 |
 |
|
»Home |  |
»Archives | |
»Bios | |
»Contact | |
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
Argentina Top to Bottom, Side to Side
Story & Photos by Tony Tedeschi
I am seated at a table at Primera Plana, a small outdoor café, just beneath and beyond the overpass for Avenida Nueve de Julio, a tree-lined thoroughfare through the heart of Buenos Aires, that lays claim to being the broadest boulevard in the world, with more lanes than the Champs Elysée. I am having a ham and cheese sandwich and a cold Quilmes beer. It is one of those perfect, early autumn days, although late March south of the Equator: mid-70s, low humidity, a slight breeze rippling the umbrella above my table, emblazoned in red-white-and-blue Pepsi logos.
The foregoing observations provide me a degree of cover. I had been at a complete loss how to begin to describe my hell-bent-for-leather, 10-day visit to Argentina. On one of my trips to Honduras, the bird-fanciers there told me when they couldn't decide which of the many amazingly shaped and colored species to choose as the national bird, they went with the clay-colored robin as a cop-out. So, the ham and cheese with the beer worked for me, really. They were a level of perfection applied to the seemingly ordinary that allowed me to catch my breath for a few moments, something I had little time to do during a top-to-bottom, side-to-side exploration of this remarkable country. Argentina is one of the great travel values in the world today. Possessed of one of the most attractive cities in South America, Buenos Aires, and some of the world's most spectacular natural attractions, the country's devalued peso places so much of what the country has to offer within any reasonable travel budget as to render it all but irresistible. The sandwich and the beer cost $2.30 U.S., including the tip. Extrapolate up from there and you'll have some idea of what I'm talking about. The travel value, however, is simply a bonus. Argentina merits your attention irrespective of price. A spin about the capital city is a joy simply for the physical beauty of the place. Architectural influences of the Spanish, Italian and French give the city its distinctively European feel, particularly along the main thoroughfares. On the side streets, the feel of neighborhoods prevails: business people dressed to the nines heading for their daily assignments, school children in uniforms filing in for class or racing into the yards for play.
In La Boca district by the Río de la Plata, I stroll down a cobbled street, adorned with stands and static displays where artists sell uncommonly well-executed paintings of city life at uncommonly low prices. On a street corner a song-and-dance troupe induces onlookers to take a step or two of the tango in the arms of the female singer. In the shopping malls, it is a bargain-hunter's dream world. You can shop for high fashions, leather goods, jewelry, the distinctive silver maté cups in which Argentines sip their herbal teas, all at prices that are almost embarrassingly low.
Since my visit to the city is a brief one on the front end of the journey to the far reaches of the realm, I have to settle for a canned show for a demonstration of the tango. My driver turns into a parking lot on the Río de la Plata, striated in rows of street lights hung with decorative lamps in the shape of playing cards. The evening's destination is a three-storey gambling barge called, appropriately, "Casino." I join a group climbing to the very top level, where we pass through rows and rows of players, dropping chips all over the various tables, to the piped-in sounds of decades-old rock 'n roll. We are led to a dining room separated from the gamblers only by a head-high glass partition. For some inexplicable reason this quasi-barrier seems to have closed out the canned music. We dine on a pastry wrap of quail and quail eggs, skewers of shrimp and vegetables, then tiramisu and rich Latin American coffee. Given the garishness of the surroundings, the meal is somewhat of a pleasant surprise. We had been assured that there would be a tango show and, sure enough, a young man walks to the center of the stage, holding a mic, which I find encouraging. Someone cranks up our element of canned music and the man with the mic sings a trio of Latin torch songs. He is followed by a couple that whirls through Argentina's signature dance: he very much a macho man; she a leggy showgirl in a revealing, low-cut outfit. There is a lot more leg-action to the tango than I'd anticipated, all of it directed by the hand he presses to her back. The couple is followed by an aging blonde with a voice still possessed of a pleasant timbre. She croons smoky-voiced lounge songs, while flirting with me and another gentleman. The entire show is done to the canned music, a kind of karaoke for professionals. It is the night, in fact the hour, when George Bush's get-out-of-town ultimatum to Saddam Hussein runs out. The overly wide-mouthed smile of the ashen-haired chanteuse seems frozen in place as I check my watch and find that zero hour is struck. The karaoke machine glides seamlessly into its next number. I'm thinking something by Pink Floyd would be appropriate. The singer offers up a lovely rendition of "As Time Goes By," in English. As the song says, I will, in fact "remember this," but "the same old story" has morphed into something truly Fellini-esque.
