Today we spent our last few hours in Buenos Aires being tourists — drinking coffee at the tourist-trap Café Tortoni, taking photos of the Casa Rosada (where because of riots that took place on Friday there were scores of police roaming the Plaza de Mayo), visiting the national cathedral (Catedral Metropolitana), riding on the Subte (the subway system), visiting the Jardin Botanico Carlos Thays (where we saw dozens of the feral cats the garden is famous for), having lunch (again) at La Biela and then walking along Las Heras to this, our favorite e-mail spot.

In about two hours, our landlady arrives to check out the apartment and, we hope, return our cleaning deposit. A half hour after that a cab arrives to take us to the airport, and then two hours after that we take off for Dallas, then Seattle, then Spokane.

I´ll have more to say about Buenos Aires, and a few photos to share. But for now, I´ll just write this: B.A. is the last, best-kept secret for anyone desiring to visit a foreign city boasting more than enough cultural, historical and visual treats to warrant the 10-hour (from Dallas) flight south. It´s especially a great destination for anyone on a budget because, as anyone will tell you, the great expense is getting here. From then on, life in B.A. is enough of a bargain to make even American minimum wage seem like a fortune.

And for those of us in mid-career, it´s enough to give us a taste of what life for Bill Gates must be like.

If you ever do come to the Hotel Tropical das Cataratas, the only hotel that´s located inside Foz do Iguacu National Park, you´ll likely have dinner here. If you do, ask for Vanderlei Alecio as your waiter. Being Portuguese, he speaks very little English. But he gets by in Spanish. And he is among the most gracious, helpful and friendly waiters I have ever had the pleasure to meet.

We head back to Buenos Aires for the day. I´m still going to try to spend some time in the Plaza de Mayo, the city´s central square where much of the official power sits. I´m especially interested in the Casa Rosada, or Pink House, which is the Argentinean version of our White House. That is where the generals sat during the Guerra Sucia of 1976-83, when the women in white scarves began to march in protest of the many people — sons, husbands, daughters — who were disappeared during those years. The women still march, on Thursdays.

And whatever other emotion that will no doubt strike me, it´s clear that this one will be among them: I will miss this beautiful city and the spirited people who inhabit it.

The thought occurs to me: I now have a Brasilian visa that is good through 2010. So I have to return. As the Brasilian movie star Fernanda Montenegro was just quoted as saying (in the inflight magazine Icaro), “O eterno retorno.” Or, roughly speaking, what goes around, comes around.

Ask anyone and you´re likely to hear: Don´t visit Iguazu Falls in the fall. Think about it: Would you tell anyone to check out Spokane Falls in October? No, the best time to visit this beautiful bit of natural majesty is when the water is running high. But here´s the question: If you had to choose to seeing Iguazu Falls in the fall when the water is low or not see them at all, which would you choose?

We, of course, chose to go. And neither Mary Pat nor I regret it for a minute. We chose to stay on the Brazilian side, at the Hotel Tropical das Cataratas, which boasts a 30-second walk to a panoramic view of the falls. But we signed up for an all-day tour, which took us back to the Argentinean side and through the national park.

The result was an exhilarating, tiring but not exhausting day of walking for two out-of-shape Baby Boomers. At its best, there are supposed to be some 275 different falls stretched along a 2.5-mile length of geography that features drops of more than 260 feet. In May there are quite a few less, but enough exist to make the trip worthwhile.

We started out on the upper walk, which is supposed to take about 35 minutes. It took us longer because the metal walkway was slippery and there were a lot of even more out-of-shape people in front of us. But it allowed us to stand at the very edge of the Devil´s Throat, the best-known of the falls — and the one featured in Roland Joffe´s 1986 film, “The Mission.” And, curiously enough for a country that is hardly disability friendly, it was accessible to anyone riding in a wheelchair.

Then we walked along the lower circuit, which took even longer and was a bit more challenging (and, filled with steps, harder to navigate for anyone not able to walk well). It took us below the falls, which was impressive in its own right.

You can arrange a tour, which we did, or you can go on your own. But either way, Iguazu Falls — or as the Brazilians call it, Foz do Iguacu — is a sight worth seeking out. Even when the river´s running low.

Here is one quick critical comment concerning Ridley Scott´s new film “Kingdom of Heaven”: In an interview that ran in the English-language newspaper Buenos Aires Herald, Eva Green, who plays the queen Sibylla – and love interest for Orlando Bloom’s character Balian – said that she understood why director Scott cut out so much of her character’s story: Movies are always about men, she said.

Scott disagreed, saying that he cut some 45 minutes out of his film, paring it down to the final 140-minute-plus running time, because “tighter is always better.”

