Beunos Aires

We are introduced to hot sweaty Buenos Aires with a day tour of the city. Elizabeth the tour guide begins at the famous Recoleta Cemetery one block away from our hotel the Alvear Palace. She makes an apology and says not everyone finds the idea of a cemetery so entertaining, but this one is something special. And she did not need to apologize. The cemetery has more than four hundred above-the-ground burial chambers, built mostly of marble and decorated with sculptures of angels or the members of the family buried there, or anything else that will impress and show the undoubted status of the family. It's like walking through the streets of a small city with each burial chamber with it's own personality and style like its own house. In fact buying a plot there, we are told is the equivalent price of an apartment in the same area. They are often like little pantheons with greek columns and elaborate friezes. The tour is intended as a show-piece of the flamboyant Spanish-Argentinian art and architecture. As we spend the hour there Elizabeth tells us the amazing stories and gossip of some of the people buried there. One grave is that of Evita who resides not in anything indicating her Perron connection, but in that of the Duarte family that she came from.

It's true, Argentinians eat a lot of beef. everywhere we go there are steak houses and restaurants indicating their beef options. In one big busy water-front restaurant where we stop for lunch, the waiter waits until we are seated and then comes to each woman in turn and fastens her handbag to her chair with a plastic strap. "Just in case" he says because there are pick-pockets and thieves prowling around all the time. Even in crime prone Jo'burg we have never seen anything like this!

It's also true that Buenos Aires has outstanding architecture. We see many French-style European and Spanish-type structures that give the whole place a sense of elegance and old-fashioned style. Like Madrid, it feels like a capital. One of the most opulent is the world-renowned Colon Theatre where we take their hour-long tour of the interior. A kind of Paris Opera combined with La Scala and an overlay of Covent Garden all in one. More evidence of the Spanish-Argentinian flamboyance and showmanship

But if you want to see the epitome of this it must be the tango. We spend the last evening at a tango show. In a small theatre-restaurant with a stage, we first have dinner and then the music and dancing start. The music is a piano, cello, accordion mixture of exuberant joy laced with sadness and the dancing blows us away. I remember the tango scene in "Scent of a Woman"and imagine that it will simply be a polished version of that. But it is a great deal more. Five professional dancing couples doing the tango in unison with wonderful costumes of the thirties and fourties, the time when the tango was born in the BA neighborhood of La Boca. The frowning possessive fake-stern men and flirting seductive women perform in the romantic sexy style of swirls and high kicks around the legs and make it look so flowing and easy.
We buy the DVD on our way out , and can't resist playing much of it again back in our hotel room.

Santiago

Santiago Chile

Our first day in Santiago is also my birthday. Emma arranges a room-service chocolate cake delivery with candles and participation of smiling hotel staff at 07h00. I try to be gracious in my sleeping shorts and grizzly slept-out appearance. Celebration breakfast and more chocolate cake
We do a hop-on hop-off bus tour of Santiago and find the Centro crowded, shabby and unattractive. We know little about the Chilean history and don't connect with the plugged in bus commentary Thousands of people bustling about their morning business, most looking down-market  and ranging from Aztec-like Indian to Spanish-European. We don't see any of the smart-tie and-suit-brigade we noted at breakfast at the Grand Hyatt. Then the bus eventually hits the Sandton of Santiago Barrio El Golf and suddenly it is Dubai style sky-scrapers, exuberant architecture and suave yuppie financial service execs all over. Elegant restaurants and smart shopping.

We settle in a good-looking steak-house restaurant and immediately start eating too much. A big shared Caprese salad and then medium fillet for me and well-done prime-rib for Emma. Plenty of wine and smiling eager waiters plying us with everything they can muster. We come away from it meat-sated and heavily satisfied.

For my birthday treat Emma suggests a spa treatment back at the hotel. A bit cautious I opt for a pedicure and imagine that I will have some lovely Latin American spa-lady giving me a soothing foot massage and re-energising treatment. Instead I get a tough-looking woman who must be out of the Nazi gene-pool of people who escaped here after the war. Instead of young and alluring this post-middle age fighter with her clenched jaw and mean streak first with some reluctance kindly soaks my feet but then lies me down and with much more vigour starts a scary process of using sharp tools to  push back cuticles and rasp away any roughness. I imagine lying there, eyes closed that she is using the chisels and tools used for stone-cutting and wood-carving. Instead of relaxing and dosing off I lie there squirming and wishing it was over.

She ends the experience and then thrusts an invoice into my hand listing the various services performed leaving room for a "tip". I ignore it with a scowled smile and leave.
We give up the idea of a dinner and settle for a delicious wild-mushroom soup and Sauvignon Blanc in the room. We watch the next instalment of the Madiba memorial and crash.
Adios Santiago.

Over the Andes

This has been a long-held  'bucket-list' goal. The idea of going by boat across the glacial lakes high up in the Andes mountains from Chile to Argentina. Well, I can tick it off now. We fly from Santiago to Puerto Montt and from there by bus to a beautiful little harbour town Puerto Varras where we spend a night in a Swiss-type log-and-stone hotel before boarding the catamaran the next day and start a series of boat trips across three lakes.  From one lake to the next we connect by small jerky bus through rain forests over very narrow scary roads.  We are constantly surrounded by snow-capped mountain peaks and massive rock formations

We arrive finally at one of the most beautiful hotels we have ever seen, the Llao Llao (pronounced Shao Shao) perched on a cliff overlooking a lake and when we check in the receptionist says we were originally booked into a regular studio room but they have up-graded us to a suite.  There is something about an up-grade of any service, be it a hired car or a seat on a plane or anything else that can make one feel like some minor celebrity. Emma and I go whooping around the big luxurious suite like a pair of teenagers, not used to a thing. We open and close the big cupboards gasp at the views from the windows and big balcony with its towelling covered deck chair loungers and smell all the delightful bathroom toiletries. We collapse finally on the Frette bed linen and sink into the enjoyment

The hotel also reminds us of the Fairmont Hotel at Banf near lake Louise in Canada. But mostly it is a German or Swiss feel that comes from the big migration of people from Europe to Barliloche at the beginning of the 20th Century. They settled here presumably because the mountains and snow reminded them of home but with the benefits of freedom and space. The architecture is typical Swiss Alpine stone and log structures with pitched roofs and we are told immediately that Barilochi is famous for chocolate. Chocolate shops everywhere. Our normal carefully managed eating pattern gets dumped and we stuff ourselves.

Next stop Buenos Aires. 

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