We got up this morning and hailed a taxi to the Recoleta neighborhood. The first stop was to visit the famous cemetery.

Afterwards, we walked through the neighborhood. Recoleta has grand avenues, stately mansions, and luxury hotels. It is a grand old neighborhood.

We passed into the Barrio Norte neighborhood which is filled with more grand avenues and beautiful old buildings. This seems to be the main shopping district of the city with shops everywhere. 

Our next stop was El Ateneo Grand Splendid bookstore in Barrio Norte. This building was originally built in 1919 as a theater for ballet, opera, and tango. In 2000, it was converted into a bookstore, and it retains the character of the original theater. It is so cool!

Lunch was at a place that specializes in milanesa, one of the traditional Argentine dishes. A milanesa is a breaded and sautéed cutlet of beef or chicken which is pounded very thin, and it can be served with a variety of toppings. On our first day here, I had beef milanesa napolitana with melted provolone and sliced tomatoes on top. Today I had a plain chicken milanesa, and it hit the spot.

We had grand plans to go to another neighborhood after lunch, but by this point, we were so hot and tired that we took a taxi back to the apartment and just chilled for a couple of hours.

We eventually worked up some energy to go out into the neighborhood, primarily to buy some groceries. We had a few things in the fridge from the previous couple of days, but we needed more supplies for this evening (Christmas Eve) and all day tomorrow (Christmas Day).

I’m glad we went out when we did! Most mom-and-pop shops had closed early. The giant supermarket was still open, but it closed in 10 minutes at 6 pm. We hustled around to make sure we bought enough food, and we came home with some stuff for salad, bread, bottled water, pasta, and tomato sauce, and yogurt, fruit, and juice for tomorrow morning. With these new groceries and what we already have in the fridge, we’re all set for our holiday meals.

Now Chad is prepping some food for dinner. We’ve been seeing green parakeets flying around in the botanical garden across the street, and I’ve been watching the clouds over the city. Our apartment really does have a wonderful view.

Felices Festivas and Feliz Navidad.

We love going to botanical gardens. Whenever we travel to a city that has a botanical garden, we always make time to visit it. The Botanical Garden in Buenos Aires is very convenient, right across the street from our apartment! We spent time wandering around, looking at the plants, and enjoying the shade.

The garden was designed in 1898 by Carlos Thays, the landscape architect who was responsible for many of the parks and green spaces around the city. The garden is huge and has thousands of botanical species on view.

The garden is also designated as a “rifugio climatico,” a climate refuge and a shady place where people can go hang out in the summer.

Entrance is free, and people take advantage of this amenity. There were lots of visitors this afternoon – people chatting with a friend, reading a book, listening to music, strolling around, or just sitting. The garden is a quiet, peaceful get-away in the middle of the city. Enjoy the photos!

We had a lazy day mostly due to the weather. The heat and humidity are really quite exhausting, so we spent the morning relaxing in the apartment. For lunch, we were in the mood for a light meal. Traditional Argentine food is heavy on meat and potatoes, but there are a lot of vegetarian options these days. We found an excellent vegetarian restaurant called Puerta a few blocks away. The place was small but the food was creative and delicious.

Then we went down the street and got gelato.

Then we saw this, and Chad said, “Huh, that’s not how we do things in the United States.”

In the afternoon, we wandered around the botanical garden. We were hoping the shade in the garden would provide a refuge from the heat, but we were still hot and sweaty. Exploring the garden did provide an interesting distraction, and we spent a couple of hours there.

We returned to the apartment at 5 pm just as it started to rain and continued to rain for the next two hours. We alternated between reading, relaxing, and watching the rain across the city. 

When the rained stopped, the temperature was much cooler, so we went back outside for a walk around the neighborhood. We don’t know if any grocery stores or restaurants will be open on Christmas day, so we picked up some food for our fridge.

We had dinner at a restaurant across the street called Ganzo. It’s up on the second floor, so it was an interesting vantage point to watch people and cars pass by below. We started with a cocktail and then had dinner at  9 pm, the typical dinner hour in Buenos Aires. The food wasn’t that great, but it was nice to sit there for a couple of hours, enjoying each other’s company.

After that, we called it a night and headed home.

The Japanese Garden opened in 1967, and it was designed and constructed by the Japanese community in Buenos Aires as a tribute to the first visit of the Crown Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko to Argentina. 

There is a small cafe on site that has typical Argentine lunch fare, and the visitor center also has a restaurant with sushi and sashimi. We didn’t eat there, but we spent a morning strolling around and enjoying the garden and the views.

There were interesting sculptures throughout the garden.

There was a small exhibit of bonsai trees.

The visitor center had an exhibit of kimonos, parasols, and musical instruments.

There were also examples of origami in the visitor center.

There is so much to see and do in Palermo, we spent another day exploring our neighborhood.  We started with breakfast at a cafe down the street.

We took a 30-minute walk north to the Japanese Garden. I’ll give the garden its own blog post since there was so much to see there.

