the argentine letters

1. into the argentine:

we are now into our fourth day in argentina.  

the important things are going well.  housing and food are terrific.  moreover, housing has taken a decided leap upward in comfort and class since we are staying with eduardo and claudia for the next two weeks.  eduardo and claudia are friends of jan through her love of the tango.

the house of eduardo and claudia  is lovely with a courtyard full of jasmine and the glorious smell of it.  it is little bit of heaven.  eduardo is a flutist for tango and claudia  is an artist, not just for tango but also for marvelous photographs of south american indians.  both  are wonderful and interesting hosts.  they are willing to converse in english or in our pathetic spanish.  so we are totally comfortable here. did i say it was also lovely?  it is.

there has been one minor problem.  i had composed a few pages of email describing the trip so far.  i intended to send this to you folks. the composition has disappeared into the bowels of my laptop.  so i will have to recreate it.  that will take a little time.  but it will be done.  this will be sent off then.  since the weekend is coming, i should have the time.  perhaps i will sit with my laptop in a small cafe, i will have one of argentina's wondrous capuchinos, and i will compose.  it will happen.

this trip began with the long drive from rochester to berea, kentucky.    my ex-student  jan lives and teaches there.  she has a sabbatical and has invited me to join her for a few weeks in argentina and in uruguay.  it is six weeks in all, the first  two at a spanish language school in buenos aires.  

we are joined the next week by jan's husband bob who arrives for the next 4 weeks.  we immediately go to montevideo, uruguay, where the two argentine passions for meat and for tango are completelyt shared by the uruguayans.  i will focus on the meat.  

the last 2 and a half weeks are spent with jan and bob in the far south of argentina, the region called patagonia where the straights of magellan are and they have andes mountains with glaciers.

i have departed from deep winter in rochester.  the temperature was approximately 10 degrees fahrenheit.  so it was a joy to find spring had arrived on my stop in cincinnati.  there was no snow, the sun was shining and the temperature was near 60 degrees fahrenheit.  

cincinnati is an important stop for me since they have three important attractions which rochester does not have.  rochester is a desert island of commerce isolated  in the financial barrens of the north.  cincinnati hums with commerce.

one, cincinnati  has an ikea store. i purchased some significant bedding there.   i intend to get an ikea mattress from the ikea in burlington, ontario after i return from this trip to south america.  i will wait for that opportunity.    it is quite far enough from burlington to rochester to have to transport a mattress, roughly 150 miles.  at ikea,  i bought some wonderful pillows, supports for bed frames, and a nice matress cover.   all of these are meant to cure a problem in my current sleeping arrangements in rochester.  sleeping well is vital for life.

ikea is a friend to cheap homemaker's and to poor students.  it has scandinavian quality at reasonable prices.  

two, cincinnati has a whole foods store.  i like to buy some of their inexpensive organic products.  such products constitute their 365 line, in other words, their everyday line.  these products deviate from what chuck mcgibbon refers to as their whole paycheck line.  for example, let me make here an enthusiastic advertisement for their herbal mint shampoo.  it is nicely priced and smells good.  i brought a bottle of it as a present for jan.

three and perhaps most important, cincinnati has its signature skyline chili outlets.  chili in cincinnati is not just chili.  for example, the five way version has chili, beans, spaghetti (the defining ingredient), grated cheese, and onions.  lesser versions arise by subtracting one or more ingredients.  three way, four way, five way, it is superb comfort food.

i arrived a jan's house in berea without incident.   i woke up the next day to find that winter had returned.  but it was a much milder version this far south than what was in rochester.  the temperature was near 20 degrees fahrenheit,  totally bearable.

the thought of winter returned in another way as we completed the final packing.  since it is so far south, patagonia, especially combined with the height of the andes, is a cold place.  they have glaciers there.  they have penguins there.

i knew it was cooler and still i wanted to go there.  what i did not know is that jan and bob had visions of hiking for days at a stretch in the andes mountains,.  this would involve carrying lots and lots of gear and the necessary food. this weighs many pounds.  sleeping would be in tents on glaciers.  in other words, it would be both cold and heavy.  horrible! (which is the same word in spanish or in english)  please remember that i am a survivor of an aortic dissection!  i need to take care of myself at least a little!

the meaning of these revelations was clear,  it is that is necessary to pack and carry much more weight.  two sets of clothes are required. one set is for buenos aires and montevideo where it is hot and humid.  there, people dance tango and eat in respectable restaurants.  they still sweat but they expect more formality in dress than is required of mountaineers.  light and presentable clothes are definitely required.  

on  the other hand, moutaineers are well known for wearing clothes without changing them for weeks at a time.  this second set of clothes has to be very warm, at least after sufficient layering.  such clothes are bulky,  and, for sleeping on glaciers in patagonia, tents, sleeping bags, and sleeping pads are going to be required.  a stationary body gets cold easily.

after a search in the "backwoods"  of central kentucky, i was able to find long underwear for patagonia.  the wal-mart had tops but no bottoms.  they were made of cotton which is a dangerous fabric for cold weather.  sweat makes it wet and cold.  fortunately, the metropolis of richmond, kentucky has a dunham's sporting goods store. it had the long underwear made from the superior fibre called polypropelene.  so i would not freeze in the andes and on the shores of the straights of magellan.

we were to fly from lexington to atlanta and then to connect with a flight to buenos aires.  jan suggested that i could fly directly from rochester to atlanta and join up with her for the flight to buenos aires.  i explained that that was a bad idea with the potential for disaster.  in the past four years, the airlines have treated me badly.  for example, they have cancelled the first leg of flights on international trips.  

it was the fear of not getting to atlanta in time to catch the flight to buenos aires with jan that convinced me that it was preferable to do the long drive to berea so as to begin our trip together with jan.

as i said, something is likely to go wrong.  i expect that and i can tolerate it.  but i prefer not to be alone when it happens.

jan had stressed the importance of getting to the lexington airport at least two hours before our flight.  but jan and our driver, her husband bob, were both seduced by the possibility of lunch at an indian restaurant in lexington.  suddenly, jan did not think that it was so vital that we insure sufficient time.   we stopped in lexington to have lunch at the indian restaurant with jan and bob's friends keela and john.  it was a fine lunch.  the carrot and raisin dessert was excellent.  i did not know that such was included in indian cuisine.  

in fact, it did not matter that we were a few minutes late in getting to the airport.  it all worked out with just a little more stress than might have been necessary.  it was starting out to be a typical adventure with jan pearce. i have been here before and it can be fun if you stay calm. 

our arrival in buenos aires occurred without incident.  we went directly to the spanish language school to take a test and to start classes.  the school was suitably impressed by the mountains of luggage we had brought for the combination of buenos aires, montevideo, and patagonia.  

i took the test.   my training with the language courses of michel thomas had great effect.  michel thomas believes that verbs are the structure and foundation of a language.  they are the key.  hence, he emphasizes verbs, their persons, tenses, and their endings.  we students of michel learn a very limited vocabulary.  michel thomas believes that you can get by with an active vocabulary of very few words, especially if you learn how to transform english words into cognates, for example, different into differente.

michel is probably right but the result is that i can usually get the ending of the verb right without knowing any of the meaning.  it is very difficult to converse this way.  the meaning of words is vital for understanding conversation.

because of my distorted strengths, i was placed in the same class with jan and with two brasilian girls.  jan has been 4 times to argentina to practice her spanish.  since portuguese is much closer to spanish than english is, jan and the brasilians totally eclipsed me in conversation.  i understood almost nothing.  on the second day, it was clear to me that i had to drop down to a lower level.

this downward plunge put me among americans, canadians, and a single brit.  i immediately moved from being the worst student in the class to being one of the better ones.  in the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king.  the new class is still total immersion but a lot more attention is paid to vocabulary.  i am much happier.

