Tigre is a town north of Buenos Aires and a popular porteño getaway. It was recommended to Chris’s mom by two separate people, so we decided to make the trek.

From Retiro station downtown, the suburban metro train will get you there for US$0.75 round-trip, per person. The trip is an hour, but honestly could be halved if the train went more than 30km per hour. So. Slow. There’s a more touristic train that goes even longer, but an hour train ride is long enough for us.

Our guidebooks had little information about what to do in Tigre, so we just had to wing it. There’s a popular amusement park, but it was closed for the season. It’s located on a river delta, with lots of rivers and streams creating small islands. One of those islands is called Tres Bocas, and there’s a path that goes all the way around. We took the Interisleña commuter boats — old polished, wooden boats that hold about 100 people — and the trip was about 30 minutes from the estacion fluvial.

The boats pull up to the docks and one of the workers holds your hand to help you leap onto the stairs. Chris’s mom was surprised by the elderly folks who climbed on and off with ease, while I was surprised the captain never prematurely took off because he barely waited to see whether everyone was safely aboard or not.

Approximately half the path around the island is paved or has a wooden boardwalk, while the other half is just grass and dirt.

Walking along the path, there are lots of quiet little houses to our left and small, private docks along the (nearly dry) river to our right. A lot of the houses had names on them instead of addresses, kind of like boats.

One of my favorite things were the many handmade signs for a rowing school with canoe and kayak rentals.

But eventually the paved path ended and we ended up in really thick mud, courtesy of the thunderstorms over the past several days.

We bumped into a couple folks from France who were also looking skeptically at the sludge and we all decided to turn back. I think if we’d made it all the way around the island, it would have been a leisurely 1-2 hours.

We had to wait nearly an hour for the return boat back to Tigre, which was only annoying because there was a restaurant and if we’d known we were going to wait that long, we would have gotten some coffee…or wine. But we did get to meet this little fellow sleeping on the dock and get in some good people-watching on the ride back.

All in all, an interesting day. We felt more like we were on the set of True Detective, out near the bayou, than just outside Buenos Aires.

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