Resistencia

The main thrust of our route after Santiago was to get to Iguazú via a series of pleasant or interesting places with comfortable hotels.

Mendoza was a nice town where we didn't find a good place to stay. In Córdoba we found a great apartment but didn't take to the town.

Clare and I differed in our feelings about the comparison between Santa Fé and Córdoba. Neither of us found Santa Fé town remarkable. Clare, as mentioned, was not a fan of Córdoba itself and also preferred the hotel in Santa Fé. I preferred Córdoba for both accommodation and town, former more than latter, feeling Clare had been unduly put off by the weekday crowds. Neither had nice places to eat like Mendoza, though.

We wanted a route from Santa Fé to Puerto Iguazú (the nearest town to the falls) that didn't replicate so much the route we'd have to take back from there to BA. Surfing, we found Resistencia described as "city of sculptures" and decided to make that our next stop.

The road from Santa Fé to Iguazú via Resistencia is National Route 12. Early on the first day we passed the marker (milestone) for kilometer 500 and spent all day watching these gradually count down to kilometer 1000 just south of Resistencia, as the scenery gradually changed from semi-desert to lush plains.

On leaving Resistencia they rose past kilometer 1500 to around 1600 as the landscape gradually changed again from plains to jungle.

The hotel in Resistencia was directly on the main square. All main squares in Argentina seem to have roads only round the sides, occupy the space of four city blocks and be full of trees and statues. This hotel was unusual because it had a very narrow frontage, all of glass. The rooms were accordingly small, but very well-designed and finished that this didn't matter.

The area for shower and toilet was walled entirely with near-opaque glass, with the sink outside near the room door. The king-sized bed faced a fair-sized flat-screen TV.

However, the most remarkable feature of the room were the blinds facing the street. There were four panes of mesh, the middle two of which drew aside. Behind these was a full-height blackout blind, raised and lowered by a bedside electric switch. Different, clever and effective.

On the first evening I asked at the hotel reception where we might find restaurants. He made various marks on the map covering the few blocks directly behind the hotel. We went that way, and slightly further, and eventually found a couple of attractive-looking restaurants nearly side-by-side. However, by 8:45pm they still looked like they were preparing to open.

We took drinks at a nearby bar to pass some time, sharing a large bottle of lager, neat for Dave and shandy for Clare.

Around 9:30 we returned to find the restaurants looking little different. Fortunately, a woman outside one assured us it was open. Maybe it had been all along?

The surroundings and service were impeccable, the food good but unexceptional.

On the second night we looked all over the town for another good restaurant, taking ages. Eventually we ended up next door to the previous night. The environment and the service were fine but a bit less stylish. The food, however, was amazing and I took pains to tell the manager how impressed I was. A real treat.

We took our day in Resistencia very easy. First a stroll across the square, then a lap of the edge, following a line of orange tiles set into the pavement. Resistencia cleverly holds a sculpture festival/competition every four years, and has been for some time, becoming internationally recognised. The sculptures in the competition have to stay in the city, now amounting to over 500 works, many of which are connected by this path of orange dots.

We followed the line for some time, enjoying the pieces. We ended at the bar outside the local arts centre, where we repeated our lager-and-shandy trick, found a free wi-fi hotspot and sat for ages reading up the history of several common street names on Wikipedia (e.g. Bernardo O'Higgins, apparently a loose cannon as a military leader but a key figure in freeing South America from Spanish rule after 1810, when Spain itself was conquered by Napoleon's France).

We liked Resistencia, and might have stayed longer if we hadn't already booked the next night in Iguazú (and run out of good local restaurants ;)