Robbed of everything at gunpoint

Now that I'm safely back in England, I can tell you the truth about my trip. I experienced genuine Argentine culture first-hand - hearty barbecues; wide-open horsey spaces; passionate football support; and violent robbery at the wrong end of some of the two million unlicensed guns the country can boast.

Yes indeed. On Sunday 31 October, I was attacked by a gang of gunmen, tied up naked on a hostel floor, and robbed of everything I had. It was not one of the more enjoyable Hallowe'ens I've had.

I was staying in a hostel in Rosario. There were only three other people in the hostel that evening: two guests and a guy on reception. At half past ten or so, I was woken up by a man hitting me on the head. Not violently - more like a peevish interwar Latin master boxing the ears of a boy who had forgotten his prep. I protested until I realised, staring foggily at him without my glasses, that he was hitting me with a gun.

Though I couldn't quite understand what he was shouting - my phrasebook unaccountably didn't have a 'Armed raids and hostage situations' chapter - the gist was clear, and involved me taking to the floor, face down and naked, to join two other hostellers who had their hands tied behind their back.

One of the gang tied my hands behind my back - I thought with handcuffs, but it turned out it was coat-hanger wire. Another pointed a gun at the reception guy and demanded the keys to the safe and the security lockers. With us on the floor, two gunmen hoovered up everything in the hostel and lobbed it to their accomplices standing outside by the getaway van: rucksacks, cash takings, clothes, contents of all safes and lockers and cupboards, even - rather bizarrely - the beers in the hostel fridge.

It took about seven or eight minutes. Eventually they left, and the four of us unwired our hands and assessed our situation. We were left with nothing except the clothes we stood up in. Except that I'd been stark bollock naked and face down on the floor.

In fact, in the chaos of clothes left in our dorm and deemed valueless, my T-shirt and jeans remained. Luckily for me, my credit cards, passport and cash happened to be in my jeans; the thieves were both ruthless and incompetent. Everything else though was gone. Clothes, shoes, waterproofs, hiking boots, swimming stuff. Camera, laptop, watch, toiletries, Swiss Army Knife, nail scissors. Spanish books and dictionaries, work, documents, contracts. The rucksack itself. My underpants.

What sort of weirdo takes beer out of the fridge, and underpants?

It was a vile experience, made worse by the total lack of interest shown by the police. Unknown to us, a fifth person was in the hostel while the raid was taking place, an Argentinian guy who hid under a bed in a remote dorm and called the police on his mobile. All he got was the Rosario Police answering machine: If you wish to report an armed robbery in progress, press 4. For theft of underwear, press 5. If you're delivering the pizza we ordered, please hold.

When the police eventually did come, they made no effort to investigate and took no statements from most of us. They had, grudgingly, to be persuaded to make lists of our stolen property for insurance purposes, taking half a day to do so. The document I got from them is virtually useless, an illegible dot-matrix photocopy cursorily summarising the detailed list of articles I tried to give them. (And missing out the underpant larceny entirely.)

Their attitude was clear. Gun crime? So? This is Argentina, what's the big deal? Happens all the time.

The loss of all my belongings made the following months quite a challenge. Without Spanish books or dictionaries (and no, worthwhile replacements are not available in provincial Argentina) I couldn't develop my Spanish. Without my laptop, bus journeys changed from being an opportunity to work and write up into deadly boring six-hour purgatories. The very guidebook I was updating had gone too. I struggled by for the next six weeks on the bare minimum - two sets of clothes, a toothbrush, and a pen and pad, essentially - but it was no fun.

Obviously, I couldn't tell family (they'd have worried) or friends (they'd have told family). It didn't seem right for a Facebook status update either:
OMG just got robbed at GUNPOINT!!! : ( wtf?? even took my underpants lol!!

Now, to put it in context, I only met a couple of dozen people in my time there who'd been robbed of personal possessions at the point of a gun. So the chances of you being attacked by evil men with firearms are very, very small. Only one in three, say.

So let me stress that Argentina is a wonderful country full of vibrant and friendly people, and I can thoroughly recommend going there. Except for Buenos Aires, which is too dangerous, and the bits outside Buenos Aires, which are too dangerous.

Maté: Argentina to a T

I had my first maté today. It's a herb tea, very Argentinian, and very popular. It's an essential part of any picnic, or sit-down in a city square or rural park.

It's drunk through a metal tube from something that looks like an ashtray full of cooking herbs. You keep topping it up with water from your flask and sipping away. I wondered why street stalls were so keen on advertising 'agua caliente' - 'hot water' - on 35-degree early summer days. Well, it's so you can refill your maté.

The effect of the bitter-tasting brew is said to be mildly stimulating, like a good strong coffee.

The effect on me was not unlike sucking water through a layer of pondweed, cigarette butts and woodshed floor.

But I don't know how to say that in Spanish. I only know how to say 'está bien'. Which is just as well.

Anyway, I've left Buenos Aires behind, and after three very unpleasant days in Rosario, I'm gradually working my way up through the east side towards Iguazu.

Pax vobiscum: A super hostel in Buenos Aires

After nearly two weeks in Buenos Aires, I'm moving out to start updating the regions. One of the pleasures of BsAs is the hostels: there are dozens and dozens of them, and the competition means you get a lot of facilities for your peso. Free internet and wifi, fresh sheets and bed made for you every morning, breakfast, 24 hour access and private lockers come as standard.

I stayed a week at the Pax Hostel, at Salta 990. Run by an Australian woman, Kaylee, and her bloke Nico (although he's apparently up in Iguazu running the Stop Hostel), it's a fine example of a really good little place to stay that gives you loads of well thought-out extras.


For instance, the bottom bunks have privacy curtains round - a boon not just for me, inside, but I suspect for everyone else in the dorm, who probably don't want to see the contents.


There's also free bike hire - I had a lovely half-day clanking round the ecological reserve and the parks of Recoleta - and a fine breakfast that includes fresh squeeze-it-yourself orange juice.


And even free international phone calls, much to your mum's delight. Though, to judge by this young lady, her mum's phone conversation was less than riveting - she was emailing a friend during the call...

All this for just 40 pesos (less than six quid) a night. I can thoroughly recommend Pax. It's well situated, really good value, and in addition to the extras, the staff are very friendly and helpful (hi to David). I hope my mum hasn't good to used to me calling so often...

Taking leave of one's census

Argentina was shut today. It was Census Day, and everybody must have been at home filling in forms, because the shops were all shuttered and the roads were almost empty.

Which was a problem for those of us who hadn't realised, and who depend on shops to buy food from. The hostel did breakfast, but lunch was a challenge. Eventually I found a man selling hot dogs from a stand near Retiro, the main bus and train station.


Dinner was even more of a problem. The 24-hour pharmacy was open, but had its sandwich cabinet closed off with bin bags; is there a law preventing tourists from eating? Is this the Argie equivalent of a state-imposed Ramadan? At least you get dates and tea at dusk in Morocco.

Eventually I found a man selling hot dogs, rather furtively - frankfurtively, presumably - from a shop a few blocks from the hostel.


I don't know what the census position is on people who die on the day of the count. As happened, of course, to Nestor Kirchner, former PM, and husband of the current PM.

The news dominated the telly all day. The channels must have been delighted; with everyone indoors grappling with the form-filling, what else would there have been to cover?

Hotel name that's a load of...

I know better than to snigger at the various references to 'Colon' you get in South America: Teatro Colon, Paseo Colon and so on. It's nothing to do with bowels, but the non-Latinised form of Columbus, the man to blame for all this.

But what the explanation is of the name of this hotel just round the corner from my hostel - Faecys - I don't know. Its muddy brown colour scheme doesn't help.

At least I now know that a Cementario isn't full of cement, but dead bodies, and a Ferreteria is a shop selling iron things, not ferrets.

