Tigre & the Parana Delta

First of all, my slow internet connection is making it hard to put images in this blog, so you can see some of my pictures on flickr. About half of them right now are from Tigre.

Sunday I took the train to Tigre, a town about an hour from Buenos Aires, situated on an island in the Parana delta (well, everything’s an island there because the land is divided by canals). I went with Bright and two people that we’d met in a tango class the day before; I’d been wanting to get out of the city but didn’t know where to go, and they’d already been thinking about going here and invited us along.

I went into it kind of blind; I just knew that there would be more water and fewer cars and that was enough of a reason to go. It turns out it’s the thing to do on the weekends; porteños (Buenos Aires natives) flee the city by the tens of thousands on the weekends to have asados (barbecues) with their families and breathe the fresher air of the countryside. There are two train routes to Tigre and also two bus lines; the one we took left every 20 minutes and was packed (standing room only, and not much of that); I estimated there must have been over a thousand people on the 11:20 train alone.

Upon arrival in the city, (which seemed pleasant and manageable and I’d like to go and actually see it someday) people board one of several boat-buses that navigate the canals—or if they are there to visit family, may be picked up in their family’s motorboat. We took one of the boat buses for an hour upstream, past endless green lawns, and a few sandy beaches, covered with sun bathers, children playing in the water, and families having barbecues. The houses along the river are all on stilts in case of flooding, but these are not rickety wooden structures; if you took off the stilts they’d blend right into my neighborhood in Berkeley. The water itself is the color of milk chocolate, because of iron in the soil all around, and is actually quite clean. It’s used for recreation as well as transportation, and we passed many people in rowboats, kayaks, sea-doos and motorboats (sometimes with water-skiers in tow).

Since we didn’t have a barbecue to go to, we got off the boat at an inn that had restaurant with tables on the lawn looking at the river. Most restaurants here are pretty laid back and don’t mind if you stay for a while, so we just sat for a few hours and had a couple of beers before taking the boat back to Tigre.