Planning our trip to Argentina

This blog post was written in February 2020.

Next up on the bucket list of travel is Argentina, specifically Buenos Aires, Iguazu Falls and a city in Patagonia. Argentina has been on our list for a long time, and now we’re making it happen.

I’ve blogged about planning the perfect travel itinerary. But now that my husband and I are doing the planning in real-time I want to give you some updates as we go! Plus, I’m pumped and I want to share it with you. We’ve received a lot of recommendations, but if you have more please comment below! And if you want our itinerary or more details, subscribe to my newsletter for additional information.

Planning the flights

This trip was a bit complicated in that we’re covering a vast amount of space in a somewhat short amount of time. Flights were a big deal here. At first, we thought we may have to choose between Iguazu Falls and Patagonia. But after talking to others who had been we knew we wanted to do both spots.

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After we got the bookend flights (round trip from the U.S. to Argentina), we set aside a Saturday to start looking at internal flights. It took longer than we thought – and we made sure to use incognito windows hoping the prices wouldn’t fluctuate too much – but we finally found reasonable flights to go from city to city to city and back.

A tip: try looking at round trip, one way and multi-city flights when you’re searching. I used to assume round trip was the cheapest. But I recently found some great one way tickets which surprised me. I also search on different sites to compare prices (never trust what you see is the best price, always compare).

planning the days

First, we searched all the different travel apps, websites and blogs as well as outlets like TimeOut. We began with Buenos Aires. Researching neighborhoods as we booked hotels was helpful too because through that and with friend recommendations we picked a safe and trendy place to stay in Buenos Aires.

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We made a list of stuff we knew we wanted to do in Argentina: tango lesson, museum visits, cooking class, etc. And then we planned our days based around those and the location. If the museum was on the other side of the city than the cooking class, we put them on separate days and realigned our days based on other things we wanted to do in the area. So we ended up planning the days based first on what event we wanted to do most that day and then on the location. This will hopefully save us money on taxis too.

Iguazu Falls was simpler to plan than Buenos Aires since we are going for one day. But we still wanted to make sure we got the best tour of the falls. So researching companies took time.

Patagonia has been a little more complicated since it is more remote than a city. This is where travel recommendations really helped us out!

gETTING RECOMMENDATIONS

I love getting recommendations wherever I go. If I don’t know someone who has been there I read blogs, I search social media and I try to piece together ideas that way (aside from the usual research). We had a lot of recs for Buenos Aires too which have been awesome. But for Patagonia they have been key. I wasn’t sure if we needed a car (we don’t think we do now), what airport to fly to, what spot to stay (we don’t want to camp outside) and what to wear (still need to spend time figuring this out).

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We decided to stay in El Calafate after talking to friends and reading blogs. It seems to be a pretty central spot for what we want to do. Activities we are thinking about include kayaking a glacier, hiking Torres del Paine and visiting the town of El Chalten. More to come on that as we continue that part of the planning.

That’s our Argentina trip so far. We will keep you updated. In the meantime, please leave comments and recommendations below!