North Argentina

Argentina! The country of tango, dulce de leche, asado and mind blowing landscapes. After the flatness of Uruguay, I felt excited about getting closer to the mountains. My legs weren’t that happy pedalling on over 3000 meters passes, but my eyes just couldn’t get enough.

A joke goes that when an Argentinian wants to commit a suicide, he jumps off an edge of his ego. Maybe the stereotypical Argentinians are hiding in other parts of the country as I haven’t met any. What I find though is that the people seem to have very strong political opinions. Either pro or anti government. It was quite an experience to watch political programmes on Argentinian TV. The format looks more like a reality show, with special sound effects, repeating video clips 10 times in a row, WITH subtitles (just in case people didn’t understand what was said). All this spectacle seemed to me as a quite effective brain washing machine, but what do I know about politics… not much.

When you travel in Argentina you will come across a phenomenon called dollar blue. In short, the government decided to limit the people possibility of changing pesos into dollars (everybody is doing this since there’s not much trust in Argentinian currency and I suppose there are good reasons for it). If you are Argentinian and want to buy some dollars, you need to go through a paper work to prove to your government that you are going abroad for holidays and if you’re lucky you will be allowed to buy few hundred dollars, not more. The result of it is that a parallel market for dollar exchange appeared. Theoretically it is illegal, however the exchange rates for this ‘dollar blue’ is broadcast on national TV and it is quite easy to find a place where you can change the money in any city. The government policy obviously doesn’t work and the absurdity level of the situation reminds me of that of my country during the communist state time.

Some pics from Argentina: