BUENOS AIRES
Rio is a Portugese town with beaches. Montevideo is a Spanish town, with beautiful old buildings reflecting the influence of its founders.
Buenos Aires is a cosmopolitan city, easily deserving its name of Paris of South America. Strolling along and among its wide, tree-lined boulevards, its sidewalk cafes, its massive buildings in the art noveau and art deco style is like being in Paris.
Except, well, in La "Boca, the old cobblestones, the bright and funny murals on the pastel colored buildings, its general air of party time -- that 's Italian. And the big clock tower that resembles Big Ben, yep, a gift of the British. And the American influence? The many stsylistic high rise office buildings bearing the names of technology giants, of course.
The style is all mixed up, an eclectic mixture of buildings representing all periods. It shsould be a jumbled nightmare, but somehow, it works.
I loved our time in Buenos Aires. We rode a little train; we rode a catamaran out among the many rivers with their summer homes. We dipped into the lovely old cathedral --this one was Gothic Spanish all right, and we stopped to admire a very beautiful "new" church, all pink and white with clean looking lines. We walked thorugh Independence Square, the heart of the city, so named because independence from the Spanish was declared there shortly after we got our own.
In Buenos Aires, Peter and I had our own car and guide, a young man with soulful brown eyes named Carlos. I had arranged over the internet for Carlos to show us around, and he gave us a fine overview of the town.
We even stopped for lunch on the river cruise. I ordered what we both thought he said was a stuffed banana. Sounded interesting. It wasn't. It was an empenada, those tasty little meat pasties .
We got those aplenty the day before when we visited an "estancia," a ranch where the gauchos of one family had raised prime beef cattle and ridden fine horses for more than 200 years. It was on the shores of a lagoon -- we'd call it a lake, smack in the middle of the pampa, flat grasslands that looked a lot like Oklahoma prairie. This ranch was about 100 miles outside of Buenos Aires, and a visit was well worth the long drive out there.
We were greeted on our arrival by men and boys wearing long flowing woolen capes and smashed black hats, just like the gauchos in the movies. Ladies in costume served us hot empenadas and glasses of homemade wine while we looked around at the beautiful grounds.
We rode a funny little farm wagon through a stand of trees thick enough to be labelled jungle, and we saw llamas, javelinas, ostriches, geese and other native fauna and flora.
The fantastic aroma of roasting meat pulled us into the dining room where we had several kinds of meat barbecues, including a "blood sausage," which neither of us dared to try.
Eight young men and women entertained us with folklore dancing and singing in the Argentine style, and then we were treated to an exhibition of riding skills on horses whose coats gleamed under a wam sun. One of the riders was the owner's young son who had been practicing his English with me. When he snared the ring in one of the races, he rode over to the fence, bowed and gave it to me with all the aplomb of a romantic gaucho of storybook.
Buenos Aires is to tango what New Orleans is to blues, and no trip is complete without a visit to a tango show. I went with several of my shipboard friends that night. This particular tango venue was a former theater in a "galleria," and it was finely decorated in the baroque style, with stalls along the walls as in London theaters. We sat at long tables laid out with linen tablecloths, china plates, gleaming silver and sparkling glassware. Out ticket price entitled us to all the champagne, wine and beer we could drink, as well as heaping plates of tapas, Spanish hors d'ouevres including, yep, empanadas.
Where the afternoon folklore dancing had been fun with the enthusiasm of young dancers, these dances were true artists. The men were all small and lithe, the women decked out in a series of colorful costumes. The dancing was breathtaking.
Tango got its start in Buenos Aires in the La Boca and port districts, in waterfront dives and bars we'd call honky tonk. It wasn't quite respectable, and the elite did not claim it. It spread throughout out the world in the thirties, however, and was picked up by the ****s of all people. After the war, by the time rich folk in Buenos Aires were ready to embrace it, rock and roll pushed it out and it has survived mostly now in Argentine cafes and stages, where it has evolved as far more complicated, more precise and more entertaining. And yeah, maybe touristy!
Two days is not enough time to see Buenos Aires. It is a fabulous city, and I know I am going to have to come back some day. But time - and ships - sail on.
We see the Penguins!
They toddled. They waddled. They just stood there in a close crowd, tiny white feathers floating lazily around, littering the close-cropped green grass like an Oklahoma snowfall.
I had come to see the penguins who made their home year-round in a remote cove in a remote set of islands, the Falklands.
It was windy and cold, no place to sit and no place to shelter until our rattley jeeps come back to pick us up in an hour. No matter. I came to see penguins, and I intended to observe them for my allotted 60 minutes.
