Location: Guatemala

Friday, February 26, 2010

Carnival - Argentine Style

Having not the money, nor the time really to make our way to Rio for Carnival, we thought we'd give the local Argentine celebrations a shot and so headed to Gualeguaychú.

About Gualeguaychú (which I cannot for the life of me spell, let alone pronounce):

1. It is not on any tourist map you will find - though only 3 hours from Buenos Aires, you would never know this place existed. That is unless you befriended an Argentine and asked where to go for Carnival (a la Jorge at our first parillia experience on the border of Argentina and Bolivia. Thank you Jorge, and Lonely Planet who suggested it). This little 'beach side' (or what really should be called a 'river side') town is a very popular holiday destination for Argentines - It's restaurant and bar strip would definitely rival anything you would find in any substantial resort town. However, definitely minus the 'resort' factor for Gualeguaychú. It even reminded me a bit of walking down the Promenade at Manly - a bit grubby, with restaurants and bars everywhere.

Our hostel was very basic, the bathroom in particular (and we were very lucky to get it - no hostel in this town being on hostel bookers/world etc. It took a very many emails before we even got one reply. RUDE! ) With the sink falling off the wall, and no shower recess or curtain, just a shower head positioned between a wall on one side, and the toilet on the other, showering, was to say at the very least, a whole bathroom affair. Everything - including the toilet paper, got wet. With the water running primarily in the opposite direction from the drain hole, at one point, I thought I was going to flood our room and saturate our bags that were sprawled across the floor - the water heading straight for the door (where there was no lip). Luckily, I averted any crisis with the rubber mop type implement that they love to provide you with here instead of a shower curtain - so you can clean up all the water mess you make after you have made it, instead of avoiding the whole problem in the first place. Clever. (I hope you get my sarcasm)

2. It's flooded - like everywhere else we have gone, from Peru, Bolivia, and now apparently even parts of Buenos Aires, Gualeguaychú was flooded. So again, no beach for us. There was a massive thunderstorm the second night we were here. So much so that we were even put off going out for dinner - instead we resorted to bread and cheese we had left over from an afternoon's snacking and a bottle of wine that we'd been carrying around since Mendoza.

3. Carnival goes off here - who knew! Beginning about 10pm and continuing through till at least 3am, Gualeguaychú plays host to a huge parade of floats to celebrate carnival (some with rather scary figurines on them - one reminded me of the 'Demon Headmaster' if anyone read that book when they were little). Half naked dancers bearing massive headpieces of feathers and cubic zurconia embossed bikinis, dance through the stadium to the beat of drums. To make sure we looked the part, Claire painted masks on our faces with glitter and stars. We danced in the stands (complete with table service) to the parade - honey dew melons filled with punch in hand - as the floats sailed by. I managed to join in the parade briefly, jumping over the fence. However my fun ended not soon after, being escorted back to the right side of the fence by the friendly Gualeguaychú police. And I'm not just saying their friendly for the sake of it. Claire's wallet, complete with credit card, disappeared at some point in the evening. After managing to locate the wallet, sin tarjeta credito (without credit card), a local police man escorted us the 15 blocks back to our hostel. That was nice. Talking to the hopeless credit card company on the other hand was not nice - Emergency credit card system my butthole.


Carnival dancers, and the Demon Headmaster look-a-like float

My brief excursion over the fence

4.The steak cooking, unlike Carnival in Gualeguaychú, is not great - again, no one paid attention to our 'bien jugoso' requests. Our asado evening in Rosario, where the meat was blackened within an inch of it's life has got us thinking that people don't like their cow mooing here. Such a shame, cause the meat is so good otherwise. And we had a massive problem with bugs - we were swarmed by an army of them at dinner thanks to the light that sat right above our heads on the outdoor patio over looking the 'beach.' Thankfully, we didn't come the week earlier when they had a plague of pests fly through....

Overall though, woo hoo for Gualeguaychú!

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