Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Peninsula Valdes is a bit like an arrowhead, its shaft an isthmus five kilometres wide at its narrowest point. There is a bay to the north and a bay to the south, which experience high tide five hours apart, due to the current from the south which takes this long to make its way round the coast. Migrating birds such as the red knot, flying between Canada and Antarctica, find it a useful feeding ground, flitting between bays depending on where the tide is low. Puerto Madryn sits on the mainland by the larger bay, the Golfo Nuevo, and tours leave from here to the peninsula. The minibus leaves just after seven, and passes the town dump, the bauxite plant, some ceramics factories and the fishing fleet on its way to the whale breeding grounds. The tour takes eleven hours and covers 400 kilometres, embracing one of the greatest wildlife reserves in the world.
The Israeli who sat behind me was the son of Cochin Jews, of whom there are apparently only seven still living in India, the rest having migrated to Israel. I asked him if any are considering returning to India, as NRIs from the US, Britain and elsewhere are now doing, to enjoy the fruits of the boom. He said he thought not. He was intent on getting a photo of an armadillo, but by the end of the day had not succeeded.
This part of of Patagonia is flat scrubby desert, with white soil and and a frequent mauve-tinged cloud cover. Flashes of sea revealed themselves as we drove, increasingly so as we crossed the isthmus, passing a tidal island shaped like a squashed gaucho hat that is rich in bird life (it’s called Island of Birds), and heading for Puerto Piramides, the only settlement on the peninsula. It got its name from a pyramid shaped headland nearby, and its sandstone cliffs are full of fossils of giant shells, shark teeth and whalebones. It is the place for whale watching cruises, a bright little village of restaurants and tour agencies. A partner in the restaurant where we had lunch was Jimmy from Perth, who’s been more or less marooned for ten years tending to his mother, who is Argentinian and disabled and lives in Puerto Madryn. He was cheerfully resigned to his exile, and seemed happy at least to have escaped to the peninsula.
Soon enough our boat was ready to take us out to the whales, which we could easily see from the beach, splashing about in the waves. We climbed into an aluminium speedboat with twin outboards, with benches along the centre and sides. We were allowed to stand on these as soon as we were in the water, but the handrails were unnervingly low, and I’m sure they must lose the odd passenger overboard in choppy water. Hopefully not in the midst of mating whales.
There were whales everywhere – each year about a thousand come to the shelter of the peninsula to mate or give birth. They are Southern Rights, so named apparently because they swim slowly and float when dead, which made them the right whale to catch and the right whale to transport. The world population is about 20,000. They feed in the summer in Antarctica, and for the winter divide into three groups, heading for Australia, New Zealand and Argentina. We visited several pods thrashing around as well as some individuals standing on their heads with their tails out of the water. There are several theories as to why they do this, one being that they are pregnant females repositioning their foetus, another being that that it is a way of regulating their temperature. They do it for fifteen minutes or more at a time, and we approached several so close that we could almost touch the tail. The tails are smooth and black but the heads are encrusted with white formations made by crustaceans, allowing individual whales to be identified. Then we visited a group where three or four males were working together to turn over a female. The females turn on their back if they do not wish to mate, so the males turn them over so one of them can have a go. Apparently up to about fifteen males might mate with the one female. Makes me think they should rename Cronulla football team ‘The Whales’.
The female gestates for eleven months, during which time she will travel to Antarctica to feed (they don’t eat at all while they’re at the peninsula) and return. After giving birth she stays with the calf for a year if it’s male or eighteen months if it’s female, taking it to Antarctica and back to teach it to feed. While there the calf can grow two to three centimetres a day, feeding on krill and its mother’s milk, eventually reaching a size of about 16 metres. The population of Southern Rights is increasing by about seven per cent per year, but there are also threats. In 2007 a record 70 calves died (about 200 are born each year), many due to attack by seagulls, a phenomenon which I witnessed at Puerto Madryn on the first day. Madryn’s economy is thriving on an unlikely combination of ecotourism and Argentina’s only aluminium smelter, and the town is growing fast – it was by far the most prosperous I’ve seen here. This means that the open air rubbish tip is also growing fast, which in turn means that the seagull population has gone up. Seagulls have always eaten the cast off skin of whales, but now they’ve taken to pecking at the calves themselves and eating the blubber. Some calves die of the trauma, or from infections, in which presumably the rubbish tip plays a role. Scientists have been studying the problem for three years, and there is talk of culling some the gulls as only a proportion of them attack the whales. Doing something about the rubbish tip might be an idea, too. I’ve noticed that the Patagonian desert that lies near towns is strewn with plastic bags, which the shopkeepers here hand out with gay abandon.
We spent about an hour and a half among the whales, cruising from pod to pod, and once or twice could see them quite clearly underwater beside the boat. We also passed a colony of sea lions, and saw a group of Magellanic penguins – which have black stripes around their collar - far out in the bay. As we made our way back to port we passed a whale which breached three or four times as it headed out into the bay.
From Piramides we headed across the peninsula, past a couple of salt pans with flamingoes off in the distance, sighting a couple of grey foxes, two burrowing owls and a Patagonian hare the size of a small dog. We also saw a large flock of choique, large flightless birds. There are a couple of varieties of these, but I can’t remember the name of the bigger ones and I’m on the bus and can’t be bothered fishing out my notebook. One male of the flock is chosen to incubate the eggs, and when they start to hatch he breaks one egg to attract flies so that the other chicks can feed.
Our destination was the opening of a narrow bay formed by a long spit of land. The beach is the destination for elephant seals in mating season, which is just about to begin. The beach was grey and pebbly beneath blond cliffs which stretched in a vast arc, and we spotted three or four of the elephant seals – a couple of males and a couple of females. We weren’t allowed onto the beach, or to smoke or eat on the path. The males grow to four tonnes, while the females get to about 900 kilos, which sounds a bit uncomfortable to me. They spend ninety per cent of their lives in water, only coming on land to breed. Apparently this is the only place in the world where they do so. It’s also the only place in the world where orcas beach themselves to catch pups, swimming up in narrow channels that scar the beach, then wait for the tide to take them back out to share the meal with their family. The guide told us that in a month or two the beach would be thick with elephants, fighting, mating, giving birth and being eaten by orcas. Sounds bloody. On a tiny reef out in the surf we saw a group of sealions, but they looked puny by comparison. About 47,000 elephant seals visit the peninsula in season.
We then drove back across the peninsula, seeing some guanaco – like llama, but smaller and undomesticated – on the way, and plenty of merino, which form the local industry. There are 47 estancias on the peninsula. Back in Puerto Madryn, I communed once more with the flock of 100 or so flamingoes that live by the pier. With those heads and those hooked beaks I think they might give the old capybara a nudge for ridiculousness.
Yesterday I took a ride out to a couple of Welsh towns. The whole area was settled by Welsh, beginning in 1865, but there’s not much evidence of them in Madryn, nor was there in Trelew, the first town I went to, the name notwithstanding. Finally I made it to Gaiman, a couple of hours from Madryn, to discover a lovely town nestled on a river, with street names like Evans and Jones alongside the usual Espana and Yirogoyen, and little stone cottages, and flat-faced row houses with lacy curtains in sash windows. The town is overlooked by a tussocky ridge studded with knuckles of amber rock, and a place less like Wales would be hard to imagine. I didn’t hear any Welsh spoken – or English in a taffy accent for that matter – but I did see a hell of a lot of signs for places serving Welsh tea ‘con calido y autentico ambiente Gales’, or something like that. I thought I might like to sample this, as the Princess of Wales, peace be upon her, reportedly did so here in 1995, and as I don’t have a clue what Welsh tea might actually be. So I followed the signs, and followed them, over a suspension bridge across the Rio Chubut, past a couple of garages and up a dirt road, and graceful willow trees bursting with green shoots, and leafless poplars and pink blossoms, and sweet gardens decorated with rusting ploughs, but could not actually locate a functioning teahouse. Either that or I wasn’t willing enough to push on closed doors. Perhaps it was just that it was between 12 and four, when all kinds of things cease to function. Instead I took coffee and facturas in an ice cream parlour, pure Argentinian style. The girl who served me was pale, her hair starless and Bible black. She said her mother was Welsh, but she herself didn’t speak it. The family name was Jones, pronounced ‘Shoness’. That, and a couple of shops selling ceramic beer mugs and acrylic tea cosies in green and white, was what I tasted of the autentico ambiente Gales.
And that was the last adventure. I sit yet again on the bus, having watched a long and mournful Patagonian sunset, a sallow smear that lingered between the clouds and the featureless desert for a couple of hours before bursting briefly into translucent gold and purple, then transforming itself into sheets of scarlet draped across the sky. I hit Buenos Aires at seven-something in the morning, and fly out at ten to five. I’m tired and it’s time to go home.
The Israeli who sat behind me was the son of Cochin Jews, of whom there are apparently only seven still living in India, the rest having migrated to Israel. I asked him if any are considering returning to India, as NRIs from the US, Britain and elsewhere are now doing, to enjoy the fruits of the boom. He said he thought not. He was intent on getting a photo of an armadillo, but by the end of the day had not succeeded.
This part of of Patagonia is flat scrubby desert, with white soil and and a frequent mauve-tinged cloud cover. Flashes of sea revealed themselves as we drove, increasingly so as we crossed the isthmus, passing a tidal island shaped like a squashed gaucho hat that is rich in bird life (it’s called Island of Birds), and heading for Puerto Piramides, the only settlement on the peninsula. It got its name from a pyramid shaped headland nearby, and its sandstone cliffs are full of fossils of giant shells, shark teeth and whalebones. It is the place for whale watching cruises, a bright little village of restaurants and tour agencies. A partner in the restaurant where we had lunch was Jimmy from Perth, who’s been more or less marooned for ten years tending to his mother, who is Argentinian and disabled and lives in Puerto Madryn. He was cheerfully resigned to his exile, and seemed happy at least to have escaped to the peninsula.
Soon enough our boat was ready to take us out to the whales, which we could easily see from the beach, splashing about in the waves. We climbed into an aluminium speedboat with twin outboards, with benches along the centre and sides. We were allowed to stand on these as soon as we were in the water, but the handrails were unnervingly low, and I’m sure they must lose the odd passenger overboard in choppy water. Hopefully not in the midst of mating whales.
There were whales everywhere – each year about a thousand come to the shelter of the peninsula to mate or give birth. They are Southern Rights, so named apparently because they swim slowly and float when dead, which made them the right whale to catch and the right whale to transport. The world population is about 20,000. They feed in the summer in Antarctica, and for the winter divide into three groups, heading for Australia, New Zealand and Argentina. We visited several pods thrashing around as well as some individuals standing on their heads with their tails out of the water. There are several theories as to why they do this, one being that they are pregnant females repositioning their foetus, another being that that it is a way of regulating their temperature. They do it for fifteen minutes or more at a time, and we approached several so close that we could almost touch the tail. The tails are smooth and black but the heads are encrusted with white formations made by crustaceans, allowing individual whales to be identified. Then we visited a group where three or four males were working together to turn over a female. The females turn on their back if they do not wish to mate, so the males turn them over so one of them can have a go. Apparently up to about fifteen males might mate with the one female. Makes me think they should rename Cronulla football team ‘The Whales’.
The female gestates for eleven months, during which time she will travel to Antarctica to feed (they don’t eat at all while they’re at the peninsula) and return. After giving birth she stays with the calf for a year if it’s male or eighteen months if it’s female, taking it to Antarctica and back to teach it to feed. While there the calf can grow two to three centimetres a day, feeding on krill and its mother’s milk, eventually reaching a size of about 16 metres. The population of Southern Rights is increasing by about seven per cent per year, but there are also threats. In 2007 a record 70 calves died (about 200 are born each year), many due to attack by seagulls, a phenomenon which I witnessed at Puerto Madryn on the first day. Madryn’s economy is thriving on an unlikely combination of ecotourism and Argentina’s only aluminium smelter, and the town is growing fast – it was by far the most prosperous I’ve seen here. This means that the open air rubbish tip is also growing fast, which in turn means that the seagull population has gone up. Seagulls have always eaten the cast off skin of whales, but now they’ve taken to pecking at the calves themselves and eating the blubber. Some calves die of the trauma, or from infections, in which presumably the rubbish tip plays a role. Scientists have been studying the problem for three years, and there is talk of culling some the gulls as only a proportion of them attack the whales. Doing something about the rubbish tip might be an idea, too. I’ve noticed that the Patagonian desert that lies near towns is strewn with plastic bags, which the shopkeepers here hand out with gay abandon.
We spent about an hour and a half among the whales, cruising from pod to pod, and once or twice could see them quite clearly underwater beside the boat. We also passed a colony of sea lions, and saw a group of Magellanic penguins – which have black stripes around their collar - far out in the bay. As we made our way back to port we passed a whale which breached three or four times as it headed out into the bay.
From Piramides we headed across the peninsula, past a couple of salt pans with flamingoes off in the distance, sighting a couple of grey foxes, two burrowing owls and a Patagonian hare the size of a small dog. We also saw a large flock of choique, large flightless birds. There are a couple of varieties of these, but I can’t remember the name of the bigger ones and I’m on the bus and can’t be bothered fishing out my notebook. One male of the flock is chosen to incubate the eggs, and when they start to hatch he breaks one egg to attract flies so that the other chicks can feed.
Our destination was the opening of a narrow bay formed by a long spit of land. The beach is the destination for elephant seals in mating season, which is just about to begin. The beach was grey and pebbly beneath blond cliffs which stretched in a vast arc, and we spotted three or four of the elephant seals – a couple of males and a couple of females. We weren’t allowed onto the beach, or to smoke or eat on the path. The males grow to four tonnes, while the females get to about 900 kilos, which sounds a bit uncomfortable to me. They spend ninety per cent of their lives in water, only coming on land to breed. Apparently this is the only place in the world where they do so. It’s also the only place in the world where orcas beach themselves to catch pups, swimming up in narrow channels that scar the beach, then wait for the tide to take them back out to share the meal with their family. The guide told us that in a month or two the beach would be thick with elephants, fighting, mating, giving birth and being eaten by orcas. Sounds bloody. On a tiny reef out in the surf we saw a group of sealions, but they looked puny by comparison. About 47,000 elephant seals visit the peninsula in season.
We then drove back across the peninsula, seeing some guanaco – like llama, but smaller and undomesticated – on the way, and plenty of merino, which form the local industry. There are 47 estancias on the peninsula. Back in Puerto Madryn, I communed once more with the flock of 100 or so flamingoes that live by the pier. With those heads and those hooked beaks I think they might give the old capybara a nudge for ridiculousness.
