Mar de las Pampas

We offer a thousand apologies for our web absense. We were, well, taking vacation in Mar de las Pampas, a laconic beach town on Argentina's Atlantic coast. It was pretty much like these photos--walking down sand streets, listening to shells (or, in Cintra's case above, a pine cone) for sounds of the sea; ogling cool architecture wedged between tall, skinny, branchless pines; loving a place where the distance to all necessary landmarks is under 200 meters (see signs); and reveling in the white bright sun on the beach (okay, I opened the aperture a little on the photo at bottom, and it was the first and only chilly day, but hey, it's a good picture). Literally a day after we reserved a spot at Cabañas El Ocio, one of the 'oldest' lodgings in the town at seven years of age, one of the local dailies ran a front page travel section piece on MdlP, declaring is 'en voga' (in vogue), which led us to fear that it would be awash with tense tourists looking tensely (and failing) for a place to relax. But our fears were not realized: ten hours of nightly sleep, five hours of reading on the beach, three slow meals a day, and naps spacing everything really do make for perfect relaxation.

Mar de las Pampas is a self-designated 'Slow City' (click here for more info on the Italian trend), which means that the streets aren't paved (i.e. traffic can't move quickly), there are almost no chain stores, the houses and hotels are all blended into the surrounding forest (i.e. the porch on our cabaña was built around the trunks of the already existing trees so they didn't suffer a scratch) and there's terrible cell phone coverage. In other words, a perfect place for a vacation.