Braving La Boca

La Boca is a spot everyone must see when they visit Buenos Aires. At the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, a huge influx of French and Italian immigrants landed in the port of La Boca and decided not to leave. Plagued by poverty, but filled with a sense of pride, they began to construct homes and businesses. As most of them worked in the port, they scrounged up any unused paint they could find at the shipyard to spruce up the exterior of the buildings. These bright colors (originally purchased to paint the shipping containers), that still remain today, are what draw people to the area as a tourist attraction. Now, business owners and street vendors have capitalized on the tourism by selling every kind of trinket and memorabilia in shops and kiosks lining every street. Tango performers can be found at each corner, and most restaurants employ tango dancers to entertain the patrons willing to spend top dollar for their food.

Yesterday, Abby and I crawled out of our cave at an early-ish hour, packed our pockets with only the bare essentials, grabbed the city bus book (its huge!) and headed out. The tourist location of La Boca is basically a 5 square block area, with a pedestrian street called Caminito at its center. The surrounding areas of La Boca are rumored to be extremely dangerous. In fact, we have heard multiple stories of people being mugged or assaulted when they ventured out into the local neighborhood. We even met 2 Israeli girls who got on a bus at Caminito but realized once the bus took off that they did not have any change (buses here only take exact change). The bus driver refused to take any bills, pulled the bus over and forced them to get off. Before the girls could figure out what to do (it was still daylight), they found themselves surrounded by a group of hoodlums armed with a gun. They handed over their purses, but not before one of them was pushed down so hard that she cracked her head off the curb. Luckily, aside from a lot of blood and a headache (figurative and physical), they are both OK.

Given that, we decided to take a cab directly to Caminito (we locked the doors when we got in because we have heard of people getting ripped out of cabs too!) instead of risking a bus not dropping us off exactly where we wanted to be. We made it there without issue and felt much more at ease once we saw the brightly painted buildings, the abundance of milling tourists and the tented walkways of a street fair (but still alert, no worries). We scoped out the local crafts market which was really beautiful and had very high quality goods. We bought a couple things (we only had a little bit of money stuffed in our bras or else we probably would have bought a bunch more!), wandered around the neighborhood, took pictures and relaxed by the water for a bit.

When we decided it was time to head back to San Telmo, we agreed that we wanted to give the bus a try. There are 3 privately owned bus companies that function within the city. We knew which buses dropped off in our area and we wanted to scope out a little bit of La Boca on our way through. Our first choice was Bus #20, but the driver was so rude to us when we got on, refusing to confirm our stop that we jumped off before the doors closed. The next bus, #29, was our second choice and the driver was much more helpful – even though he had cut outs of scorpions all over the front dash.

The bus only did a small circuit through La Boca before dropping us off safely in San Telmo, so we were not able to see much of the neighborhood but we were happy to spend $1.20 for the trip instead of the $15 for a cab. We headed home, made dinner and then took off to Abasto for the 22:10 showing of Avatar.

All in all, yesterday was a pretty productive day. La Boca: Check! Avatar: Check!