Rollin With My Homies: A Bike Tour of Buenos Aires
By: Smith Schwartz |
This weekend we took a bike tour of the parks and plazas of Palermo and Recolta in Buenos Aires.
The fine folks over at Biking Buenos Aires really showed us a great time with an informative tour and a beautiful backdrop.
The bike lanes here are really amazing, and fairly new. Up until a few years ago, biking in BsAs was a risky venture at best. Now with miles of protected lanes, you can easily get around the city and its expansive parks system with ease.
However, sometimes you still have to cross twelve lanes of traffic!
We got to get off our bikes a fair amount as well. This is a welcome change of pace considering the tour was almost 5 hours long! We saw some famous sites, including the new symbol of Buenos Aires, Floralis Generica. The wiki page mysteriously leaves out the fact that the electronics are broken and the flower remains open at all times. It’s too expensive to update. Those of us from the art world know that electronic-based art never lasts for long… does it?
At the end of our tour, we stopped at a large park with lots of roller bladers, bikers, and skateboarders. Basically any kind of wheels that a person can strap to themselves were being used here. There was a pretty cool Solid Gold-style skate off going on. We saw some pretty gnarly tricks happening, dude. (That’s how skaters talk, right?) This little man was pretty impressive!