by the way, one of my new classmates is a young version of nicole kidman.  she has taught english in austria, is studying wine, and is the daughter of backstage theatre people from the upper west side of manhattan.  her father is a carpenter.  all i can say about her is:  wow!  cool and poised, sure of herself with good reason to be. she is beautiful! she is in argentina to learn the wine business. in manhattan she moonlights as a somelier at no less than le bernardin! i will have to ask her if she knows anthony bourdain. anthony loves le bernardin and i can now see yet another reason why he might do so. i can personally testify that, at 200 dollars a person, a meal at le bernardin is worth the price even if you do not get this somelier. and if you do?!

another of my new classmates is a geologist who works at a mine in the far north of canada, just south of baffin island.  she is young, attractive, perky, and the only woman in a mining camp with 30 men.  her company on these arctic shores included polar bears.  for some reason, she is planning to abandon this dream job in order to have a more active social life in toronto.

i worry about the fact that the argentines, especially in the vicinity of buenos aires, possess peculiarities in their pronunciation of spanish.  after acquiring these habits, one might not be understood in the larger world of spanish speakers.   the pronunciation seems to be the spanish version of a klingon dialect with some harsh sounds which are spoken nowhere else.  

for example, the double el  and the y are pronounced by argentinos as follows;  

the word for she, ella, is pronounced eh sha here and not eh ya as in the rest of the spanish speaking world.  

the word for i, yo, is pronounced as in joe frazier and not as in yo mama. 

i find it amusing that the spanish word for a retired person such as myself is "un jubilado."  i believe that "un jubilado" can be back translated into "a jubilated one."  very appropriate!

led by one of the teachers at the spanish school, we took a walking tour of the famous plaza de mayo.  it is the home of the presidential palace, the so-called casa rosado.   hence it is the location of many political demonstations.  

in this location,  the so-called madres del plaza del mayo performed their vigils for their disappeared children.   such children were of two types.

some young ones were snatched away by the powers that be.   they were given up to parents of a higher social class and raised to be ignorant of their real parents.

some were adult political trouble makers or so accused.  they were imprisoned indefinitely or forced to jump out of airplanes without parachutes.

jan slandered eva peron by claiming that juan and eva had also forced people to jump out of airplanes.  false upper class propaganda!  this was done by the military junta who came later.  

it is said that the casa rosado, the argentine pink equivalent of the united states white house, is so colored since it was decided to mix the blood of many cattle with the cement.  it is appropriate.  politicians and blood go together.

our guide remarked that one ex-president of argentina was so hated that he had to depart the casa rosado by helicopter, lest he be torn to shreds by the people.  to a citizen of the united states like myself who has just seen george bush leave the white house, this seems like standard procedure.  does anyone doubt that, in the absence of permanent security guards, bush and cheney would not live long?  if the foreign terrorists did not get them, one of the newly poor and formerly well off citizens of the usa would.

our first three nights in buenos aires were spent in a cheap but clean hotel.  all things considered it was a quiet place.  earplugs completely muffled the sound of the late night talkers in the adjacent courtyard.  life here goes late.  dinner is not until 8, tango goes on all night, etc.  

i prefer to go home and do homework for language class.  there is not muchof it but it has to be done.  then one can relax in the evening.  but jan shamed me into accompanying her to a so- called milonga.   this is a bar where people do tango.  after five minutes, boring!  some dancers have good moves but many are arrogant old guys prowling around looking for dance partners.  some of these old guys are supposed to be the tango equivalent of movie stars, legends in their time.  to me, they are chauvinistic old men.  

jan also dragged along the two brasilian students from her class.  in our broken spanish, we agreed that the tango was not as lively and exciting as the brasilian salsa dances.  one of the brasilian girls indicated this with a swish of her hips.  it is good way to communicate, equal to the spoken word!  i had agreed to stay at the milonga for an hour. our stay lasted almost two hours.  jan and the brasilians were totally ignoring me and happily chatting away in spanish.  i was lost.  in fact, that is why i dropped out of the spanish class with exactly those three.  now here i was back in the same environment.  loco!  typical jan.

by the way, jan tells me that i must not call her "loco" here.  loco means totally insane.   but i regard loco as a humorous description of the situations jan leads me into.  in the words of oliver hardy to stanley laurel, "this is another fine mess you have gotten me into."  i am sure that ollie would have used the word loco to describe stan. that does not mean that ollie does not like stan!

it is important to discuss food in argentina, especially when it is very good.  

first of all, it seems to a constant in latin american countries that they all have excellent coffee, rich and not bitter.  i have had some superb capuchinos here.  the capuchino at the cafe tortoni is exceptionally fine.  the cafe tortoni was the old hangout of the intelligensia, people like the writer jorge luis borges and the founder of tango carlos gardel.  in buenos aires a tango dancer is regarded as an intellectual.  it is a curious fact that a dance said to have been born in brothels is so regarded.

jan corrected my understanding of tango.  it included both the music and the dance.  carlos gardel was a legend as a signer of tango not a legend of the dance. i stand corrected and will endeavor to have proper respect.  this is important because both eduardo and claudia fully deserve much respect.  and we enjoy staying with them in their house.

the cafe tortoni has many fine paintings on the wall, colorful things done by 20th century artists.  i suspect that the artists paid their cafe bill that way. this cafe is a very nice place, lots of polished and varnished wood,  filled with busts of famous argentine intelligensia.  borges and gardel have the status of being remembered by plaster statues.  borges is sitting at  a table together with a women writer whose name i cannot recall.  carlos garbel is standing next to them and is the spitting image of tyrone power.  even the hair is slicked down the same way.

the salads at the tortoni and in other places are excellent. they are filled with many good things.  hearts of palm, watercress, and beets are often included.  with a little balsamic vinagraite, it is good food based on simple ingredients.  it satisfies the defining characteristic of good modern cuisine.   i particularly enjoy the cabreze salad, just sliced tomatoes over mozarella cheese and covered with basil.  a vinaigrette completes it.  each taste is clearly present and they blend well.

it is probably damaging to argentine pride that there is a legend that the tango was danced for the first time in cuba.  maybe not.  but there is no doubt that it was nutured in buenos aires.  or maybe in montevideo also.  

tango is like corn.  peru and mexico are always fighting over who discovered corn.  i think the cubans have long since abandoned their claim for tango.  but i suspect you could still start a war between argentina and uruguay over the rights to claim origin.  after all, many wars are fought over the claims of stranger religions than tango.

i should return to the subject of food.  the great anthony bourdain came to argentina and to uruguay.   he loved both cuisines. they are very similar.   anthony loves grilled meat, both steak and pork.  

argentina is famous for its beef.  i happy to report that i have now sampled two kinds of steak.   the chorizo is similar to a ribeye and is my current favorite.  the loma is a loin and seems similar to a sirloin.  argentine beef is grass fed, not finished up in feed lots as in the usa.  it is therefore more tasty and with more substance.  it is not tough but these cattle do have to walk around to eat.  they lead a full life in the open air.  they grow up to be tasty.  then they are slaughtered and eaten.  as long as you are at the top of the food chain,  life is as it should be.

the local wine called malbec is a rich red, full bodied and quite sweet for a red.  i found it very nice.

i like the beer here even better.  one local beer is called quilmes.  served cool.  it is crisp and the perfect accompaniament to steak.  and it comes in a bottle of enormous size.  not a bad thing at all, but be careful and ready to drink your full.  otherwise, specifically request a small bottle, uno individuale.

it is worthwhile adding that they have excellent pizza here, the thin crust kind called a marguarita or perhaps a cabreze with some basil.  it is the influence of the early italian immigrants. 

well, that is all for now. i finished this before the weekend actually starts.  marvelous!  jan and i plan to visit the cemetery where evita is buried.

stay warm up there,

joe n 

2. mainly evita

hello again from the argentine.

today jan and i made a pilgrimage to the tomb of evita or eva peron. fittingly, it is the number one tourist destination in the city. the people who loved evita bring flowers to her every day even after all these over 50 years. the crowds and the cramped situation with the other lesser tombs make it difficult to get a good photograph of her tomb. they should clear out the space taken up by the surrounding other tombs! evita deserves the respect. she is after all bay far the greatest lady in argentine history.