Yesterday I took a ride out to a couple of Welsh towns. The whole area was settled by Welsh, beginning in 1865, but there’s not much evidence of them in Madryn, nor was there in Trelew, the first town I went to, the name notwithstanding. Finally I made it to Gaiman, a couple of hours from Madryn, to discover a lovely town nestled on a river, with street names like Evans and Jones alongside the usual Espana and Yirogoyen, and little stone cottages, and flat-faced row houses with lacy curtains in sash windows. The town is overlooked by a tussocky ridge studded with knuckles of amber rock, and a place less like Wales would be hard to imagine. I didn’t hear any Welsh spoken – or English in a taffy accent for that matter – but I did see a hell of a lot of signs for places serving Welsh tea ‘con calido y autentico ambiente Gales’, or something like that. I thought I might like to sample this, as the Princess of Wales, peace be upon her, reportedly did so here in 1995, and as I don’t have a clue what Welsh tea might actually be. So I followed the signs, and followed them, over a suspension bridge across the Rio Chubut, past a couple of garages and up a dirt road, and graceful willow trees bursting with green shoots, and leafless poplars and pink blossoms, and sweet gardens decorated with rusting ploughs, but could not actually locate a functioning teahouse. Either that or I wasn’t willing enough to push on closed doors. Perhaps it was just that it was between 12 and four, when all kinds of things cease to function. Instead I took coffee and facturas in an ice cream parlour, pure Argentinian style. The girl who served me was pale, her hair starless and Bible black. She said her mother was Welsh, but she herself didn’t speak it. The family name was Jones, pronounced ‘Shoness’. That, and a couple of shops selling ceramic beer mugs and acrylic tea cosies in green and white, was what I tasted of the autentico ambiente Gales.
And that was the last adventure. I sit yet again on the bus, having watched a long and mournful Patagonian sunset, a sallow smear that lingered between the clouds and the featureless desert for a couple of hours before bursting briefly into translucent gold and purple, then transforming itself into sheets of scarlet draped across the sky. I hit Buenos Aires at seven-something in the morning, and fly out at ten to five. I’m tired and it’s time to go home.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
I’m writing this from the bus. Another epic, this time 20 hours from Buenos Aires to Puerto Madryn, Patagonia. The green pampas slips pleasantly by. I was on another bus last night, from Mercedes to BA, and got not much sleep, but dozed off a bit this afternoon. So I am recovering from that bus journey by taking another bus journey. I had about four hours in the capital, running errands, and found the crowds, the traffic and the pollution pretty disagreeable considering 24 hours earlier I was in something approximating the Garden of Eden.
The destination for tomorrow (8am) is supposed to be one of the best whale watching spots in the world, but it’d be hard to beat what I’ve just seen up north. That was the Estero del Ibera, a system of wetlands between the two main rivers, about halfway between Iguazu and BA. It literally crawled with wildlife – snakes, monkeys, birds, reptiles, and what must be one of the sillier animals on the planet, the capybara. It takes a bit of getting there – the direct route from San Ignacio Mini is not served by public transport and the road is terrible, so you do a long arc round to Mercedes, a pleasant and sleepy little town where last night, at dinnertime, not a single restaurant was open in the city centre. From there it was theoretically a three-hour bus trip, with one minibus a day leaving at 12pm. When the thing showed up at one, its windscreen was webbed with cracks and its back doors were held closed by twined wire, and the inside was coated with decades of grime. The driver had a length of rope constantly in his hand, as if he expected trouble.
The drive could have been through country Australia – vistas of sun-yellowed grass, hereford and merino grazing, flightless birds the size of emu, tin windmills, and lonely farmhouses with rusting roofs sheltering in stands of eucalyptus. By about halfway we were all coated with dust, which entered through countless crevices in the ancient panels, when there was a sound like we had hit a log. As we coasted to a halt, something banged repeatedly on the floor beneath our feet, and that something turned out to be the drive shaft, which had completely detached itself from the gearbox and had been dragging along the ground. We all stared at it dumbly for about two minutes and were contemplating the possibilities of hitchhiking, when up drove a Ford pickup with three farmers in it, and within seconds one of them, a gaucho called Bolson, was under the bus, tools, baggy pants, happy shoes, white shirt, black beret and all. In about ten minutes he had it fixed, helped by his mate, who kept feeding him lengths of wire, apparently kept on hand for just such situations. The van behaved itself the rest of the way into Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, in spite of a few worrying sounds from beneath, and we arrived only about an hour behind schedule. Enough time to have a look around the ‘town’, which was as unambitious as any beachside holiday hamlet, and have a bit of a stroll along the causeway and watch the sun sink gradually, a crimson ball, behind the smoky waters of the lake.
I’d arrived with a couple of Frenchies, Sarah and Fannie, and our host at the hostel was Giorgio, a young lothario with a head of curls, a face of designer stubble, and a pair of reflective aviatior shades. All conversation was addressed to las chicas (understandably enough, seeing as they both spoke Spanish, in contrast to me). The house was whitewashed and surrounded by lush lawn and there was an open sided kitchen and dining area at the back, a half-empty swimming pool, and in proper Argentine fashion a TV that remained on all day with no one watching it. Giorgio and a couple of his mates ran the place more or less as a bachelor pad, running out for milk and sugar in the morning, and bringing bags of empanadas and boxes of pizza at lunchtime. They were all friendly and generous fellows, in the Argentinian way.
In the evening a few others dropped by, including Jessica, who had a green parrot named Kiwi crawling about on her at all times. She was half American (Jessica that is, not Kiwi) and had done a couple of years at Aspen as a park ranger, serving the likes of Hilary Clinton and Owen Wilson, before inheriting her banker father’s hobby farm three years ago. The hobby farm was 4,000 hectares, with 3,000 head of cattle, 60 buffalo, about 100 horses, and three gaucho families to run it. Her aim is to combine ecotourism with sustainable farming, and with her was Miguel, a graduating naturalist whose specialisation is birds, and who is volunteering at the farm doing a survey of birdlife. In his first week he’d counted 111 species. They told us that there were piranhas in the lake, but not to worry because they only lived near the shoreline. If you fell overboard in the middle of the lake you would be safe. In any case they only attack during egg laying season, which is later in the year, and besides which, they were unlikely to kill you unless you really stayed out in the water a long time.
I woke up in the morning with that I’m-a-bit-over-living-out-of-a-backpack feeling, compounded by the realisation that breakfast consisted of cream crackers with butter (a change from the usual baguettes and jam I suppose, but I could murder a plate of bacon and eggs or a bowl of bircher muesli more or less anytime now). That feeling lasted until exactly the minute about eight of us got into a little aluminium motorboat for an exploration of the lake, the standard activity when visiting the laguna. Before we’d even cast off we’d seen a group of caiman – small purplish crocodiles which grow up to 2m and aren’t dangerous to humans. There would be hundreds more. Next was an otter slithering up an embankment, as well as cormorants, gulls and ducks passing constantly overhead. We passed a series of floating islands with spectacular birds such as pairs of southern screamers, and any number of capybara, bumbling about in groups of two or three. These, in case you don’t know, are the largest rodents in the world, and weigh up to 75kg. They look like oversized wombats, with longish brown hair and boxy heads and snub noses and stumpy limbs with three claws. They charge across the grasslands, or swim in the laguna with the tops of their heads poking out of the water, or lounge blissfully in the sun as birds pick insects out of their fur. They have no predators, so they are literally everywhere. They are truly ridiculous.
We also saw several marsh deer, and many more birds including ibis, herons, egrets, a hefty kingfisher taking a dive for a fish, and a large turkey vulture, which is a relative of the condor. There was also a single jabiru, with a head and beak like charcoal and a neck like raw meat, stalking along the shore as if he owned the place. They eat caiman eggs, and young caiman, and snakes, among other things. We stopped on an island, whose ground was soft and spongy, and saw a couple of capybara making woohoo, which provoked laughter and shouts of ‘Giorgio!’ from the lads. It was a completely magical two hours of greenery, still waters and extraordinary creatures.
In the afternoon an Irish couple and I headed with Jessica and Miguel out to the ranch for a couple of hours, with Kiwi munching at Jessica’s straw hat for the entire drive. The Irish, who as far as I could work out were called Elis and Kieron, went horse riding, but I wasn’t game for this, in spite of Elis pointing out my feet would almost have touched the ground. I headed off with Miguel in the four wheel drive and we saw more birds, including more of the emu things, and abundant woodpeckers, and a couple of bizarre looking grey things with crazed eyes and hooked beaks and swept back fringes, looking like characters from Dickens. There were armadillo burrows, but no armadillo to be seen. Back at the estancia, we were hanging around the cattle yards hoping for some gaucho action when sure enough we started hearing urgent ‘yip yip yip’ sounds coming from behind some trees. We couldn’t work out whether they were being made by a woman or a man, until a boy who looked like about seven emerged, barefoot and riding bareback on a horse about twice his height, driving a herd of about twenty cattle. He brought them into the yard, jumped off the horse, then proceeded to drive them into the next yard using a stockwhip and well-aimed clods of dirt. He then separated them into two groups, drove one group into yet another yard, divided this group again and drove the remainder back into the second yard, leaving three calves penned in. Miguel said they were to be milked but he is, after all, an ornithologist. The lad, whose name was Christian, then remounted the horse and proceeded to drove the cattle back to where they came from. The whole operation probably took about twenty minutes.
Jessica and the Irish couple came back soon after, accompanied by Paulo, the senior gaucho, resplendent in blue gaiters, bombachos, suede apron, a broad belt full of pouches, a blue necktie which apparently signified his political allegiance (there are red neckties also) and a very battered felt hat. We all retired to a large room enclosed with fly screens, with an enormous grill at one end, and sipped Earl Grey tea and munched fresh tortilla fritas – which reminded me very much of kapse made for Tibetan New Year – prepared by one of the gaucho women. Paulo came in to show off pictures of himself in his full gaucho gear at various riding events, and to explain the features of his costume, and then we called it a day.
The other main activity at Estero del Ibera is to take the causeway across the lake and visit the interpretation centre, then walk through a patch of preserved forest where a family of howler monkeys lives – the only primates on the reserve. I’d been told about a certain snake that lived nearby as well, so in the interpretation centre I asked the ranger if I might see this as well. ‘You mean the yellow anaconda?’ she asked. I said I supposed so.
‘Come with me.’ And she walked briskly out of the centre and over to the low brick wall which edged the causeway, about 20 metres away, and pointed out a spot. ‘He usually comes here,’ she said ‘but I think it’s a little early. He’ll come out when it warms up a bit. If you do see him, don’t bother him or go too near. Some visitors do that, and if they keep doing that, he’ll go away.’
How big is the snake, I asked. ‘Oh, about two metres. They grow to seven.’ I assured her that I had no intention of bothering him, then crossed the road to look at the monkeys.
The forest was a gorgeous little bower of trailing vines and leafy understory, with tall palms and other species with twisting trunks. There were ground orchids and begonias and succulents with leaves like saws. Many of the trees were bearded with various kinds of epiphytes, which are not true parasites because they don’t feed off the tree, just use its height to gain access to the sun. One of these was a form of cactus whose fronds trailed whispily earthwards. There were whistles and tweets and hoots all round from various kinds of birds, and one that sounded alarmingly like a blowpipe, but no howls from the monkeys. They howl to establish territory and apparently can be heard kilometres away, but only do so if they feel another primate is attempting to trespass. White ropes delineating the paths and signs instructing us not to cross them put paid to any thoughts of tree climbing, but I did spot several monkeys when tipped off by that telltale naturalist’s sign, a couple of photographers pointing ginormous lenses at the canopy. The males are large and black, and the one I spotted was draped frontwise along a branch, limbs drooping. The females are blonde and moved about a bit more. When I emerged from the forest there were some juvenile deer hanging about, and a full-grown marsh deer, which are distinctive by their sandstone coloured coat and muddy forelegs. Popping up on the parapet as I began to cross the causeway to head back, I finally saw the anaconda, curled up amid the rocks, doubtless warming himself for a bit of fishing later in the day.
Latest update. Have arrived Patagonia. Saw a flock of flamingoes and several whales from the beach. Feeling trashed.
The destination for tomorrow (8am) is supposed to be one of the best whale watching spots in the world, but it’d be hard to beat what I’ve just seen up north. That was the Estero del Ibera, a system of wetlands between the two main rivers, about halfway between Iguazu and BA. It literally crawled with wildlife – snakes, monkeys, birds, reptiles, and what must be one of the sillier animals on the planet, the capybara. It takes a bit of getting there – the direct route from San Ignacio Mini is not served by public transport and the road is terrible, so you do a long arc round to Mercedes, a pleasant and sleepy little town where last night, at dinnertime, not a single restaurant was open in the city centre. From there it was theoretically a three-hour bus trip, with one minibus a day leaving at 12pm. When the thing showed up at one, its windscreen was webbed with cracks and its back doors were held closed by twined wire, and the inside was coated with decades of grime. The driver had a length of rope constantly in his hand, as if he expected trouble.
The drive could have been through country Australia – vistas of sun-yellowed grass, hereford and merino grazing, flightless birds the size of emu, tin windmills, and lonely farmhouses with rusting roofs sheltering in stands of eucalyptus. By about halfway we were all coated with dust, which entered through countless crevices in the ancient panels, when there was a sound like we had hit a log. As we coasted to a halt, something banged repeatedly on the floor beneath our feet, and that something turned out to be the drive shaft, which had completely detached itself from the gearbox and had been dragging along the ground. We all stared at it dumbly for about two minutes and were contemplating the possibilities of hitchhiking, when up drove a Ford pickup with three farmers in it, and within seconds one of them, a gaucho called Bolson, was under the bus, tools, baggy pants, happy shoes, white shirt, black beret and all. In about ten minutes he had it fixed, helped by his mate, who kept feeding him lengths of wire, apparently kept on hand for just such situations. The van behaved itself the rest of the way into Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, in spite of a few worrying sounds from beneath, and we arrived only about an hour behind schedule. Enough time to have a look around the ‘town’, which was as unambitious as any beachside holiday hamlet, and have a bit of a stroll along the causeway and watch the sun sink gradually, a crimson ball, behind the smoky waters of the lake.