I am on a plane, very early the next morning, heading north to much warmer climes. Sleep is not something that factors well with Argentina. Nonetheless, Iguazú is an eye-opener. I have seen South America's other most highly regarded waterfalls: Angel Falls in Venezuela, the world's tallest; Kaieteur in Guyana, the falls with the greatest uninterrupted cascade. Neither is as dramatic as Iguazú in Argentina's northeastern Misiones Province, a finger of territory that sticks up into Brazil to the east and Paraguay to the west. Water from the Ríos Paraná and Iguazú, swollen by subtropical rains, feed more than 275 individual cascades, including a V-shaped cleft that funnels the water into a tumultuous torrent of such drama the locals have named it "The Devil's Throat."
Walkways lead to the very lip of one broad expanse of the falls where you get a vertigo-like sense of the suction pull of the cataract, clouds of mist rising from the force of the water against the cliff faces. A shift in the wind will have you soaked in an instant. On the way in, you will be told, expect to get wet. If you revel in the cool blast of the mist, you'll love the boat ride below the falls. These excursions shoot you right up to the base of various parts of the falls and will insure you are soaked to the skin. It's really quite exhilarating. And, on a sunny day, the ever-present rainbows dancing about the mists add a Disneyesque quality to the experience. I was lucky enough to be in the area on a night of a full moon, so I returned to the falls for that experience. The silvery glow from the brightest of moons created a moonbow effect about the upper rim of the falls that was a truly memorable experience. Before Iguazú was declared a national park it was inhabited by Guarani aboriginals, who were relocated into communities just outside the park. Insistent upon maintaining their culture, within the larger, far-more-modern communities that surround them, the Guarani live now in shabby villages with little electricity or running water in homes they fashion from the wood and palm thatch of the surrounding forests. The government provides a school, where teachers walk the fine line between the two cultures. I visit a village called Fortin Mborore. My Guarani guide, Santiago, speaks in a very literate Spanish, apparent even to me, whose Spanish is wanting, even before a translator turned what Santiago says into English. Most interesting to me, is Santiago's discourse on Guarani religious beliefs.
"After God created the world," he relates through the translator, "the first life he created was Maino I, the hummingbird, a creature that is comfortable in, and extremely adapted to, its environment."
Hummingbird feathers play a prominent role in the village's religious ceremonies, which occur every night at a public gathering in a small, open-sided, thatch-roofed church. "When you go to the disco, you are tired the next day," Santiago says. "We are fresh and ready to meet the day." My send-off is a lovely chorale session with children of the village, including guitar, violin and drums. Patagonia, a place of near mythic reputation is my next stop. My flight lands mid-morning in the town of Trelew, an odd name for a Hispanic country unless you are unfamiliar with the fact that this part of Patagonian had been settled by Welch immigrants in the 1860s, drawn by a government land grant designed to encourage settlement in an otherwise forbidding region. The Welch, however, were familiar with harsh climate and knew how to raise sheep. Trelew is Welch for "town of Lewis," in deference to its founder of that name. Heading north along route 3, one of the southernmost sections of the Pan American Highway, we confront a Patagonian landscape of seemingly endless stretches of scrub-covered plains and hillocks fading into mountains on the west and dropping off dark-colored cliffs above rocky beaches in the east. The terrain is not unlike those great stretches of open territory in West Texas, dotted here and there with herds of sheep or wandering bands of guanaco, a relative of the llama. The topography is oddly hypnotic, having once been submerged, in many places revealing the millennial layers of its history, which I was told have been a boon to paleontologists. Whales court, conceive and calve in the waters off the Península Valdés here, sea lions colonize great stretches of the shoreline, Magellan penguins bob about the cliffs and ridges. (Penguin, I am told, is in fact a Welch word.) I only have time for lunch at a typical Patagonian restaurant, so the road trip there and back is an end in itself and it does provide some fascinating sightings: dozens of guanacos, males, females, juveniles; hairy (really) armadillos; huge, ostrich-like rheas in small groupings; a flock of burrowing parrots in bright green and yellow plumage; longtail meadowlarks flitting about stunted trees; hawks circling above; Chilean flamingos feeding on crustaceans in the shallow waters of Lago Salina Grande; Magellan penguins on the ridge right outside our restaurant.
