Buenos Aires, Argentina (map)
After spending time in the small town of Puerto Iguazu we hopped on the next leg of our Argentina flight purchase and headed to the HUGE city of Buenos Aires. By huge I mean around 13 million! The city center population is only around 3 million, but adding in those who live just outside the city it makes BA one of the 20 largest cities in the world.
We had a surprise for us when we went to check in for our flight at the Iguazu airport. We had booked our multi-city flight through Orbitz for a steal and for the leg from Iguazu to BA it had us having a 5 hour layover in Rio de Janiero. We didn’t think much of it since we never planned to visit Brazil due to the visa costs. Well, turns out the visa restrictions are so strict that if you don’t have your visa you cannot even fly into the country and stay within the international airport for a connecting flight. We immediately referenced Tom Hanks in the movie he did called Terminal. Guess Brazil doesn’t want random tourists living in their airports?? The airline employee then tells us that the airline itself will get fined a huge sum if they allow people to fly into Brazil without their approved visas. So, what we had thought would be a night sleeping in the Rio airport turned out to be us getting changed to a nonstop flight to BA (at no additional cost to us!). The airline employee even apologized to us like it was his fault our layover in Rio could not happen!
Typically when we arrive to a new location we figure out the area of town we want to stay in and head there to find a place to stay. Since we began our RTW trip we have actually only made reservations in advance two times! This time in BA was one of them. After hearing from other long term travelers about how they find unique places to stay we decided to check out a site called AirBnB. Basically people who have rooms or extra homes/apartments will advertise them for people like us to rent for a period of time. We ended up scoring a nice little apartment in a quiet area of Buenos Aires. It was a welcomed change from hostel life!
We Go Round the World 
Wow, beautiful photos but CRAP about Rio. We have tickets to India flying out of Rio and figured we’d just catch a short flight from BA to Rio… but now it sounds like it might be much more complicated. Oh noooo….
Sorry Kim, we didn’t know it either. Hopefully you can get them to change it for free! What was funny is that we booked our flights based on the cheapest (hence a 5 hour layover versus direct) but when they changed us they were the apologetic ones and didn’t charge us any extra. If it doesn’t workout maybe y’all can visit Brasil and pay the visa; I know we wouldn’t of minded seeing it.
Hey guys! I must say that next to the leaping perfect form sunset pix of you Em, early in the trip, the coffee ghost pix is the best artistic pix of all the trip! We miss you guys!
Thanks Uncle Phil!
I love the Cofe pic! I just may have to steal it and add it to my facebook. BOOM! LOL Looks like y’all are having a great time! Miss you suckas!
Please do steal it, but give us a FB shout out 🙂 Miss you guys too, your comments have been cracking EmSue and me up.
So jealous of you guys to be in Buenos Aires! Have a great time!
Please get some photos of the BsAs tango dancers all around the city! 🙂
Unfortunately all the Tango dancers we saw around the city were there just for tourist purposes so if you took their picture they wanted to be paid for it. (I love the distinguish of Phillip’s Co-Worker; it did help 🙂 )
You can almost smell the coffee – either it is very cold or the coffee was very hot – great shot.
It was a little bit of both, funny though it was just a coincidence shot with where the morning light was and I had happened to just be sitting across the room and it caught my eye