The Paris of South America

Buenos Aires – a city known for Tango, Evita and Diego Maradona. It’s been dubbed as the Paris of South America, a city of wide avenues, beautiful parks and fine architecture. I recently visited the most romantic city of South America, and I can see what the fuss is all about. I felt like I was in Europe, somewhere between Madrid and Paris. The people are very well dressed, and well mannered (in fact, sometimes too well mannered that it can be borderline snobby – though saying that, the Argentinians are very friendly and warm once you get to know them!).

Here are some of the top ten highlights of my trip to the Argentine capital:

1. Tango

One of the highlights of my trip was to see a tango show. I have never been into dancing, but there is just something about the passion and elegance of the tango. While I was walking in some of the neighbourhoods in Buenos Aires, I saw a lot of bars and tourist pubs that try to lure you to a free tango show. A lot of them are just amateurs, but you can’t tell the difference until you’ve seen the real Tango show where you have to pay. The dancers we saw at the show were just fantastic dancers! My friend and I went to this place called La Ventana, and we got the dinner and show package. It was well worth it! The food was great, and the show was just absolutely fabulous!

2. Crossing the Ave. 9 de Julio

Ave. 9 de Julio is the widest avenue in the world, and has the most famous landmark of Buenos Aires. Nearly every image or postcard of Buenos Aires has to have this iconic monument called El Obelisco (The Obelisk). It has 10 lanes on each direction, and it normally took me more than 1 minute to cross the entire stretch!

3. Indulging in Alfajores

I’m a big chocolate addict, and the minute I discovered this mouth-watering Argentinian treat, I was instantly hooked to it! The Alfajores (pronounced as ‘Al-fah-ho-res’) is basically a cookie with dulce de leche in the middle and covered with a chocolate or meringue coating, wrapped in a foil. Some would call it a type of dulce de leche, which is an argentinian delicacy. I just had at least a piece of it each day while I was in Buenos Aires, and even brought some home! My favourite brands are El Cachafaz (the dark chocolate ones are the best!) and Havanna…Yum!

4. Visiting the El Ateneo bookstore

The El Ateneo bookstore is a chain of bookstores around Argentina, but there is one particular branch that is special. This store is an old theatre converted into the bookstore, and still retains a lot of its 1920s theatrical features and charm. It’s voted by a British publication as the #2 best bookstore building/interior in the world! The selection of books are fantastic, and the CDs are also great! They have both English and Spanish sections, which caters to tourists as well!

5. Walking along Calle Florida

Calle Florida is one of the pedestrianised shopping streets of Buenos Aires. It offers a wide range of shops from souvenir shops to leather goods to bookstores and cafes. It stretches to a few blocks, and along the way, you’ll find old buildings with remarkable architecture ranging from the 1600s til the early 1900s. It’s a great walk for both sightseeing and shopping. At the corner of Calle Florida and Avenida Cordoba is the Galerias Pacifico, one of the best shopping malls in Buenos Aires. It offers tax-free shopping.

6. Exploring Recoleta and the Recoleta cemetery

Recoleta is one of the more upmarket suburbs of Buenos Aires. You’ll notice it while walking around the big plush houses and upmarket shops around the area. One of the unique attractions in the area is the Recoleta cemetery (Cementerio de la Recoleta). It’s filled with grand and beautifully-decorated mausoleums and sarcophagi of the rich and well-known people of Buenos Aires. You will find the tomb of Eva Peron, the famous first lady of Argentina (made popular by the musical “Evita”). Another attraction is the Florialis Generica, which is a giant metal flower monument in the middle of a park that opens like a flower during the day, and closes its petals during the night!

7. Cruising around Tigre

Tigre is a town 50 minutes away from downtown Buenos Aires. It’s on a river delta along the Rio de la Plata. This is a weekend destination for the Porteños (residents of Buenos Aires city). Residents in the area are connected via the rivers and canals that run along the region. There are no roads to get to some of the houses by the riverbanks, and nearly each house has its own mini-pier. There’s a floating supermarket, a few gas stations with no roads beside them.. Quite an interesting sight!

