New Years Eve- Tigre river delta
We made the fatal mistake of arriving at our resort without enough actual pesos to pay our bill for our accommodations. We don't have many frustrations about travel in South America but not being able to pay for a hotel with Visa is a BIG one especially when you combine that with the fact that the maximum withdrawl amount from the ATM is $250 ( 1000 pesos) per withdrawl per day that comes with a bank charge of $4. Apparently there is a shortage of paper money in Argentina so they limit the amount available which of course is why most places want payment in cash.
$900 is a lot of money to be carrying around for days at a time. Our plan was to get to another bank machine before the boat arrived but it arrived on time and in the flurry of activity to haul our provisions and our mountain of luggage onto the top of the boat we didn't have enough time to wander the streets looking for an ATM.We reasoned that they must accept Visa at our resort or they would have said "no Visa" when we made the reservation, right? If not then one of us will take the 3 hr journey back into Tigre in the next few days to get some cash and more provisions should we need them.
Here are a few more shots of our beautiful resort. There are parrots flying around here!!! Green parrots like the kind for sale in the pet store. How cool is that?
Today is the day for some adventure. I will go into town with Hollis to get what we need. We caught the 12:40 Launcha - river boat collectivo, expecting to be back around 4:30 pm. Remy and Bowen will have lunch ready for our arrival! WRONG again! The trip back into town on the boat was nearly 3 hours in itself. We toured up and down many arms of this fantastic river delta picking up passengers heading into Tigre. Once in Tigre we completed our errands in record time- Hollis has been a fantastic help on these expeditions. He has a chance to use his Spanish which is coming along quite well and he is confident enough to go off in a different direction inside the store to get 1/2 the supplies while I got the other half.
Here are some shots of the interesting mix of houses along the many rivers we traveled on today
Our launcha home eventually went off in a different direction than I expected which made me very nervous about where exactly we were going. With several dozen boats at the dock all collecting hundreds of passengers it would be easy to hop on the wrong one and end up miles from our intended destination. I worried for about an hour about how we would get to our resort, Rio Manso, and about how freaked out Remy and Bowen would be that we were so late. The boat was too full of people to ask the captain if we were on the right boat so I just waited.............not easy for me to do! Check out the many rings on this woman!
Here is a man drinking mate on the boat. Little did I know I'd be having lunch with him 2 days later!
We finally arrived home at 8:30 pm. Remy and Bowen were there on the dock waiting to greet us just like all the other passengers had family waiting as they departed! Dinner would be served on the beach around 10pm tonight so we had lots of time to relax and shower up for the end of the year party. After dinner on the patio the boys set up their big fireworks display on the beach. Three young boys, including the owners son, joined in and between the 5 of them kept us all entertained with explosions of color over the river until well after 1am. For our boys this was better than Christmas!! Our New Years resolution was to try to spend as many of our future New Years Parties with our feet in the sand.
~Liz
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