Advertisement
Published: February 3rd 2008
Edit Blog Post
In Punta del Este. An afternoon thunderstorm has dropped rain and the ubiquitous humidity onto this cluster of high rise hotels, condos and bling bling lining the sandy shores of Uruguay’s southeastern most point. I’m in an open air bar drinking piss beer and watching drips fall off of gaudy blue beach umbrellas onto vacant tables as people scuttle by on foot, bike, motorcycle. It will be hot and humid once again if the sun comes out, but for now this is heaven. The wind has shifted from the south in the last hour, which means we’ll be sailing tomorrow, thank god. We are all itchy to lift the sails. Since leaving Buenos Aires we’ve had a wind on our nose almost the entire way, making the diesel drone on and on when the slicing of the (newly painted) hull is the sound we crave.
Lightning and thunder. Memories of my 5 weeks alone in Patagonia and Buenos Aires. Argentina is a seductress who leaves you searching in vain for metaphors. She is the seventh note , carrying all the tension of the entire scale that is never resolved, never returned to the first. You are not the same
once you have experienced her incongruities of place and of people. Questions arise. Such incredible beauty, such heights of cultural expression, yet her buildings crumble. Highly educated, her governments continually waste the intelligence of her people with perpetual lip service and very little return. Even for a gringo, it can be very frustrating, but in Buenos, in Bariloche, in El Bolson they shrug, they light a cigarette and squint through the smoke to say that Argentina is a passion from which you cannot divorce the good from the bad. It is impossible not to admire the fierce pride Argentinians feel for their country, even if one sees how that pride hampers their simultaneous desire for Argentina to proceed as a 21st century power.
And in many ways I do not want the country to change. There still needs to be places in this world untouched by the notion that red meat is bad for you and you’d be better off eating quinoa and flax for the rest of your life (I love you California!!) Where barbque (parilla), cigarettes, and red wine flow freely every night and hamburgers come equipped with a fried egg and ham on top. I think
Wednesday Night Revelry
What can I say, BA knows how to party Buenos Aires single-handedly contributes at least 5% to the annual revenue of Phillip Morris, but what is tango if not seen through a haze of smoke.
I felt most at home out on the pampas, the vast interior plain of semi-arid scrub that connects the western Andean region to the Atlantic coast along the winding pathways of wicked winds and long black ribbons of asphalt that cut straight through the rocky soil for miles at a time without a thought to curving. This area still supports the huge estancias established mostly by Italian, Spanish, and German immigrants, and also the romantic notions, held so tightly by urban Argentinians, of the gaucho owning nothing but his mate gourd, his rope, and his large knife tucked into his belt. After a day of hitch-hiking out of the mountain town of San Martin de los Andes, just north of Bariloche, I jumped a barbed-wire fence to make my little camp in a cluster of rocks and trees, and was awakened in the early morning sun by the high-pitched whistles of two gauchos not a hundred feet from me, sitting tall in their saddles, rounding up a group of 15 or so semi-wild
horses. I lay completely still, not wanting to breathe, as they passed by without noticing me, or at least not caring that I had poached a decent nights sleep on their bosses land. I could see their black wool ponchos, their silver stirrups, could hear them joking at they expertly negotiated their horses across the creek as if they were extensions of their own legs.
Meeting up with Monique, a cool American woman in Bariloche who was on a road trip from Santiago de Chile, where she had been helping set up a pommegranate farm for three months, we spent a day rock climbing just above Bariloche with amazing views out over the city and Lago Nahuel Huapi. Setting out that evening in my favorite light with the sun sinking down behind the Andes, we angled towards the funky hippy-ish town of El Bolson about 120 km south where we were told we could find some great microbrew and some fantastic hiking. We were not let down in either respect. Staying at the home of an Argentine hippy who with his mother and 14 year old daughter open their doors to travelers through the website couch surfing.com (or .net),
we set out the next day in seach of the Rio Azul and found a beautiful little river cutting through basaltic canyons with the trail rolling on between refugios (a mixture of backpackers hostel and mountain huts) that sell their own pan casero y cerveza (homemade bread and homebrewed beer) over suspension bridges, through beautiful forests and orchards of cherries pregnant with summer juices. We met several horse caravans bringing supplies to the refugios, and I had the feeling of having stepped back in time a century, not the last time in Patagonia that sensation would occur.
South of El Bolson, which translates as “the big bag” and refers to the bowl shaped valley that nestles the town and produces some amazing hops used in the region’s justly famous sweet beers (a cousin to hops, cannabis sativa, does very well there too, I’m told), the valleys broadened a bit, the road turned to gravel, and we were cruising along a high plain ringed by mountains and foothills, working our way to the village of Choilila where, 106 years ago three Americans made their way by steamship, rail, and horse all the way from New York by way of Buenos
Woohoo! Mendo
On the bus ride to Bariloche Aires to this idyllic spot under the shadow of the Andes. They bought 12,000 acres from the Director of Land Development in the state of Chubut and built a small cabin and brick store, both of which still stand today. Their names were Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Longabaugh, better known as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Longabaugh’s sweetheart Etta Place. Having a little too much heat on them in the States, they found a place they could live comfortably and in the safety of obscurity, but after 5 years the old itch resurfaced and they began holding up banks all over northern Patagonia. The details of their lives begin to fuzz out after that point, with the accepted version that The Kid was shot through the head by Cassidy during a stand-off with Bolivian soldiers after a botched attempt to rob the payroll of the tin mine they working in, then Cassidy turning the gun on himself rather than accept the grey walls of a prison. The truth may be as elusive as the still standing cabin proved to be for us. Despite several trips up and down the main street of Choilila, we were unable to
San Martin de los Andes
A small mountain town at the edge of Lago Lacar find it, and left for the town of Esquel with our only consolation being the magnificent blue skies and rolling foothills waving their fat stalks of summer grass in the wind.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.101s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 6; qc: 46; dbt: 0.0772s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb