Carnaval (Part 2)

Every year in a small city of about 90,000 people north of Buenos Aires, the population almost doubles as it celebrates its version of Carnaval in January, February and the first Saturday in March. I had just heard about it for the first time last Friday morning from Leandro, a friend of mine who I also hire as a graphic designer for my company.

Impulsively, I cleared my afternoon schedule, begged a friend from Colombia, Gabriel, to come along for the adventure, and hopped on the subway to Retiro (the city bus station) to buy two tickets for later that afternoon for Gualeguaychu (about 4 hours north of Buenos Aires, bordering the country of Uruguay). Buses in Argentina are a lot different than the Greyhounds or similiar in the US. There are different types of buses: common (some with a/c and some without, and normal bus-type seats), semi-cama (leather seats that extend 120 degrees, a/c, TV), cama (leather seats that extend almost to a full 180 degrees, a/c, TV, DVD, meal served), and cama suite (leather seat that turns into a full bed, pillows, blanket, TV, DVD, meals and drinks served). We took a cama on Flecha Bus there and back.

It was 10:00 pm by the time we arrived - and without a hotel. There was a tourist information office at the bus terminal that provided a list of hotels with occupancy (just 3). We selected Hotel Brutti because it had air conditioning and was close to the carnaval. The office said it was a reputable hotel. They lied. We arrived to a room with no air conditioning and a toilet that did not flush the entire stay. We told them two times about the problem with the toilet and they responded that no plumbers were available during Carnaval and that we were more than welcome to use the public toilet in the restaurant next door if we needed one.

The hotel room was the only bad experience of the trip. On Saturday, after spending a good portion of the day sleeping to ready ourselves for a five hour parade that lasted until 4:00 am, we arrived at the stadium at 10:30 pm and grabbed the first of many beers. Coincidentally, Leandro and his family were just 20 seats away from us and had been already waiting in line, so we joined them, avoiding a 30 minute wait to be seated. After arriving to our seats (we opted to buy assigned seats, rather than a ticket for open seating), we befriended four girls who had traveled from Rosario, Argentina to participate in Carnaval and who gave us a background of the event.

The parade, featuring well over 1,000 dancers and participants, started at 11:30 with samba music played throughout. The floats were huge (some over 40 feet tall) and contained hundreds of participants wearing costumes associated with the theme of each float. There were three different "parades," each following one another. The parades were also a contest and one of the three (I still don't know which) won the competition that night. Our seats were right next to the judges station, so we were treated to the best performances of the parade route. Overall, the crowed was well behaved and I only saw three people dragged out by the police for jumping over the barrier into the parade route. After the parade ended, most of the attendees and participants headed to a local beach for an all-night post-Carnaval party before spending most of Sunday in bed recovering.

Click here for all of my photos and videos from Carnaval!