I’d arrived with a couple of Frenchies, Sarah and Fannie, and our host at the hostel was Giorgio, a young lothario with a head of curls, a face of designer stubble, and a pair of reflective aviatior shades. All conversation was addressed to las chicas (understandably enough, seeing as they both spoke Spanish, in contrast to me). The house was whitewashed and surrounded by lush lawn and there was an open sided kitchen and dining area at the back, a half-empty swimming pool, and in proper Argentine fashion a TV that remained on all day with no one watching it. Giorgio and a couple of his mates ran the place more or less as a bachelor pad, running out for milk and sugar in the morning, and bringing bags of empanadas and boxes of pizza at lunchtime. They were all friendly and generous fellows, in the Argentinian way.
In the evening a few others dropped by, including Jessica, who had a green parrot named Kiwi crawling about on her at all times. She was half American (Jessica that is, not Kiwi) and had done a couple of years at Aspen as a park ranger, serving the likes of Hilary Clinton and Owen Wilson, before inheriting her banker father’s hobby farm three years ago. The hobby farm was 4,000 hectares, with 3,000 head of cattle, 60 buffalo, about 100 horses, and three gaucho families to run it. Her aim is to combine ecotourism with sustainable farming, and with her was Miguel, a graduating naturalist whose specialisation is birds, and who is volunteering at the farm doing a survey of birdlife. In his first week he’d counted 111 species. They told us that there were piranhas in the lake, but not to worry because they only lived near the shoreline. If you fell overboard in the middle of the lake you would be safe. In any case they only attack during egg laying season, which is later in the year, and besides which, they were unlikely to kill you unless you really stayed out in the water a long time.
I woke up in the morning with that I’m-a-bit-over-living-out-of-a-backpack feeling, compounded by the realisation that breakfast consisted of cream crackers with butter (a change from the usual baguettes and jam I suppose, but I could murder a plate of bacon and eggs or a bowl of bircher muesli more or less anytime now). That feeling lasted until exactly the minute about eight of us got into a little aluminium motorboat for an exploration of the lake, the standard activity when visiting the laguna. Before we’d even cast off we’d seen a group of caiman – small purplish crocodiles which grow up to 2m and aren’t dangerous to humans. There would be hundreds more. Next was an otter slithering up an embankment, as well as cormorants, gulls and ducks passing constantly overhead. We passed a series of floating islands with spectacular birds such as pairs of southern screamers, and any number of capybara, bumbling about in groups of two or three. These, in case you don’t know, are the largest rodents in the world, and weigh up to 75kg. They look like oversized wombats, with longish brown hair and boxy heads and snub noses and stumpy limbs with three claws. They charge across the grasslands, or swim in the laguna with the tops of their heads poking out of the water, or lounge blissfully in the sun as birds pick insects out of their fur. They have no predators, so they are literally everywhere. They are truly ridiculous.
We also saw several marsh deer, and many more birds including ibis, herons, egrets, a hefty kingfisher taking a dive for a fish, and a large turkey vulture, which is a relative of the condor. There was also a single jabiru, with a head and beak like charcoal and a neck like raw meat, stalking along the shore as if he owned the place. They eat caiman eggs, and young caiman, and snakes, among other things. We stopped on an island, whose ground was soft and spongy, and saw a couple of capybara making woohoo, which provoked laughter and shouts of ‘Giorgio!’ from the lads. It was a completely magical two hours of greenery, still waters and extraordinary creatures.
In the afternoon an Irish couple and I headed with Jessica and Miguel out to the ranch for a couple of hours, with Kiwi munching at Jessica’s straw hat for the entire drive. The Irish, who as far as I could work out were called Elis and Kieron, went horse riding, but I wasn’t game for this, in spite of Elis pointing out my feet would almost have touched the ground. I headed off with Miguel in the four wheel drive and we saw more birds, including more of the emu things, and abundant woodpeckers, and a couple of bizarre looking grey things with crazed eyes and hooked beaks and swept back fringes, looking like characters from Dickens. There were armadillo burrows, but no armadillo to be seen. Back at the estancia, we were hanging around the cattle yards hoping for some gaucho action when sure enough we started hearing urgent ‘yip yip yip’ sounds coming from behind some trees. We couldn’t work out whether they were being made by a woman or a man, until a boy who looked like about seven emerged, barefoot and riding bareback on a horse about twice his height, driving a herd of about twenty cattle. He brought them into the yard, jumped off the horse, then proceeded to drive them into the next yard using a stockwhip and well-aimed clods of dirt. He then separated them into two groups, drove one group into yet another yard, divided this group again and drove the remainder back into the second yard, leaving three calves penned in. Miguel said they were to be milked but he is, after all, an ornithologist. The lad, whose name was Christian, then remounted the horse and proceeded to drove the cattle back to where they came from. The whole operation probably took about twenty minutes.
Jessica and the Irish couple came back soon after, accompanied by Paulo, the senior gaucho, resplendent in blue gaiters, bombachos, suede apron, a broad belt full of pouches, a blue necktie which apparently signified his political allegiance (there are red neckties also) and a very battered felt hat. We all retired to a large room enclosed with fly screens, with an enormous grill at one end, and sipped Earl Grey tea and munched fresh tortilla fritas – which reminded me very much of kapse made for Tibetan New Year – prepared by one of the gaucho women. Paulo came in to show off pictures of himself in his full gaucho gear at various riding events, and to explain the features of his costume, and then we called it a day.
The other main activity at Estero del Ibera is to take the causeway across the lake and visit the interpretation centre, then walk through a patch of preserved forest where a family of howler monkeys lives – the only primates on the reserve. I’d been told about a certain snake that lived nearby as well, so in the interpretation centre I asked the ranger if I might see this as well. ‘You mean the yellow anaconda?’ she asked. I said I supposed so.
‘Come with me.’ And she walked briskly out of the centre and over to the low brick wall which edged the causeway, about 20 metres away, and pointed out a spot. ‘He usually comes here,’ she said ‘but I think it’s a little early. He’ll come out when it warms up a bit. If you do see him, don’t bother him or go too near. Some visitors do that, and if they keep doing that, he’ll go away.’
How big is the snake, I asked. ‘Oh, about two metres. They grow to seven.’ I assured her that I had no intention of bothering him, then crossed the road to look at the monkeys.
The forest was a gorgeous little bower of trailing vines and leafy understory, with tall palms and other species with twisting trunks. There were ground orchids and begonias and succulents with leaves like saws. Many of the trees were bearded with various kinds of epiphytes, which are not true parasites because they don’t feed off the tree, just use its height to gain access to the sun. One of these was a form of cactus whose fronds trailed whispily earthwards. There were whistles and tweets and hoots all round from various kinds of birds, and one that sounded alarmingly like a blowpipe, but no howls from the monkeys. They howl to establish territory and apparently can be heard kilometres away, but only do so if they feel another primate is attempting to trespass. White ropes delineating the paths and signs instructing us not to cross them put paid to any thoughts of tree climbing, but I did spot several monkeys when tipped off by that telltale naturalist’s sign, a couple of photographers pointing ginormous lenses at the canopy. The males are large and black, and the one I spotted was draped frontwise along a branch, limbs drooping. The females are blonde and moved about a bit more. When I emerged from the forest there were some juvenile deer hanging about, and a full-grown marsh deer, which are distinctive by their sandstone coloured coat and muddy forelegs. Popping up on the parapet as I began to cross the causeway to head back, I finally saw the anaconda, curled up amid the rocks, doubtless warming himself for a bit of fishing later in the day.
Latest update. Have arrived Patagonia. Saw a flock of flamingoes and several whales from the beach. Feeling trashed.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Sunday – a day of rest, appropriately enough as my balcony overlooks a Jesuit mission founded in 1609. The roofs are gone but the solidly built sandstone and laterite walls remain and it’s a handsome site – all orderly rows and neat organisation, with sundrenched terraces where once the fathers of the Jesus Company would’ve looked out over fields of corn and yerba maté. You can walk amid the lines of workshops that once turned out iron and glassware and carvings of saints, their floors now carpeted with lush grass and little yellow and scarlet and mauve flowers. Scattered amongst them are orange and pomelo trees, heavy with fruit that drops to rot on the ground, and long tailed lizards dart in and out of cracks in the walls.
It’s been a lazy day so I’ve tooled around the streets of the town – all two of them - sat on the net, dozed a bit, had a steak and mash and a coffee and flan (that’s crème caramel to you, served as a slice from a great big round), read the papers and a bit more of Pico Iyer’s ‘The Lady and the Monk’. I realised this morning that I’d been on the go for six days, more or less, including one bus journey of 23 hours, and it was time for a break.
The same road that got me here had also taken me to Iguazu a couple of days earlier, in the opposite direction, an undulating highway which traces the Paraguayan border where a thumb of Argentina inserts itself between Paraguay and Brazil. The guidebook – and possibly everyone else, for all I know – refers to it somewhat clumsily as Argentinian Mesopotamia, because of its rivers, the Parana and the Uruguay. (Is there a hanging garden I’ve missed? Is someone thinking of invading?) The province is called Misiones and there are orange orchards and pine plantations, and thin farms. This is clearly not a rich part of the country, and many of the houses are simple timber cabins with wooden shutters for windows, painted in reds and yellows and blues, while others are cubes of brick, looking as if they’ve been plucked from the simplest kind of suburbia, floral curtains and all. In between is forest festooned with creeper, and olive rivers flowing between banks of red volcanic rock, and a rusty dust coats the road.
On the bus we had the inevitable video show, and this time it was ‘Australia’. The sun was bright outside and the locals like to close the curtains when travelling, so I took a look at it for the second time in nine months, hardly able to believe someone once convinced me to part with $15 to watch this tosh. Reading the subtitles, NT became Territorio Nordeste, and Hugh Jackman’s frequent ‘crikey’s became ‘Oh caramba!’, and 1,500 head of cattle had been translated into 15,000, possibly the fantasy of some overenthusiastic Gaucho subtitler. Happily, Drover and ‘walkabout’ remained unchanged. For once I would happily have identified myself as a Yankee, or a Royal Marine, or even, God forbid, a Chilean, than associate myself with such a king size pile of crap.
I’m starting to understand Spanish, a bit. I still can’t speak it to save my life, but when people tell me things I more or less get it. Simple things, that is. Like what time the bus leaves. No need to overdo it. The Argentinians, for their part, don’t seem to have much trouble with my name – not the surname, which needs no introduction (I remember it even induced snickers of recognition in Tajiks and Turkmens), but the first. Either they know the Angus cow, or more commonly, they know Angus Young of AC/DC. The Argies are great devotees of classic rock, and plenty of big acts come to play here – apparently the accas are on their way out later this year. One fan who saw them about ten years ago said he thought they were better live than the Rolling Stones. The radio and restaurants churn out a constant soundtrack of yesterday’s hits, and it’s been a pleasant voyage of rediscovery of the likes of Kate Bush, Meatloaf, Midnight Oil, Credence and, er, Rick Astley. On other points, though, they’re not quite so cosmopolitan. One subtitle slip I noticed was when a reference to Mickey Rourke was translated as Ricky Martin. Um, no.
Iguazu was stupendous. Everyone you meet tells you it’s great, and the guidebooks say it’s not to be missed, and it’s supposed to be a wonder of the world, but then you think, well how good can a waterfall be? Well, good enough to invest in a 23 hour bus trip from Salta to Puerto Iguazu, enduring three egregious Hollywood b-graders, Burt Reynolds and Jim Carrey, a double decker that stank like a backpacker dorm on a day of particularly sweaty sneakers, and nothing but sugary flour to eat and sugary nescafe to drink. Only to arrive in a town that featured little more exciting than a travel agency named Turismo Dick and a burger joint called El Willy. (Made me wonder if the Clintons had ever been guests here.) The day I arrived it was overcast and cold, but on asking Diego at the hotel what the weather would be like the following day, his response was, in effect, well it’s a bad day today, so it’ll probably be good tomorrow. And that’s how it turned out. That’s the way it’s been in Argentina, I’ve noticed – sunny except for the occasional chilly one-off. The weather is as easygoing and companionable as the people.
Now I guess it’s my turn to wax lyrical in terms that are meaningless to anyone who hasn’t been to Iguazu. Wonder of the world? Definitely. It takes a day to see the falls properly, and that’s only from the Argentinian side, and that’s if you don’t mess around. There’s an upper path and a lower path (known offputtingly as the Circuito Inferior), and a boat across a raging torrent to reach an island in the middle of it all (not running, unfortunately, due to high water levels), and a little railway to transport visitors between the various points along the cascades which run for a total of about five kilometres. You do the upper path first, crossing what looks like a placid brown stream beneath overhanging branches, aware of a persistent roar all around. You come to the first fall, 50m or so deep, which is impressive enough until you realise you’re in the midst of a massive arcade and that you’re crossing tumult after tumult of thrashing white water, each one of which would be a river and a waterfall worthy of its own name and national park anywhere else in the world. Dozens, scores, probably hundreds of the things. When a panorama emerges it is sheer rock, jungle and water, vast and unapproachable. Then the lower circuit takes you via the bottom of the falls, where you feel utterly overpowered, and occasionally soaked. Along the way there are toucans (well there was one) and little creatures called coatis, furry tree climbers with long snouts and striped tails who stand cutely on hind legs to pester tourists for food. Hundreds of butterflies flutter about, tiger striped or lemon yellow.
Finally, after a ride to the head of the falls on the propane powered toy train, a catwalk takes you across 1.1km of mud coloured river and fragile, parrot infested islands to view a bowl of boiling spume known as the Devil’s Throat where the spray is so dense you can barely see the top, let alone anywhere further down than a few metres. Torrent isn’t an adequate word. Nothing is. It’s raw power and sheer volume, an unstoppable, obliterating force, punching its way downwards in a 180 degree arc. The spray rises to a height of about ten metres, and when the wind decides to blow in the direction of the platform, a sudden shower drenches all the onlookers. Sensible tourists bring raincoats, or buy them from stalls for 20 pesos. Some just shove their camera in a plastic bag and get wet.
There are all kinds of creatures in the park, including 430 bird species, and one of the best places to see some of them is on the Macucu Trail, which I did last. It wends its way through about 3km of forest until it comes to – surprise – a waterfall, but this time a twin drop that is almost delicate, at least compared to the behemoths up the road. On the way there for a while I tailgated a couple of Valley Girls, buxom backsides busting from their leggings, who kept shrieking at their own hilarities and once asked me to take their photo (‘It parps from the tarp’), and a young French couple who chased each other swinging lengths of bamboo, giggling loudly. Surprisingly, there wasn’t a lot of wildlife to be seen (or heard) on this stretch, so I stuck the legs in fast mode and left them behind, and on the return journey let them pass. Soon enough I spotted a massive chestnut coloured rodent lingering casually on the path; it trotted back and forth a couple of times, at its leisure, then disappeared to forage in the jungle. I waited for more, but only managed to catch the cries of about half a dozen birds before a young Argentinian biologist wandered along whom I’d noticed earlier clutching a guide to the park’s wildlife. She said she’d seen plenty of kingfishers, but was surprised I’d seen a toucan (me and twenty other tourists, that is, beside the kiosk). Apparently they’re endangered, and rare around the park.