You know when you've been tangoed (2)

Caminito is the place to come for tango kitsch.

The tiny alley, in one of the dodgiest and poorest areas of Buenos Aires, was tarted up with a few pots of paint some decades ago and reinvented itself as a tourist postcard.


Each weekend, the pavement cafes and restaurants ring to the sounds of tango performed live, often by an old boy with a wavering baritone.


Lavishly-fishnetted young Latin ladies with rakish trilbies try to persuade passers-by to eat here or have their photo taken there with your head poking through one of those painted headless boards - for a few pesos, of course.


Models of Diego Maradona are everywhere. The lying, drug-taking, tax-evading, cheating football genius is one of Boca's most famous sons.

Here's an effigy of him on the balcony of the Havanna cafe in Caminito, doing what he's most famous to English fans for: handling the ball.


The restaurants have live tango dancing, and sometimes the diners join in, such as this lady. Not me, of course: dancing's not my thing. I was more interested in the disused Transporter Bridge just up the docks road.

And I had a bus to catch back. It's only a few blocks north back to San Telmo, the cobbly artisan district, but everyone warns you in dark tones NOT to walk, even by day - Boca is evidently a place of cutpurses and brigands. Well, the tango has always had that edge of danger...

Laying down routes: Cycling in Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is just about recommendable as a place to cycle now. Lots of things militate against cycling - the one-way system, San Telmo's cobbled streets, the pampas-sized eight-lane urban expressways - but now a system of separated cycle tracks is in place, with more being added. It's pretty skeletal, but it just about enables you to do some pleasant half-day trundles.


For instance, you can cycle round the back of Puetro Madero, the shiny new docklands skyscraper district, on the riverside path. There are picnic tables and pleasant places for lunch. Here you can hear the strange jungle-bird tweeting of squeaky free hostel loan bikes like the one I was riding.


It feels like it should be the seaside, but of course this is a river, and so the water doesn't taste of salt. It tastes of cadmium and lead and mercury.

Back in the city, there's a very nice trip up the track on Libertador a mile or two to the big gardens of Palermo. It's all rather reminiscent of Hyde Park, with skaters and pleasure boats on the lake.


It wasn't the only thing that reminded me of London. Taxis here evidently pay as much respect to bike facilities. When I saw this I felt like crying. Not because of the driver's attitude, but because it made me homesick.

Don't cry for me: Eva Peron's tomb in Recoleta Cemetery

Recoleta Cemetery is the resting place for Argentina's great and good, and presidents, though I'd never heard of them. You know the sort of thing: Presidente General Doctor Jose Ignacio Rodriguez Lopez Rodriguez Rodriguez, founder of something in 1844 etc.

What's interesting about Recoleta for the gringo is not who's buried but what they're buried in. This is no line-up of headstones: it's a whole village of deads, each in their kiosk-sized mini-mausolea, terraced like a village, complete with streets and little squares: a genuine Ghost Town.



Actually, there is one person buried here famous even to the clueless such as me: Eva Peron. Apparently there was some opposition to her being interred here - not because of the appalling songs she sang in the Lloyd Webber musical, but something to do with her family, the Duartes, being of low birth.

This is her tomb, anyway. It's not signed and rather tricky to find. Luckily I tagged along with Xavier, a Spanish guy who did the asking. After a half-hour unintentional tour and conflicting instructions from guides, tourists, cleaners and chaps digging up the pavements, we found it: the Familia Duarte.

Dogged work: Buenos Aires's dog-walkers

One of Buenos Aires's most distinctive sights is the paseaperros: the dog-walkers.

The conurbation has a population of around 13 million - more than London - and they're just as keen on pets as Londoners.

And for all those who have dogs but live in flats and have busy city jobs, the paseaperros are there to exercise their companion animals.

Stroll around the parks'n'museums area of Recoleta and you'll see plenty of them, taking a friendly pack of hounds round in a fistful of leads.