8. Visiting an Estancia (Gaucho farm)

The Gaucho is one of the unique symbols of Argentina. It’s a reminder of the traditional farming and cowboy roots of the country, which developed into a culture of its own. The gaucho culture is slowly dying, as farmers have now become more modern, and have slowly abandoned the traditional ways of living in the countryside. I visited Estancia Santa Catalina, which was 2 hours away from Buenos Aires. The farm offered a BBQ lunch and a gaucho show to showcase the talents and skills of a gaucho. There was a museum of a typical gaucho house, and we had the chance to ride on a horse around the farm. It’s well worth checking out!

9. Dining in Puerto Madero

Puerto Madero is a new development in Buenos Aires. It used to be a bustling port area in the early 1900s, but unfortunately turned into a series of abandoned warehouses. Then in the late 1990s, it was turned into restaurants, bars and cafes, and a whole number of condominiums and offices have since arisen in the area. Being by the water, it’s nice to sit out and have coffee and watch the people walk along. A nice modern pedestrian bridge spans the port area to link up to the other side of Puerto Madero. We had dinner at this restaurant called La Caballeriza. They serve a good asado ribs and this great dessert called Bombon Moro (made of mascarpone cheese, chocolate brownie, and topped with strawberries)!

10. Caminito (La Boca) and San Telmo

These two neighbourhoods are worth checking out. San Telmo has a lot of very old buildings, and is one of the oldest neighbourhoods in Buenos Aires. It has a lot of plazas where people dance tango to show to tourists, shops and cafes all around the place. Caminito, on the other hand, is a very colourful neighbourhood, with brightly painted houses and buildings and giant papier machè dolls decorating some of the shops. The neighbourhood around it (La Boca) is one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Buenos Aires, and locals don’t advise tourists to go around the area apart from the Caminito. It’s a very lively neighbourhood, definitely worth visiting.

White Christmas

It’s Christmas day, and as I’m writing this blog, I thought I’d share one of my memorable Christmas holidays which involved some travelling. I had the pleasure of spending Xmas in the Cotswolds in England with my big sister and brother-in-law in 2005. Though it wasn’t my first time in England, and it wasn’t my first Xmas in England (I spent 1 other Christmas there while I was briefly living in Milton Keynes), it was my first time to see the Cotswolds and that part of the English countryside.

At that time, I was living in New Zealand, and I had to fly for 36 hours to get to England, which is practically on the other side of the world. I actually didn’t let my sister Cherie know that I was arriving in England for Xmas. It was a surprise trip for her, as my brother-in-law Gerry told me that she was feeling home sick that year, and that it would be great if I could fly over and spend Xmas with them (she got very surprised when I turned up at Harrods later that day, where Gerry organised for us to meet up in the iconic London department store). Gerry picked me up at the train station in Kingham, and drove 15minutes to the town of Stow-on-the-Wold. It’s a tiny old market town, which dated back to 1100s, with buildings as old as Shakespeare. Gerry and Cherie lived right in the middle of Stow-on-the-Wold, in an old workingmen’s cottage. The house dated back to the 1700s. It had the original fireplace made of costwolds stone, with a wooden floor and a shed that looked like a small outhouse that was built in the same era.

Christmas Eve

On Xmas eve, we had dinner at one of my brother-in-law’s favourite pub, the Chequers pub on Church Road in Churchill, Oxfordshire. It’s a 15-minute drive from Stow-on-the-Wold. Gerry has surveyed the pubs in the Cotswolds area, and even wrote a book on the “40 Classics Cotswolds Pubs”. He highly recommended this pub amongst all the 40 pubs he mentioned in the book. And it really showed! The hosts/owners of the pub were really great with their service, and the food was fantastic! The hosts were very accommodating to my niece Georgia, who was 9 years old back then. I would recommend this place if you’re ever in the area in the Cotswolds