She was in the process of completing her undergrad degree, where she’d been doing research into bee and fly distribution. She told me vast swathes of Argentina are given over to the cultivation of soybean for export to Asia, and that the industry is controlled by Monsanto, who supply the seeds, the fertiliser and the pesticides. Because of this monoculture the bees and other pollinating insects are disappearing – as elsewhere in the world – with serious consequences for the propagation of plants and forest. We ambled back towards the road discussing the life cycles of butterflies, bees and flies, and before too long what looked like a chocolate coloured antelope crossed the path right in front of us. She spotted some birds, which I barely saw, and I took some photos of butterflies in the last of the golden light, but she being a bee person was a bit dismissive of butterflies. We passed a sign which I had noticed as I came in that said to be wary of dangerous animals. Unnervingly, the dangerous animals weren’t specified so I asked her (I never did get her name) what they might be, and she said that the coutis sometimes bite people to get food. Apparently, though, there is still the occasional jaguar, and the wildlife guide had plenty of pictures of cats. A baby was taken from a ranger’s house about three years ago.
The next day I had hoped to cross into Brazil but discovered that, along with the Yankees, Aussies aren’t welcome in Brazil unless we’ve got a visa. It’s a shame because it’s only from there that you can get the full panorama of the falls. You’d think they’d have some $10 for a day pass kind of scheme going on, but apparently not (I didn’t bother schlepping all the way to the border to find out). I mean, it’s not like we’re about to disappear into the cities and take jobs from the locals or anything. And while I’m in whinge mode, I’ll say that if you’re going to charge foreigners more than locals to see sites, then you really should provide comprehensive information in English. Iguazu was fine – as it should have been, considering we pay three times what an Argentinian pays – but the Jesuit mission leaves a bit to be desired. There were various little machines with recorded information around the site, where you could press a button to hear a spiel in your own language, but I have to say it was a bit of a relief that none of these actually worked. The diagrams on top weren’t bad, showing the mission as it would’ve looked in its prime.
Oh, and before leaving Puerto Iguazu I wandered up the road to see the spot where two rivers and Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil meet. There probably aren’t that many places in the world where you can actually see three countries, at least from ground level. I have to say they all looked pretty much the same. Beneath a large spreading tree was a map of the Malvinas, enamelled in the white and sky blue of the Argentinian flag.
It’s been a lazy day so I’ve tooled around the streets of the town – all two of them - sat on the net, dozed a bit, had a steak and mash and a coffee and flan (that’s crème caramel to you, served as a slice from a great big round), read the papers and a bit more of Pico Iyer’s ‘The Lady and the Monk’. I realised this morning that I’d been on the go for six days, more or less, including one bus journey of 23 hours, and it was time for a break.
The same road that got me here had also taken me to Iguazu a couple of days earlier, in the opposite direction, an undulating highway which traces the Paraguayan border where a thumb of Argentina inserts itself between Paraguay and Brazil. The guidebook – and possibly everyone else, for all I know – refers to it somewhat clumsily as Argentinian Mesopotamia, because of its rivers, the Parana and the Uruguay. (Is there a hanging garden I’ve missed? Is someone thinking of invading?) The province is called Misiones and there are orange orchards and pine plantations, and thin farms. This is clearly not a rich part of the country, and many of the houses are simple timber cabins with wooden shutters for windows, painted in reds and yellows and blues, while others are cubes of brick, looking as if they’ve been plucked from the simplest kind of suburbia, floral curtains and all. In between is forest festooned with creeper, and olive rivers flowing between banks of red volcanic rock, and a rusty dust coats the road.
On the bus we had the inevitable video show, and this time it was ‘Australia’. The sun was bright outside and the locals like to close the curtains when travelling, so I took a look at it for the second time in nine months, hardly able to believe someone once convinced me to part with $15 to watch this tosh. Reading the subtitles, NT became Territorio Nordeste, and Hugh Jackman’s frequent ‘crikey’s became ‘Oh caramba!’, and 1,500 head of cattle had been translated into 15,000, possibly the fantasy of some overenthusiastic Gaucho subtitler. Happily, Drover and ‘walkabout’ remained unchanged. For once I would happily have identified myself as a Yankee, or a Royal Marine, or even, God forbid, a Chilean, than associate myself with such a king size pile of crap.
I’m starting to understand Spanish, a bit. I still can’t speak it to save my life, but when people tell me things I more or less get it. Simple things, that is. Like what time the bus leaves. No need to overdo it. The Argentinians, for their part, don’t seem to have much trouble with my name – not the surname, which needs no introduction (I remember it even induced snickers of recognition in Tajiks and Turkmens), but the first. Either they know the Angus cow, or more commonly, they know Angus Young of AC/DC. The Argies are great devotees of classic rock, and plenty of big acts come to play here – apparently the accas are on their way out later this year. One fan who saw them about ten years ago said he thought they were better live than the Rolling Stones. The radio and restaurants churn out a constant soundtrack of yesterday’s hits, and it’s been a pleasant voyage of rediscovery of the likes of Kate Bush, Meatloaf, Midnight Oil, Credence and, er, Rick Astley. On other points, though, they’re not quite so cosmopolitan. One subtitle slip I noticed was when a reference to Mickey Rourke was translated as Ricky Martin. Um, no.
Iguazu was stupendous. Everyone you meet tells you it’s great, and the guidebooks say it’s not to be missed, and it’s supposed to be a wonder of the world, but then you think, well how good can a waterfall be? Well, good enough to invest in a 23 hour bus trip from Salta to Puerto Iguazu, enduring three egregious Hollywood b-graders, Burt Reynolds and Jim Carrey, a double decker that stank like a backpacker dorm on a day of particularly sweaty sneakers, and nothing but sugary flour to eat and sugary nescafe to drink. Only to arrive in a town that featured little more exciting than a travel agency named Turismo Dick and a burger joint called El Willy. (Made me wonder if the Clintons had ever been guests here.) The day I arrived it was overcast and cold, but on asking Diego at the hotel what the weather would be like the following day, his response was, in effect, well it’s a bad day today, so it’ll probably be good tomorrow. And that’s how it turned out. That’s the way it’s been in Argentina, I’ve noticed – sunny except for the occasional chilly one-off. The weather is as easygoing and companionable as the people.
Now I guess it’s my turn to wax lyrical in terms that are meaningless to anyone who hasn’t been to Iguazu. Wonder of the world? Definitely. It takes a day to see the falls properly, and that’s only from the Argentinian side, and that’s if you don’t mess around. There’s an upper path and a lower path (known offputtingly as the Circuito Inferior), and a boat across a raging torrent to reach an island in the middle of it all (not running, unfortunately, due to high water levels), and a little railway to transport visitors between the various points along the cascades which run for a total of about five kilometres. You do the upper path first, crossing what looks like a placid brown stream beneath overhanging branches, aware of a persistent roar all around. You come to the first fall, 50m or so deep, which is impressive enough until you realise you’re in the midst of a massive arcade and that you’re crossing tumult after tumult of thrashing white water, each one of which would be a river and a waterfall worthy of its own name and national park anywhere else in the world. Dozens, scores, probably hundreds of the things. When a panorama emerges it is sheer rock, jungle and water, vast and unapproachable. Then the lower circuit takes you via the bottom of the falls, where you feel utterly overpowered, and occasionally soaked. Along the way there are toucans (well there was one) and little creatures called coatis, furry tree climbers with long snouts and striped tails who stand cutely on hind legs to pester tourists for food. Hundreds of butterflies flutter about, tiger striped or lemon yellow.
Finally, after a ride to the head of the falls on the propane powered toy train, a catwalk takes you across 1.1km of mud coloured river and fragile, parrot infested islands to view a bowl of boiling spume known as the Devil’s Throat where the spray is so dense you can barely see the top, let alone anywhere further down than a few metres. Torrent isn’t an adequate word. Nothing is. It’s raw power and sheer volume, an unstoppable, obliterating force, punching its way downwards in a 180 degree arc. The spray rises to a height of about ten metres, and when the wind decides to blow in the direction of the platform, a sudden shower drenches all the onlookers. Sensible tourists bring raincoats, or buy them from stalls for 20 pesos. Some just shove their camera in a plastic bag and get wet.
There are all kinds of creatures in the park, including 430 bird species, and one of the best places to see some of them is on the Macucu Trail, which I did last. It wends its way through about 3km of forest until it comes to – surprise – a waterfall, but this time a twin drop that is almost delicate, at least compared to the behemoths up the road. On the way there for a while I tailgated a couple of Valley Girls, buxom backsides busting from their leggings, who kept shrieking at their own hilarities and once asked me to take their photo (‘It parps from the tarp’), and a young French couple who chased each other swinging lengths of bamboo, giggling loudly. Surprisingly, there wasn’t a lot of wildlife to be seen (or heard) on this stretch, so I stuck the legs in fast mode and left them behind, and on the return journey let them pass. Soon enough I spotted a massive chestnut coloured rodent lingering casually on the path; it trotted back and forth a couple of times, at its leisure, then disappeared to forage in the jungle. I waited for more, but only managed to catch the cries of about half a dozen birds before a young Argentinian biologist wandered along whom I’d noticed earlier clutching a guide to the park’s wildlife. She said she’d seen plenty of kingfishers, but was surprised I’d seen a toucan (me and twenty other tourists, that is, beside the kiosk). Apparently they’re endangered, and rare around the park.
She was in the process of completing her undergrad degree, where she’d been doing research into bee and fly distribution. She told me vast swathes of Argentina are given over to the cultivation of soybean for export to Asia, and that the industry is controlled by Monsanto, who supply the seeds, the fertiliser and the pesticides. Because of this monoculture the bees and other pollinating insects are disappearing – as elsewhere in the world – with serious consequences for the propagation of plants and forest. We ambled back towards the road discussing the life cycles of butterflies, bees and flies, and before too long what looked like a chocolate coloured antelope crossed the path right in front of us. She spotted some birds, which I barely saw, and I took some photos of butterflies in the last of the golden light, but she being a bee person was a bit dismissive of butterflies. We passed a sign which I had noticed as I came in that said to be wary of dangerous animals. Unnervingly, the dangerous animals weren’t specified so I asked her (I never did get her name) what they might be, and she said that the coutis sometimes bite people to get food. Apparently, though, there is still the occasional jaguar, and the wildlife guide had plenty of pictures of cats. A baby was taken from a ranger’s house about three years ago.
The next day I had hoped to cross into Brazil but discovered that, along with the Yankees, Aussies aren’t welcome in Brazil unless we’ve got a visa. It’s a shame because it’s only from there that you can get the full panorama of the falls. You’d think they’d have some $10 for a day pass kind of scheme going on, but apparently not (I didn’t bother schlepping all the way to the border to find out). I mean, it’s not like we’re about to disappear into the cities and take jobs from the locals or anything. And while I’m in whinge mode, I’ll say that if you’re going to charge foreigners more than locals to see sites, then you really should provide comprehensive information in English. Iguazu was fine – as it should have been, considering we pay three times what an Argentinian pays – but the Jesuit mission leaves a bit to be desired. There were various little machines with recorded information around the site, where you could press a button to hear a spiel in your own language, but I have to say it was a bit of a relief that none of these actually worked. The diagrams on top weren’t bad, showing the mission as it would’ve looked in its prime.
Oh, and before leaving Puerto Iguazu I wandered up the road to see the spot where two rivers and Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil meet. There probably aren’t that many places in the world where you can actually see three countries, at least from ground level. I have to say they all looked pretty much the same. Beneath a large spreading tree was a map of the Malvinas, enamelled in the white and sky blue of the Argentinian flag.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Sunday in Salta
I’m back in Salta for a couple of days after disappearing into the Quebrada de Humahuaca for a week or so. The what de what? A rainbow made of rock, is what it is. A world heritage listed valley in the Andes, 130 kilometres long and 3,000 metres high, where the colours vary from champagne to claret, from marmalade to cocoa, from sunburn to seaweed in the space of a hillside. And then there are the shapes – dripping candle wax and frozen tsunami, fluted organ pipe and dinosaur’s shoulder and flared stalagmite, on a monumental scale. There are pre-Inca pueblos and whitewashed churches and the relics of a toy train. More of all this in a minute.
Salta is a pleasant little town which makes a handy hub for the psychedelic desert of the altoplano. There is the inevitable town square, with its equestrian statue and surrounding buildings which feature every type of arch known to architecture. There is a cathedral the colour of fairy floss, and a 17th century Spanish colonial town hall, and a former governor’s mansion in the beaux arts style so favoured in Buenos Aires, with round apertures and an arched french window set into a top floor wall which slopes gently back from the façade. Most of them seem to house cafes these days, wi-fi enabled and bouncing with bonhomie. I found one this morning which offered a handy buffet breakfast – juice and coffee and fruit, croissants and danish, ham and salami and cheese and rolls, crème caramel and chocolate torte, for 15 pesos. That’s $5 to you folks back home. I was glad of it, tiring as I am of the usual jam and baguette.
The rest of the town is a one way grid of low terraces, with barely a traffic light and no stop or give way signs, where everyone is expected to look out at each intersection and decide on the spot who has right of way. It works surprisingly well, with traffic flowing in a constant limbo of accelration and deceleration, encouraged by the deep dips in the tarmac at many of the crossroads. There are tombola shops almost on every corner – the Saltans seem to be ardent lottery lovers - and apartments with little vestibules lined with faded tiles and carved doors, and beaten up pickups piled high with oranges for sale. That kind of thing. One feature I find a little unnerving – there are still posters around from the last election, and one of the candidates bears a striking resemblance to Ray Martin, only younger and better looking, and minus the gap in the teeth. His name is Fernando Yarade, pronounced I think like ‘charade’, or possibly ‘charaday’. He promises change – ‘cambio’. I saw the posters right up in the Quebrada, in villages where the locals are still partial to pre-columbian mountain gods, and have no electricity. Odd to stumble across a grinning Ray up there, every hair in its right place, pushing cambio.
