings everywhere. They looked like subsidized housing might here in the US, but, well, didn't seem horrible or run-down. I gather that with the current economic situation, that's where the middle ( Read more... )