Another weekend, another safari, this time to the Recoleta Cemetery (for those of you who aren't flickrianos yet, that link will take you to all the pictures tagged as being from this safari).

We've been to the cemetery before, in March, so this time we were less concerned about seeing Evita's tomb and suchlike (not that we were concerned before but you know how it is sometimes (you have to make sure some people are dead and buried... erm... maybe not) and much more about taking pictures. There were 25 or so of us this time (it's getting a bit successful, because, well, it's good fun: as a measure of success the tag basafari:recoleta has been one of Flickr's hottest tags in the last 2 days) and it's a good job that Recoleta is a cemetery that's already well frequented because we were mob handed.

The hunt for pictures meant that, while the tour groups were being shown round and taking pictures 'This is your Uncle Albert in front of Evita's tomb, this is me in front of Admiral Brown's tomb...' there were 25 people looking up, down, getting onto their hands and knees, crawling into crypts, climbing on statues, making people laugh...


This time we weren't the only English speakers, a chap called Graham turned up (Scottish, here on a gap year I guess) but once again we were in the presence of fantastically friendly people, who patiently let us bumble along in getting-better-but-still-crap Spanish without making us feel bad and without being at all condescending or patronising...

Recoleta is the cemetery for the great and the good, it's overlooked by towerblocks and opposite one side there's a park and high-priced restaurants. The thing that strikes me though is the decay in some of the crypts... you'll have a brand new marble and glass thing next to something where the ironwork is more a memory than actual, where the stone has the consistency of wet sand and the dried flowers and dusty interiors suggest that no one but the tourists are visiting.  ¶ 8:50 PM