Speaking of such things, there are a couple of excellent museums in Salta, one of which is largely dedicated to the mummies of three children sacrificed by the Incas on Mount Llullaillaco (‘Shushaishaco’) a few hundred kilometres from here. The bodies date from the 15th century and were preserved by the cold, and were discovered in 1999. They are said to be the best preserved of all Inca mummies. They are put on display one at a time on six month rotation, and the one that’s on show at the moment is a six-year-old girl, sitting cross legged, eyes closed, her mouth open with her teeth showing, as if she’s just dozed off. She wears a shawl with a silver pin and one of those woolly hats which cover the ears, but her braids show through at the front. She would be perfect except for a long ago lightning strike which slightly blackened part of her face. She was sacrificed to appease the mountain gods, which control as much as anything the availability of water, which is scarce on this side of the Andes. It was shocking until I walked out and faced a building exalting a being said to have sacrificed his own son for all our sakes.
There are some great people on the road in Argentina, quite a few of whom seem to be French. I’m not sure if there’s a reason for this, other than it being la vogue en France at the moment. I headed for the Quebrada with a London-based Serbian graphic designer named Georgie and his French girlfriend, Ann-Claire. I spoke French with her (and taught Georgie useful terms such as ‘lager lout’, ‘redneck’ and ‘white trash’) and she screwed up her face at first, as French people will when subjected to someone mauling their language. I’m sure her English was fine but I persisted, partly to relieve my embarrassment at my complete lack of Spanish. I left them at Purmamarca, the first town in the valley, which huddles in the crook of an elbow of geology known as the Cerro de los Siete Colores (the Hill of Seven Colours). There wasn’t a lot to do there except admire the colours, and even that was difficult when the day after my arrival turned out to be the coldest I’ve experienced in this country. It was freezing and windy and overcast, and by the end of the day a very light snow fell for a couple of hours. I broke out my thermals for the first and so far last time on this trip, because the day after the weather reverted to its normal sunny warmth and has remained so ever since. Apparently it’s like this year round. The Tropic of Capricorn crosses the highway close to Purmamarca.
Not liking the look of the day I took an excursion in a bus to the Salinas Grandes, a big salt field that lay on the other side of a 4,000 metre pass. We cleared the cloud just before the pass and out on the pans a warm(ish) wind was blowing. The locals have been trading the salt up into Bolivia for centuries, and there were perfect rectangles dug in neat rows where it is still mined. We visited a refectory for the miners whose walls, roof, tables and chairs were made entirely of salt bricks. There was even a salty shrine for a salty saint. I got talking to a couple of Germans from Berlin, one of whom spoke good French, and the other of whom spoke English about as good as my French, and Spanish. We had a dinner of barbecued llama, pork, beef and lamb, followed by quinoa flan (yes quinoa really is a word) and made feasible conversation in three languages, or four if you include ordering the food.
The road is tracked by what would be a shoo-in for a list of the world’s most spectacular railways (or a book on the subject which some photo-hack is sure to want to do) if it still ran. Unfortunately it doesn’t. It was once a tiny narrow gauge line with cute stations and riveted water tanks and sheds with arched openings, now bricked up with breezeblocks and turned into markets selling cheap clothes. I watched it go by when the scenery got too dazzling, its steel girder bridges and faded level crossing signs, its tracks which sometimes would disappear altogether only to emerge again suddenly from the earth, or poke out from a crumbling embankment like bones from an ancient mound. Some of the bridges were covered with ancient graffiti, and one, solid-sided and studded with rivets like a World War One tank, had been turned ninety degrees by some sudden torrent. It all seemed somehow more authentic than the Trene de las Nubes (Train to the Clouds), a line refurbished for tourists which takes a 15-hour round trip up to 4,200m. It costs $US120 for the day. I haven’t bothered.
I ended the journey up the Quebrada at Iruya, a tiny town high in the mountains, two hours along a dirt road which breasts a pass before descending into the next valley via a set of twenty-odd switchbacks neatly laid out on a broad hillside. From a distance the mountains look velvety and smooth but close up they are loose conglomerate slopes, cracked and fissured by long ago deluges and feathered with hardy tussocks. We dropped to the valley floor, a wide rocky riverbed where a narrow stream braided and sparkled, and followed this to the town, which sits like a Greek village in the midst of what looks like a gigantic cave that has had its roof removed. A squat, lemon-coloured church dominates the gap where the shoulder of a hill has collapsed, and is surrounded by what gigantic stalagmites, their sides split by erosion and striped by what look like dribbles of black paint. The town ascends a flat-topped sugarloaf at a steepening angle until a single cobbled street twists itself round the flank of the hill, ending at a peak marked by a white cross and a bristle of antennas. I ensconced myself into a hostel called the Maté-Bar, a two room adobe hut nestled at the bottom of a set of round-topped rock pillars shaped like melting snowmen. The place was owned by a cheery bearded man named Oliver, and the other guests were a couple of Breton medical students and a very bright lad called Julien who at the age of 22 or 23 had already done an internship in Washington, lobbying senators on energy policy. That evening Oliver made an asado (barbecue) with hunks of beef, pork sausages, roasted capsicum, enamel jugs full of malbec and litre bottles of Salta stout. The revels continued till 6am, with violin playing, guitar strumming, pan pipe blowing and Breton folk dancing. The girls translated my French into Spanish for Oliver, and Julien translated my English into French for the girls. They only scrunched their faces a little bit, and only at the beginning. Oliver had already told them I was Austrian, so I suppose the only way was up.
The next day was a day of pure rest in the bright Andean sun, and the one after that I hiked up to San Isidro, a village further up the valley. There, opening a door to a house in search of some advertised empanadas, I came across Theo, a porteno (Buenos Airean) sitting calmly behind a Leica. He had been a photographer until a couple of years ago, when he’d left it behind to become an engineer in the navy. The reason? ‘How do you say in English? Starvation.’ But life wasn’t all bad. He’d formed a company with some friends and spent months at a time custom building yachts in other parts of the world. He’d been to China and Morocco, and he’s off to Italy in a couple of weeks. The Argentinian navy sounds like a highly tolerant employer, or perhaps it’s not that busy. Or maybe they’re keeping an eye on what the Moroccans are up to.
Theo asked to see my pictures of the condor – I think he wasn’t really convinced it was one – so I pulled out the laptop, which I hadn’t been willing to leave in the hostel. I showed it to Theresa, the lady of the house, and her two sons – the village had no electricity, and I suspect they hadn’t seen a computer before. We ran through the pictures of the condor, and then I looked for something else to show them. The first ones I came across were from Che Guevara’s house, so I turned to Theresa and said the name, expecting a light of peasant rebellion to flash in her eyes. Blank stare instead. ‘She won’t give a toss about Che Guevara,’ said Theo (his actual language was stronger). ‘Show her Buenos Aires.’ So I did.
Outside, Ray Martin was still grinning.
Well I could go on about the ethnological museum with its icons of musket-toting European angels, where the directors bowl you over with their enthusiasm and explain every feathered headdress and silver breastplate in voluble Anglo-Spanish, or the feast of San Roque which takes place today, where the townspeople carry their poodles in procession through the streets to be blessed at the church of San Francisco, but it’s pushing 10pm and I still have to buy food and pack my backpack, download my pictures, upload this and with any luck finish Graham Greene’s memoirs before I go to bed. Tomorrow I head in a hired car with three Austrians for the the Quebrada de Cafayate, which is supposed to be even more spectacular than Humahuaca, though I can’t imagine how. So I guess I’ll call it a night.
Salta is a pleasant little town which makes a handy hub for the psychedelic desert of the altoplano. There is the inevitable town square, with its equestrian statue and surrounding buildings which feature every type of arch known to architecture. There is a cathedral the colour of fairy floss, and a 17th century Spanish colonial town hall, and a former governor’s mansion in the beaux arts style so favoured in Buenos Aires, with round apertures and an arched french window set into a top floor wall which slopes gently back from the façade. Most of them seem to house cafes these days, wi-fi enabled and bouncing with bonhomie. I found one this morning which offered a handy buffet breakfast – juice and coffee and fruit, croissants and danish, ham and salami and cheese and rolls, crème caramel and chocolate torte, for 15 pesos. That’s $5 to you folks back home. I was glad of it, tiring as I am of the usual jam and baguette.
The rest of the town is a one way grid of low terraces, with barely a traffic light and no stop or give way signs, where everyone is expected to look out at each intersection and decide on the spot who has right of way. It works surprisingly well, with traffic flowing in a constant limbo of accelration and deceleration, encouraged by the deep dips in the tarmac at many of the crossroads. There are tombola shops almost on every corner – the Saltans seem to be ardent lottery lovers - and apartments with little vestibules lined with faded tiles and carved doors, and beaten up pickups piled high with oranges for sale. That kind of thing. One feature I find a little unnerving – there are still posters around from the last election, and one of the candidates bears a striking resemblance to Ray Martin, only younger and better looking, and minus the gap in the teeth. His name is Fernando Yarade, pronounced I think like ‘charade’, or possibly ‘charaday’. He promises change – ‘cambio’. I saw the posters right up in the Quebrada, in villages where the locals are still partial to pre-columbian mountain gods, and have no electricity. Odd to stumble across a grinning Ray up there, every hair in its right place, pushing cambio.
Speaking of such things, there are a couple of excellent museums in Salta, one of which is largely dedicated to the mummies of three children sacrificed by the Incas on Mount Llullaillaco (‘Shushaishaco’) a few hundred kilometres from here. The bodies date from the 15th century and were preserved by the cold, and were discovered in 1999. They are said to be the best preserved of all Inca mummies. They are put on display one at a time on six month rotation, and the one that’s on show at the moment is a six-year-old girl, sitting cross legged, eyes closed, her mouth open with her teeth showing, as if she’s just dozed off. She wears a shawl with a silver pin and one of those woolly hats which cover the ears, but her braids show through at the front. She would be perfect except for a long ago lightning strike which slightly blackened part of her face. She was sacrificed to appease the mountain gods, which control as much as anything the availability of water, which is scarce on this side of the Andes. It was shocking until I walked out and faced a building exalting a being said to have sacrificed his own son for all our sakes.
There are some great people on the road in Argentina, quite a few of whom seem to be French. I’m not sure if there’s a reason for this, other than it being la vogue en France at the moment. I headed for the Quebrada with a London-based Serbian graphic designer named Georgie and his French girlfriend, Ann-Claire. I spoke French with her (and taught Georgie useful terms such as ‘lager lout’, ‘redneck’ and ‘white trash’) and she screwed up her face at first, as French people will when subjected to someone mauling their language. I’m sure her English was fine but I persisted, partly to relieve my embarrassment at my complete lack of Spanish. I left them at Purmamarca, the first town in the valley, which huddles in the crook of an elbow of geology known as the Cerro de los Siete Colores (the Hill of Seven Colours). There wasn’t a lot to do there except admire the colours, and even that was difficult when the day after my arrival turned out to be the coldest I’ve experienced in this country. It was freezing and windy and overcast, and by the end of the day a very light snow fell for a couple of hours. I broke out my thermals for the first and so far last time on this trip, because the day after the weather reverted to its normal sunny warmth and has remained so ever since. Apparently it’s like this year round. The Tropic of Capricorn crosses the highway close to Purmamarca.
Not liking the look of the day I took an excursion in a bus to the Salinas Grandes, a big salt field that lay on the other side of a 4,000 metre pass. We cleared the cloud just before the pass and out on the pans a warm(ish) wind was blowing. The locals have been trading the salt up into Bolivia for centuries, and there were perfect rectangles dug in neat rows where it is still mined. We visited a refectory for the miners whose walls, roof, tables and chairs were made entirely of salt bricks. There was even a salty shrine for a salty saint. I got talking to a couple of Germans from Berlin, one of whom spoke good French, and the other of whom spoke English about as good as my French, and Spanish. We had a dinner of barbecued llama, pork, beef and lamb, followed by quinoa flan (yes quinoa really is a word) and made feasible conversation in three languages, or four if you include ordering the food.
The road is tracked by what would be a shoo-in for a list of the world’s most spectacular railways (or a book on the subject which some photo-hack is sure to want to do) if it still ran. Unfortunately it doesn’t. It was once a tiny narrow gauge line with cute stations and riveted water tanks and sheds with arched openings, now bricked up with breezeblocks and turned into markets selling cheap clothes. I watched it go by when the scenery got too dazzling, its steel girder bridges and faded level crossing signs, its tracks which sometimes would disappear altogether only to emerge again suddenly from the earth, or poke out from a crumbling embankment like bones from an ancient mound. Some of the bridges were covered with ancient graffiti, and one, solid-sided and studded with rivets like a World War One tank, had been turned ninety degrees by some sudden torrent. It all seemed somehow more authentic than the Trene de las Nubes (Train to the Clouds), a line refurbished for tourists which takes a 15-hour round trip up to 4,200m. It costs $US120 for the day. I haven’t bothered.
I ended the journey up the Quebrada at Iruya, a tiny town high in the mountains, two hours along a dirt road which breasts a pass before descending into the next valley via a set of twenty-odd switchbacks neatly laid out on a broad hillside. From a distance the mountains look velvety and smooth but close up they are loose conglomerate slopes, cracked and fissured by long ago deluges and feathered with hardy tussocks. We dropped to the valley floor, a wide rocky riverbed where a narrow stream braided and sparkled, and followed this to the town, which sits like a Greek village in the midst of what looks like a gigantic cave that has had its roof removed. A squat, lemon-coloured church dominates the gap where the shoulder of a hill has collapsed, and is surrounded by what gigantic stalagmites, their sides split by erosion and striped by what look like dribbles of black paint. The town ascends a flat-topped sugarloaf at a steepening angle until a single cobbled street twists itself round the flank of the hill, ending at a peak marked by a white cross and a bristle of antennas. I ensconced myself into a hostel called the Maté-Bar, a two room adobe hut nestled at the bottom of a set of round-topped rock pillars shaped like melting snowmen. The place was owned by a cheery bearded man named Oliver, and the other guests were a couple of Breton medical students and a very bright lad called Julien who at the age of 22 or 23 had already done an internship in Washington, lobbying senators on energy policy. That evening Oliver made an asado (barbecue) with hunks of beef, pork sausages, roasted capsicum, enamel jugs full of malbec and litre bottles of Salta stout. The revels continued till 6am, with violin playing, guitar strumming, pan pipe blowing and Breton folk dancing. The girls translated my French into Spanish for Oliver, and Julien translated my English into French for the girls. They only scrunched their faces a little bit, and only at the beginning. Oliver had already told them I was Austrian, so I suppose the only way was up.