i am reminded of the grave of el cid in the cathedral in burgos, spain. he had to share honors with bishops whose names have long since passed from history. just as in the case of evita, relatively worthless temporary wealth and social position get locations in death equal to the immortals!

evita's tomb is in the most exclusive cemetery in buenos aires. sadly, evita would not be happy with this location. she should be among the people, together with her husband and such luminaries as the iconic tango singer carlos gardel. they are in the poorer people's cemetery which was filled with the victims of a yellow fever epidemic.

it seems to be the fault of evita's family that she is where she is. her family were social climbers who wanted a family tomb in a socially impressive location. so her brother who outlived her gets to be there too.


as you may know, the body of evita was spirited off to europe by the oligarchs,the army representatives of her rich enemies in the upper classes. they wanted to totally annihilate evita's influence. eventually, they were forced to return evita's body to her husband juan peron who was in exile at the time in spain. juan eventually brought the body of evita back to buenos aires. her body is safely entombed well under ground, protected from both her enemies and the people who love her. i suppose that the grave needs to be secure so that no one can dig her up. depending on their politics, they might either vandalize the body or follow evita into battle with the oligarchy.

herein argentina, evita has the same status as a saint in the middle ages. relics are powerful and have to be protected. one good thing about evita is that she still stirs up controversy. she is both loved and hated.

think of evita as a combination of saint iago and saint francis, with a bit of saint joan thrown in, a saint who is both a warrior and a source of miracles of kindness. upon reflection, i am surprised that the oligarchs did not burn evita's body. they did it with joan and for the same reason. saint iago shows us that the miracles of god are great and that even a long lost body can lead a people to victory, in his case, against the moors, in evita's, against the oligarchy and for the lower classes!

i will have to do more research to find the truth about evita. i am beginning to suspect that evita is still being slandered by the argentine equivalent of the supporters of george bush. the rhetoric against evita seems very similar to the republican party rhetoric against the democrat party. there is much anti-union sentiment in it. i have learned to be suspicious.

her enemies call her a fascist. what does that mean? does it mean merely to create social programs benefiting the unfortunate? the oligarchs know well how to coerce others to get what they want. if you have to bruise a few feelings or gently bang a few heads to get some benefits for the poor, what is wrong with that? read on, you will see that it is not evita who was the truly violent one!

tomorrow, my second week of spanish class begins. they have promised me that jan and i will both have morning classes. this is important so that we both can use the afternoons to see the sites which are only open then. i fear that this might mean that jan and i will be back in the same class. this would be acceptable only if the teacher is not the same that we both had when we first arrived. she was a bad teacher who was totally oblivious to whether or not her students understood a word of conversation.

it would also mean that i must part with my fair nicole kidman look alike who works as a somelier at le bernardin. a unavoilable tragedy!

doris and john harper tell me that they remember beef in argentina as being so tender you could cut it with a fork. i have not yet found such beef. perhaps it is a myth. or perhaps it refers to the roasted or braised beef which is that tender.

after all, you can make most any beef that tender by braising it long enough. it is too easy that way. but i think that the myth must refer to a grilled beef, an argentine version of the japanese beef called kobe. kobe beef is worth its weight in gold and it costs just about as much.

a fellow student tells me that he has found such beef in a restaurant called cabrera and it is only 70 pesos, roughly 23 dollars, a portion.

eduardo tells me that any beef at 70 pesos a portion is "highway robbery." he tells me that no real argentino would ever bother to massage a cow in the manner that the japanese have to do to create kobe. but, by japanese standards, a price of 70 pesos per portion would be cheap.

tomorrow, after the morning language class, our plan is to go to the zoo to see the native argentine wildlife. we will know what penguins and guanacos look like when we see them.

the zoo is next to the museum of evita. jan tells me that i will like it there she says it is filled with much pro-evita propaganda. as it should be! it is a new museum and i regard it as a "must see."

by the way, i am pleased to say that, even though my worst fears have come true and i have indeed been asigned to the previously cited "bad teacher's class" , either she or i have vastly improved. now i am actually understanding much of the conversation in the class and i can withdraw my threats to demand my money back.

this morning there was a demonstation that closed the metro or subway. the train stopped halfway to school, we all got off, and a nice fellow kindly gave us directions down the street called rivadavia for the walk of the remaining 15 or so blocks to school. argentines being the way they are, we were still the first persons, teacher included, to arrive in class.

jan has remarked that she would prefer that this demonstration not lead to a coup white we are here. she feared that there was a real danger in my sarcastic remarks helping that to come about. all i said was that the federal forces should deal harshly with anyone who stops transportation and inconveniences us tourists and serious language students.

i think i said something about sending in federal troops armed with clubs. jan suspected that the demonstrators were prepared to respond with guns. she was paranoid. there was absolutely no evidence for that!

jan is remarkably considerate of argentine sensibilities. i continually inflict horror upon her with my amusing observations of argentine character. the argentines are a proud and touchy lot. jan did not like it when i found in her guidebook the latin american saying that "the argentines are the only people who can commit suicide by jumping off their own egos." true enough.

jan is remarkably polite, stange, she was never known for that. she is known for her honesty and forthrightness. age is mellowing her.

jan lives in fear of argentine english speakers hearing my sacastic remarks. when i make them, usually not in anybody else's hearing, she just looks as me with a strained smile on her face. she was never like this before. what has happened to her? has this chauvinistic culture and her love of tango intimidated her. it has certainly not tempered her views on american politics. but on those of argentina?

my laptop gave me a scare. it became quite hot, turned itself off, and would not turn itself back on. it demanded a cooling off period. then it was fine. jan tells me that i should not keep it plugged in all the time even if it is turned off. the voltage here is twice that in the states and, even with a transformer, this system was not made to tolerate that. of course, jan's primary concern is that i am wasting little dribs of electricity. rather than impoverish the earth, i will ration the time i keep the computer plugged in.

a complete shutdow of the computer would have made it very difficult to continue these emails i write. i could do so by writing the emails out by hand and then transcribing them quickly into another computer for sending. but i am happy that i do not have to descend to that level of difficulty.

today after language class jan and i took the metro and journeyed to the museum of evita.

just before finding the museum, in front of the zoo, we had lunch at a place which was a buffet whose clientelle were clearly all locals. it had a parilla (grill) on which various interesting meats were being grilled. i chose pork and was presented with a choice of a chop and some ribs. i chose the chop. the grill man had run out of plates and had to wash one just for me. although i did not see that he had access to any hot boiling water, he must have done a good job since my stomach feels happy.

anyway, the chop was delicious together with a sweet spiced marinade, vinegar based.

in addition, jan was happy. the selection of salads was fresh and appetizing, simple, crisp, and good. i liked it too. the other vegetables like eggplant and potatos, a choice of mashed and fried, were excellent also.

but the green melon was the star of the lunch. it was the very best i had ever had, naturally sweetened on the vine, just right.

my observation is that the common people of buenos aires eat very well, from the meat grilled right in front of you, beef and pork, all the way to the staple vegetables, the melons, and the flan for dessert. our place was clearly the best all-you-can-eat place i have ever visited.

from there, we proceeded over to the museo evita. the museo is in the building which used to house her charitable foundation. we paid our entrance fee of 12 pesos and began our tour of enlightenment.

the tour began with a film of evita's buriel. the museum set the film to a haunting modern tango music, sort of a tango version of mozart's requiem mass.

there were many photos of the young evita. there were selections of her film work. she was on her way to being a star. as one might expect from the 1930s argentine film industry, the acting was rather melodramic. evita was not a bad actress but her performances were often rather too formal. but such was the style at the time and, as the song says, evita always had style.

i took out my camera and snapped a photo of a dress that evita had worn. the guard gently chided me that this was not permitted. i was genuinely sorry. he did not confiscate my camera. he smiled. he made no threat to do so. so i have this one picture.

