Day 20 – Buenos Aires – Night

After our tour of the Tigre River it was time for our night tour, a Tango Show. I was not going to go on this tour originally but was convinced by my friends that being in Buenos Aires and not seeing at least one Tango Show was not the done thing!

We departed for the tour at 7:20, having to go through the hassle of transferring to the passenger terminal via an in port shuttle bus and then onto another bus. This was needed earlier in the day as well. The port is a container port as well as a passenger cruise ship port, so security is always high, will talk about that again later, we had an interesting return to the port.

Our destination was La Ventana, a very nicely restored building that has been purposely remodeled as a theatre restaurant. The did a fairly good job

 There are a lot of wine bottles around the place, all with the house label, which we were going to be trying over dinner / during the show

The main draw back from a venue like this is that the floor is the one level, so if you are unlucky enough to sit in the wrong seat, you will have your view of the stage obscured.

There were two bottles of house wine to choose from, the white was a Chenin Chardonnay, the red was a Malbec. They were not in the same class as most of the other wines we have tasted on the cruise, in my opinion, they are about the same, from a quality perspective, a usual house wine offered in most restaurants.

Unfortunately, as usual with these sort of shows, we were not allowed to take photos during the show. so I have searched the web and the La Ventana’s own site to find a few photos, thanks to them photographers!

The three live bands on the stage were great and so were the various performers , was not expecting to enjoy the night as much as I did, but I do recommend the show if you are in Buenos Aries.

Being in Argentina, there had to be a tribute to Evita Peron, and there was, the singer in the photos below was not the singer who was on stage for our show. Hopefully you can see the dancers waiving Argentinean Flags over the heads of the audience from the sides of the room in the second photo, they quietly came out during the song and started waiving the flags towards the climax of the song. It was one of the better renditions of Don’t Cry For Me Argentina I have heard. A nice touch was the historical montage projected behind the singer.

After Evita the next set of acts came out. The second half of the show was Argentinean Folk music and one crazy bloke who dances with bolas. This was a lot of fun, the band and the crazy bloke play and dance around each other with the bolas flying, they also have more interaction with the crowd than the tango dancers, but that is as it should be as their show is designed for it. Lots of laughs!

The finale

After the show we headed back to the ship, when we arrived at the passenger terminal, the place was locked up and then after a short while we were let in, as we moved towards the security check point I noticed that there were riot police forming up, what the … was going on. I asked around and it seems that heightened security was due to a British Ship scheduled to be berthed at the port today or tomorrow and concerns that there would be protesters who were going attempt to board it. Obviously those little islands we visited a couple of days ago are a sore point for some.

Tomorrow we disembark our home for the past few weeks and I head back to Singapore, but not before spending the day wandering around Buenos Aires.