Hostels are my preferred option when I'm traveling alone.
16.08.2024 - 13:31 / lonelyplanet.com
Aug 16, 2024 • 8 min read
Famed for food, fun and fleet-footed dancers, Argentina's capital has evolved into one of the most talked-about travel destinations on the planet. What makes Buenos Aires so much fun? It's partly the energy and lust for life, best experienced in the city's tango-tastic milongas (dance halls). But it's also the city's wealth of experiences, from top-flight decadence to urban, gritty excitement.
For every top-flight art museum, there's a backstreet painted with flamboyant street art, and for every group of cocktail-sipping trendsetters, there’s a cluster of old-timers gathered around a radio, tapping a toe to the tunes of Carlos Gardel.
The city boasts an incredible number of thing to see and do – and much of it is free (or very budget-friendly), leaving you with more money to spend on lavish steak dinners washed down with glasses of robust Mendoza red. Don’t miss these top Buenos Aires experiences.
You'll meet centuries worth of great porteños at the spectacular Cementerio de la Recoleta, a necropolis ornate enough to rival Père Lachaise in Paris or the moss-cloaked cities of the dead in New Orleans. This intriguing cemetery is a maze of narrow passageways lined with crumbling marble statuary and ornate mausoleums in architectural styles ranging from art nouveau to neo-Gothic.
Get lost in the alleyways to discover cherubs in stone relief, stained-glass windows edged with cobwebs, marble angels and bittersweet poetry etched into granite.
In Buenos Aires, fútbol is not just a game – it's a way of life. The nation's favorite pastime inspires near-religious passion in locals, clearing the city streets and sending spectators into fits of ecstasy and anguish as they huddle around TV screens or brave the explosive stadium crowds.
Seeing a game at La Bombonera, the famed stadium of Club Atlético Boca Juniors, is one of the world's top spectator sports experiences, especially if you manage to catch the superclasico match against rival team River Plate.
Planning tip: Tickets are hard to come by – it's best to use a travel agent.
The barrio of San Telmo exudes faded grandeur and bohemian spirit. The neighborhood's elegant belle-époque architecture and crumbling villas are throwbacks to the district’s 19th-century heyday. Before yellow fever and cholera sent the beau monde fleeing for higher ground, aristocratic Spanish families traversed these atmospheric cobblestone streets in horse-drawn carriages.
After the epidemic, San Telmo’s poor immigrants turned the abandoned mansions into makeshift conventillos (tenement housing).
Tango music developed, in part, amid the melancholy of homesickness and the merging of musical traditions in the district's plazas and patios. Today, the pretty barrio still
Hostels are my preferred option when I'm traveling alone.
With rising temperatures in southern Europe, more and more tourists are flocking to cooler destinations in the north.
Call it the most epic Europe cruise ever.
Aug 15, 2024 • 6 min read
Greece is still on high fire alert as temperatures are set to reach 40 degrees Celcius across the nation.
I prefer to travel by train when I can — even if it means taking an overnight ride.
Aug 14, 2024 • 5 min read
Delta Air Lines is expanding its free Wi-Fi globally with plans to offer the service on international flights starting this summer.
Europe's scorching hot summer is showing no signs of cooling down, with Italy facing its warmest weekend of the year so far and heatwave warnings issued in southern France.
When my husband and I decided to retire, we devised a plan. We wanted to rent out our home in California and visit the UNESCO World Heritage city of Guanajuato.
The tonka bean, a wizened-looking South American seed, is beloved for its complex almond-vanilla scent, often appearing as an ingredient in perfumes. Outside the United States, it has also long been utilized by chefs, but studies have indicated that coumarin, a chemical compound in the plant, can cause liver damage in animals, and the Food and Drug Administration banned the bean in commercial foods in 1954. Now, with reports that the minuscule amounts used to impart big flavor are harmless (and the F.D.A. seemingly not particularly interested in enforcing the ban in recent years), tonka is showing up on dessert menus here. Thea Gould, 30, the pastry chef at the daytime luncheonette La Cantine and evening wine bar Sunsets in Bushwick, Brooklyn, was introduced to tonka after the restaurant’s owner received a jar from France, where it’s a widely used ingredient. Gould says the bean is an ideal stand-in for nuts — a common allergen — and infuses it into panna cotta, whipped cream and Pavlova. Ana Castro, 35, the chef and owner of the New Orleans seafood restaurant Acamaya, discovered tonka as a young line cook at Betony, the now-closed Midtown Manhattan restaurant. Entranced by the ingredient’s grassy, stone fruit-like notes, she’s used it to flavor a custardy corn nicuatole, steeped it into roasted candy squash purée and grated it fresh over a lush tres leches cake. And at the Musket Room in New York’s NoLIta, the pastry chef Camari Mick, 30, balances tonka’s richness with acidic citrus like satsuma and bergamot. Over the past year, she’s incorporated it into a silky lemon bavarois and a candy cap mushroom pot de crème and whipped it into ganache for a poached pear belle Hélène. “Some people ask our staff, ‘Isn’t tonka illegal?’” she says. Their answer: Our pastry chef’s got a guy. —
Delta Air Lines is now rolling out fast, free Wi-Fi by T-Mobile on select long-haul international routes, with most transatlantic flights to be in service with free Wi-Fi by the end of the summer.