The last full day of our ‘side-trip’ to Buenos Aires, and we kicked off by heading to Monserrat – a commercial area in the city…
Our destination was a Peruvian cafe called Chan Chan for lunch, where Eli seemed strangely immune to the most spiciest of sauces (this is his just-after-eating-extremely-hot-spices face)
We were then off to visit La Boca, a popular tourist attraction, and area, in a more run down part of the city
La Boca is home to La Bombonera – a famous football stadium and home to Boca Juniors – where Maradona played before gaining world fame.
We were hoping to take a stadium tour but to our disappointment and Semma’s relief… it was closed the day we got there for some random reason – so we posed for photos outside instead…
We walked from the stadium towards Caminito, admiring some of the graffiti en route
Caminito is an open air museum of sorts, a street made to look like how things used to look a hundred years ago – brightly colored shacks made of disused materials – all created by one of Argentina’s most famous artists (and a local resident) in the late 1950’s with some friends.
It’s retained that artist influence, indeed a wide range of artwork is on sale on the streets, and while small and very tourist oriented, it is still an interesting place to visit.
We stopped for coffee in a small Italian cafe – the area was first inhabited by Italian immigrants from Genoa
We didn’t hang about – there’s not a great deal to do in La Boca – and wondering the surrounding streets was off-limits due to it being considered unsafe for tourists (and actually marked as such on maps).
We’d been told by a friend that you could do graffiti tours, which sounded fun, but it was late in the day and we we’d seen enough to be ready to head home.
It was tough to get a taxi out of La Boca, a makeshift taxi rank by the waterfront was not attracting enough cabs for those who actually wanted them. We got lucky, someone, seemingly self-appointed in charge, bumped us up the queue, I felt bad because I had nothing to offer him. He grumbled, but seemed to appreciate the acknowledgement.
We sped off and along the dock area…
The taxi took us through the ‘dangerous area’ on the map… some amazing buildings as we sped through
Our driver was going very fast alongside busses
Soon we rejoined the main road heading out of La Boca
Back at the hotel we had a relaxed final evening in Buenos Aires. Eli and I played some backgammon and chess in the lounge…
And to finish off the evening Eli insisted on taking the elevator to our hotel room floor all by himself. I could only watch to make sure the numbers went to the right place!