there were films, propaganda and news, of the work of evita's foundation. her foundation supported orphanages, old people's homes, homes for battered or displaced women, health care, and what we would call social security. i thought i was listening to the 1930s and 1940s programs of the democratic party in the usa. this was called fascism by the oligarchy!

the more things change, the more they stay the same!

there is a lot of room for corruption in private charitable foundations. it would be surprising if there were none in evita's. i do not know. what i do know is that she did a lot of good before she died at 33, worked long hours and helped a lot of people. the right winger oligarchs who opposed her only wished to destroy her programs without replacing them by anything better. they eventually succeeded and one result is that we see poor little girls and boys begging for food money on the subway.

more and more, it looks to me that these argentine oligarchy and the military who opposed her were the argentine equivalent of the rush limbaughs and dick cheneys of today. they were the representatives of the dark side.

evita seems like a more forceful and tougher south american version of eleanor roosevelt. in case you don't remember, the right wingers in american hated eleanor too. such are good at hating.

when evita died, the military stole her body. they transorted it to milan, italy and buried her secretly under a false name. years later, when her body was returned to juan peron in spain ant thence to buenos aires. she had been well embalmed and that her hair had grown to be long and lush. but her nose was broken, her face was cut, and her toes had been amputated and the wound sealed with tar. it was rumored that liberties had been taken.

the oligarchs do not even respect the dead.

to hear the voice of evita speaking to the people when she knew she was dying is to recognize the phrasing and the diction. the broadway play got its lyrics, its heart and soul, from the original.

in the song of thepaly, evita is telling the people: all through my wild times, my sad enchantments, i kept my promise, don't keep your distance. the emotion and cadence were there in the historical reality.

i am impressed by this lady evita. she bears a striking resemblence to my financial advisor and former skating buddy, kathryn owellen. they are both good looking in the same fresh faced way. there are signs that the current financial crisis may bring out more agreement in kathryn with evita-like policies!

the facts about evita can be transformative. i am pleased to report that jan has reevaluated her position on evita. jan now concedes that evita's museum is a suitable educational experience for the next trip jan leads of berea college students to argentina. of course, the primary purpose of such trips will remain tango. jan is both sensible and a silly rabbit!

after leaving the museum it was too late and we were too tired to visit the zoo. argentine wildlife remains a mystery to us.

we descended into the rush hour metro, packed ourselves onto a sardine can of a train, and found our way back home.

near the house of eduardo and claudia we discovered a large enclosed market where we bought salads to eat at home. as usual, the fresh ingrediants were excellent with just oil and vinegar. so the subways are a problem but, on the whole, argentina functions well in the important things.

best wishes,

joe n

3. buenos buenos aires

today was the last day of spanish language school. this school believes in what john harper calls "the lake wobegone way of education." harper's statement that all students were above average now has a wikipedia reference. i can testify that it was john harper who invented the terminology. he did so in a faculty senate meeting on grading policy, specifically addressing the elimination of grades in the freshman year.

in language school, we all, without exception, received certificates of accomplishment in the study of spanish. whether we could actually speak and understand spanish was not an issue. the wizard of oz had certificates for us all.

on the last day, our teacher emphatically informed us that the compound past tense, such as "we have learned", is used in all the rest of the spanish speaking world, even in chile, but never, never used in buenos aires. she said they, the portenos, were proud of this fact.

in the afternoon, jan and i went to the museum of carlos gardel located in the house in buenos aires that he shared with his mother. there we watched a bit of an old 1930s film starring the iconic tango singer. it was filled with the actors saying lines in the compound past tense!

before visiting the carlos gardel museum we stopped at the huge and fancy abasto shopping mall. while there i had a wonderful tenderloin steak in the food court. the steak and its accompanying salad were both terrific. the steak was accompanied by a marvelously garlicy pesto sauce. the cucumbers in the salad were sweet and crisp. it was a very pleasant lunch. it proves that, if food courts have charcoal fired grills and fresh ingredients, they can serve excellent food.

by the way, this food court had the world's only kosher mcdonalds outside of israel. it was closed at the time so we did not get to ask jan's question concerning whether or not a kosher cheeseburger could possibly exist. since jan is a vegetarian, she did not actually want one. it was a theoretical question.

according to the omniscient wikipedia, the kosher mcdonalds serves no dairy at all. problem solved! but you can get a quarter pounder with cheese at the regular mcdonalds in the same food court.

there are three advantages to being done with spanish language class.

one, we do not have to get up at seven in the morning.

two, we do not have to ride the rush hour metro. we are packed in like sardines. there is no need to hold onto a strap. you are totally supported by the crush of people. you get very hot and tired. the close packing also insures that there is very little air circulation. it is an aspect of argentina, the humidity, the steam of it, especially of buenos aires. when you consider how rats behave under similar circumstances, the portenos, the citizens of buenos aires, behave very well. they endure much with no complaint.

three, we might actually have more time to see the sights of buenos aires. further possibilities include the famous race track, the mysterious "evita city" which walt disney may have used as a model for a part of disneyland, and of course one or two famous parillas or meat grills.

evita city may or may not be the same as evita's children's city. the internet is confusing on this. evita's children's city was a small scale model in which children could be free and learn to govern their lives. that is what i would really like to see.

at our local parilla last night, i ordered three good things, all of them grilled.

i ordered a chorizo sausage, not to be confused with the rib eye like steak of the same name. it was red and spicy like the portuguese version, sort of a cross between polish sausage and pepperoni. a good thing and michelle would have liked it. they also have a thinner version which must be identical to the portuguese.

i ordered morcilla, a blood sausage which is more of a blood pudding. you squeeze it out of its skin and indulge in the soft tasty purple mooosh. my mother was fond of a similar german version. although you boil the german version and you grill the argentine one, the taste, the color, and consistency turn out much the same.

the third order, that of mallejas, was the star. mallejas are sweetbreads, the thymus glands of lamb, beef, or pork. they are what the french call ris de veau. as the name indicates they are sweet tasting, not bitter at all. these were excellent, grilled with just the addition of some lemon juice. the french usually prepare a sauce for them and that is certainly the very best way to go. but this simple grilling with lemon is very good indeed. i intend to return for more.

my understanding of the argentine parilla grows. it is grilled meat in all its forms. the core is beef, as chorizo or ribeye, as lomo or tenderloin. important alternative meats are pork, as chops or ribs, sausage as chorizo or morcilla. lamb and even goat are grilled. rivaling the world of beef are the superb sweatbreads, mallejas. i have not yet sampled forms of grilled chicken or fish. i still have to explore cuts of beef like vacio or flank steak, and the tenderloin that is ojo de bife, short ribs, asado de tira or costillas. but these are not central issues and i feel that i can walk into a parilla now and know how to eat well in various ways.


our lady professor in spanish class told us that the classic expression of an argentine male when an attractive woman walks by is: "que lomo!", literally, "what loins!". since beef and tango are the two major religions in argentina, this can be interpreted as pure male chauvinism based on lust, that is, "what a piece of meat she is!", or as a sincere form of worship based on the use of the legs as powerful instruments of dance in the tango. in tango, the woman's legs are often entwined with those of a man. so either way, there is a great deal of lust involved.

there is the strut of a man and the allure of a woman. like roosters and hens. tango.

argentina is a culture of steam. sometimes the steam is repressed. until it explodes. sometimes it is right out there from the beginning. it is in the sex. it is in the politics. in the demonstrations in the plazas.
in the impulsiveness of che guevara. it is in the anger. steam is near or on the surface in all things. steam is in evita, in deep, mysterious, active, and powerful evita. full of bite and good works, a medieval light that shines on in life and in death. evita is tango combined with religion. she is beef. because like che she worked so hard. the long hours, for the poor and for social justice. for argentina. evita is at once the lamb and the beef of god. plus his bite. that is life, that is tango. that is evita.


