An Unabashed Gluttony Tour - Argentina

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I am in Argentina. I am here for a variety of reasons, the most important being that I have no job. The other good reason is beef and red wine in serious quantity. This is an unabashed gluttony tour - no museums, tango, soccer, trekking, churches or paintings. I am here to eat.

I have plenty of air miles but no money to speak of. Luckily for me, the folks here have none either. Their economy is in shambles making it a very affordable tourist destination for the first time in decades. My budget is about forty dollars a day.

My flight was uneventful, except for the turbulence timed to toss the meals into the air and over everyone. Once we landed, I got some pesos and took the airporter bus into the city. Forty miles into town and then to my hotel for three dollars is truly a bargain. But I was tired and stinky and wanted to "not be there". The Hotel Lourdes is worn out and meets backpacker standards, but I wouldn't send any of you there. It is cheap, though. I paid in advance for four days, ninety pesos or twenty five dollars and seventy-one cents (including breakfast). The hotel is tired but the staff is friendly.

After a good sleep, I spent two hours at an internet cafe. Cost: fifty-six cents. The Hotel Lourdes is a stone's throw from the National Congress Building, a stone's throw being accurate since there are regular, scheduled demonstrations there. The demonstrators do their thing for the television cameras while bored policemen lounge around behind barricades. I saw several such protests within a couple of days. I can't always determine what the particular demonstration is about. The placards don't always make a lot of sense. Maybe they are protesting about the weather.

I checked out El Chiquilin, one of my well-connected pal's restaurant tips, and an excellent recommendation, normally well out of my price range. I had a fantastic empanada as a starter, followed by an immense, tender sirloin steak and plate of fries, washed down with a carafe of the house plonk. I sat and read Frost On My Moustache by Tim Moore, drank wine, ate enough for a week and paid seven dollars, not counting my generous two peso tip.

Buenos Aires is five hours ahead of Pacific time. Restaurants don't get going until ten o'clock. That worked out for my lizard brain which was still on Pacific time. The problem was that I kept sleeping through the complimentary breakfast. So, it was time for lunch when I got up.

The waiter insisted on speaking to me in Spanish, which made sense, but only if you understand the language. The Porteños speak Spanish that sounds more like Italian, which it is, kind of. My rudimentary language skills failed me this time. I never had this problem in Spain or Mexico.

Lunch was a twelve-inch, deep-dish pizza with anchovies and green olives, washed down with a couple of cafe con leches and a flan with a scoop of dulce de leche. All that plus a tip came to a total of three dollars and forty-three cents.

Later, I met up with Ezequiel, a perennial student who relished the chance to speak with native speakers of English. He kept meeting mainly Aussies and picked up the goofy lingo of the antipodeans. He was a good tour guide. We chatted and walked. He showed me important buildings such as the Pink House where the President hangs out. A bright and funny conversationalist, Ezequiel was very candid about the situation in Argentina and what the future might bring. I told him the city was unusually clean, that it reminded me of Paris (which is what everyone says).

I am here solely for food and drink, and cannot waste a mealtime eating poorly. I ate at "La Estancia", recommended by several different sources. I recommend it too. Various cuts of meat are grilled or barbecued over an open fire in plain view. It's a gigantic place and does a pretty good business. The waiters are the real thing, no snarls or attitude here. I ordered a T-bone steak, a salad, some spring water and a bottle of Suter Malbec. (Lonely Planet's guide listed some vintners. I would have been very lost without that. How many Argentinean wineries can you name?)

The steak was so large that it would have humbled Fred Flintstone. It was accompanied by a vat of chimichurri salsa, a concoction of the gods that I will soon start buying by the barrel. The restaurant was finally filling up their last tables at eleven on a school night! As I finished the bottle of Malbec, I felt myself getting a bit tipsy. I ordered dessert, specialty of the house, "Canasta dulce - La Estancia," an over-the-top ice cream dessert that should be unlawful. I managed to eat it all before waddling home. The check came to twelve dollars and eighty-six cents, plus tip.

Lunch on Friday was a few empanadas and a slice of pizza. Empanadas are wonderful here, and cheap cheap. In the evening I met up with Grupo de Ingles, a group of small Porteños who get together once a week to practice their English with each other. Occasionally, they post invites on the Lonely Planet Thorntree, so I hopped in a cab and made my way to the cafe where they meet.

