Bienvenido a Buenos Aires

We left Mumbai on a night flight, after a packed last day in which we set out to Eat Everything (in keeping with the theme of our gastronomic Indian adventure), ending with a stroll along the causeway to Haj Ali´s tomb before sunset and a succulent roast aubergine dish on a darkening hotel terrace on P J Ramchandani Marg near India Gate. It was strange and poignant to contemplate laving India after thse eleven weeks. Us and downs all in, we left as smitten as ever with the beguiling cosmos and it still, like always, felt a little too soon to go. So long old friend.

Stranger still did it feel to transit continents twice in quick succession, with a day and a half back in London town, where we stumbled sleepily into a pre-Christmas Richard Curtis-scape of twinkling trees, dark skies and Londoners wrapped up in warm knits, bustling and busy as ever. We caught up with some of our nearest and dearest (overdoing it as London usual in the process, despite our three months of subcontinental moderation!), did some errands and whirled back out to Heathrow, up and away on a crack-of-dawn flight bound for the New World.

My first ever South American trip and we hit it exhausted like sleepwalkers, happy but reeling a little. Transferring throuh Buenos Aires after midnight, the expansive boulevards were eeirly quiet away from the bustle of the city´s famed nightlife, and the driving fast. Not India-fast, rattling and ducking and diving, but smooth and with speed - a return to the West. We collapsed into our hostel, Telmotango in the boho San Telmo neighbourhood and finally let go.

Buenos Aires is exciting. It´s one of those sexy cities with natural charisma, that you sense needs an insider scoop to unlock fully but which nevertheless grabs you instantly with its street-life and buckets of bohemian connotations. It´s as if New York slammed into a European capial and evolved a string of charming idiosyncrasies from tango to the mysterious (to the outside eye) rites of mate drinking. Wide straight avenues on a grid system carry canary yellow traffic lights overhead as black and yellow taxis cruise by; cobbled shady plazas where Porteños laze the afternoons away over 3 hour lunches in cafes and restauants that spill over into the streets; packed commerical and theatre districts bordering huge leafy parks, and everywhere, but everywhere, fantastic food and wine. The city rises late and buzzes well into the next morning, requiring an even bigger wrench to the North European bodyclock than Spanish habits, for example, to do it justice.

 
We had six nights, which felt like the minimum the city needed, and fortunately or unfortunately, spent much of the week gradually getting over our sleeplessness and acclimatising. The latter was perhaps as much about re-acclimatising from India as about our induction into South America (I´d hit Lonon a little disoriented as usual, weaving erratically down the middle of roads as if dodging rickshaws and porters, shoving unapologetically past people and generally in need of a little reverse-acculturation).

It was also, on a much more mercenary note, a painful transition for the budget. Argentina, always a troubled and erratic economy, is expensive for the traveller these days. Really. While many things are unbelievably good value - food and wine, of which much, much more later, is abundant in portion and excellent in quality at prices which should have London eateries blushing at the comparison. But as a country to travel in on a shoestring, and most certainly after our three months on the rupee, it took a good few days of adjustment, all too easy to dangerously mis-imagine, in our sleep-deprived minds, that we´d stumbled into our typical city-break habits, able to dine out each meal and stop for coffee at leisure.  Absolutely not, we reminded ourselves (slightly unconvincingly) as we eased into a new regime of hostel cooking interspersed with restaurants every few days. Though we quickly realised this was not a hardship, so deprived of the pleasures of cooking were we from our time away. So in no time we were thinking our way around simple, tasty, hostel dishes with Ready Steady Cook ingenuity, and spicy cheese and red-pepper omlettes with avacodo and tomato salads and good cheap supermarket wines were a regular fixture.

So we adjusted. And we slept. And we wandered. We took our time getting our first glimpse of South America at the macro level, Argentinia more specifically (where we planned to spend a good 4-5 weeks of our 3 months in the continent) and this unique captivating city at the micro. We explored lovely San Telmo, which quickly became my ´This is where I´d live´ choice in our BA round of Fantasy Parallell Lives as well as our ´hood for the week. All narrow cobbled streets, quirky antique and vintage clothes shops, with street tango and great winebars and cafes lining the streets. We wandered through the curious and beautiful La Camina area in Boca, where - not dissimilarly to many popular sights in India in fact - it is hard to disentangle the authentic cultural idiosyncacy from the pastiched tourist product. We went to the Fundación Proa, also in Boca, for a brilliant Giacometti exhibition and the city´s famous MALBA gallery in Palermo for a succinct and superbly curated tour through 20th century modern Latin American art.

 

We´re fairly serious walkers when travelling and BA was no exception. We padded the city streets far and wide, luxuriating in a very livable late spring climate, warm but never debilitatingly tropical. The protest encampments at Plaza de Mayo, where history hangs palpably in the air - from the Peron´s greeting their descamisados or "shirtless ones" to the Madres de Plaza de Mayo keeping up the vigil for the disappeared of the late 1970´s Dirty War . The jaw-dropping micro-city of the Recoleta Cemetary, where Buenos Aires´19th and 20th century elites continue working to outshine one another in the afterlife to glorious architectural effect, especially in the late afternoon light.

And we ate. Outside our home cooking - with one eye on the coming weeks to be spent camping in Patagonia - we indulged in some serious BA wining and dining every other day. Two meals in particular bear note as stand-out superb. La Cabrera in Palermo and Gran Parilla del Plata in San Telmo, both leisurely

lunches. The fomer involved Toby´s Best Steak Ever (unsurpassed over a month of Arentinian eating later), a criminally addictive Proveleta (grilled provolone cheese) and a bottle of Fin del Mundo Malbec from Neuquén that was the stuff dreams are made of. Not just, I hasten to add, because of the meat, cheese and wine deprivations of the previous three months but as genuinely epic in the context of our pretty damn food-and-drink heavy adult lives. We literally giggled helplessly at how good it was. The latter, meanwhile, was a perfect San Telmo restauant we´d walked past each night, observing it packed full of locals time after time at the BA dining hour of 10pm. A burning sun chasing me across the street-side table as an hour turned into two on our last day in Buenos Aires, as I worked through what, again, hyperbole aside, was the Best Ravioli I Have Ever Eaten (apologies Italian friends!), prepared simply with a rich pesto; Toby manning up for a plate of grilled offal half the size of the table; and another Malbec, served helpfully in many places by the half bottle as well as full.

I wish, in retrospect, that we´d had both the energy and the wallets to hit this incredible city running. Tango classes and dancing til dawn for starters, more late dinners, parks and galleries and people-watching to follow. I think I will definitely be back some day to do it more justice. That Parallell Life - like so many I am accumulating - still waits somewhere real or imagined. But as a starter for Argentina and the months to come it was a pretty great week. And with the memory of steaks, raviolis and good wine still fresh, we started out on the long, long road South to the wild winds of Patagonia.