4. fascists and such

hello from buenos aires:

jan convinced me to accompany her on a bus ride to the airport. her purpose was to test out the idea of going on tuesday to meet her husband bob's plane. she must leave the house at 5:30 in the morning. at this hour, she will do this alone. the cost of a bus will 66 cents compared to a 20 dollar taxi ride. i will be sleeping.

i was lured into this test bus ride by the prospect of catching a glimpse of cuidad evita, evita city. evita city is a housing development just three kilometres from the international airport of buenos aires. it is not the so-called children's city of evita. this may no longer exist.

evita city is a bright and shining planned community laid out on a large property in the shape of evita's head. okay, this part is bizarre! but it is a clean community with lots of fresh white paint. it is a classic example of urban planning from the 40s, reminiscent of the planned communities of paul goodman. it looks like a nice place to live.

in the spirit of evita, it possesses a large white church with mosque like spires.

evita city is thus a successful example of government planning for the housing of the working class and the poor. when the military dictatorship took over from peron, they renamed the community after some nondescript general. to be expected! but the people always called it evita city and now it again has its proper name.

i am moved to speculate on the nature of south american government. these governments are almost always authoritarian dictatorships.

the dictatorships come in three types. all three abuse the people by censorship, jailings, and killings. all three fill the pockets of the ruling class, more or less. the question is: do any of them do any good at all? and for whom?

there is the dictatorship for the rich. this form is the sort that the united stated usually supports. it is characterized by an economy unfettered by restraints and corrupted by forms of cronyism, either local or international. the elite is smug, convinced of its moral superiority over the common people. a form of divine right is taken for granted. this form of government does little or nothing for the poor. but large profits can sometimes be made in international trade to the benefit of a small group, often those with links to multinational corporations.

this sort of government can be instituted or furthered by the so-called "shock doctrine" described by naomi klein. some shock hits the society, either by intention or accident, and the frightened masses are stampeded into giving up their political and economic rights. this is what happened in chile under pinochet and in russia under yeltsin. it helps to have disciples of the late milton friedman in place to grease the the process.

an attempt to approximate this sort of government occurred in the bush administration after 9-11.

there is the dictatorship of the left, so-called socialism or communism. this form is opposed by the united states. it seeks government ownership of the means of production. the united states regards this as the ultimate sin these days. it is characterized by inefficiency. it is totalitarian, attempting to shape all views. it represses the rich and expropriates foreign ownership. it tries to foster social programs which benefit a broad class of people. the capitalist powers usually attempt to isolate and cut off these nations. cuba comes to mind. venezuela is innoculated by the possession of oil. the united states has made attempts to overthrow both of them.

to a large extent the united states opposition to left wing dictatorships is a legacy of the cold war. such dictatorships were the natural allies of china and russia, strong and powerful enemies of the united states. with such allies came an insulation from western capitalism, both from its benefits and its exploitations.

there is the dictatorship called fascist. during and just after the second world war, the united states was opposed to this form. but with the anticommunist realignment, it is not opposed now. fascism seeks a corporate union between the state and capitalism. it is characterized by ruthless efficiency and also by glorification of the leader. it makes the trains run on time. it is deeply flawed by its power to crush opposition. in germany but not in italy, it led to mass murder.

the argentine form of fascism, peronism, was economic nationalism based on peron's admiration of benito mussolini. it had no racist component. jews were safe in argentina and prospered and multiplied there. it never resorted to systematic organized violence or dictatorial rule. it stifled the opposition by its resounding electoral victory and by its contempt for the elite who it accused of being traitors and agents of foreign powers. it nationalised broadcasting, controlled the unions, rationed newspaper print, shut down the national newpaper, la prensa, and jailed an opposition leader. these are heavy handed totalitarian tactics to be sure.

but it instituted programs for the common people. it built evita city, sent kids to summer camp, instituted a social security system, created shelters for lost women, old people's homes, and a system of national health care.

in other words, it shares many of the characteristics of the new deal. that must be why some writers describe peronism as a leftist form of government. it is all so confusing!

evita herself used her power to slight those who had slighted her. financial corruption was not unknown to her or her favored brother. she spent lavishly on herself, on jewelry, on clothes. evita's self beautification was not hidden. it was a political tool. the people lapped it up just as they do today with celebrities. evita was a star!

but she worked so hard to do good for the people. her genuine commitment to good works is the thing which justifies her. that is the thing which is missing in the play and movie about her. yes, her people adored her, lived through her, and forgave her much. but, not for nothing was she regarded as a saint. at her core, she was a genuine force, a bright, shiney, tinsely force, like a hollywood star who works hard for good things.

evita was not a force like che in fatigues in the jungle. she was not like fidel. she was not a self-effacing force. she was a self-aggrandizing force, for the people.

by his brutal racism, hitler gave fascism a permanent stain. always remember though that the democracies did not fight him for this reason. they fought along side the soviet union in order to contain aggressive war. aggressive war was the primary crime at the nurenburg trials.

after the war, it was impossible to ignore the evidence of nazi barbarism.
this barbarism was not however a defining characteristic of all forms of fascism.

by south american standards, fascism was not the worst form of government. they have seen far worse. they still do.

of the three forms of dictatorship, the communist and the fascist form seem to benefit more people. the dictatorship of the rich, that is oligarchy, it benefits only a small number. all forms of dictatorship, whether friends or enemies of the united states, suppress liberty.

the people of latin american have been hurt by the sacrifice of their economic interests. riches such as coffee in columbia and brazil, minerals in peru, bolivia, and argentina, fruit in central america, and, until recently, oil in venezuela, and oil in mexico have been sacrificed on the altar of international capitalism in the service of the so-called democratic powers.

now the united states is focused on opposition to any leftist form of social justice, at home or abroad. at home our senators object to the tyranny of requiring companies to accept caps on executive pay in return for the gift of government money. these senators never had an objection to capping earned income in welfare cases! this is the hypocrisy of fundamentalist free market religion in economic thinking.

political corruption is not absent in united states democracy. it never has been. in recent times, witness the financial corruption of cheney. witness the care and financial feeding of the underachieving fratboy, george bush.

witness the new revelations concerning the magical process whereby ex-senator dashle, with nothing but insider knowledge to sell,succeeded in maintaining a lavish lifestyle. witness the fact that obama was willing to appoint dashle to a key position influencing the economic destiny of health care in the united states. obama was willing to ignore the obvious and well known fact that dashle was the husband of a major lobbyist. since dashle sleeps with shit, he cannot wake up smelling like a rose.

witness bill clinton feasting off his connections with fatcats, foreign and domestic. he too crawled up the social and political ladder as did evita. he too worked very hard. has he done as much good as evita? i don't think so. that was not bill's focus.

recall the wisdom of mark twain: "the only congenitally criminal class in the united states is the united states congress." americans should be careful before they throw stones at evita and her foundation.

i have had a revelation. there is a permutation of the qualities of bill and hillary clinton which will give you a faint approximation to the combined qualities of juan and eva peron. but, of course, without eva's style!

jan and i returned by bus from the airport. we went to the neigborhood of buenos aired which is called la boca. la boca is located at the mouth of a smaller river which empties there into the immense rio de la plata. it is a port neighborhood with an artist colony. at an outdoor stall, i bought my second belt of argentine leather. in spanish, i had a pleasant conversation with the seller.

la boca was the first time in argentina that i felt i was in a tourist town. there were restaurants with tango singers and tango dancers. we choose one with a group which also included flamenco and gaucho dancing, a nice loud stomping while twirling bolas.

jan and i shared some beer. jan ordered a russian salad. she had hoped for beets but it turned out to be a nice potato salad. i ordered mussels a la provence. this was just mussels with lots of garlic, parley, and wine. no tomatos, which i think is standard in mussles provencales. but very nice. my favorite remains the mussels marinieres which leaves out the garlic. at home or in a parisien brasserie, it can't be beaten.

we returned to the piers where there was a free bongo drum concert. no tips were expected. it was music made just for the pleasure of making it.

