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.