El Tigre

6/4

What a long (and fantastic) day this was! Our group travelled to El Tigre for the day, which is about an hour long train ride North of Buenos Aires. Since we live near each other, I got on a colectivo with Natalie at 7am and we headed over to the train station for our 8am train. Our ride was shorter than expected and we got to the station at 7:30, so we found a cafe and enjoyed cafe con leche (coffee with milk) and a medialuna (croissant infused with honey). As we were enjoying our breakfast, I heard skrillex-type music come on the radio from the kitchen. In Spanish, of course, which was absolutely hilarious to me at 7:30 in the morning. 30 minutes later, the rest of our group showed up and we purchased our train tickets for 3 pesos (~40 cents) round trip.

Some pre-travel cafe con medialunas

El Tigre is an area dominated by rivers that form into a river delta. Some of the islands within the delta are entirely man-made, so a lot of the land it soft and contains non-native plant species. The water in the river is brown because they originate in Brazil, where soil deposits in the water combine with the motion of the river have caused the water to be turbid and brown. But, it is still "clean" and swimmable, so a few members of our group swam in the river. Also, since the geography of the are is entirely islands around rivers, the only form of transportation is by boat, so they have public boat buses and private boat taxis.

Sasha and Sutton on El Tigre

Once we arrived in El Tigre, we divided into two groups and canoed down the river for two hours to our first stop at a house (one of Gaby's friends) in the middle of the forest. There, we drank tea and ate banana bread then continued on our journey to Domingo Sarmiento's (Argentina's 7th president) house (now a museum and completely enclosed in a glass box) for a tour around his property. We then got in a private boat taxi and headed over to a local's house (another one of Gaby's friends) for lunch. Which was AMAZING- sausage and steak sliders- because the sliders we received were actually just chunks of filet mignon between two buns. I liked it so much I went for fourths and then asked if I could have the beef without the buns (I wasn't going to eat the bread anyway), which I then received as a larger chunk of steak on a plate. Oh yes, it was that good! As the woman prepared tea/coffee/dessert, we went on a walk around the island to explore a bit. We then ate home-made alfajores (I being the proud alfahoarder of the group) and sunbathed next to the river for two hours. And I didn't even get a sunburn. Score!

The typical El Tigre river-front home