Well, How Did We Get Here?

Random travel tip #73: Make sure you know about local holidays and when the locals are traveling. We really enjoyed our first week in Buenos Aires and had planned to move south to Peninsula Valdez and the towns of Trelew and Gaiman immediately afterward. Primary mode of touring in that area is car rental. When we started trip planning on a rainy Friday (18-Mar) afternoon in BA, we discovered that there were actually no cars available until the first of March! Same was true for hotels, flights, etc.

Turns out, end of February is pretty much end of summer vacation in Argentina-think August and days leading up to Labor Day. Compound that with a national holiday, Carnival!, that gives locals a four-day weekend 25-Feb through 1-Mar. Pitfalls of on-the-fly trip planning. Needless to say, everything was booked everywhere we looked.

With help from the Hotel Magnolia staff, where we were staying in BA, we learned about Tigre and the Parana River Delta. (Disclaimer from A: we don’t endorse the information found on this page — I already found a plant id error with a quick glance. Jeesh. Wikipedia proves its worth as a source once again.) An easy 40-minute train ride from BA, and you’re in a new world where the locals live on and around countless rivers in a huge delta.

Unfortunately, the only hotel with any availability was an overpriced Wyndham in a gated-community area called Nordelta 15 minutes outside the town of Tigre. We had great hopes that our extra time in the area would at least include some unexpected excess luxury with pool bars and lounging in the sun. What we encountered when we arrived could not have been more the opposite of the way it was marketed. COVID notwithstanding, the hotel was well past it’s glory days.

The building was dingy and surrounded by stip malls, roadways, and gated condo developments. As we approached the hotel, we were greeted by a lovely commercial building with a defunct Escape Room, a crypto currency mining operation, money exchange, empty retail, and luckily a fairly decent minimart where we could get booze and snacks.

We checked into our room only to discover that it smelled horribly musty and was humid and hot. The airconditioning wasn’t working, and we could not have felt more trapped in 5 days of non-refundable hell. I about lost it, and Ande had to bring me back down to earth. She also led me back down to the front desk to get another room.

We did roll with the punches and made the best of our time. The clerk at the front desk was very apologetic and upgraded our room. It was still a little musty, as was the entire hotel and area because of the heat and humidity of the river delta, but the air conditioning worked and we discovered that it was fairly easy to get Uber rides the hell out of there and into the much more quaint town of Tigre. Future posts will provide more about that and the fun and good food we actually had.

More About Nordelta

Nordelta is obviously an ecological nightmare boondoggle concocted by developers with government officials in their pockets. Acres and acres of wetland were filled to create the Argentinian dream of spending golden years in a condo on Bahia Nordelta. The marina in the picture above is an artificial concrete waterway constantly patrolled on land and sea by security. The areas is ripe with aging half-constructed condo buildings long abandoned with nature reclaiming what was taken. Nature’s fight is aptly covered in this Guardian article from several months ago: Attack of the giant rodents or class war? Argentina’s rich riled by new neighbors.

We didn’t see any carpinchos, but you can see the politics echoed in local establishments like the “Irish Pub” along the marina:

Areas of wetlands are somewhat preserved between roadways. We didn’t see any of the capybaras (carpinchos), but on a walk to the local shopping mall to get our laundry, we encountered caracara (local eagle-like raptors), herons, wild turkeys, possibly ibis, and a huge nutria.

It was pure chance we ended up in this bizarro world for 5 days, and it is an experience we will never forget. Our pure shock at where we were and what it was kept us from actually capturing more photos, but I think you get the idea.

We’ll catch up with photos of the awesome river delta and our time there soon.