After dinner, my sister Cherie and I hanged around the house, chatting and catching up on lost time after having been apart for 2 years. Being raised a catholic, it was our family tradition to go to church together on Xmas eve and attend a midnight mass. I don’t normally go to church these days, but I thought it would be good to go for once and reflect on the spirit of Xmas. However, we could not find any Catholic churches in Stow. We instead decided to try and see if they would let us into the Anglican church which was on the next block from the cottage. The people in the church were very welcoming, and even ushered us to our seat! Though we couldn’t recognise any of the hymns or songs that they sing, it was an interesting experience for us to hear an Anglican mass. It had a number of similarities to the Catholic mass which we were used to. At the end of the day, it was good to just be able to reflect on the true meaning of Christmas.

Xmas Day

My niece Georgia woke up early and excited to unwrap her presents. She was eagerly sitting by the tree and waiting for all of us to wake up and sit by the tree. She has been waiting for it since the previous night, and she has prepared Santa a brandy and a biscuit so that Santa will give her the best Xmas gift ever! When we finished exchanging presents, we then sat on the breakfast table and had a quick breakfast before starting to prepare for the big Xmas lunch.

Christmas lunch was at my sister’s place, and all my brother-in-law’s parents and auntie came from Andover and Reading. Gerry made the roast turkey and baked ham, and my sister made some Christmas fruit cake. We had a feast! I caught up with Gerry’s family, who I’ve met a number of times when I was living in the UK a few years back, and I continued to keep in touch. We popped some Xmas crackers, shared some stories and enjoyed a typical English Xmas lunch. We then opened more Xmas presents from Gerry’s folks. At the end of it all, I got heaps of presents that I was getting worried on how I was going to carry them all the way back to New Zealand! It was just great to be showered with presents for a change and I really was humbled by how much I got that year!

After lunch, we played a few games and kept the party going. Gerry’s family left sometime mid-afternoon, an we decided to take a stroll along the countryside near my sister’s place. It’s quite relaxing to walk along the quaint English countryside. Then, the snow started to fall. A white christmas, as I imagined Christmas to be normally! It was a fitting finale to a wonderful Xmas day!

The Tomb Raider set

Angkor What?? Oh… Those temples where Angelina Jolie shot the movie “Tomb Raider”!… For some people, that is the first thing that comes to mind when Angkor Wat is mentioned. For others, they’d remain asking the question. Angkor Wat is one of a group of ancient Khmer temples that can be found in the Siem Reap region of Cambodia. These days, bus loads of tourist flock to this magnificent 13th Century temple to admire its grandeur and exquisite bas reliefs, carvings and construction.

The Moto experience

I travelled to Cambodia 3 years ago with my best mate from high school. It was our very first experience of backpacking and travelling in not-so-much style. Prior to this trip, I was used to travelling in tour groups and staying in reasonably good hotels that I didn’t know how I’d live up to staying in hostels and riding on the back of someone’s motorcycle. Well, the fun all began the minute I landed in Siem Reap in Cambodia. At the airport in Siem Reap, we had an option of taking a normal taxi, or a much cheaper alternative called a “Moto”.

We didn’t know what a moto was, but we were dead set on having an adventure and trying new things out. And, since they’re the cheapest, and we wanted to stick to our backpacking theme, we thought we’d give it a go. It turned out that a Moto is basically a bloke with a scooter, and you’re supposed to ride on the back of his scooter! I’ve never really ridden on the back of someone’s motorbike, let alone a scooter, so I was beginning to feel uncomfortable there. Anyhow, my friend and I each hopped on to a scooter, and had our backpacks “hugged” by the moto driver (see photo). We breezed through the Siem Reap traffic, through the tiniest gap in traffic, through the dust, until we got to our hostel looking pale and still clinging on to the back of the scooter! Our drivers must be the Michael Schumacher of Cambodia! We’re so happy to get to our hostel without a single scratch!