a group of performance artists strolled by. among them, there were a grown man in diapers, a woman in a negligee with black fishnet stockings and carrying a paper mache pig, a man in a devil suit, and various others.

i remarked to jan that, if she continued to have difficulty getting tango dances at the bars called milongas, then adopting the outfit of the negligee and the black fishnet stockings would probably cure that problem. she should leave out the paper mache pig.

we had freshly squeezed orange juice and caught the bus home.

we catch buses in buenos aires solely by knowing the number of the buses which will serve us. there are many which will work and many which will not. the 53 bus we choose was not crowded and delivered us to a street near our lodgings with eduardo and claudia. our day of city bus adventure was successfully completed.

today, jan and i took a taxi to an outdoor market on the outskirts of buenos aires. it was supposed to feature the presence of gauchos but, sadly, it was just a shell of what it is from april to december. none the less, i had a pleasant lunch of mollegas, sweetbreads, at the neuve chicago restaurant in the market area. the waiter beamed at me when i ordered the mollejas. he knew that i was not just any tourist. i shared the argentino enjoyment of unfairly neglected organs of the cow.

but the waiter really liked jan. he talked to her a lot. after she ordered her usual salad, he tried to coax her to get a dessert. he assured her that she was "redhaired and skinny." it was a complement.

the mollejas with lemon and chimichura sauce, oil, vinegar, garlic, oregano, and spices, were superb, even better than the first time in buenos aries.

i attempted to buy a pair of gaucho pants but they were way too long. the effect was baggy and sloppy. not true gaucho style.

my only purchase at this market was a leather money belt. the leather here is excellent and economical.

since this market was not in season, we invested in yet another taxi. this one took us from the this market at the outskirts to the sunday market in san telmo. san telmol is a neighborhood of buenos aires.

i approached an open air bookstall. as i was flipping through a used cookbook written in german, i noticed two books which were selling for 2000 pesos each. that is approximately 700 dollars per book! what could be worth so much?

the first book was old and bound with a rubber band. i did not ask to open it. but it had the nazi symbol of a red swastika on the cover.

the second book was opened to show a photo of adolf hitler at attention. he was smiling at another man who i think was the leader of the german youth. this book was a deutsche jugendbuch, the nazi equivalent of a boy scout handbook. perhaps the price of 700 dollars was worth the chance to recall old memories. perhaps these old memories could be shared with the present pope.

the deutshe judendbuch was right next to a pile of old photographs of eva peron. i do not know if there was any connection.

let me close with set of jokes about argentina. the consistency of theme is remarkable.

1. q. how does an argentine commit suicide?
a. he jumps off his ego.

2. q. how do recognize an argentine spy?
a. by the sign on her back that says "i am the greatest spy in the world."

3. q. how do you make a quick buck?
a. buy an argentine for what he is worth and sell him for what he thinks he is worth.

4. an argentine asks a spaniard, 'friend, do you know which country is closest to heaven?" "argentina, i suppose," retorts the angry spaniard. "no, friend," says the argentine, "uruguay is the closest to argentina!"

5. a man meets an argentine in the street and asks him for a light. the argentine starts patting his pants, chest, and seat pockets. "sorry," he says, "i can't find my lighter-but man, do i have a great body!"

6. a pschologist calls her colleague at 2am in the morning. "it's an emergency!" she says.
"at two in the morning? it better be good." says the colleague.
"i have a unique client," says the first, "it's and inferiority complex!"
"an inferiority complex? but they're so common!" shouts the colleague.
and the pschologist responds, "yes, but....an argentine?"

7. god is creating the countries. he says to his assistant, "here's a good one: lots of rich land, beautiful high mountains, great beaches, verdant forests, and a wide variety of climates and animals. what do you think?"
the assistant replies, "but that is so much to give to one place!"
"it's ok," says god. "i'll fill it with argentines!"

on that note i will close. but i really do like it here!

joe n


5. where the beef is

in the morning i encountered a large cockroach in the bathroom. as i stepped on him, i remembered the identical phenomenon happening in new orleans many years ago. it was after al vitter's wedding. i forget whether i stepped on the cockroach then. but he was very large and brown.

new orleans and buenos aires are such similar cities. both are hot and humid, both have a strong tradition of music, jazz for new orleans and tango for buenos aires. both have strong culinary traditions. new orleans is focused on gumbo, shrimp, and crawfish. buenos aires is focused on beef. both are infested with large brown cockroaches.

i am not certain but i think that buenos aires is safe from destruction by water and storm. one never hears of tropical cyhclones down here. perhaps that is a product of a north american focus. but new orleans has a clear lead in the variety of its cuisine.

jan and i went to the ferry terminal in preparation for our trip to montevideo. from the metro to this terminal is a walk of six long blocks or more. as is usual here at this time of year, it was hot and humid.

we discovered that the days of paper tickets were gone. the e-tickets we had were all were going to get.

our goal in two days was to go from buenos aires to montevideo. after 5 days, we would come back from montevideo to colonia via bus and thence by ferry from colonia to buenos aires.

if we could shed our luggage in colonia, this would give us time to see the sights of this small town. it seems that the only way we can shed our luggage in colonia is to book an overnight stay in one of the hotels there. i think that is what we will do.

we went to see the buenos aires cemetery called la charcarita. this is a lower class version of recoleta cemetery. it is still grand indeed. its surrounding walls are high and noble in the roman manner. it is much larger than recoleta. among many, many others, it has the graves of the tango singer carlos gardel, the transatlantic flier jorge newbury, and some 1920s faith healer. every day they all get flowers. but all together they don't get as many flowers as evita.

we were led to believe that juan peron was buried in la charcarita. his family's tomb is there but he has been moved. we could not determine where. it is the fate of the perons, eva and juan, to wander in death.

the wide spaciousness of la charcarita contrasts with the close packing in la recoleta. even though la recoleta is the more prestigious place to be buried, it makes me wish that evita had been buried in la charcarita. there she would also have been close to the many people buried in the underground burial vaults of la charcarita. the space and the company would have suited her better.

we did not descend into the vaults but we could see the steps leading down to them. the extent of the underground burials was impressive. the argentines have many corpses to preserve. theirs is a culture which, for the most part, does not forget the dead. perhaps that is why real hatred is shown by argentines trying to obliterate the memory of people like evita and later the so-called disappeared activists.

i dragged jan to the cabrera restaurant in the district they call palermo. palermo is a high class neighborhood of buenos aires which began as a home for italian immigrants. hence, the name. it has been much upgraded. you can tell by the many dealerships which sell high priced foreign cars. but, in the cab on the way to the restaurant, we saw an abandoned and burnt out car. this is one of the symbols of buenos aires. i do not know why they are not towed away.

among those which do not specialize in foreign food, cabrera is one of the fanciest restaurants in buenos aires. in other words, cabrera specializes in beef. i went there seeking the argentine version of kobe beef. this is a beef so tender you can cut it with a fork. i found it there and, poco hecho, what they call rare here, the taste of it was superb.

many small portions of vegetables, such as roasted garlic, french beans, roasted red peppers, lima beans, a wonderful pear with pepper, too many to list, were included as side dishes. the combination was a spectacular meal. this alone would have been more than enough for anybody.

but i was eating with jan. jan is a semi-vegetarian, that is, a vegetarian who does not object to eating fish. i suppose that fish are not a high enough life form. the devouring of fish does not offend the semi-vegetarian.

so, in addition to my having this wondrous tenderloin with the consistency of butter, jan shared with me a roasted kabob of vegetables, tomatos and eggplant, and a salad of avocado and smoked salmon. it was accompanied by a nice red wine, a malbec blended with a syrah. blending cuts the fullness of the malbec down a little. this is a good thing.

lest we forget an essential that adds to any meal, there was a nice agua con gas to wash it down.

clearly, this meal constituted a mountain of delicious food. the total cost, wine included, was approximately 40 dollars per person. you cannot get that in new york! if you add to this the fact that the argentine version of kobe beef seems to be fully as good as the japanese version which costs at least five times as much, then you fully appreciate what a bargain this meal was.

