Hello (fuck you) Argentina

Igatzu falls was a major highlight of the trip, I've seen angel falls in venezuela but this was supposed to be more spectacular than that and niagra.  

It didn't fail to deliver, however we had a bit of a bad start in Argentina which put a dampner on things. I don't  want to bore you with the details so I'll give you an overview:

1. There was cloud and rain the day we went to the falls
2. On our first night we awoke at 3am to find bedbugs crawling on the sheets
3. At 3am the Hostal moved is to their sister hostel
4. We discovered bed bugs in the 2nd hostel
5. I demanded they wash our clothes for free, they then lost a whole bag of them. I had to go trawling through dirty clothes at the launderette 
6. They were really rude and didn't appologise
7. Skipping onto buenos aires - when we got off the bus and walked to the tube I was spat on and my bags squirted with mustard (an old trick they use to mug you) I realised what was happening so pushed them out the way and walked on pretty quick

So with all that I was pretty much ready to say fuck you Argentina! However not wanting to believe this bad luck was representative of the whole country we pressed on, and were not disappointed.

Anyway, back to igatzu. So the weather wasn't great, and it was very touristy, especially as they have built walkways right out into the falls. Ok it gets you good photos but it sort of spoils the natural environment a bit. 

They were very impressive, the big momma one was literally a huge lake of calm water then suddenly there's a massive hole in the ground that all the water just falls into near enough 360 degrees, so it's not just some regular river waterfall. You'll have to see the photos via gregs blog to see what I mean (you'll have to imagine blue skies though).

So without hesitation we got out of puerto igatzu to get away from bed bugs and a shitty town as soon as we'd visited the falls, this is such a massive country so another 20hr bus awaited us, this time headed for BA. 

Again I was looking forward to tango, cafe culture, amazing architecture and chic people. I'm sorry to say I found a ominous, dangerous, expensive, unfriendly place without the x factor which I expected this famous city to have. 

God, it doesn't sound like were having a very good time does it! Well it's all part and parcel of travelling. You don't expect to like every place you visit, it isn't a 2 week holiday where to try to ensure you will like where you're going. This is about experiencing the world, and In doing so you find out about what factors about a place ticks your boxes. I'd rather travel somewhere to find i don't like it, than never have the opportunity to travel there at all, and never know if I would like it or not.
We also met a lot of people who liked BA, so I think there Is an element of your state of mind when you visit a place, as well as whether it floats your boat. And for me the mustard trick left a bad taste that didn't leave me for 4 days no matter how hard I tried.

When we arrived we had a lot of trouble finding somewhere to stay, we hadn't been pre-booking for a while, but it turns out this is somewhere you really have to. We ended up in a youth hostel dorm in the business district of town, but it wasn't all bad as it was really cheap and we had a 4 bed dorm and we only had 1 dorm mate for 2 nights of our 4 night stay. 

Like in Rio we used all our night out energy and stamina on our first night when we didn't get to bed till 9am. You might be thinking, well BA can't have been that bad, but it was a very strange evening, and the people we were hanging out with were American ex pats. Seeing the sun rise on the way home in the taxi was pretty cool, if only he didnt shaft us with a fake 50 change! Our night consisted of several 3l pitchers of beer, a lot of jack Daniels,  us pimping our precious conversation out to a couple of banker wankers and a fake 50. It was certainly a story to tell, but again I'll save it for the pub when we get home!

We spent the next few days trying to cover ground in this massive city, but all we achieved really were sore feet. We went to all the main places the guide books tell you about, and we had a steak and watched the tango. The buildings are pretty impressive, and the whole city feels like Europe with the grand stone architecture. After dark the street lights are so poor you can't walk about at all. We also missed out on going to see Boca juniors as a few people warned us that it would be too dodgy to go, so Greg was quite disappointed. All big cities have their dodgy roads and areas, for example in Rio we were always careful and therefore didn't feel threatened but in BA you didn't feel safe a lot of the time, even in the daytime. 

After 4 days of searching we decided to cut our loses and move on, so we took a 23 hour bus to Bariloche in Patagonia, and there our luck changed...