Flying further south, I make a brief stop and take a quick tour of Ushuaia, a town that bills itself as "the end of the world," since it is the southernmost place before Antarctica, smack in the midst of Tierra del Fuego, where Magellan crossed from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Darwin cruised through the channel now named for his boat the Beagle. Here the southern rim of the Andes drops into the sea to create dramatic fjords; submerged until they rise again in Antarctica. Fall is already manifest here at the bottom of the planet, the deciduous trees solidly yellow or gold.
Some 50,000 residents call this stark place home, most induced to come by the factories the government helped build to attract a year-round population. Life here, however, has a distinct element of tentativeness. People build their homes on giant sleds so they can take the houses with them when they leave. Sunlight is part of the drama, 20 hours of it in the middle of summer, little more than six in mid-winter. If you are a golfer, there is a course you can play and that has got to be a conversation element back at the country club. I am on a chartered turboprop up to El Calafate, a town that is the gateway to the Argentine glacier region. The sky is a crystalline blue, layered in clouds, the spiked peaks of the southernmost Andes punching through in places. The Patagonian landscape pancakes into rust browns and dark, dark greens, dropping off limestone cliffs to scalloped, grey-sand beaches. The near-in waters are a silty brown, which dissolve into the dark blue of the frigid, off-shore waters. Anemic-looking watercourses spider the plains. Straight-edge lines of unpaved roads run off at angles that, from the air, seem heading nowhere that would account for shifts in their direction. No mountains or rivers that would account for an acute change of angle. Years ago, I would have found such a geography too dull to rate more than a glance up from the novel I am reading, but now it mesmerizes me. It truly does seem part of some grander design I attach to in glimpses, but the certainty that these revelatory moments come in uncertain bursts keeps me staring out the window.
The town of El Calafate was born in the 1930s of a need to establish a way station for sheepherders hauling wagonloads of raw wool from estancias in the north and east to be loaded aboard ships on the coast. The population plateaued at about 2,000 inhabitants until the 1980s. Then, word spread from tourists who had experienced the almost indescribable grandeur of the glaciers that had crept through the mountains, millennia past, carving out the cauldron that became the country's largest lake, Lago Argentino, before receding to the positions they hold today west of the great lake. Now a tourism growth industry has taken hold, tripling the town's size to 6,000, with new construction expanding the perimeter of the town in all directions radiating out from the lake to its north.
The chill of incipient winter in this far southern clime bites the air on a cloudy, drizzly day as we head west on the road out of town to pick up our cruiser to the Perito Moreno Glacier. The route skirts the foothills of mountains capped in snow throughout the year. Fields of grasses wave in the insistent winds: buff-colored, rust, grey-green, darker greens in the washes and ponds spotted about. With a sudden, albeit short-lived calm in the winds, the ponds reflect the drama of the snow-ridged peaks and the layered colors of the morning sky. Sheep forage about the grasslands. In the distance, wild horses gambol about. A hairy (yes hairy) armadillo darts across the road, its rippling hide almost illusionary on a beast known elsewhere for its tank-like armor. Andean condors circle the crest of the peaks, dipping out of the mist, then disappearing back in. A crested caracara preens on a dead branch of a scrubby pine, its keen eye scoping the grounds for small mammals. For a quarter century, excursions out to the glaciers, along the canals cut through mountain passes, north- and southwest of the Lago Argentino, have been run by a company called Fernandez Campbell, a name typical of amalgam of the Hispanic and Anglo immigrants that settled this region. Today the company runs a fleet of catamarans and large mono-hulls. We relax in comfortable armchairs during our cruise out on a big cat. Eats include finger sandwiches and sugary pastries, along with deep, rich Latin-American coffee. The water of the lake and the Canal de los Témpanos is an emollient of minerals, ground loose by the glaciers, creating a milky green, nearly opaque liquid. While the lake is said to be home to salmon, trout and perch, one of our party allows as how to catch one of them you'd have to hit the fish in the snout with the baited hook.