while i do not doubt that no argentine would endure massaging a cow as the japanese do with kobe, still they must be doing something right.

we were given the leftovers to take home. we will make a dent in it ourselves. we will also have the help of the soon to arrive husband bob of jan. bob has a reputation of being able to consume enormous quantities of food. the remnants of our meal will not go to waste!

the cabrera was a restaurant filled with tourists. without a reservation, we ate at a table outside. there were many people waiting but the restaurant provides free champagne to help them pass the time.

as we got up to leave, we heard american tourists discussing which cuts of beef to get. i volunteered the information that the kobe beef was superb.

the resulting conversation gave me some valuable information. they recommended the rock towers torres del paine in patagonia as a world class sight not to be missed. there was a dirt road to the torres. to see the torres it was not necessary to carry all your gear, to hike up steep slopes at high altitude, and to sleep on a glacier. all you had to do was to pay for a ride. hence, i could sleep in a bed in the hostel. i would not need to carry tons in order to eat and to sleep. prospects are improving!

this morning bob arrived from the states. jan picked him up at the airport and immediately whisked him off to get tea and medialunas. i have not yet seen tea available in a cafe here but eduardo assures me that it is.

it is a curious fact that the national drink, mate, a form of herbal tea, is available in very few cafes. in grocery stores you can get bags of the stuff. you can make your own. people do.

mate is a ritual. hot water is poured over the leaves. the mate is drunk through the mandatory filtering straw. and the process is repeated, with the same cup possibly passed on to another.

if one feels that one might need a drink of mate at any momemt, the argentine leather industry represented by the street vendors can provide an enormous carrying case for a thermos. you carry it over your shoulder.

but it is very difficult to buy mate already prepared. outside of the tourist areas would regular tea be any different?

eduardo has done me the kindness of making mate for me. it comes in a little cup together with the all important straw. eduardo tells me that this straw must be of good quality and not moved when in place, lest it get clogged.

the cups for mate are little gourds which must be properly cured before the first use. it is necessary to coat the inside of the gourd with wet mate leaves and then let set for three days. failure to do this will adversely affect the gourd for the remainder of its life.

mate, done properly with a little sugar, has won me over. i will carry a bag of it and the required cup and straw home with me.

we took the metro to the zoo. i was particularly eager to see the whole lineup of llama type animals. in increasing order of size, these are the vicuna, the gaunaco, and the llama. this is also the increasing order of value of their wool for sweaters. the vicuna has a very appealing look with intelligent looking eyes. i suspect it is hoping that some corn will be thrown its way.

i found nemo, that is, the parrot type fish who is the prototype of the hero of the well known movie. he lives in a tank next to very large cousins.

in the reptile house, we saw an anaconda. he was totally submerged under water. his head was not visible. since he needs to breathe, we must have missed where he keeps his head.

the rain forest exhibit had specimens both alive and dead. there were large spiders, large scorpions, large moths, large butterflies, large insects of undetermined type, and large frogs. many of these creatures seem to be large, fully capable of causing pain to larger creatures like ourselves.

since my companions bob and jan present a united front on requiring periodic food, we stopped at the zoo food outlet. it was an argentine copy of macdonalds. i decided to try the comida classica, a cheeseburger with pepsi light and fries. both tasted inferior to the macdonalds versions. the hamburger was less juicy and the fries were less crisp on the outside. many gourmets, for example, frank peterson, are willing to say that mcdonalds makes pretty good fires. these were not as good. bob asserted as fact that mcdonalds imbues everything they make with sugar. that is why it is so popular with children. this is probably so. but i wouldn't say that the lack of sugar was what made the zoo cheeseburger and fries dry and inferior to the mcdonalds' versions. i suspect it was primarily due to long term exposure to the zoo's heat lamp.

while we were eating our so-called lunch, it began to rain. and then it rained harder. as we wended our way through the zoo, we took refuge briefly in a men's room next to the urinals. we were not alone there. men ducked in and out depending on the intensity of the rain. eventually we made a determined effort to reach the safety of the metro.

once safely inside the metro, i pointed out one of the many kiosks where one could buy women's lingerie. i never saw anyone actually making a purchase so i do not know whether these emergency purchases in the metro are made more by men or more by women. jan's theory is that men buy lingerie on their way home. it is a substitute for flowers. there are flower shops next to the metro but only near cemeteries. what you need depends on your purpose. but sex and death are both very important in argentina.

we rushed home from the metro through the rain. as i type this it is still raining hard.

it is time to do some packing for montevideo.

6. across the wide la plata

claudia shared mate with me. mate or yerba mate is the traditional argentine drink. she explained that one must share mate. when satisfied, add some more hot water, perhaps more sugar, and pass it to a friend. you share the same cup and straw. inspired by an affection for this drink, i looked it up for purchase on the internet. all was available, the leaves, the little gourd cup, and the special straw.

but claudia was shocked at the prices. she offered to take me to buy both the leaves, the yerba mate, and the paraphrenalia. we bought a bag of the leaves, the yerba mate, in a supermercado and the gourd and straw in a small shop on the large street called rividavia. not surprisingly, it was all much cheaper than on the internet, just 24 pesos total for a gourd, un mate, and nice straw, un bombilla. and 4 pesos for a 2 kilo bag of the leaves.

i am leaving my gourd here to be cured by experts. it is a simple process, just fill it with leaves and cold water for three days.

we are taking the ferry, the buquebus, from buenos aires to montevideo. it is a three hour trip. the ferry is almost empty. i have discovered what makes for the most desired seat. it is not a window view alone, or a place in the sun. plenty of those are unoccupied. the valuable seats are those which are next to a window and have an electrical outlet, a scenic view and something to plug your laptop into. for a while, i chose to have a view. but now i choose electrical power. but i have no view.

the rio de la plata is wide indeed. but it is brown water all the way from argentina to uruguay. the rio is a big muddy lake with distant shorelines. it has whitecaps tinged with brown. since plata means silver, the rio de la plata is properly named only if silver comes in brown.

in the spirit of the dogs of buenos aires, the rio de la plata might be called the rio de leche. the sidewalks of buenos aires are littered with the wastes of dogs. the locals, the portenos, refer to this as dulce de leche. dulce de leche is the sweet caramelized substance made from milk and used to flavor ice cream. it is similar to caramelized sugar and very popular here.

there is a law in buenos aires requiring dog walkers to pick up. but no one obeys it. it is necessary to keep a sharp eye open in residential neighborhoods.

on this boat of empty seats, bob is frustrated by the fact that there are partitions which prevent one from stretching out and taking a proper sleep. he seriously wishes for an allen wrench, in this part of the world, they have troops to stop that sort of thing.

we arrived at the port of montrevideo and went through customs. i had a little problem using the atm machine. so i pulled out the power card, the morgan stanley card. since the rate of exchange is 20 to 1, i withdrew over 2000 uruguayan pesos. with it i bought a grilled cheese sandwich and
a pepwsi light. i still had lots left over to pay for the taxi ride to the hotel.

the hotel staff were very helpful. in the day time, we are safe going wherever we want. at night, stay closer to the hotel. there are coffee shops in the immediate vicinity.

the tango lessons that jan and bob are signed up for include some kind of tango show at the beach tonight. i think that i will just have some coffee and be a vegetable tonight.

we are now in a nice clean budget hotel with internet. however, they have q shortage of power outlets. at the moment the wireless is superb in the lobby where they do have an outlet. in celebration, i am going to send this now, my first email from montevideo, uruguay.

