Buenos Aires Day 4

Our last day in Buenos Aires was as busy as yesterday. We were on even more of a time crunch because our bus to Paraguay was at 1700.

We kicked the day off by heading to Puerto Madero. The port was scorching in the sun and reminded us a lot of London and the Thames. There was a boardwalk, intermittent bridges to get across, and restaurants on either side as well as some hotels. We stopped and walked back and forth across Puente de la Mujer, an icon of the port area. The bridge swings out, not up, to allow boats to pass. It is very modern looking and made from recycled products which I thought was a nice touch.

We continued our walk down the port and then veered off into a park away from the city center. We visited an interesting statue that was originally meant to be in the Plaza de Mayo in front of Casa Rosada. The Fuente de Las Nereidas was inspired by greek gods and animals. It's nudity is what prevented the beautiful fountain and sculpture from pride of place in the central plaza. The animals were intricately sculpted and you could see the story taking shape as you walked around and viewed the statues from different angles.

As we were a fair bit out of the center now, to save time in our packed day, we got an Uber to Caminito in the La Boca neighborhood. We couldn't get right up to the Caminito street because the local stadium had a football game today. Before walking up Caminito, we popped along to the CABJ Stadium where the Boca Juniors play. This is the same team that our couchsurfee host, Gonza, supports. The stadium was hard to miss with it's bright yellow and blue. After we took some pictures, we made our way back down to Caminito. The street is well known for all the colorful buildings and it did not disappoint. Not only was each house and building a different color, some had designs or multiple colors. There were also local artists selling prints of the colorful neighborhood.

After Caminito, we started walking back towards the city center. We left La Boca and traveled through Parque Lezama into San Telmo. Parque Lezama was designed by a french architect. It was very hilly with brick paths, gazebos, and stone tables with chess boards painted on them. As we walked through San Telmo, we passed many markets and had a look at some of the stalls for the pink amethyst from Patagonia. Sadly, it was expensive to buy and made me further regret forgetting to get some while we were in Patagonia. Sam Telmo was crazy busy packed full of tourists and local shoppers. It probably didn't help it was a Sunday afternoon. We fought the crowds and visited a couple La Casa del Dulce de Leche stores. We tried a whole bunch of different dulce de leche flavors. Allan liked the original and buffalo milk one. I quite liked the mint chocolate and banana flavors. They also had chocolate orange dulce de leche liqueur, coffee dulce de leche liqueur, and rum dulce de leche liqueur. They were also really nice. At the second store we popped into on our way back to the hostel we bought a dulce de leche ice cream popsicle. It was so rich, but very tasty.

We were getting tight on time, so I went back to the hostel to start organizing some things while Allan ran to Ugi's for (another) pizza. Quick and cheap is all we have time for these days! We managed to eat our pizza, get organized, and get our Uber to the bus station with just over half an hour to spare before our bus. Being an international bus, we have to get our documents checked and bags had to be weighed this time. Everything went smoothly for us, but things were taking a bit longer for others so we unfortunately left a bit late and we were also making a lot of stops for the first couple hours. On such a long journey, we expected delays though. We've also learned our lesson to try and book buses earlier to get good seats...もっと詳しく