Five of the "regulars" were there and two travelers, a German and myself. They were in their thirties, smart, middle-class and candid. I stayed for about an hour, chatting about politics, mainly. I took the subte (subway) back to the center of town, got off at the wrong stop and walked.

I chose a La Piruana, a Peruvian restaurant that I was turned onto by a foodie friend. This was away from downtown in a working class neighborhood - a joint for Peruvians missing a bit of home. I had a wonderful Arroz con Pollo for about a dollar and a half, then cabbed it back to my hotel.

There are 60,000 taxis here. The meter starts at 1.12 pesos, about thirty cents, and rarely goes over five pesos for rides. The cabs are mostly Peugeot 504's or Renaults. I prefer the roominess of the Peugeots so I waited until one of those came along. The drivers were gregarious and honest, though I did have one try to play dumb and take me to Bombay.

On Saturday morning, I went and picked up my laundry - washed and folded for one dollar and fifty cents. I love it when they fold your laundry. Then I took a cab to Cementario Recoleta to visit Evita - after lunch of a chorizo, an empanada, a T-bone steak the size of Houston, some fries, a couple of Cokes finished with two scoops of Dulce de Leche ice cream. The bill came to five dollars and forty-three cents.

After the cemetery, I went to the Caminito, a vaguely Fisherman's Wharf style place where tourists arrive by the busloads. Dinner that night was at Broccolino, a splurgy pasta place where the stars eat and the tourists flock. I ordered a bottle of wine and the waiter upsold me into a bottle of Viniterra Cab 1999, which was very good but not unheard of. I was trying to check out as many of the reds as possible. My salad, Ensalada Real, included large, paper thin slices of aged ham, some dry Italianish cheese, cress and arugula. My main course was a very respectable linguini entree with tomato, basil and cheese. The bill came to twelve dollars and forty-two cents, before tip.

On Sunday, it was off to the antiques market in San Telmo. This was the event that I had been looking forward to and the highlight of my Buenos Aires wanderings. There were dozens of stands selling good old stuff and some not-so-good, not-so-old stuff. There were street buskers, human statues, costumed tango dancers, miniature horses for photographing toddlers, short grandmothers selling empanadas and pastries from baskets and plenty of springtime sunshine.

After lunch (a plate of beef short ribs for $1.50), I cabbed it over to the bus terminal to check out my options for a ride to Mendoza that night. The double-decker luxury bus included a free hot meal (with wine!). After dinner, a movie was shown ("Shallow Hal") in the original English, but with subtitles that didn't include any swear words. (It's a crummy movie anyway, skip it) Thankfully, the movie eventually ended, lights out and I snoozed. I woke up at sunrise with a nice view of the Andes.

I checked with the helpful Tourist Information desk at the bus station for a private room at one of the three hostels in town, but there were only dorms left. I chose Hotel Castillo at random, a one-star but clean and cheap at eight dollars and fifty-seven cents a night (thirty pesos), including breakfast.

A nearby youth hostel (Campo Base) set me up for an all-day, thirty-five peso tour of the nearby mountains. A dozen of us roared off in a van where I started running out of air to breathe. We were almost at the Chilean border. It was time to eat! We had a passable lunch for a dollar and a half (meatballs, soup, rice, vegetable fritters), and after lunch, we all drove back down.

I was no longer in the finer neighborhoods of lovely Mendoza. I was now near the bus station where shady characters hang out. Twice I wandered past the same barbershop that contained a bored barber with a great head of hair. A sandwich sign out front advertised haircuts for five pesos, about one dollar and seventy-five cents. With nothing better to do and certainly overdue for a haircut I walked in, sat down and got a great haircut by a tonsorial wizard.

Argentina is huge. Going from Mendoza to Puerto Iguazu is like going from San Diego to Chicago. And I was taking the bus. Buses are comfortable. They maintain a reasonable speed limit of ninety kilometers per hour and there are movies - not good, but movies, nevertheless. At Tucuman, I changed buses for Posada, a newer one with picture-window seating. From my new vantage point, I could see colorful raptors eating road kill, large flightless birds wandering around along the side of the road (it's been over 30 years since I read about these in Whispering Land by Gerald Durrell). At Posada, I caught the third bus of my journey, a local one that took six long hours to get to Puerto Iguazu. But I made it.