The penguins were molting, which means they were shedding their tiny white feathers and cannot swim for another two to three weeks. When they cannot swim, they do not eat. Thus, they just stood there, waiting. Ocasionally one would roll his slender neck around, stretch his bill to the sky and emit a kind of hissing noise that sounded a lot like donkey braying.
Occasionally one or two would toddle off from the group, heading straight at me and my camera, but veering off on their pitty pat feet before they got close enough for a good portrait.
When they toddle along, they look like a 12-month-old baby taking his first steps, hurrying to keep from falling. Some of the fatter ones waddle more than toddle, their shortened wings flapping about for balance. I was reminded of the overly dressed waiters in our dining room aboard ship on formal night.
The penguin cove is off the beaten track in the barren Falkland Islands, rocky outcroppings 500 miles from the Argentine shore, within blowing distance of Antarctica.
We tendered to the dock in the prim little town of 2500 souls and boarded a coach which took us several miles into the barrenness where we then crawled into four-wheel drive jeeps for a rip-roaring jaunt across the peat bogs. For a place that gets minimal rainfall, those bogs were muddy, and some of the jeeps in our caravan got stuck in the mud. Our driver, a farm woman with a thick British accent, tackled the mud, the hills and the rocks with daring impunity, shaking and jolting her passengers.
She dropped us off at the cove, a slight hollow behind a grassy dune opening onto a shallow inlet of the sea and went back for more tourists, leaving us to the chilly winds, or a walk over a nearby hill for warmth and tea. I elected to remain with the penguins, freeze my fingers and question the young man who seemed to know all about the birds. Between shivers I learned more about the black and white toddlers than I ever wanted to know.
The young man is a native of the Falklands, as were our tour guide on the coach and the jeep driver. They send their young to England and America for schooling and almost all of them return to live. Our guide told us her family came to the Falklands in 1841, and now there are more than 450 descendants living on the islands -- "those living here not kin to me are my husband's cousins," she told us.
I think in the last century there have been two invasions to break up the monotony of sheep, penguins and cold winds. One was the ill-fated iintrusion in 1982 of the Argentines, who still dispute Britain's claim to the colony.
There is a grim reminder of the Argentines -- several miles of beachlands riddled with mines, the plastic kind that cannot be located with metal detectors. Woe to the luckless native )(or tourist) who wanders into what now has become wasteland.
The other was the prolonged visit of almost 1000 tourists totally unexpected. Several cruise ships a year stop briefly at the Falklands. But last February, while the Amsterdam (the ship I am on,) was anchored there, a sudden shift in the wind churned up the waters in the bay higher and fiercer than the little tenders could manage. Those ashore could not get back to ship until the next morning. Every faamily in the village of Stanley was pressed into offering overnight hospitality. One woman said she offered to bed four stranded passengers, ended up with ten who slept in chairs and on the floor, and she had to pull all the towels out of the linen closets for blankets!
They are a friendly people, those Falkanders, and hospitable ones. I felt comfortable among them -- they certainly are more talkative than their well-known birds!
Around the Horn!
The southernmost tip of South America is an island jutting out into the cold, cold sea, and island with a light house and a couple of buildings occupied by Argentinian officials. Across a narrow inlet is the famed Tierra del Fuego -- land of fire, and on the other side some snow-tipped peaks which belong to Chile.
Since I was a small child, this tip, named Cape Horn, has fired my imagination as I read stories of seafarers who battled fierce waves and cold in an attempt to get from east to west, or back again.
The fierce waves are real. Unbelievably high -- up to 47 feet as we sailed through. Big ships like our Amsterdam cruise liner can handle rough seas -- the small sailing ships of yore, for sailors like Vasca da Gama and Magellan and those who followed in their wake, even for the gold seekers of 1849 who rushed from the East Coast of the United States to California in an attempt to avoid savage Indians on the plains, - for them the going must have been pretty rough.
I have sailed enough in recent years that I can say, never have I seen waves like that. Our ship lurched through them, bucking and listing and bobbing. Most of us passengers were gathered at the wide windows on Deck 8 -- too cold in the open air with that bnsk wind -- and we lost balance and fell into each other every few minutes. I did not dare get up to change sides of the boat.
Every minute or so there was another loud crash as dishes, lamps, ash trays skidded off tables and hit the floor. In one lounge a baby grand piano was dislodged from its platform and scooted across the room. It really was a mess. Crews were still sweeping up an hour after our safe passage through.
But fascinating. Our captain took us right up to the mountain called the Cape so all could get a good view, and then slowly took us around it with three hours of rocking. It was late afternoon, but I did not notice anyone missing from dinner tables that evening. Apparently no sea sickness.