On the way to the garden, we crossed Avenida del Libertador. Buenos Aires has several grand avenues, and this is one of them. It is 11 lanes wide, all going in the same direction. It was mind-boggling.  

Believe it or not, this is not the widest avenue in the city. That title goes to Avenida 9 de Julio which was modeled after the Champs-Elysees in Paris and, at 14 lanes wide, is the widest street in the world. That one takes a pedestrian two traffic cycles to cross the street, and that’s only if they don’t dilly-dally.

Walking around today, we also saw lots of dog-walkers. Portenos (people in Buenos Aires) love their dogs, and dog-walkers take the pooches out during the day when their owners are at work. This guy had 8 or 9 dogs. When he got to the crosswalk of Avenida de Libertador, he untangled all of the leashes and took pictures all around to prove that he took the dogs out, and then he crossed the street with both hands in the air so the cars knew to give him a wide berth with all of those dogs.

We stopped at a pharmacy to get some cold medicine for Chad. I only know very basic Spanish, so I used google translate on my phone and typed, “My husband has a cold. Do you have decongestant?” and showed it to the pharmacist. The pharmacist handed some medicine to me and used his own phone to translate and showed me, “Take this every 4 to 5 hours.” Thanks, Technology!

Afterwards, lunch was at a little bistro called Kajue. 

After lunch, we strolled around some more and found the hipster part of the neighborhood with lots of stylish shops. Chad pointed out that this area was for “hipsters with money.” Things seemed expensive in these shops.

At this point, we were hot, tired, and sweaty, so we got some gelato and then headed home to rest. We knew it would be summer here, but we didn’t really think about how exhausting the weather would be. When it’s 85 degrees and 85% humidity in Atlanta, it doesn’t seem bad, but we’re not usually walking around for hours in that weather. We’re at the point here where we want to take multiple showers a day.

So after resting, we thought, let’s go walk around in the heat some more. We explored another part of the neighborhood and stopped for a cocktail at Tres Monos. This place has been voted the best bar in Latin America and one of the 50 best bars in the world, and the cocktails were very interesting.

On the way back to our apartment, we popped into a little neighborhood shop to buy a bottle of wine. We left the shop with wine, a very interesting cheese, olives, salami, and a local beer. Chad is so good at asking for local recommendations and a taste of this and a taste of that, and then we have a full grocery bag of local treats. And then we stopped into a panaderia to get some bread, and this panaderia also had a lot of delicious pastries and cakes.

Dinner was a combination of restaurant leftovers and miscellaneous groceries as we watched the evening turn into night over the botanical gardens.

Buenos Aires has been on our list of places to visit for years. Our primary purpose of this trip was the Antarctica cruise, but we figured, as long as we’re traveling all the way to the southern end of the globe, we might as well take advantage and spend a week in Buenos Aires. I can already tell that one week is not enough time, a month would be better, but we’ll certainly enjoy it while we’re here.

Our apartment is in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. The metro area of Buenos Aires has 17 million people, and Palermo is the most populated neighborhood. It is just northwest of the historic city center. It is a very hip neighborhood with lots of shops, boutiques, restaurants, and nightlife. 

Palermo is a stately old neighborhood with some beautiful buildings from the 19th century. Our building, however, is only a couple of years old.

Palermo has several huge gardens and parks, and our apartment is right across the street from the Botanical Garden. Just beyond the Botanical Garden is a series of other gardens that stretch to the river’s edge.

We spent the day exploring the neighborhood with no particular destination in mind. We found lots of cafes, restaurants, gelato shops, little grocery stores, and other shops with everything from shoes to clothes to toys to gifts and more.  This is a very vibrant neighborhood.

While this is a very stately old-world kind of neighborhood, most of the buildings are 20th century. Every once in a while you can spot one from the late 1800s when the city built rich, opulent houses and other structures.

We had a superb lunch at a small restaurant with lots of character. We each ordered a beef dish and shared a salad. Argentina is known for its beef, and this meal did not disappoint. Yum!

In the evening, we explored another area of the neighborhood and stopped for a cocktail and some people watching. There is no shortage of people walking their dogs, and there is a surprising number of dachshunds. So many wiener dogs, everywhere.

At some point, Chad realized that it was the solstice and, since we’re in the southern hemisphere, we got to experience our second summer solstice of 2025. We had two longest days of the year! 

After the cold and dry climate of Antarctica, we’re enjoying the heat and humidity of summer in Argentina. The weather is great, perfect for walking around and exploring or just for sitting and watching people go by.

After spending one last night on the boat in the port of Ushuaia, we woke up and vacated our stateroom at 7:30 am. We took a 20-minute shuttle bus ride to the airport to catch our charter flight. 

Imagine a small local airport that has only 6 gates, and then a series of shuttle buses drops off 200+ people at the front door all at the same time. Needless to say, the line for security was insanely long. The airport is relatively new, and it is a beautiful design, all heavy timber construction.