The next day was a day of pure rest in the bright Andean sun, and the one after that I hiked up to San Isidro, a village further up the valley. There, opening a door to a house in search of some advertised empanadas, I came across Theo, a porteno (Buenos Airean) sitting calmly behind a Leica. He had been a photographer until a couple of years ago, when he’d left it behind to become an engineer in the navy. The reason? ‘How do you say in English? Starvation.’ But life wasn’t all bad. He’d formed a company with some friends and spent months at a time custom building yachts in other parts of the world. He’d been to China and Morocco, and he’s off to Italy in a couple of weeks. The Argentinian navy sounds like a highly tolerant employer, or perhaps it’s not that busy. Or maybe they’re keeping an eye on what the Moroccans are up to.
Theo asked to see my pictures of the condor – I think he wasn’t really convinced it was one – so I pulled out the laptop, which I hadn’t been willing to leave in the hostel. I showed it to Theresa, the lady of the house, and her two sons – the village had no electricity, and I suspect they hadn’t seen a computer before. We ran through the pictures of the condor, and then I looked for something else to show them. The first ones I came across were from Che Guevara’s house, so I turned to Theresa and said the name, expecting a light of peasant rebellion to flash in her eyes. Blank stare instead. ‘She won’t give a toss about Che Guevara,’ said Theo (his actual language was stronger). ‘Show her Buenos Aires.’ So I did.
Outside, Ray Martin was still grinning.
Well I could go on about the ethnological museum with its icons of musket-toting European angels, where the directors bowl you over with their enthusiasm and explain every feathered headdress and silver breastplate in voluble Anglo-Spanish, or the feast of San Roque which takes place today, where the townspeople carry their poodles in procession through the streets to be blessed at the church of San Francisco, but it’s pushing 10pm and I still have to buy food and pack my backpack, download my pictures, upload this and with any luck finish Graham Greene’s memoirs before I go to bed. Tomorrow I head in a hired car with three Austrians for the the Quebrada de Cafayate, which is supposed to be even more spectacular than Humahuaca, though I can’t imagine how. So I guess I’ll call it a night.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
News just to hand. I’m sitting in a café with wi-fi on the city square of Salta. I had to signal to the waiter to get the password, after which he seemed very happy to leave me to it. He seemed a little surprised when I asked for coffee, which I don’t particularly want but thought I’d better order out of courtesy.
Latest development. The coffee comes with banana pastry. Don’t mind if I do.
The weather is making me wish all my t-shirts weren’t at the laundry. Am I really in the foothills of the second highest mountains on earth in the depths of winter? I suspect an elaborate scam to part tourists from their dollars.
I spent yesterday in search of condors. The Parque Nacional Quebrada del Condorito (Canyon of the Condorito – a smaller, low altitude version of the bird) was set up in 1996 and is a little gem. If it’s anything to go by, Argentina’s national parks service is in good shape. The paths are good, the signposts are clear and I didn’t see a single scrap of rubbish during a six-hour trek. At the visitor’s centre a single ranger gave me a quick rundown on what I needed to know, cautioned me to be out by dark, and I was on my way. No fee, no gift shop, no snack counter. I walked across an open, undulating landscape made up of tufts of pampas broken up by outcrops of ancient, pre-Andean granite, copper green with lichen and sparkling in the sun. From time to time the path was scattered with hunks of pink and white quartz, and occasional slender streams snaked through the grass.
The weather was flawless. I trekked most of the day in a t-shirt, beneath a deep indigo sky and a bright sun. After an hour and a bit, a deep gorge opened up at the bottom of which was a green river, its stone slab banks peppered with round pools. You descend sharply to a bridge and climb equally sharply up the other side, amid gnarly trees and craggy boulders, but not before spotting three condors wheeling high in the sky. After traversing the hilltop at the other side of the gorge, you come to a balcony with a view that’s worth far more than the half an hour of scrambling and laboured breathing that it’s taken to crest the top. A wide valley of golden grass stretches across to another line of sierras, brown and wrinkled in the haze. In the distance, white houses dot the shores of a long gunmetal lake, above it a single striated cloud resembling a thunderbird. Immediately in front of the viewing platform, the gorge comes to a dramatic end, spilling into the valley in a clench of gigantic dragon claw ridges interspersed by steep streams with multiple waterfalls. The lair of the mighty condor.
I had about an hour to get up close and personal with one of these birds and sure enough, within ten minutes I spotted one sailing far below in a lazy circle of the bowl, unmistakeable with its white-topped wings, the end feathers splayed like fingers. It disappeared behind a cleft and a few minutes later as I strained for another view, what I assume was the same bird suddenly appeared less than a hundred metres away at my left, glided across for a good look at me, sheared off as it came at right angles, and did another lazy circle at my level before diving once again into the chasm. Curious creature, friendly bird, or complete camera tart? I suspect all three. In any case, it only pulled this trick once, and having said hello, or made sure I was only another gawping tourist, or whatever it was doing, it was content to glide in zig zags across the valley for the next half hour or so, and make occasional visits to a nest high amid the crags. I met a French-Argentinian couple on the trek who told me of getting similar visits from the birds while trekking in the Andes, and of paragliders being accompanied by sociable condors.
Apart from this the only other wildlife I saw were a couple of birds with a bright orange breast which are apparently long-tailed starlings, known in Spanish as loica, and some bigger birds. I did see a sign warning what to do if you encounter a puma and took pains to decipher the Spanish (wave your arms, apparently, and don’t trek alone) but didn’t have to use the advice. The park is also home to some guanaco, a smaller version of the llama introduced in 2005 after disappearing from the area a century ago, and a lot of red foxes, who are known wonderfully as zorro colorado.
I had about an hour back in Cordoba - just enough for a quick shower but not unfortunately for a change of clothes – or rather I wanted to reserve my last clean set for this morning - before getting on the 13-hour bus to Salta. The buses truly are amazing. This one left at 10.15 and after a reasonable night’s sleep on the almost fully reclining seat, I awoke to a snack pack handed out by the conductor and an urn dispensing unlimited coffee. Then I sat back for a few hours enjoying the view of scrubby forest that variegated from reddish yellow to olive green, with a series of ridges fading to blue in the background, as we made the final run into Salta. The only possible fly in the ointment was that I was seated next to four English lager louts who cracked cans of beer as soon as the bus pulled out and were loudly reminiscing about their exploits in the clubs of Buenos Aires as we burrowed into the night. I had picked their nationality the second I’d spotted them on the platform (and was briefly tempted to yell ‘Viva Thatcher!’ and run off to watch the consequences), and was ready for a night of shouting and chundering. But lo and behold, half an hour into the journey two of them had pulled out books (one of them was Crime and Punishment), the other two were lost in their iPods, and they were quiet as mice for the rest of the trip. I almost felt like congratulating them.
What a relief it is to be in a country where the people are completely relaxed about photographers, instead of the oppressive mix of suspicion and officiousness that you encounter everywhere in Australia these days. Want to take someone’s photo? They’ve very happy to oblige, without the clowning about and racing to get into the frame that you encounter in some other countries. Take pictures in a museum? No problem. Set up a tripod in a world heritage listed church? Go for your life. The only objection I’ve had was from a church attendant who pointed out (as far as I understood it) that it was prayer time, was incredibly polite, and allowed me to take one more. Nice people.
Latest development. The coffee comes with banana pastry. Don’t mind if I do.
The weather is making me wish all my t-shirts weren’t at the laundry. Am I really in the foothills of the second highest mountains on earth in the depths of winter? I suspect an elaborate scam to part tourists from their dollars.
I spent yesterday in search of condors. The Parque Nacional Quebrada del Condorito (Canyon of the Condorito – a smaller, low altitude version of the bird) was set up in 1996 and is a little gem. If it’s anything to go by, Argentina’s national parks service is in good shape. The paths are good, the signposts are clear and I didn’t see a single scrap of rubbish during a six-hour trek. At the visitor’s centre a single ranger gave me a quick rundown on what I needed to know, cautioned me to be out by dark, and I was on my way. No fee, no gift shop, no snack counter. I walked across an open, undulating landscape made up of tufts of pampas broken up by outcrops of ancient, pre-Andean granite, copper green with lichen and sparkling in the sun. From time to time the path was scattered with hunks of pink and white quartz, and occasional slender streams snaked through the grass.
The weather was flawless. I trekked most of the day in a t-shirt, beneath a deep indigo sky and a bright sun. After an hour and a bit, a deep gorge opened up at the bottom of which was a green river, its stone slab banks peppered with round pools. You descend sharply to a bridge and climb equally sharply up the other side, amid gnarly trees and craggy boulders, but not before spotting three condors wheeling high in the sky. After traversing the hilltop at the other side of the gorge, you come to a balcony with a view that’s worth far more than the half an hour of scrambling and laboured breathing that it’s taken to crest the top. A wide valley of golden grass stretches across to another line of sierras, brown and wrinkled in the haze. In the distance, white houses dot the shores of a long gunmetal lake, above it a single striated cloud resembling a thunderbird. Immediately in front of the viewing platform, the gorge comes to a dramatic end, spilling into the valley in a clench of gigantic dragon claw ridges interspersed by steep streams with multiple waterfalls. The lair of the mighty condor.
I had about an hour to get up close and personal with one of these birds and sure enough, within ten minutes I spotted one sailing far below in a lazy circle of the bowl, unmistakeable with its white-topped wings, the end feathers splayed like fingers. It disappeared behind a cleft and a few minutes later as I strained for another view, what I assume was the same bird suddenly appeared less than a hundred metres away at my left, glided across for a good look at me, sheared off as it came at right angles, and did another lazy circle at my level before diving once again into the chasm. Curious creature, friendly bird, or complete camera tart? I suspect all three. In any case, it only pulled this trick once, and having said hello, or made sure I was only another gawping tourist, or whatever it was doing, it was content to glide in zig zags across the valley for the next half hour or so, and make occasional visits to a nest high amid the crags. I met a French-Argentinian couple on the trek who told me of getting similar visits from the birds while trekking in the Andes, and of paragliders being accompanied by sociable condors.
Apart from this the only other wildlife I saw were a couple of birds with a bright orange breast which are apparently long-tailed starlings, known in Spanish as loica, and some bigger birds. I did see a sign warning what to do if you encounter a puma and took pains to decipher the Spanish (wave your arms, apparently, and don’t trek alone) but didn’t have to use the advice. The park is also home to some guanaco, a smaller version of the llama introduced in 2005 after disappearing from the area a century ago, and a lot of red foxes, who are known wonderfully as zorro colorado.
I had about an hour back in Cordoba - just enough for a quick shower but not unfortunately for a change of clothes – or rather I wanted to reserve my last clean set for this morning - before getting on the 13-hour bus to Salta. The buses truly are amazing. This one left at 10.15 and after a reasonable night’s sleep on the almost fully reclining seat, I awoke to a snack pack handed out by the conductor and an urn dispensing unlimited coffee. Then I sat back for a few hours enjoying the view of scrubby forest that variegated from reddish yellow to olive green, with a series of ridges fading to blue in the background, as we made the final run into Salta. The only possible fly in the ointment was that I was seated next to four English lager louts who cracked cans of beer as soon as the bus pulled out and were loudly reminiscing about their exploits in the clubs of Buenos Aires as we burrowed into the night. I had picked their nationality the second I’d spotted them on the platform (and was briefly tempted to yell ‘Viva Thatcher!’ and run off to watch the consequences), and was ready for a night of shouting and chundering. But lo and behold, half an hour into the journey two of them had pulled out books (one of them was Crime and Punishment), the other two were lost in their iPods, and they were quiet as mice for the rest of the trip. I almost felt like congratulating them.
What a relief it is to be in a country where the people are completely relaxed about photographers, instead of the oppressive mix of suspicion and officiousness that you encounter everywhere in Australia these days. Want to take someone’s photo? They’ve very happy to oblige, without the clowning about and racing to get into the frame that you encounter in some other countries. Take pictures in a museum? No problem. Set up a tripod in a world heritage listed church? Go for your life. The only objection I’ve had was from a church attendant who pointed out (as far as I understood it) that it was prayer time, was incredibly polite, and allowed me to take one more. Nice people.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Domestic arrangements for guerrillas
The night bus brought me from Buenos Aires to Cordoba. The buses are to be admired, and in a country where the flights are expensive and the trains, apparently, almost completely non-functional, that’s a good thing. The terminal was a bit like an airport plus diesel fumes, with departure lounges, coin-operated TVs, security checks and X-rays for the bags. I didn’t get the X-ray treatment, so Cordoba is presumably terrorist-free at the moment. The bus was a sleek double decker with seats that reclined almost horizontal and a board that came up to support your legs so it really is almost like being in a bed. All this with the cheapest ticket, $25 to go 700km. I must try ‘ejecutivo’ class next time – it has to be truly luxuriant. My travelling companion was yet another fluent English speaker, a criminal lawyer from Cordoba just returning from a trip to Europe. We talked for an hour, after which she more or less passed out, having flown from Madrid the previous night and having been in Spain, Germany and Belgium in the previous week. And I thought it was only me that attempted such madness. That left me with the screening of ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’, which I watched for a while (the Argies take their foreign films with subtitles – another thing to like about them) until someone asked for the sound to be turned down. I didn’t object. I woke up as we pulled into Cordoba bang on time at 8am, and having made a date to meet Fernanda on Sunday (today), headed off to find somewhere to sleep some more.
Cordoba is the second largest city, with 1.5 million, 10 per cent of whom are students at its nine universities, but after BA it feels like a village. It also feels like South America, unlike BA which was more or less like Europe. There are squat eighteenth century churches with peeling pink paint and rotund belfries decorated with cornices and scrolls, and low ceilinged cantinas with whitewashed walls. There’s much less of the beaux arts and art nouveau, and more of the neoclassical and mission architecture. It also feels quite a bit safer.The city was capital of Argentina before BA came along, and boasts the oldest university on the continent, dating from 1621.
