Tigre and the Delta

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Today is our first day out of the city. To the north end of the city is the huge delta of the Rio Parana de las Palmas. The town or suburb, Tigre (or "tiger"), is on the mainland, the delta is to the north. There's a large market and many boat tours you can take through the delta on lovely old wooden boats.

We take a long Uber ride to the Maipú station where there's an interesting coastal train running up to Tigre. We could have taken public transit all the way to Tigre but it would have taken quite a while. The coastal train is also a scenic slow route and we're in no hurry. When we got home we discover that our friend Deborah in Ann Arbor has a connection to this area — her family had been here in the '70s working for Ford and lived along this short coastal line. The area is pretty plush with nice homes, people strolling or biking on well tended paths.

Along the way, at each station on this coastal route, there seems to be an outdoor cafe of one sort on another. The picture above has us at Tribu San Isidro, a restaurant at the Juan Anchorena station. There's quite a bit of green space along the coast there. We had a lovely nosh there on our return trip. Gord took that picture holding his cell phone over his head — I didn't think it would work but it did. We were enjoying some wine and a huge platter of cheese and meats on a lovely patio overlooking a parkland along the shore when a rain came up and forced us inside.

At Tigre, the last stop on the coastal train is the Delta station. There's a large market on the water front called Puerto de Frutos (which I understand to mean "fruit port") and it might have been at one time. These days there's lots of restaurants and gift shops. But there are lots of small boats servicing those who live in the delta and some shops with greenery.

We had some time to kill before the next boat we had decided to take out into the delta and had some lunch at a restaurant called La Vieja del Puerto (the old woman of the port). We had some beer, wine, fresh bread, some empanadas and a salad. Oddly rather than serving you chilled white wine they serve the wine with a small bucket of ice cubes and tongs so you can cool down your wine. We discover they do the same with red wines. The girls had wine, Reg had a Quilmes, a popular light lager, and Gord ordered a "red" ale. I had never heard beer described as "red" before but it seems to be an Argentine type. Perhaps our "amber" would be the same?

Kate, who was navigating with her cane, asked for the washroom (¿Dónde está el baño?) only to discover that "No, we don't have one for customers. You need to walk out of the restaurant and down the street." Actually they took pity on her and let her use the restroom upstairs for the staff (missing soap though). It's not very reassuring that the staff  use this washroom. Reg found the public restroom down the street before getting on the boat and foolishly walked into the women's side. My cousin Walter tells me, "Reg, look for the names Al Fondo - Damas y Caballero".

The Tigre Delta is a distributed community of homes and services that can only be reached by water. On the city side as we start the tour we pass a number of parks, sea side restaurants, boating clubs and the impressive Museo de Arte Tigre.  Most of the islands we saw are pretty swampy with levees around the rim to keep the water at bay. There are many boats servicing the community including taxis, school buses, and grocery stores that ply their wares. There's also a municipal service, again by boat, that brings around bottled water and takes away the garbage. There are no roads and bridges in the Delta. From the air, Beunos Aires ends abruptly at Tigre with the crowded city separated by water from the lush green delta.

After our afternoon nosh at Tribu San Isidro we're back at the Maipu station (where the coastal train ends and the inner city train at Bartolomé Mitre begins) we waited for an Uber but after a while gave up and continued on inner city transit. It's quite comprehensive like London England, New York and Paris (of course). Toronto's transit system is laughable by comparison. We also took the underground subway system for part of our return trip and lastly a quick Uber home. The transit system is fast, clean, modern, and very inexpensive. We liked it a lot and it was easy to navigate with Gord and Leslie as they had figured it out already! You could easily live in this city without a car.

Finally, at several places along the train line, saw these small blue government signs saying "Las Islas Malvinas son Argentinas" (the Malvinas Islands, aka as the British Falklands, are Argentine). Oddly we bumped into the same at the Belgrano train station. You might recall that the ARA General Belgrano was an Argentine war ship sunk in the Falklands War of 1982. These "patriotic" blue signs seem to me to be a classic deflection by the government in power — stop worrying about these real problems (e.g., hyper inflation) and worry about that problem!