GUALEGUAYCHU (pronounced wall-uh-why-chew) is a city about 3 hours away from Buenos Aires that annually puts on the "Carnaval de Pais" a.k.a. the raddest Carnaval celebration in all of Argentina.
Thanks to their good timing, my Californian visitors happened to be here on one of the weekends of the celebration in February. Historically and religiously, Carnaval is the festive season that comes immediately before Lent. I, on the other hand, have absolutely no idea what this means and went purely for the amusement.
So it was Friday morning and we thought the bus and all accommodations in Gualeguaychu were full... Lauren, Evan, Kacy and I were hungover from a big night out in Buenos Aires, and we were about to give up on the pending adventure when I got a message from my friend saying that the trip was on! Jules, my Ozzie friend, and her Colombian boyfriend Jonathan went to Gualeguaychu last year for Carnaval and knew all the ropes (thankfully). We had a couple hours to shower, pack, buy a tent for camping, and get to the bus station. Surprisingly, we made it and arrived in Gualeguaychu 3 hours later.
When we got there, there was a slight misunderstanding about the campsite, so we talked to the tourist office and ended up renting a house for the first night. Now, when I say we rented a house, I don't mean we rented a "luxury vacation home." The woman at the tourist office literally called her friend, asked if she wanted to make some extra money, directed us into a cab headed towards the concrete 'projects' of the city, and booked us a night in a nice lady's house complete with pictures of her family and the Pope. We had basically kicked this lady out of her house, and she said she would be back in the morning to get the keys. Weird.
View from inside the iron gates of the concrete house:
After a night of live music, wandering the streets full of debaucherous people in costumes, and playing on see-saws, we woke up early to get the hell out of that creepy house and set up camp. Boy-scout Evan helped us set up our 100 peso tent, and then we headed to the "beach"! "Beach" is in quotes because it was actually a river bank, but it was nice to enjoy the sand and water on a sweltering hot day nonetheless.
The "beach" scene? Similar to Spring Break in Mexico... Drunken frat-ish guys in sombreros and Borat unitards (you thought that only happened in the U.S., didn't you!), a lot of fake boobs, and everyone in thong bathing suits. We didn't get the memo that normal bathing suit bottoms were like wearing granny panties.
After a day in the sun, we geared up for the CARNAVAL PARADE! Now I know this parade dwarfed those in Brazil and other countries, but it was incredible!!! The colors, the costumes, and the dancing were amazing. You could really see the amount of effort that went into the parade. The dancers were wearing boobie tassels, thongs, and crazy feather headdresses and probably danced around for 4 or 5 hours. Every now and then came massive floats with more people dancing on them. And the entire time they played the same song over and over again.
All in all, it was a really cool and unique experience, and I'm really glad to have actually made it there. Brazil next year, anyone?
I leave you with this poorly made video I threw together of girls shaking their booties in crazy feather costumes:
