Tren de la Costa and the Tigre Delta

After two days in Argentina, I have to say that our Spanish is still quite rusty - this morning when we were trying to buy the train tickets to transfer from Retiro to B. Mitre to catch the Tren de la Costa, at the ticket window when the guy said 'quatro' I just went blank because I thought there was no way it was going to be FOUR pesos only! That's like NZ$0.35 each for a train trip from Auckland Central to Papatoetoe. In fact, all subway trips are capped at ARS$1.10 (about 40c NZD) each way no matter how far you go or how many transfers you make. Really wish Auckland had at least something remotely resembling a decent public transport network...

Anyway, after we got all that sorted and arrived at the first Tren de la Costa station, it seemed a little bit weird how run down it was given it was such a popular (local) tourist route.

Still, the trip was nice and we saw plenty of kids playing Saturday morning sports in fields along the way, and we got a glimpse of BA from across the water as well (though passed by too quickly to take a photo).

At the end was the 'Delta' stop of Tigre, where, on our way to the Tourist Info Office, James made an important discovery!

That's right, turns out you can get V in Argentina too... good to know!

Then it was a river ferry up to Tres Bocas, where three of us had a lovely lunch of grilled fish, the local speciality (James got grilled short-ribs).

I also finally gave in and decided to give beer another go, since it was so much more economical to get a bottle of that instead of wine or anything else - Quilmes seems to be the local choice, and the main reason I can tolerate it is because it tastes more like just cider, lacking the strong barley/hops aftertaste. I like how they brought it in an practical though not particularly attractive polystyrene enclosure to keep the bottle cool.

After that, we had intended to do a loop walk of the island, but thanks to some bad planning and lack of map/sign reading, we crossed several bridges that we shouldn't have and ended up 3km south of where we were trying to go... was finally forced to turn back when we ran out of track. Oops! Oh well, at least it was still a nice walk, and we made some canine friends along the way - basically these dogs would just follow us around for absolutely ages, for no particular reason.

Eventually we got all the way back safe and sound, and tired! Tomorrow is the antiques market in our neighbourhood so really looking forward to that, afterwards will finally check out 'El Obelisco' and Congreso, maybe go up the tower at Palacio Barolo.