In Puerto Iguazu, I checked into Residencial Lilian, a small, immaculate motel overlooking a garden courtyard with air conditioning, cable television, a double bed, hot water - all for five dollars and fifty-five cents. For my first adventure, I chose a sedate day cruise on a ship. There were thirty passengers in a space meant for three hundred and I was the only English-speaking one. A couple of musicians played standards and medleys while we ate the buffet lunch included in the price of the cruise. We cruised to nowhere in no hurry. A good day.

The next morning, I took the shuttle bus to the National Park Iguazu. The park is very well run and has great signage. There are several trails and one takes catwalks out to various vantage points to get close, close enough to get drenched when the wind changes slightly. I had read about the falls. I had heard about them and I had seen photographs of them, but I was not expecting such magnificence and magnitude.

I also took the ecological tour, a private-concession-run raft trip that cost a couple of dollars. We got up close and personal to a basking alligator and saw plenty of attractive birds. And butterflies! Heaps of them, all sizes and colors everywhere you looked. They were constantly landing upon us, not a bad thing at all, if you like butterflies. I do. Also coatimundis. They wander the park for handouts (strictly forbidden, but they don't read the signs). They are a more attractive version of a raccoon. Bower birds with delightful, drooping nests can be seen too. Toucans made an appearance, colorful forest ruffians using their long beaks to rob the Bower bird nests of their eggs. And I saw geckos.

For dinner, I went to a nice restaurant, El Quincho, and ordered a sirloin champignon flamado con cognac en salsa demi glas y papas noisette for 15.50 pesos, about four dollars and forty-three cents. Dinner and service were great and after drinking an entire bottle of wine, I thought everyone was great.

For the long ride back to Buenos Aires, I had reserved a seat on a Super Cama bus, only three-wide, leather seats across, a newish, very comfortable and whimsically painted Marco Polo double decker bus. At the very instant the bus departed the terminal, the skies opened up. The streets were flooded in less than a minute, brown water was up past the curbs. Hail the size of unshelled walnuts came down, the sound somewhat disconcerting as it bounced off the fiberglass roof of the bus, inches from my head. I suppose in every rainforest, a bit of rain must plummet.

We were driving south from the border. For the first time, everyone was boarded and identified by the national police who were dressed like Army soldiers. At three checkpoints, my passport was carefully scrutinized and my daypack searched once. The officers were looking for drugs, I was told, which seems fair. I have had those days myself.

The usual drill on buses is that free, hot meals are served the same way as they do on airplanes, but tonight was very different and astonishing. Sometime after nine in the evening, we pulled off the road at a dedicated restaurant owned and run by the bus company, Crucero del Norte. The bus passengers were shuffled into a large dining hall bedecked with tables for four, presided over by uniformed waiters.

We were each served a scrumptious, three-course meal - a vegetable frittata, a baked, boneless chicken morsel stuffed with spinach, a seasoned rice thang and French rolls, with a choice of wines, beer or soft drinks. And generous refills. I finished my hot meal too quickly, and they brought me another. As we ate, musicians played sad songs and a female singer serenaded the dining bus passengers while she walked around the aisles carrying a cordless microphone. Our plates and glasses were whisked away, replaced with new dessert plates - a slice of chilled, three-layer cake with a flan topping. After that, champagne! While I was attempting to scribble some notes down about this on my Palm Pilot, baskets of shortbread cookies were placed at each table.

This meal was included in the price of the bus ticket, which cost less than twenty dollars. As we left, another busload arrived, the whole process to begin again. I snapped a photo because I couldn't believe what I had just experienced.

For my last supper, Ezequial and I dined at Chiquilin, Sarmiento 1599 at Montivedeo. We had a fabuloso T-bone, good wine, an immense salad, two scoops of ice cream with a dollop of dulce de leche, for about twenty dollars. And for my final meal, I returned to Chiquilin for lunch, an even better experience than their dinners. I had steamed asparagus, avocados stuffed with chicken salad, shrimp salad, pickled tongue, a huge portion of aged, dry ham, a pot-roast-like steak, tempura'd broccoli, some green salad, French bread, a coffee "cortado" and a Coke for 16.50 pesos, or about five dollars.

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