The first hint of the Perito Moreno Glacier is a white line between two dark brown points of land that V into the water ahead. As we draw nearer, the ship's approach seems to add height to the wall in front of us, until it towers some 80 meters above. Our guide, Maria Gabriela Garstein, informs us there is another 100 meters of ice wall below the water line.
The glacier is a magnificent natural construction of ice in shades of blue, the lightest color in broad sweeps across its face, with deeper blues in jagged crevices, all of it dusted here and there by recent snow squalls. Now and again, giant shards of ice drop into the water in explosive bursts. While the view from water-level is inspiring, it is only the appetizer for the magnificence of the glacier seen from man-made balconies on a ridge above and directly opposite. Here, you get a greater sense of the huge ice highway that has pushed its way through the mountains, stretching back as far as the eye can see. In 30 years of nature travel, I have seen nothing that quite measures up. The flat light of grey clouds, directly above, appears to nurse deeper blues from the great rifts in the wall. Layers of sunlight seem like white icing atop the far reaches of the ice floe. I find myself banging away with my camera, taking frame after frame of an image that alters subtly in the changing light patterns. Captain Leonardo Fernandez Campbell, one of the cruise company's owners, says less than 10% of the 50,000 people who visited the glaciers last year were American. I can't help but conclude that when word gets around, his indeed will be a growth industry. Before returning to Buenos Aires for a couple of days, I make a brief stop at San Carlos de Bariloche, a popular South American resort area for winter sports. This being summer's end, I take a quick tour the nearby village of Villa la Angostura and then a cruise across beautiful Lago Nahuel Huapi, part of a national park that, along with Iguazú, is the country's oldest. From a natural perspective, this is a place of great visual beauty, the lake a mirror for Andean peaks on a windless morning. Scrubby meadows yield to towering forests of cypress, pine and a red-trunked tree called arrayanes. Red deer roam the woods and trout populate the streams and ponds. Perhaps the antithesis of a week-long, nature-oriented experience in-country is a walk among the corridors of mausoleums in Ricoleta Cemetery, but a stop here is a must for any visit to Argentina. For here sits the tomb of the country's most famous personage. Ask who is the country's liberator and few will know of José de San Martín. But the second wife of a former president, Sra Eva Duarte de Perón . . . who has not heard of Evita? It's an eerie passage along narrow promenades, between tombs of military leaders, politicians, businessmen and society matrons to the tomb of this former entertainer who caught the eye of a rising politician, Juan Domingo de Perón. After one of the most celebrated, albeit brief, careers in recent world history, Evita died of cancer at the age of 33. So beloved is she of the downtrodden, "shirtless ones," whose cause she championed, freshly placed flowers adorn her tomb each day. It reminds me of my visit to the Louvre, where seeing the Mona Lisa was so much a requirement that signs direct you to it so you can take care of this must-visit in order to enjoy the rest of the museum. How could you visit Buenos Aires without a moment of reflection at Evita's tomb? So I sit, on a perfect day in late summer, my last day in Argentina, having a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a cold beer at a sidewalk café in Buenos Aires, musing on my whirlwind tour of Argentina and wondering where to begin the telling. Where to begin?
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ©2005 Natural Traveler. All rights reserved. Disclaimer. | Maintained by Zerojack |