Yesterday I took a ride out to Alta Gracia, about an hour away, the boyhood home of Che Guevara. You can visit the house where he lived, more or less, from 1932 to 1943. It’s a modest but pleasant bungalow in a tranquil little town on the edge of the sierras, and I can’t imagine any place less conducive to revolutionary fervour, although the museum helpfully mentions that there were rich and poor in the town, and that the young Ernesto sometimes liked to play cowboys and Indians with his friends. There wasn’t a whole lot more by way of explanation, but there were a few telling details. The Guevaras moved there when he was four in the hope that it would be good for his pronounced asthma. It was – he apparently was a keen golfer and football player, and when he finished school went on a 4000km bike ride around Argentina. But in a video one of his schoolfriends theorises that Che’s asthma was brought on by his parents’ arguments, and there is a sad reminiscence by the family’s maid, who remembers sitting up with Che during his attacks - he read Zola and Verne and Anatole France as he struggled to breathe - because his parents slept all day and were out all night. They lived in four different places in Alta Gracia before moving to Cordoba, after which Che went to BA to study medicine. And then he started on his travels, which more or less never stopped. There is one photo of him before he left Cuba, sitting on a sofa in his fatigues with his wife and four young children, looking thoroughly miserable. Shortly afterwards he headed for the Congo in a ridiculous disguise to serve as a military adviser. The man clearly could not abide domesticity. There is another photo where he looks much happier, lying in a camp bed, smoking a cigar and reading Goethe. By the time he was killed in a schoolhouse in Bolivia (there is a tile from its roof in the museum), I suspect he had come to the end of the line. Like Michael Jackson, there was only one place left for him to go. Other than this there is another museum, the house of the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla (never heard of him but apparently he’s significant) and a World Heritage-listed Jesuit estancia which was a perfectly kempt little idyll of clipped lawns, scrubbed cells and period furniture. Not bad for a town of 10,000.
I won’t go on about Buenos Aires too much as that seems long ago now. But a couple of highlights included a visit to the annual agricultural show at La Rural, which included several of the biggest bulls I’ve ever seen, which were entirely white and amenable to being paraded around the showground. I noticed that the press photographers had all been given red vests, whether in evil intent or not I do not know. One day I went out to Tigre with Ana, the owner of the guest house, and Monika and Katerina, the Austro-German students who were also staying there, a very mature and thoughtful pair. Tigre is a town on the edge of a Delta on the River Plata, and we roared out there in Ana’s ancient VW wagon. I commented on the number of old Ford Falcons on the road, and she told me that it was a popular model until it was used as a police car during the dictatorship. The police used to drive round with dissidents in the boot until they suffocated. Urgh. Tigre is beautiful – there are hundreds of forested islands in the delta, which is named after some kind of small puma which used to frequent it. We didn’t take a boat trip, there wasn’t time, but wandered around the town, which has a feeling of moneyed leisure about it. There is a profusion of rowing clubs, including an English one which looks like an Oxford college, and an Italian one which looks like a Venice palazzo. Everyone’s favourite, though, was the art museum, which has been converted from an early twentieth century casino, built in the style of a chateau.
I’ve just noticed that I’m sitting here in my t-shirt, which is a good sign. Cordoba is sunny and pleasant during the day, and chilly at night. It doesn’t have the piercing wind of BA,which comes straight off the river. My next stop is Salta, close to a thousand kilometres north of here, which is supposed to be warm in spite of being in the foothills of the Andes.
A quick word on the restaurants here before I go. The waitrons believe in the back-to-basics school of service. The first thing they will ask you after you’ve sat down is what you want. If you ask for a menu one will be produced, but it seems to be regarded as a bit of an unnecessary affectation. Last night I asked for a beer and was not asked what kind – a Budweiser was produced and it was up to me to insist on something local. When it comes to paying the bill, you just ask the waiter how much and they will tell you. You hand over the cash and they hand over the change. Finito. Not that any of this bothers me in the slightest, in fact I appreciate the minimum of time wasting on the way to delivering the meal, which is inevitably wonderful. If in doubt (which I usually am when presented with the menu) I order a steak. This is produced, unadorned, on a plate which is usually barely big enough to contain it. No garnish, no sauce, nothing. The meat is always so tender and so perfectly seasoned and marinated that it doesn’t need anything – not even salt and pepper. The other staple is pizza, which is a little thick and cheese-laden for my taste, but I force it down. I had one the other night which I could barely finish (though finish it I did) for four dollars. And then there are the cake shops… but enough.
Cordoba is the second largest city, with 1.5 million, 10 per cent of whom are students at its nine universities, but after BA it feels like a village. It also feels like South America, unlike BA which was more or less like Europe. There are squat eighteenth century churches with peeling pink paint and rotund belfries decorated with cornices and scrolls, and low ceilinged cantinas with whitewashed walls. There’s much less of the beaux arts and art nouveau, and more of the neoclassical and mission architecture. It also feels quite a bit safer.The city was capital of Argentina before BA came along, and boasts the oldest university on the continent, dating from 1621.
Yesterday I took a ride out to Alta Gracia, about an hour away, the boyhood home of Che Guevara. You can visit the house where he lived, more or less, from 1932 to 1943. It’s a modest but pleasant bungalow in a tranquil little town on the edge of the sierras, and I can’t imagine any place less conducive to revolutionary fervour, although the museum helpfully mentions that there were rich and poor in the town, and that the young Ernesto sometimes liked to play cowboys and Indians with his friends. There wasn’t a whole lot more by way of explanation, but there were a few telling details. The Guevaras moved there when he was four in the hope that it would be good for his pronounced asthma. It was – he apparently was a keen golfer and football player, and when he finished school went on a 4000km bike ride around Argentina. But in a video one of his schoolfriends theorises that Che’s asthma was brought on by his parents’ arguments, and there is a sad reminiscence by the family’s maid, who remembers sitting up with Che during his attacks - he read Zola and Verne and Anatole France as he struggled to breathe - because his parents slept all day and were out all night. They lived in four different places in Alta Gracia before moving to Cordoba, after which Che went to BA to study medicine. And then he started on his travels, which more or less never stopped. There is one photo of him before he left Cuba, sitting on a sofa in his fatigues with his wife and four young children, looking thoroughly miserable. Shortly afterwards he headed for the Congo in a ridiculous disguise to serve as a military adviser. The man clearly could not abide domesticity. There is another photo where he looks much happier, lying in a camp bed, smoking a cigar and reading Goethe. By the time he was killed in a schoolhouse in Bolivia (there is a tile from its roof in the museum), I suspect he had come to the end of the line. Like Michael Jackson, there was only one place left for him to go. Other than this there is another museum, the house of the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla (never heard of him but apparently he’s significant) and a World Heritage-listed Jesuit estancia which was a perfectly kempt little idyll of clipped lawns, scrubbed cells and period furniture. Not bad for a town of 10,000.
I won’t go on about Buenos Aires too much as that seems long ago now. But a couple of highlights included a visit to the annual agricultural show at La Rural, which included several of the biggest bulls I’ve ever seen, which were entirely white and amenable to being paraded around the showground. I noticed that the press photographers had all been given red vests, whether in evil intent or not I do not know. One day I went out to Tigre with Ana, the owner of the guest house, and Monika and Katerina, the Austro-German students who were also staying there, a very mature and thoughtful pair. Tigre is a town on the edge of a Delta on the River Plata, and we roared out there in Ana’s ancient VW wagon. I commented on the number of old Ford Falcons on the road, and she told me that it was a popular model until it was used as a police car during the dictatorship. The police used to drive round with dissidents in the boot until they suffocated. Urgh. Tigre is beautiful – there are hundreds of forested islands in the delta, which is named after some kind of small puma which used to frequent it. We didn’t take a boat trip, there wasn’t time, but wandered around the town, which has a feeling of moneyed leisure about it. There is a profusion of rowing clubs, including an English one which looks like an Oxford college, and an Italian one which looks like a Venice palazzo. Everyone’s favourite, though, was the art museum, which has been converted from an early twentieth century casino, built in the style of a chateau.
I’ve just noticed that I’m sitting here in my t-shirt, which is a good sign. Cordoba is sunny and pleasant during the day, and chilly at night. It doesn’t have the piercing wind of BA,which comes straight off the river. My next stop is Salta, close to a thousand kilometres north of here, which is supposed to be warm in spite of being in the foothills of the Andes.
A quick word on the restaurants here before I go. The waitrons believe in the back-to-basics school of service. The first thing they will ask you after you’ve sat down is what you want. If you ask for a menu one will be produced, but it seems to be regarded as a bit of an unnecessary affectation. Last night I asked for a beer and was not asked what kind – a Budweiser was produced and it was up to me to insist on something local. When it comes to paying the bill, you just ask the waiter how much and they will tell you. You hand over the cash and they hand over the change. Finito. Not that any of this bothers me in the slightest, in fact I appreciate the minimum of time wasting on the way to delivering the meal, which is inevitably wonderful. If in doubt (which I usually am when presented with the menu) I order a steak. This is produced, unadorned, on a plate which is usually barely big enough to contain it. No garnish, no sauce, nothing. The meat is always so tender and so perfectly seasoned and marinated that it doesn’t need anything – not even salt and pepper. The other staple is pizza, which is a little thick and cheese-laden for my taste, but I force it down. I had one the other night which I could barely finish (though finish it I did) for four dollars. And then there are the cake shops… but enough.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
The Sunday market at Mataderos is fantastic. It takes place at a T-junction in an outer suburb of Buenos Aires, beneath a town hall of pink stucco with white borders, arched galleries on the ground floor and high shuttered windows above them, surmounted by a grand clock tower. A stage had been set up beneath the aicazor trees and a band was playing. The first thing I saw was an older couple dressed in gaucho clothes – pantaloons, hat, a black jacket and belt studded with coins for him, a red shawl black cravat for her, performing a handkerchief dance, hooking hands, twirling, then breaking off to twirl some more while waving their hankies in the air. I thought it was some kind of performance for tourists until the song ended and they just wandered off. More couples, mostly in everyday clothes, got up to dance at the next number, and so it went on, more or less, for the next eight hours. At twelve there was a ceremonial raising of the flag and an impassioned singing of the national anthem by a moustachioed MC, himself in full gaucho regalia with a patterned caramel-and-white blanket thrown across his shoulders. About half the crowd sang along. They are very proud of their country.
A dance troupe took the stage and I looked at the stalls. They ran for half a kilometre along the top bar of the T. You could buy all the ponchos and woollen hats you could possibly want, or take a ride on a miniature pony or llama, if you were under ten. Handmade knives and hand tooled leather were in plentiful supply. But the thing that really interested me was the food. And the drink. You could buy homemade wine, branded and labelled, for 7 pesos (that’s about $2) or grapa for nine. There was homemade cheese, homemade chocolate, homemade chorizo, and an abundance of flavoured ‘licores’, limonchello, orange, mandarin, chocolate, white chocolate, aniseed – even one labelled ‘baileys’. I bought a couple of bottles for 18 pesos, one of which seems to have disappeared already. There was a stall selling cubanitos – rolled up waffles coated in chocolate and filled with sweet cream – and a two or three selling toffee apples. Not just toffee apples, but toffee figs, toffee strawberries and, my favourite, a stick with an assortment of toffee banana, kiwi, pear, strawberry and mandarin, dipped in popcorn. Exquisito. Over it all, sweet and heavy, hung the smell of grilling meat.
A troupe of gaucho dancers had taken the stage. They barrelled back and forth in a flurry of petticoats and purple bombachas, whirling and stamping and flinging their arms in the air. The men were whiskered and the women were raven haired, and they looked like they loved what they were doing. Each of the men came out to perform a solo, cocking their legs in and out and kicking high in the air while bouncing up and down and performing extravagant leaps. There was a stool dance, and a wine bottle dance, and the troupe leaders did a romantic solo, and then the show was over. It was time for the musicians to take the stage again, with multiple guitars and drums. The dancing in the street took up where it had left off.
I made my way past parrillas where families were tucking into plates heaped with ribs, blood sausage, chicken and steak, brought to their tables on mini-grills, and stalls selling empanadas and tamales where the queues were thirty deep. At the end of the market, sand had been sprinkled along a hundred-metre stretch of road, with a rectangular steel frame at the far end. A family of gauchos was holding a riding display. Wheeling their horses, they tore off down the street in practice runs, until the contest started: a small ring, slightly larger than one you’d put on your finger, was suspended from the frame. The trick was to catch the ring on a short metal rod as you galloped through as fast as you could. There were ten or so riders, and they managed the trick about eight per cent of the time. The youngest looked about ten, while the eldest were probably pushing fifty. They were dressed in black waistcoats and bombachas - or fawn in one case - with the occasional red neckerchief or billowing white shirt. They had aquiline faces and long black boots tucked into large discus-like stirrups, and they looked like they’d been born on horses.
They packed after a couple of hours of energetic galloping back and forth, and it was time to head back to the stalls and buy some produce. The dancers were taking up most of the square as they reeled and grasped shoulders and raised arms in a final all-out fling. As the music ended, small groups gathered beneath the arches of the town hall to strum guitars or blow on pan pipes. Men and women of all ages joined in, just as with the dance. I made my way home, after eight hours of non-stop entertainment.
The weather has improved, and I take back my earlier comments about it. It’s been pretty pleasant since the initial days of freezing winds – which is a relief. Buenos Aires is incomparable. What a city. We’ve been to a tango place – in the Armenian Club, of all places – and today it’s the agricultural show and if we can manage it the theatre of ‘percussion’ – apparently it’s a theatre run by blind people, where the audience is blindfolded and the performance is in sounds, smells, and sensations. Should be interesting.
If you think it´s been a while between blogs, you might be right. Argentina is a little, well, internet challenged, at least in my experience. Tonight´s post is the result of several days frustration. I hope it´s appreciated. I´m not sure when the next one will appear, as I head for the interior on Thursday.
A dance troupe took the stage and I looked at the stalls. They ran for half a kilometre along the top bar of the T. You could buy all the ponchos and woollen hats you could possibly want, or take a ride on a miniature pony or llama, if you were under ten. Handmade knives and hand tooled leather were in plentiful supply. But the thing that really interested me was the food. And the drink. You could buy homemade wine, branded and labelled, for 7 pesos (that’s about $2) or grapa for nine. There was homemade cheese, homemade chocolate, homemade chorizo, and an abundance of flavoured ‘licores’, limonchello, orange, mandarin, chocolate, white chocolate, aniseed – even one labelled ‘baileys’. I bought a couple of bottles for 18 pesos, one of which seems to have disappeared already. There was a stall selling cubanitos – rolled up waffles coated in chocolate and filled with sweet cream – and a two or three selling toffee apples. Not just toffee apples, but toffee figs, toffee strawberries and, my favourite, a stick with an assortment of toffee banana, kiwi, pear, strawberry and mandarin, dipped in popcorn. Exquisito. Over it all, sweet and heavy, hung the smell of grilling meat.
A troupe of gaucho dancers had taken the stage. They barrelled back and forth in a flurry of petticoats and purple bombachas, whirling and stamping and flinging their arms in the air. The men were whiskered and the women were raven haired, and they looked like they loved what they were doing. Each of the men came out to perform a solo, cocking their legs in and out and kicking high in the air while bouncing up and down and performing extravagant leaps. There was a stool dance, and a wine bottle dance, and the troupe leaders did a romantic solo, and then the show was over. It was time for the musicians to take the stage again, with multiple guitars and drums. The dancing in the street took up where it had left off.