Angelina Jolie’s favourite hangout

On our first night at Siem Reap, my friend and I managed to have a traditional Cambodian meal in one of the small restaurants around. We had this dish called Larb, which is basically meat and veggie curry with coconut and fish sauce. It was really good, thoroughly enjoyed it. We walked around town and found this place called the Red Piano. It looked like a good bar and so we went there for a nightcap. As we went through the menu, we learned that the Red Piano was the favourite hangout of Angelina Jolie while she was filming “Tomb Raider”, and that she even made a signature cocktail drink which they served! Well, my friend and I thought it would be a shame not to try it. It was called “Tomb Raider Cocktail” (funny enough..)

Sunrise at Angkor Wat

The day after we arrived, we set out early from our hostel. We negotiated with our trusted moto drivers to pick us up early in the morning so we could watch the sunrise over Angkor Wat. We got to the checkpoint of the temple complex where we had to purchase a 3-day pass, which would enable us to go to the different temples as many times as we like for the next 3 days. When we got to the entrance of Angkor Wat, it was still pitch dark, and there were absolutely no lights around. People were bringing their own torches, and since we didn’t have one, we just followed those who did. The sun slowly crept up the clear blue sky, and slowly we can see the majestic temple of Angkor Wat. The sunrise effect on Angkor Wat made it look very dramatic, and indeed, it looks just magnificent! What makes this temple fascinating as well is the fact that Angkor Wat was abandoned after the fall of the Khmer kingdom in the 14th century, and was forgotten by the rest of the world for centuries until a French explorer, Henri Mouhout,  discovered it again in the 1800s. When it was discovered, it was nearly completely overrun by the jungle, with trees growing on the temples itself, and everything was in shambles.

A Temple of Many Faces

The Bayon is one of the fascinating temples you’ll find in the whole Angkor archaeological complex. This temple is part of the Angkor Thom complex, and has an entranceway lined up with dozens of statues of mythical Hindu creatures. The temple has the top moulded with huge faces of the King Jayavarman VII, the king who built this temple. My friend and I went around this temple in awe of the intricate design, and the beautiful bas reliefs. This is a must-see of the Angkor temples!

Temple overrun by the jungle

The next destination we had in mind is the temple of Ta Prohm. This temple has been left in its original, unrestored state. One can see huge trees growing on top of the temples themselves, slowly crushing the structures with its massive roots. This must have been how the French explorers would have found Angkor Wat, overrun by the jungle around it. The trees that grew on top of the Ta Prohm are just so massive that it’s really quite a sight to see!

There are so many temples to see in the Angkor archaeological park, but these are the more well-preserved and popular ones. If you can spend at least 3 days, you can easily tour the entire archaeological complex, which stretches out 40kms from Siem Reap. The road going to the outer sites can be rough, but it’s all well worth the adventure. There are sites in the Kulen mountains, where the rock at the bottom of the river is all carved with lingas (a holy male-female symbol), plus a nice waterfall. On the way is Kbal Spean, which has more rock carvings that is set also on a river bed.

A visit to Angkor is definitely one of my most memorable trips, and one that I encourage people to go and see before it is totally too commercialised, and before the hoardes of tourists start to make an impact on its deteriorating state.

Til the next journey!

The Marvelous City

Rio de Janeiro – a city often referred to as “The Marvelous City” (Cidade Maravilhosa)! I was lucky enough to have visited the wonderful South American city and spent my 31st birthday there with my sister and a friend. I arrived in Rio with my 2 travelling companions via bus from Sao Paulo. It was a 6-hour journey from Sao Paulo on the bus. We caught a midnight bus that had seats which nearly reclined all the way down. It was a comfortable, and I was able to sleep nearly all the way through, and only woke up when the bus arrived in Rio.

We got a taxi from the bus terminal in Niteroi to the Sheraton hotel, which was in Leblon, by the beach. Along the way, I began to see how spectacular the city is! The driver went through the Lagoa, which had a great view of the Corcovado and the Christ the Redeemer statue, and drove along the coastline with views of the outlying islands just off the city.. It was amazing to look at, and I immediately fell in love with the city itself!