The sun tried to break through sullen gray clouds a couple of times, to light up the white peaks in the distance. The sea which had been a brilliant blue for most of our journey was slate gray, the huge waves lined with white foam runoff from the white caps which crested on top. From on high, (eight decks up) it looked for all the world like a giant rubboard, the kind my grandmother did her washing on.
I slept well that night, rocked to sleep by gentler swells, and next morning we awoke to a different world -- a quiet bay ringed with huge mountains, all topped in white., made even more brilliant by a sun even now making its yearly journey to the north all the way to Canada and Alaska. Clinging to the foothills were dozens of red-roofed houses, making up the town of Ushaia. Pronounced Ush waya.
It is a lovely little town of friendly people who welcome the occasional cruise shipls with wide open arms, merchandise of all kinds in outstretched hands. This is Argentina's southernmost city, and a huge sign on the harbor pronounces it also "La fin del terre."
Right. The end of the world. The bottom side of the globe. I stood there and thought about where I was, and wondered again why I was not falling off, why I was not standing head down, blood rushing away from my feet. I wished I could find a globe around here -- to see if they put Antarctica at the top so that Americans would be slanted off to the right and left and bottomside of the planet.
But I am here to tell you. I did not feel any different from standing in Oklahoma. The Earth, friends, is big enough, strong enough, to hold us all upright.
There ought to be a moral there.
.
Fall(s)ing Again
The Iquazzu Falls straddling the Brazil-Argentine border is spectacular, all right. But it is not the only cascade of water hiding deep in the interior of South America, and little known to others in the world except for intrepid travellers.
For sheer beauty and color, the Petrohue Falls in Chile cannot be surpassed.
To think I knew little of either of these falling waters until I started researching my cruise around South America. And now I can compare them knowingly as a seasoned (and intrepid) traveller.
We left the intricate series of water ways that wind around the gray and blue archipelago of southern Chile and came to a small city, Puntt Mont, squeezed between high hills and a wide bay.
There, with a couple I met on the ship, I climbed into a small car driven by a gentle little man named Nelson. An English name, but that's about all the English that he knew. He indicated by the big sign he had with my name on it that he had been assigned to take us to the falls of the Petrohue River, about 50 miles away by a pleasant two-lane coastal road. It looked much like a small state road in Oklahoma except we kept catching sight of the sea.
And then, just as the sun broke through the clouds, we beheld a huge snow-stsreaked peak across the water. The view was breathtaking. It looked like one of those sacred mountains of the Navajo in northern New Mexico. In the clear air it was so close you could almost reach out across the inlet of the sea and touch it.
As we continued to drive beneath overarching green limbs and around gentle curving hillsides, the peak rode ever before us. Nelson called it a "volcan." It is known as Osodoro, and it last erupted, we learned later, about 40 years ago.
That peak was hiding a couple of others, not so spectacular, but about as high, also with their tops blown out. They ringed a huge expanse of green water, which drains to form the Petrohue River. At the lake, or lago they call it, we stepped into a small orange and white boat.
Stepped into it? How easy I make it sound. That boat was moored to shore with two long long sagging planks which dipped into the water. The boatman skipped lightly over this doubtful bridge to help us aboard.
And we literally had to walk the plank to get on the boat.
I tell you the truth, I was a bit panicky. I am not really steady on my feet, and I cannot get far without a cane. Those planks were not wide enough for me AND my cane, nor steady enough for me, my cane and the boat man who shuffled backwards on them to guide me aboard. I was prepared for a dip into the cold lake waters, which take their opaque greenish color from snow melt off those mountains.
But inching along, I made it. I even made the high step over the gunwale (is that the word?) and fell into a hard bench seat.
The ride was magnificent, and I have the pictures to prove it. I am glad I don't have pictures to prove that I made it back to shore on those self-same planks. It must have been an awkward sight. This was real panic time. I did it, but not without a lot of trepidation and a couple of Hail Marys.
The falls were almost an anti-climax after that, but only almost, because that frothing white water rapidly cascading over black black lava boulders could not ever be anti-climactic.
There was a long walk from the park gate (Oh yes, the Chileans know a good thing when they have it and mqde this a national park) to the falls itself. But it was worth it. Climbing on and over wooden bridges to get on top of the water was an experience never to be forgotten. Even now, 24 hours later, I can hear the roar of the water in my inward ear, and rejoice.
With all the marvelous things I have seen on this trip, I can only be reminded of a poem I learned back in high school. the poet was Sara Teasdale, I think, or was it Edna St. Vincent Millay? Anyway, the lines go something like this:
Great, wide, beautiful wonderful world
With the wonderful rivers round you curled....
Yes, all those wonderful rivers curled over and around our globe, like strands of yarn wrapped around a ball. I know I have been privileged to see so many of them!