There were several Viking crew members that were headed home for the holidays, and they were at the gate with us. They were the last ones to board the plane and their seats were in the very back, and as they walked through the plane to their seats, all of us Viking guests gave them a long round of applause. It was well deserved. All of the crew were really amazing on this voyage.

The flight was annoying because we were tired and hungry. The food and drink service was minimal, and there was enough turbulence that we were cranky when we landed. Plus, Chad had developed a terrible head cold the last two days on the ship, so he was feeling really miserable and dealing with lots of congestion and pressure from the altitude.

We landed at 2 pm and went to baggage claim. As the bags came around, Chad grabbed his backpack, but mine never showed up. Apparently, only half of the passenger bags made it onto the plane. Viking didn’t know where the bags were. The airline didn’t know where the bags were. Nobody knew when the bags would arrive.

The second charter plane arrived late that afternoon, and some of the missing luggage (but not all) was on that plane. Luckily, my backpack was on that flight, and after standing around the airport for 4-1/2 hours, I finally had my bag. But you can imagine the epic amounts of crankiness at this point.

We hopped into a taxi to go to our AirBnB, and the 25-minute ride took over an hour. In the end, we made it into our apartment just before 8 pm and had to rest and decompress for a bit.

I knew that we needed to get to a grocery store to get a few things like bottled water. (Visitors aren’t supposed to drink the tap water here because our bodies aren’t used to the local water.) There is a huge supermarket a couple of blocks away, so we got water, a bottle of wine, and some prepared foods for dinner. We didn’t have the energy for a restaurant meal.

What was interesting, is that we were at the store at 9 pm on a Saturday night, and it was packed! People generally eat the evening meal here at 9 pm or later, so maybe everyone was picking up some stuff for dinner.

We came back to our little apartment, had some food, and went to bed. After a long day, we were wiped out and ready to get some rest and wake up and start anew in the morning.

During our voyage, Viking had a staff photographer, and there were several crew members that took excellent photos. They shared their photos with the passengers which was great, because they were able to capture scenes that I didn’t capture. These photos were excellent, so I want to share them.

Before that, though, here’s a map of our voyage and the places we visited so you can see where we traveled.

And now, the crew photos. First up, views of landscape and the ship:

Some photos of excursion days:

Submarine photos:

And up in the air, sea birds:

And now for the orcas:

Adorable Weddell seals:

And the adorable puppy-like faces of seals:

And now, more cute penguins:

And last but not least, the majestic humpback whales:

Until next time:

We awoke this morning to see land. It was such a welcome sight, because it meant that the Drake Passage was behind us. We had sailed to the western side of South America and then spent the day sailing around Cape Horn to arrive at Ushuaia at 7 pm. I spent some time out on the bow watching the landscape go by. There were several birds around us and even some dolphins.

We had dinner at one of the fancy restaurants and then packed our bags.

We had to put our checked luggage outside our stateroom door by 10 pm. Porters came around in the night to collect the luggage. Then they transported it to the airport and loaded it on the plane. We’ll next see our baggage when we land in Buenos Aires. In the meantime, enjoy these photos of Cape Horn.

As we cross the passage for the second time, I’m reminded that I didn’t enjoy it the first time. Even though I don’t get motion sickness, I still get weary of the boat rolling around. Sometimes it pitches from front to back. Sometimes it rolls side to side. Sometimes it does both.

In addition to giving me a headache, all of the movement makes it difficult to walk around. You weave back and forth and sometimes stumble as the ship makes a sudden twist. I have to hold onto a railing or touch the wall to keep my balance.

The captain gave a lecture this morning about the technical and operational aspects of the ship. We learned that the ship has three stabilization methods, and they are all currently deployed as we cross the passage.

Even with all of the stabilization technology and seasick meds and the Drake Lake, it’s still tiring. I can’t imagine what it would have been like on an old sailing ship a hundred years ago. Yuck.

We have seen a lot of sea birds on this time across, however. I’ve seen a few albatross which is pretty cool. It makes me think of Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner which I read in 12th grade. We also seen other types of birds, petrels and others. I should go back to look at the bird replicas to figure out their names, but I just don’t feel like walking downstairs at the moment.

One of the lines in Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner is “Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.” In our case, the ship has a reserve of potable water, and it can make more water by desalination of sea water. I learned that during the captain’s lecture. How cool!

Our passage will take 36 hours. This is pretty good time, as I’ve read that it can take up to 48 hours if the sea is rough.

Tomorrow morning around 8 am, we’ll sight land on Cape Horn. We’ll then sail around the cape and arrive at Ushuaia at 8 pm, just in time for a final dinner reservation at one of the fancy restaurants on the boat. We’ll sleep on the boat and then head to the airport in the morning for the flight back to Buenos Aires. Most if not all of the guests will then head home, but we’ll be staying in Buenos Aires for another week so we can explore the city.