In Search for The Girl From Ipanema…

I spent the next 3 days exploring the city. I started out with going to the beaches of Ipanema and Copacabana, just checking out on the whole beach scene. Before getting to Rio, I had this impression of Rio as having a sea of gorgeous looking women strolling down the beach, partly due to the song “The Girl From Ipanema” … I must have arrived during their quiet period, as I hardly saw any eye-candy there.. There were some, but not as I anticipated it would be.. (and there are the “did-not-pass-the-mark” ones which I shall leave at that..) I think the girls would have had more eye-candy than I did..

The beach itself though was nice and long and very clean.. There were a few people renting out parasols and beach mats for sunbathing, and there were also a few stalls along the beach that sells snacks and drinks.. It was very relaxing just chilling out and basking in the sun, and watching the locals play beach soccer (the Brazilians absolutely love their soccer – a.k.a. football), and then watch people go by and enjoying the beach.

Sugar Loaf

One of the highlights for me was a trip to Sugar Loaf mountain (known as Pao de Açucar in Portuguese). We took the cable car from the bottom carpark to the top. The views were just spectacular! You can see the beaches of Botafogo, Copacabana, and on the other side of the harbour, Niteroi. You can see the very long Niteroi bridge, and on the other end, Christ the Redeemer statue. You can also see the domestic airport, which has quite a short runway, and is surprisingly really close to the city (unlike in most major cities around the world).. The one thing that makes Rio interesting is the amount of fog that can cover up the mountains around city from time to time.. When we got to the top of Sugar Loaf, it was perfectly clear. But, 20 minutes later, we started seeing the clouds and the fog creeping in, blanketing the fabulous vista from the top… Lucky we made our way there when the sky was clear! You really have to seize the moment to get a perfect view.. Which leads me to our next destination in the fabulous city, ….

Christ The Redeemer statue, one of the 7 New Wonders

The icon of Rio de Janeiro -  this statue appears nearly in every postcard and every photo of Rio de Janeiro. The Christ the Redeemer statue sits on top of the Corcovado mountain, in the midst of the Tijuca National Park, and overlooks the city of Rio. To get there from Copacabana or downtown Rio, you can take the cog train from Cosme Velho, or the easiest way I reckon, is to hire a taxi all the way to the bottom carpark of the National Park and make him wait for you to finish at the top and take you back down to the city. From the bottom carpark, there are frequent buses that would take you to the statue itself.

The first time we decided to go there, it was a sunny afternoon in the city, and it didn’t look very cloudy. As our taxi made its way to the top, we noticed that the clouds were creeping in. We got to the Doña Marta viewpoint, and it looked clear at that stage. When we arrived at the top, that’s when the full extent of the fog happened! We could not even see the Christ the Redeemer statue itself, even if we’re already right there!

We went back the next day, this time we made sure that it was clear enough, and we could see the statue. This time, we went up in the morning instead of the afternoon, as I think there seems to be better chances of the fog clearing up around mid-day, and coming back in the afternoon. We finally got to see the statue itself in its full form, and views of the city was spectacular! You can see the Sugar Loaf mountain, Ipanema, The Lagoa, the Maracana football stadium (where the best football matches in the continent are played).. Just simply awesome!

A Birthday treat like no other…

The best thing I did in Rio was to take a helicopter flight over the city and see it in its full glory! I decided to do this on my birthday, which happen to fall on the time we were doing our South America tour. It was my first time to be on a helicopter, so it was so exciting for me to be on it! What an unbelievable sight to see! The pilot hovered over the Christ the Redeemer statue, and the scene was just mind-blowing! If you’re into photography, you have to fly above the city to fully relish the spectacular nature of Rio de Janeiro. It’s probably the best birthday treat I’ve given myself in years!

Rio de Janeiro is a fabulous city, despite all you hear about the poverty and crime around it. Yes it is obvious, but there is also the bright part of the city, the magic that attracts people from all over the world to this magnificent setting that is called “The Marvelous City”.

Til the next journey…