Hate to disagree, but this time the talent was right. Nothing may have saved “Kingdom of Heaven” from being the continuation of second-rate historical/mythical epics such as “Troy” or “Alexander.” But a little less pacing that felt like a kindergartener’s attention span might have made the film a bit easier to sit through.

That and fewer impossibly overwrought lines such as, “The world will decide. The world will always decide.” Even in Spanish subtitles that sounds woefully overinflated.

So the question remains: What was Colonia like? Was it worth the effort? Well, that depends on whom you talk to. Mary Pat and our friend Leslie would probably say no. I say yes.

First of all, the weather was perfect — at least at first. It was a brisk fall day, slightly sunny with a cool breeze blowing falling leaves across the wide streets. In fact, it felt a lot more like fall here than across the mouth of the Rio de la Plata in Buenos Aires.

And unless you want to rent a car, a motor scooter or even a golf cart (“$30 for all the day,” one guy yelled at us), Colonia is for walking. You need to be at least fairly hardy, though, because the old part of town is several blocks from where the port, and the sidewalks are a disaster. In any event, unless you´re planning on going out to a plantation to drink mate with the natives, most of what you´d want to see in this early 17th-century-founded-by-Portuguese-explorers town can be done so by foot.

You can climb the lighthouse, visit the very small Portuguese museum, shop for mate cups or jewelry (La Casa de Colonia, for example), stroll through the historic old part, check out the “Calle de los Suspiros” or stand on the shore and feel the wind blowing the waves on the shore (but, not to blow the poetic scene, let’s just say that the water more resembles the color of caramel than, say, anything blue or green).

We had lunch at a place called Lo de Renata, and Leslie had the best piece of meat that she has had so far in this meat-loving part of the world. And we had wine, of course, red as raspberry jelly. And for three, the total was, again, about $30 U.S.

After our three-hour tour, we headed back to the port just ahead of a rain squall. We made it there just minues ahead of the downpour, and we sat in the cafeteria drinking cafes con leche (tea for Mary Pat) while the rain pounded the sidewalks halfway clean.

All in all, I would come back. I saw a house or two on the beach that I´d like to rent. Or buy. Or, more likely, just dream about when I´m back in Spokane, filled with memories of life in this part of Sudamerica.

One of the feelings that I always seems to carry around with me when I travel internationally is anxiety. The emotion is partly due to my not knowing the language but more because I am so often ignorant of the simple mechanics of travel.

Take yesterday, for example. We — my wife, my friend Leslie, and I — decided to take the ferry to the Uruguayan town of Colonia. It was advertised as a 45-minute trip on the fast ferry, though it ended up being more like an hour and 15 minutes.

But the process of buying tickets should have clued us in right away. First we stood in the ticket line, only to be told at the window that we had to stand in another line to get passes that would allow us to buy the tickets. So we stood in the pass line, then returned to the ticket line, then went to the embarcation line, then security, then immigration (where we got out passports stamped) and then, finally, they took our tickets, which allowed us to board.

Ah, sweet bureaucrary. And in castellano, no less.

One of the first things that anyone is tempted to do in Buenos Aires — besides learning how to tango, of course — is visit the crypt of Maria Eva Duarte de Peron. You may know her better as Evita, the title character of the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice musical “Evita.” Since I don´t dance, even in my worst fantasies, I settled for a walk through one of the fanciest cemeteries outside of New Orleans.

It´s free. And it´s big. Walled in with brick a dozen feet high, the Cementario de Recoleta has any number of famous Argentine residents. But none is known more around the world than Evita.

At virtually any time of the day, you´ll find people lining the narrow walkway through 10-feet-high crypts of every color of stone between blue-gray to ebony, trying to get close to the crypt with the words Familia Duarte emblazoned across the top.

This isn´t the first stop for Evita´s corpse. It was stolen, so the story goes, by the military in 1955 when a coup overthrew Evita´s surviving husband, Juan Peron. Buried in Milan, Italy, under a fake name, Evita´s corpse wasn´t returned to Argentina until 1974, when it was placed under enough steel and concrete to ward off any further attempts at grave-robbing.

Today it sits, regally, amid hundreds of other similar monuments to the dead, famous and unknown, infamous and unremembered. Standing before it, you´re tempted to start humming Webber´s annoyingly catchy tune — which, damnit!, I´m starting now to do.

I blame Madonna.

It´s true what they say about Buenos Aires — the city has a European feel. The streets are wide, tree-lined and the air has that big-city sense so common to Rome or Paris or even New York. We just arrived this morning on an overnight flight from Dallas, by way of Seattle, and we´re still just feeling our way around. But so far, we´ve had nothing but good experiences — from the taxi drive to the owners of the apartment that we are renting to the young woman who let us sit in her cafe area this morning until we could go and pick up our keys. If first impressions are a plus, then Buenos Aires has already begun to capture my heart. Up next — my imagination.