I made my way past parrillas where families were tucking into plates heaped with ribs, blood sausage, chicken and steak, brought to their tables on mini-grills, and stalls selling empanadas and tamales where the queues were thirty deep. At the end of the market, sand had been sprinkled along a hundred-metre stretch of road, with a rectangular steel frame at the far end. A family of gauchos was holding a riding display. Wheeling their horses, they tore off down the street in practice runs, until the contest started: a small ring, slightly larger than one you’d put on your finger, was suspended from the frame. The trick was to catch the ring on a short metal rod as you galloped through as fast as you could. There were ten or so riders, and they managed the trick about eight per cent of the time. The youngest looked about ten, while the eldest were probably pushing fifty. They were dressed in black waistcoats and bombachas - or fawn in one case - with the occasional red neckerchief or billowing white shirt. They had aquiline faces and long black boots tucked into large discus-like stirrups, and they looked like they’d been born on horses.
They packed after a couple of hours of energetic galloping back and forth, and it was time to head back to the stalls and buy some produce. The dancers were taking up most of the square as they reeled and grasped shoulders and raised arms in a final all-out fling. As the music ended, small groups gathered beneath the arches of the town hall to strum guitars or blow on pan pipes. Men and women of all ages joined in, just as with the dance. I made my way home, after eight hours of non-stop entertainment.
The weather has improved, and I take back my earlier comments about it. It’s been pretty pleasant since the initial days of freezing winds – which is a relief. Buenos Aires is incomparable. What a city. We’ve been to a tango place – in the Armenian Club, of all places – and today it’s the agricultural show and if we can manage it the theatre of ‘percussion’ – apparently it’s a theatre run by blind people, where the audience is blindfolded and the performance is in sounds, smells, and sensations. Should be interesting.
If you think it´s been a while between blogs, you might be right. Argentina is a little, well, internet challenged, at least in my experience. Tonight´s post is the result of several days frustration. I hope it´s appreciated. I´m not sure when the next one will appear, as I head for the interior on Thursday.
Friday, July 24, 2009
advenimiento:arribal
Buenos Aires is FREEZING. An arctic wind slices down the avenidas, and there is no escaping it. The locals tell me that this is highly unusual, and some have even apologised for it. But as they’re all bundled up as if they’re heading for Tierra del Fuego (which they might be, for all I know – it can’t be any colder than here), I’m not so convinced. They don’t seem to stamp and curse the way, say, a Sydneysider would if they were suddenly and against their will dropped into Melbourne at this time of year, and I can tell you, Melbourne is looking distinctly balmy. Apparently there is some kind of weather event moving up from Antarctica to explain it, and parts of Argentina are experiencing their first-ever snowfall, including Jujuy and Salta, places which in my innocence I had been thinking of visiting.
The first hint, not a subtle one, came from the flight deck as we approached BA. Even in my sleep deprived state I registered that the captain was telling us the temperature was four degrees and winds were gusting at 30 to 40 knots. He then proved the point by plunging into a bank of cloud which eventually revealed a sprawling city huddled amid dusky greyness. I did manage to notice a couple of vast estates fronted by mansions straight out of a Hollywood haunted house set before the plane began to buck and pitch like a bronco at a rodeo, but with a practice run and a few energetic thrusts from the engines the pilot managed to bring us down. By the time I’d emerged from the warmth of the plane into the chill of the arrivals hall it was raining. Unable to raise my guesthouse on the phone to tell them I was late (there was a complicated arrangement about letting me in), I began to have that ‘What am I doing here?’ feeling, so familiar from other trips when you realise you’ve just marooned yourself in a strange city in an alien continent, you don’t know a word of the language and basically you haven’t a clue.
It was a bit of an anticlimax after a trouble-free and sometimes spectacular flight. Qantas took me as far as Auckland, which was where I switched to LAN, a definite step up. The Qantas plane was tatty with an abysmal entertainment system. LAN was fabulous, a new and sparkling clean plane, lovely staff (those inflight announcements are so much more palatable when delivered with a dancing Spanish lilt), potable wine (you’d hope so, coming from a Chilean airline, but then there are other wine-producing countries which don’t serve decent wines on their airlines – let me see if I can think of an example) and a swanky touch-screen entertainment system. The sun sank over the NZ coast and I sat back for a look at Gran Torino. That done, I thought I’d take a look at a doco, and for some reason I wasn’t surprised to find An Inconvenient Truth. How come this film is always screening on planes? I’d have thought it was an especially inconvenient truth for the airlines – speaking of which, neither Flight Centre nor LAN offered me the chance of a carbon offset. I suppose I could have asked, but who’s going to remember when they’re carried away with the excitement of booking a flight to Argentina?
Anyway, perhaps they have our interests at heart, figuring Al Gore is a surefire way to get the punters to sleep, and it worked on me. Ten minutes in and I was away, and I calculate I slept for the next six hours, because soon after I woke up I caught sight of the coast of Chile, and not long after that we were descending. Santiago airport must have one of the most spectacular approaches in the world. A thin golden line separates crumpled hills from a luminescent ocean, then you descend past tourquoise lakes and a winding river as you notice that the massive snow-covered flanks of the Andes are staring you in the face. I’d thought Auckland airport had a pretty good situation, with a shimmering bay and velvet hills, the sun filtering through puckered clouds as Jersey cows munched contentedly by picturesquely rustic farm sheds, but Santiago is world class. It’s not a bad airport either. I was bleary by this point though. There’s something about flying against the sun that just isn’t natural (as if flying with it is), and flying across the date line even more so. My itinerary had said depart Melbourne at 6am on 22 July, and arrive Buenos Aires at 5pm on 22 July. Sounds quite civilised, until you realise that arrival is actually the next day, even if it’s the same date. There’s an entire night in between, although a short one. And although we seemed to sight Chile just after dawn, it was already noon when we landed. The flight from Chile to BA was also spectacular, as the first thing you do is pole vault over the Andes, although the range is as narrow as it is high, and no sooner had we cleared the top of it than it was behind us. From there on Argentina looked pretty much like dust, until it turned into freezing rain before my very eyes.
The apprehension on arrival turned to relief when I reached the guesthouse and was welcomed warmly by Anastasia, the owner. It’s on the top floor of a seven story beaux arts apartment block in a part of town, apparently, where no tourists stay. My room has a sloping roof with wooden rafters, and a view over the neighbourhood, wi-fi and reverse cycle heating. I blog from it now. There are just four rooms, and at the moment it’s me, Anastasia and two blonde German students.
The Argentinians are just wonderful. Hugely friendly and helpful, and even more so when they realise this poor gringo has no Spanish. Quite a few speak some English, and some of them speak it really well. My Spanish so far consists of throwing together French and English words – and the few Italian ones that I know, usually relating to food – with a bit of an accent, and sometimes it actually works. Spanish for ‘adaptor’, for example, is ‘adaptore’, or something similar. (I thought I’d been so clever, bringing all my old Indian power cables. Turns out Argentina, uniquely in the world as far as I know, uses Aussie-style plugs. I’d have known this if I’d bothered to look at my guidebook before leaving, but this is something I’m constitutionally incapable of doing.)
Speaking of language, and I think I’ll call it a night after this, let me explore for a moment the wonderfully weird world of phrasebooks. What is it with these things? I suppose it’s the challenge of cramming an entire language into fifty or so mini-pages of useful sentences, but honestly, how useful is most of what you find in them. I remember a Hindi phrasebook I once owned which told you how to say ‘This bitch is on heat’, and had a whole section devoted to chandlering (or whatever the word is) a sailing ship. I can’t offer anything quite as spectacular from here, but I did come across a minor classic called ‘Learning Spanish in 9 Days’ at the local bookshop. Why, I wondered, had they nominated 9 days, seeing as the book seemed to follow no system, numeric or otherwise. They might as well have said seven days, which we could then all schedule for, or on the other hand why not give it to us the way we all want to hear it, ‘Learn Spanish in 9 Minutes’? Possibly, I suspect, because that title has already been used by some titan of the industry such as Berlitz. The very first entry, possibly in deference to the difference between Anglo and Latin cultures, was ‘At last!’, exclamation mark original. Flicking through it, I came across such indispensable constructions as ‘We are going to visit the citadel of King Peter, which dominates the town.’ There was an entire section titled ‘Bathroom’ in which such jewels as ‘She is washing her hair before going out’ were to be found. My favourite from here was the useful ‘You should brush your teeth’, and not far from along I discovered ‘You’re so cute!’. Under the section title ‘Business’ I found ‘We are planning to raise our turnover to $50 million this year’ and ‘We need a conference room with the latest technology’. I might try that one out on Anastasia in the morning. In fact I might use them both.
The first hint, not a subtle one, came from the flight deck as we approached BA. Even in my sleep deprived state I registered that the captain was telling us the temperature was four degrees and winds were gusting at 30 to 40 knots. He then proved the point by plunging into a bank of cloud which eventually revealed a sprawling city huddled amid dusky greyness. I did manage to notice a couple of vast estates fronted by mansions straight out of a Hollywood haunted house set before the plane began to buck and pitch like a bronco at a rodeo, but with a practice run and a few energetic thrusts from the engines the pilot managed to bring us down. By the time I’d emerged from the warmth of the plane into the chill of the arrivals hall it was raining. Unable to raise my guesthouse on the phone to tell them I was late (there was a complicated arrangement about letting me in), I began to have that ‘What am I doing here?’ feeling, so familiar from other trips when you realise you’ve just marooned yourself in a strange city in an alien continent, you don’t know a word of the language and basically you haven’t a clue.
It was a bit of an anticlimax after a trouble-free and sometimes spectacular flight. Qantas took me as far as Auckland, which was where I switched to LAN, a definite step up. The Qantas plane was tatty with an abysmal entertainment system. LAN was fabulous, a new and sparkling clean plane, lovely staff (those inflight announcements are so much more palatable when delivered with a dancing Spanish lilt), potable wine (you’d hope so, coming from a Chilean airline, but then there are other wine-producing countries which don’t serve decent wines on their airlines – let me see if I can think of an example) and a swanky touch-screen entertainment system. The sun sank over the NZ coast and I sat back for a look at Gran Torino. That done, I thought I’d take a look at a doco, and for some reason I wasn’t surprised to find An Inconvenient Truth. How come this film is always screening on planes? I’d have thought it was an especially inconvenient truth for the airlines – speaking of which, neither Flight Centre nor LAN offered me the chance of a carbon offset. I suppose I could have asked, but who’s going to remember when they’re carried away with the excitement of booking a flight to Argentina?
Anyway, perhaps they have our interests at heart, figuring Al Gore is a surefire way to get the punters to sleep, and it worked on me. Ten minutes in and I was away, and I calculate I slept for the next six hours, because soon after I woke up I caught sight of the coast of Chile, and not long after that we were descending. Santiago airport must have one of the most spectacular approaches in the world. A thin golden line separates crumpled hills from a luminescent ocean, then you descend past tourquoise lakes and a winding river as you notice that the massive snow-covered flanks of the Andes are staring you in the face. I’d thought Auckland airport had a pretty good situation, with a shimmering bay and velvet hills, the sun filtering through puckered clouds as Jersey cows munched contentedly by picturesquely rustic farm sheds, but Santiago is world class. It’s not a bad airport either. I was bleary by this point though. There’s something about flying against the sun that just isn’t natural (as if flying with it is), and flying across the date line even more so. My itinerary had said depart Melbourne at 6am on 22 July, and arrive Buenos Aires at 5pm on 22 July. Sounds quite civilised, until you realise that arrival is actually the next day, even if it’s the same date. There’s an entire night in between, although a short one. And although we seemed to sight Chile just after dawn, it was already noon when we landed. The flight from Chile to BA was also spectacular, as the first thing you do is pole vault over the Andes, although the range is as narrow as it is high, and no sooner had we cleared the top of it than it was behind us. From there on Argentina looked pretty much like dust, until it turned into freezing rain before my very eyes.
The apprehension on arrival turned to relief when I reached the guesthouse and was welcomed warmly by Anastasia, the owner. It’s on the top floor of a seven story beaux arts apartment block in a part of town, apparently, where no tourists stay. My room has a sloping roof with wooden rafters, and a view over the neighbourhood, wi-fi and reverse cycle heating. I blog from it now. There are just four rooms, and at the moment it’s me, Anastasia and two blonde German students.
The Argentinians are just wonderful. Hugely friendly and helpful, and even more so when they realise this poor gringo has no Spanish. Quite a few speak some English, and some of them speak it really well. My Spanish so far consists of throwing together French and English words – and the few Italian ones that I know, usually relating to food – with a bit of an accent, and sometimes it actually works. Spanish for ‘adaptor’, for example, is ‘adaptore’, or something similar. (I thought I’d been so clever, bringing all my old Indian power cables. Turns out Argentina, uniquely in the world as far as I know, uses Aussie-style plugs. I’d have known this if I’d bothered to look at my guidebook before leaving, but this is something I’m constitutionally incapable of doing.)
Speaking of language, and I think I’ll call it a night after this, let me explore for a moment the wonderfully weird world of phrasebooks. What is it with these things? I suppose it’s the challenge of cramming an entire language into fifty or so mini-pages of useful sentences, but honestly, how useful is most of what you find in them. I remember a Hindi phrasebook I once owned which told you how to say ‘This bitch is on heat’, and had a whole section devoted to chandlering (or whatever the word is) a sailing ship. I can’t offer anything quite as spectacular from here, but I did come across a minor classic called ‘Learning Spanish in 9 Days’ at the local bookshop. Why, I wondered, had they nominated 9 days, seeing as the book seemed to follow no system, numeric or otherwise. They might as well have said seven days, which we could then all schedule for, or on the other hand why not give it to us the way we all want to hear it, ‘Learn Spanish in 9 Minutes’? Possibly, I suspect, because that title has already been used by some titan of the industry such as Berlitz. The very first entry, possibly in deference to the difference between Anglo and Latin cultures, was ‘At last!’, exclamation mark original. Flicking through it, I came across such indispensable constructions as ‘We are going to visit the citadel of King Peter, which dominates the town.’ There was an entire section titled ‘Bathroom’ in which such jewels as ‘She is washing her hair before going out’ were to be found. My favourite from here was the useful ‘You should brush your teeth’, and not far from along I discovered ‘You’re so cute!’. Under the section title ‘Business’ I found ‘We are planning to raise our turnover to $50 million this year’ and ‘We need a conference room with the latest technology’. I might try that one out on Anastasia in the morning. In fact I might use them both.
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