Driving down Rivadivia Avenue for the first time into downtown Buenos Aires you'd be forgiven for thinking that you're driving toward downtown Manhattan. Yip, we were as surprised. The similarities continued with the street and avenue grid system, different districts, a subway system and the city definitely doesn't sleep. We later found out that the city was actually modeled on Manhattan. Now, before we get carried away, it is not Manhattan, but it is a very, very cool city.

We spent two weeks in Buenos Aires and got two very different perspectives of the city. The first week was our live in week. We hired an apartment in Centro (downtown) and made ourselves at home with groceries, cooking, tv and other teething issues like having to fix the toilet and wifi. This was the first time on the trek that we were properly in our own space and under our own rule. And it was fantastic. Admittedly, we were exhausted from our time in the jungle and our disaster of getting out of Manaus, and this kept us just chilling indoors for most of the week, but that is part of the advantage of having your own place, you can just chill out. One of our ventures out led us to Rabbi Menachem's backpacker Chabad Lametayel for Shabbat dinner. This is one of the many, many Chabads in the city that's home to about 200'000 jews. On this topic, we also went past the Kosher McDonalds in Abasto de Buenos Aires - makes ordering a BigMac with no cheese much easier. This week was also marred by marches through the town as it coincided with the anniversary of the 2001 protests. The marching went beyond history though and there were also people striking for wage increases. Turns out toi-toi'ing isn't unique to South Africa.

Our second week in Buenos Aires was our action week. Our friends and official honorary mlungus, Steve and Rael, met up us with us for the third time from London to join the last stretch of the South America leg of the Mlungu Trek (which sadly also coincides with the end of the trek). We packed and moved out of our flat and headed for hostel life at the famously notorious Milhouse. As we said above, this is a city that doesn't sleep, and in a somewhat illogical and backward approach, people only start going out after midnight and clubs only really get going around 2am! We've never before seen so many sunrises in one week. Most of our nightlife and early mornings were spent in Palermo and downtown. This late night social phenomenon made for an interesting new years where our hostel had to have a new year's countdown party before we headed out to the awesome Terrazas club because no clubs were open early enough for a midnight countdown. But the late nights didn't stop us during the day as we made our way to Boca Juniors stadium, saw tango in the colourful Boca area (but didn't spend too much time there due to some safety warnings) and explored the awesome Recoleta district with its famous Evita cemetery and the cobble stoned San Telmo district also known for its tango offerings in some of its plazas. We also spent some time wandering Florida St and the main shopping streets of downtown and eating in the swanky, redeveloped port area of Puerto Madero where a massive Standard Bank building takes centre stage...hmmm. Apparently Puerto Madero was the place to be to bring in the new year and had a massive crowd and fireworks display.

One of the things we were really interested in was the Argentinean parilla or steak houses. We've heard that this is one of the very few places in the world that can compete with the quality and delicacy of South African meat and, so, wanted to test this theory for ourselves. Almost every restaurant here sells meat - and pizza - but the place we found to be the best was Siga la Vaca (translated to follow the cow) in Puerto Madero. This restaurant had great food and the meat was as good as any we've had. The best part, though, it's all you can eat. Just make sure you get there early cause it's become a massive tourist attraction. As for the theory about the quality of meat here, we think the 7kg or so that we ate here between the four of us speaks for itself!

Buenos Aires has culture, history, great people and great food. It ticks all the right boxes for tourists and is a definite must visit city that all of us are pretty certain we'll be back to visit again.

Trek on...Brett and Darren

P.S. Keep up to speed with where we've been staying and how we've been getting around in our blog posts from Johannesburg

Also check out our video channel on YouTube (cause we now technologicious like that):

http://www.youtube.com/user/MlunguTrek/videos?view=pl