The well-behaved dogs, mostly strapping biggish breeds such as labradors and alsatians, certainly seem to enjoy it - a social outing for them, no doubt - and in some of the parks you'll see them let off the leash and doing what dogs do.

More pictures (Flickr)

Playing statues in Puerto Madero

Multiply replicated statues in city centres, each painted differently by an artist, seem to be all the rage these days.

Already this year I've seen elephants in London, lions in Bath, and toads in Hull (a homage to a poetic refernce by adopted local boy Philip Larkin).

So what have they done along the same lines in Buenos Aires?


Well, you can see for yourself: oh how Latin.

They're in Puerto Madero, the new dockside development that's eerily similar to that stretch of Thames just west of Canary Wharf, complete with similarly overpriced waterside restaurants.

I think I preferred the elephants, actually. Even the toads.


And yes, I know this one's sideways. It's a bug in blogger.

And no, I've no idea what the young lady is doing with an electric guitar when she doesn't have an amplifier.

Putting the liv into Bolivia

There was a big Bolivian parade yesterday celebrating two hundred years of Argentinian independence with a joyfully noisy show round the Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires’s equivalent of Parliament Square.

Those delightfully gaudy Bolivian costumes were much in evidence.

The women looked like they had donned a bowler hat, or sometimes a lampshade, and then covered themselves in glue, and run through a curtain shop.


Some of the chaps, not to be outdone, had magnificent hooped skirt things, which put me in mind of the toilet roll covers my gran used to have.

All did some lively formation-whirling, accompanied by marching bands with very loud timpanists who thumped out a steady two-two spiced up with the odd bar of four-against-three.

At fifteen thousand feet, perhaps crossrhythms are what keeps the circulation going.

You know when you've been tangoed...

So here I am in Buenos Aires, and yes, it’s tango city. Stroll down Florida St, the centre’s favourite pedestrianised shopping boulevard, and the hawkers (present, but not too persistent) try to entice you into this or that Tango Show.

The going rate – for floor show, meal, transport there and back from your hotel – seems to be about 360-odd pesos, or about sixty quid. Put one way, that’s ten bottles of very decent Malbec in a restaurant here. Put another... well, it’s still too much for me.



Still, if you buy into the tango schtick, there are shops for your passion. Some areas – such as Suipacha St near the Obelisk (above right), or the Abasto near the Carlos Gardel statue out along Corrientes (below right) – have plenty catering specifically, for example, for tango shoes and clothes.

And tango lessons are easy to come by: along with free wi-fi and complimentary breakfast rolls, even budget hostels offer such things.

So, if you dream of coming out here to meet a tall dark handsome stranger who will sweep you off your feet in a slow-moving clinch across a dusty dancefloor, then you’ve come to exactly the right place. Because you’ll meet lots of other people who are hoping for exactly the same thing.

Reputation at steak: Argentina slips from beef-eating top spot

My flight out to Argentina is sorted, thanks to the helpful people at Air Europa. This time next week I'll be in Buenos Aires, starting my update of the 2011 Bradt Guidebook. Obviously, in only four months, I can't visit every bar in a country the size of Europe, but I'll try.

What to put on the cover of the new edition? There are three cliche images for Argentina. First is obviously tango, probably a close-up of a fishnet-stockinged thigh bent round a male leg. Second is a gaucho hurling his horse across the pampas. Third is a steak the size of a duvet.

Well, I love the nuevo-tango music of Astor Piazzolla et al, but I dad-dance like Mr Bean after a shandy too many. I rode a horse once, in New Zealand, but couldn't steer the darn thing and couldn't find the cruise control. And I'm not that fond of steak.

And Argentina's reputation as the world's biggest carnivore is under threat. The Guardian recently reported that drought and restrictions have seen annual consumption of beef slump from 70kg per head to 56kg.

Shockingly, those quiet cousins over the river in Uruguay have taken over the the top steak-eating spot, with 59kg.