| INTRODUCTION Work was getting very stressful and my project was due the week after Thanksgiving weekend. I had to work extra time during the holiday weekend to wrap things up, and then went in to the office on Monday to get final approval. The day went on, and I hadn't gotten my final by-off. Finally, at the end of the day and a half hour after I usually go home for the night, my boss gave the OK. I hit the SEND key on my email, my project was sent to its recipients and I was on vacation.
The next morning I left Seattle for Dallas and onward to Buenos Aires,
Argentina. Including the 5 time zone changes, it took almost a full day
to get there. But it was summer in Argentina, 80 degrees and sunny and
nothing at all like Seattle at the end of November.
TRIP ROUTE After landing in Buenos Aires and exploring the city for awhile, I first took a flight to the NE corner of the country to Puerto Iguazu to visit Iguazu Falls, which is on the Brazil border. While here, I also did a day trip to San Ignacio Mini to see the ruins of the Jesuit missions of the 1600s. Arriving back in Buenos Aires, I took the ferry across the River Plata for a week in Uruguay. I stayed for 2 nights in Punta Del Este. Then I took a bus to the capital, Montevideo and stayed there a few days. My last destination in Uruguay was the historic city of Colonia del Sacramento. After the ferry back to Argentina, I immediately hopped a bus to Rosario, Argentina’s 3rd largest city located a four hour drive north of Buenos Aires. Back in Buenos Aires, I had a few days to shop for souvenirs before the long flight back to Seattle. Some General Observations Argentina is the 8th largest country in the world, so a 3 week vacation can not really do it justice. There was a whole lot left to explore for future trips. During my vacation, there was a country-wide airline strike on Argentina's domestic airline. I heard a lot of tourist horror stories about tourists being stranded in cities with no airline flights available for them. In one case a lady told me that she was able to travel on an Argentine army transport plane which was brought in to assist with the tourism problems. Luckily I had not made air travel plans in advance of arriving in Argentina, or my tickets would not have been honored. While in Buenos Aires, I purchased a plane ticket to Iguazu Falls on "Air Chile" and had no travel problems. The economic crisis was effecting a large number of people. In the large metropolitan city of Buenos Aires, it was not uncommon to see horse-drawn carts in the downtown streets used by people gathering recycling products. They would park outside a dumpster, open the lid and crawl completely inside to salvage whatever they could that had value. One of my overall surprises on this trip was how "European" Argentina seemed. It was not populated with the mixed-race mestizos that I had seen in my visits to other Latin Amerian countries. I looked up the population statistics after the trip and found these population demographics (below). (I have listed Mexico as a comparison that many Americans are familiar with.) Mexico - mestizo (Amerindian-Spanish) 60%, Amerindian or predominantly Amerindian 30%, white 9%, other 1% Argentina - white (mostly Spanish and Italian) 97%, mestizo (mixed white and Amerindian ancestry), Amerindian, or other non-white groups 3%. I took 400 digitial photos on this trip, but I can only post a small number of these. CLICK ON THE LINKS ABOVE TO NAVAGATE THROUGH THESE VACATION PAGES |
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