We’d had intermittent rain throughout the afternoon, and the temperature dropped to a comfortable 80 degrees with a cooling breeze when we started our nighttime bike ride. Buenos Aires is one of the first cities in Latin America to have established bicycle lanes throughout the city. They added extensively to the system during Covid.

We’re signed up for a three hour tour through the central city, with a stop for ice cream. Our tour guide Ricardo, or Ricky, is a former flight attendant and Tango aficionado, originally from Honduras. He’s entertaining and a bit odd. We ride the streets at a leisurely pace, crossing some major intersections cautiously. The drivers are uniformly courteous, and you hear very few horns as we progress.

Seeing the city at night is fun, and Ricky shares some good history with us. We ride to El Obelisco de Buenos Aires, where Argentines meet in huge crowds to celebrate or protest. Six million people gathered here in 2022 when Argentina won the World Cup. It looks as if someone put the Washington Monument in the middle of Broadway.

We then bike to the Casa Rosada and the Plaza de Mayo. The Casa Rosada is the official residence of the Argentine President, while the Plaza de Mayo is famously the site of demonstrations against the military dictatorship in the late 1970’s. Mothers of the disappeared would walk two by two around the Plaza to protest the government’s taking of over 30,000 citizens, most of whom were killed.

Our tour then crossed the bridge to the Puerto Madero neighborhood, which is the Gold Coast of the city, with elegant high rise buildings along the waterfront.

We stopped outside the Ministry of Culture to admire a statue of Juana Azurduy de Padilla, who was a female military commander in the wars of independence against Spain. She famously fought while pregnant, and returned to the fight immediately after giving birth. She is a feminist icon in Argentina.

Our final stop is for ice cream near the Plaza San Martin. Delicious!