And the conclusion of the poem again --
Oh World, I cannot hold thee close enough!!
I cannot. I want to embrace all this wonder, but have to be content to remember, and hope that I have captured even a little bit of it in my camera.
My cruise is coming to an end. Valparaiso is just up the ocean a bit, and then I am homeward bound.
A Tale of Two Cities -- with an accent
That silly little ditty from childhood was running through my head --
It's sad at the end of a lollipop, when you sit and look at the stick,
It's sad at the end of a lollipop, where there's no more to lick.
And that's the way I was feeling as I stood on the high deck, nine stories up, and looked at the big city snuggled into the sides of a sun-drenched hill. Valparaiso, Chile, South America, lay before me, and this was the end of the stick. My 16-day cruise down and around and up the strange continent to the south of us was at an end.
Behind me was the blue Pacific, birthplace of that delightful fish, Chilean sea bass, and of that impish force of nature, El Nino.
There was no time, however, for nostalgia. We were all packed, and Peter and I were to meet out next side of guides at 8:30 a.m. Two cities, Santiago as well as Valparaiso, remained on our itinerary, and what cities they were!
What guides they were! We had been blessed with some good guides on this trip, but George and Cecilia (www.enaturchile.com)were a pair like no others. Martha and I found out, several trips ago, that it costs very little extra, if at all, to arrange for private tours of the places we visit. It is easier for me to get in and out of an auto than a tour coach, we move at my pokey pace and we can stop and start at will without waiting for a whole busload of people.
Both George (pronounced Hor-Hay in his native language) and red-haired Cecilia spoke fairly decent English. They were young, lots of fun and full of ideas to make our two-day stay delightful and memorable.
Chile, I should remind you if your geography is as deficient as mine before I started this journey, is a long strung-out country, hardly more than a beach wide in places, squeezed in between the sea and the Andes. It starts down at the southern tip of the continent, and it stretches northward almost to the western bulge. It is not a rich country, except in scenery, and the people are fiercely proud, and somewhat resentful of neighboring nations who try to impose their will on it.
But these two main cities, about 100 miles apart, are beautiful, with imposing cathedrals, impressive office buildings of the last century and a very few new ones, hundreds of monuments and statues and plazas dedicated to the heroes of the past, and lots of palm trees, flowering shrubs and vineyards. Yes, vineyards.
Traffic here, as in all cities we visited, is a snarl at rush hour, as bad as the BA. The people are well-dressed - you can't tell them from folks here at home, and half of them have cell phones glued to their ears, just like home. In fact, cell phones have become a worldwide phenomenon, a necessary convenience and an annoying distraction.
We visited a museum about that mysterious Easter Island that is not too far away, shopped for lapis lazuli, their finest handicraft and spent a few quiet moments in churches still in mourning for the deceased Pope.
I think I had expected South America to reflect much more of the Spanish influence than it does. Although the conquistadores were the original visitors from the Old World, the last of the Spanish rulers were pushed out early in the 19th century, and thousands of British, Germans, Italians and others poured in to escape whatever was happening in their native lands that gave rise to the tremendous migrations of the past 200 years.
In fact, the language and the religion (predominantly Catholic) are about the only reminder of those earliest settlers.
We explored nearly ever nook and cranny of theses two cities, and we were charmed. We had lunch one day on the second story of a little restaurant on the coastal road overlooking a wave-swept rocky beach, and the next day out under the plane trees in a rural setting, seated at tables clothed in red-checked tablecloths. We sampled the traditional drink (pisca sours which are brought to you with the menus, in very slender stemmed glasses), and we ate such traditional goodies as empanadas, barbecue and avocado salads.
I should add that empanada is to Chileans and their neighbors what taco is to the fast-food establishments around here. You can grab one of these little pasties on just about every block, from stands, street vendors and fine restaurants. Most are filled with ground beef and onions, but some contain rice, black olives (with pits), chopped boiled eggs and other ingredients I chose not to try to identify.
One of my favorite excursions here was to a vineyard where the first vines were brought from Bordeaux, France, in the 1840's, and the
wine cellars were dug into the ground shortly thereafter. It is a beautiful spot that now proudly exports its chardonnay and its cabernet sauvignon throughout the world. The whole operation is set in the midst of a very green and well kept park, through which we walked while sipping their wares.
Two days was too short a time to devote to this area. We could see the snow-tipped Andes in the distance, but had no time to make a closer inspection.
I have a couple of regrets aboujt this whole cruise, which maybe means I have to go back again. It was too windy and overcast to stand at night on the deck of the ship to study the stars under the world, for instance. And I would like to see those glaciers sparkling in the sunshine!
Oh well. There always is another day, another cruise to start planning.
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