Jaunted

Day tripping options are therefore more limited than most people imagine. You can go play cowboy at an estancia (ranch), pop across the pond to Colonia del Sacramento in Uruguay, and, with one exception, that's about it.

Let's talk about the exception. We did the exception yesterday and here followeth the trip report.

Just 30 minutes away from BA is Tigre, a town that used to be the favored hideaway of the BA elite before they discovered the Atlantic coast. An attractive little town in its own right, packed with antique shops and riverside steakhouses (it also has an excellent market), Tigre is also the main entry point to the Paraná delta, a watery labyrinth comprising over 10,000 kilometres of canals, brooks and rivers that writhe around countless little islands. On these islands you can find restaurants, hotels, watersports centers and fugitive drug barons, all easily accessed from Tigre's port by river taxi. Alternatively, you can just charter a boat and drift about randomly for a day or so while getting drunk with the captain.

Naturally, we took option two, enlisting the services of Cap'n Carlos "Chuck" Serantes and his good ship Bruma, a recycled flat-bottomed island boat that used to carry timber and now mostly carries tourists. It has two cabins, a large covered stern and, all importantly, a barbecue that hangs over the starboard bow. (Because you don't want your boat catching fire, you see.)

The procedure for a day trip like this is quite straightforward. You turn up wherever the boat is moored at the designated hour and meet your hosts, in our case Chuck, his lovely wife Rosana and a bunch of their friends. Then you begin to load the boat with meat for the barbecue along with cheese, wine, beer, whiskey, rum, Wild Turkey, absinthe -- well, you get the idea. Then you jump on. At this point the boat will begin to list dangerously in the water, a sign that you need to lose some weight from the vessel. So you select the fattest member of your party, leave them on the quayside, sail around for an hour or so while you eat and drink their body weight, and then return to pick them up.

Then you get going in earnest. A good ol' salty sea dog -- or whatever the equivalent is for freshwater navigators who know how to put knots into ropes and stuff like that -- like Chuck knows the delta like the back of his hand and will take you off the beaten current, depending on what you want to do. This might include mooring off some remote islet and having a swim while parrots squawk around the boat, playing a game of soccer on a mud-bank with the Buenos Aires skyline in the background (particularly impressive at dusk when it's lit up), or just sunbathing on the deck while downing a Malbec or ten. If your captain is Argentine, expect him to pay more attention to tending the barbecue than steering the boat -- ramming another vessel is a lesser crime than burning the bifes. Once the meat is sizzling, other boats will draw up alongside yours, hoping to scrounge some victuals -- at which point you can either throw them a meat sandwich or make lewd gestures at them with a chorizo, depending on your mood and level of inebriation. (If you're the girl I waved a blood sausage at yesterday, and you're reading this, I apologize -- it wasn't witty, it wasn't clever, and you'll be pleased to know I'm still getting hell from my wife about it).

Related Stories:
· Buenos Aires Tour [Jaunted]
· Buenos Aires Hotel Guide [HotelChatter]

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[Photos: MattyC]