7. the temple of grilled food

montevideo is not hot and humid! at least, not right now. for the first time in two weeks, i am wearing an undershirt.

the weather is perfect with little humidity. i slept well with no fan and the windows open. weather does not get any better.

since the change in latitude and longitude is trivial, the difference in weather must be a result of the change in orientation to the atlantic ocean. the water seemed less muddy and more oceanic here. the wind blows.

my room in the hotel palacio has a private bath and a shower. the shower head is located near the ceiling high above the tub. the ceiling is very high. it is hard to see how one could take a shower without making a big mess. no matter, i took a delightful bath this morning.

when i emptied the bath tub, i discovered that the water was bubbling up through the tiles in the floor. it is very common in europe and in buenos aires to have have the shower floor be the floor of the whole bathroom. i decided to regard this bubbling phenomenon as a variation of that and not to worry about it.

the next morning, i saw that the bathtub drain pipe was severely corroded. i guessed that the bubbling problem could be greatly diminished by just slightly displacing the drain plug so as to let the water drain out slowly. it worked.

i like the fact that my toilet bowl here is flushed by pulling a cord on an overhead tank. the resulting torrent is quite effective. it reminds me of growing up in chicago. my mother always complained that the new toilets did not flush as well as those with overhead tanks. i have learned that one should never underestimate the effects of gravity. and one should listen to one's mother.

i accompanied jan and bob on a search for breakfast. jan was quite determined to fine a suitable place. her criteria were fourfold: it should be authentic uruguayan, it should not be greasy, it should not be expensive, and it should not be frequented by tourists. unfortunately our hotel had been chosen to be in the neighborhood of one of the most expensive hotels in montevideo, these criteria were impossible to meet.

after passing by authentic mcdonalds and burger kings, we settled on a uruguayan version of the same thing. bob got a greasy hamburger with cheese and an egg. i got some empanadas internacionales, small turnovers filled with some powdered egg that the army invented in world war two. eggs mcmuffins would have been better.

the capuchino at our place seems to have been made with instant coffee. this was a disaster.

jan, who had had no breakfast, was cheered by the purchase of fresh fruit.

we the continued our meanderings until we found the expensive hotel which had determined our location. this hotel, a very fancy modern radisson, is the location of the festival of tango lessons that jan and bob had contracted to do while we are in montevideo.

tango has moved into the upper class. to think that it started as a way to pass the time in bars frequented by sailors and prostitutes! so it started as a way to rest up and recharge!

i realized that i had spoken too soon when i said that it was not hot in montevideo. our breakfast wanderings and the search for the site of the tango lessons had made me overheated. fortunately, the fancy hotel had a beautiful bathroom where i could strip off my shirt and undershirt and reappear in only one layer.

i left jan and bob with their tango lessons and headed out to see the town. my first goal was to beef up my money supply. in buenos aires the automatic tellers are quite welcoming but in montevideo they refuse to give anything to foreigners. what to do?

i immediately thought of jan and bob's fancy hotel. fancy hotels can always change american dollars into the local currency! indeed this hotel has a casino which is open at all hours and it was happy to transform my currency. at that point, i did not care what exchange rate i was given.

flush with cash i headed to my main goal in montevideo, the old port market. the port market has been transformed into a place with many parillas, the fired grills where meat is cooked. there is almost nothing else there now, just a few remaining shops selling high priced woolen goods and mate gourds. the market has become totally focused on the preparation and serving of grilled food. locals frequent it but i suspect most of the profits are generated by the tourist trade.

the food at the port market is expensive but completely authentic. you are surrounded by the fires of the parillas. they are piled high with meats located at strategic heat locations, appropriate to the meat and the stage of doneness. it is devoted to the religion of grilling.

i was in meat heaven. surrounded by meat in various stages of grilling. fire and meat together were a vision, not of hell, but of heaven.

the waiters told me that they remembered a tall man with a camera crew. a year ago, he had come to them from the north. they had liked him and he them. here was a man who knew meat and savored the taste, the sumptuous greasiness of it all. this was the great anthony bourdain! anthony's show on uruguay had motivated me to make my pilgrimage to the port market. i was not disappointed.

i had an idea to temporarily change my focus from beef to lamb.

but then i was totally seduced by the opportunity to have grilled langostinos, a very large shrimp. the langostinos came with the head and shell still on and soaked in garlic and oil. it is a grilled version of what they call barbeque shrimp in new orleans. the heads are on there too.

i added a salsa made with tomatos, onions, vinegar and oil. together with a grilled red pepper and a large bottle of patricia, the beer brewed in uruguay, as the old commercial says: it can't get much better than this!

afterwards, the restaurant honored me by letting me approach the sacred fire. they put a black chef's hat on me and had me pick up a short rib of beef with a fork and knife. as i held it high, they made the moment immortal by taking a picture. it is inside my camera now.

with much smiling and much saying of "amigo!" we parted, i the pilgrim who would return and they the keepers of the flame.

i returned to my hotel via the ocean walk. the path reminds me of walking in my youth in chicago along the shores of lake michigan. the barriers to the waters are the same sort of two tiered concrete. both have fisherman with their poles. since salt water fish tend to be bigger than the biggest lake michigan perch, the fishing poles are longer and stronger. otherwise, it is the same.

and both have ladies in bikinis basking in the sun, some of them young and nubile and some of them human versions of the elephant seal. it is nice to see both kinds.

in argentina and in uruguay, one can always find coca cola and pepsi cola. indeed, they are sold all over the world. for those who wish to end this form of american commercial imperialism, there is encouraging news. richard kane has alerted me to the fact that a hindu nationalist organization has begun a research program intended to end the world domination of coke and pepsi. once again nationalism strikes out at imperialism!

the hindus are basing their hopes on an animal that is sacred to them. i speak of course of the cow. products made from cow's milk have long been a competitor to soft drinks.

now a new front, based on hindu practices, has been opened. cow urine, hereafter to be marketed as cow water, can be made to taste good. and, unlike coke and perpsi, it has absolutely no toxicity.

the hindu researchers have not yet decided whether cow water will come only in the traditional form or also in a new version, cow water light.

not content with the development of cow urine, they also assert that cow manure has been unfairly neglected as a basis for human cuisine. do not scoff, they have evidence for this too in past practices.

here in uruguay and in argentina, there is a less drastic alternative to coke and pepsi. especially in uruguay, people carry with them a mate gourd and a thermos of hot water. they walk around sipping the mate through the required straw.

the mate gourds, the straws, and the mate leaves are the most popular tourist product in montevideo. they are available on tables in the street, shops in the squares, and in the gift shops of fine hotels. they are everywhere!

mate is full of anti-oxidents and it encourages weight loss. i sense a real opportunity to bottle mate and perhaps to carbonate it. since ice tea is already bottled, why not mate?

coke and pepsi may survive the competition from mate but cow water does not stand a chance. the economies of the mate producing nations, argentina, uruguay, paraguay, and brazil will boom. the economy of india will be forced to rely on the answering of telephones and on the taking over of the computer software industry.

when i went out to get breakfast this morning the streets were being patrolled by many men and women. they were a cheerful bunch and wore police unifroms with the labels policia turistica. i was unable to determine whether these tourist police were there to protect the tourists or to protect the shopkeepers from the tourists. the only obvious function of these police was their smiling presence. they were stationed every few blocks with clumps in the main tourist sites. perhaps their employment is some kind of uruguayan economic stimulus package.

the charging software for my laptop battery has ceased to function. simple attempts to remedy the situation have failed. i will not do the next step. it would involve wiping the harddrive and losing all my stuff. i choose instead to use the laptop with no battery. i must therefore plug it in to an electrical outle. otherwise, it will not function.

this hotel has wireless in a tiny room near the lobby. but it has no outlets there. the rooms for guests have outlets but no wireless. hence, in my room one can use the computer but there is no internet. fortunately, the sofa by the lobby desk has a nearby outlet and is close enough to the tiny room to have wireless.

so there is no unsolvable problem with the laptop. but this morning while i was reading email, i was suddenly hit by a package of cookies which had falled through the lobby airshaft from several stories up.

i was surrounded by shattered cookies. the maid was cleaning rooms and had unwisely placed the cookies on the edge of the airshaft. i was startled but uninjured. the staff was both amused and embarrassed by the incident.



8. around and about montevideo

bob, jan, and i took a taxi to the main bus station in montevideo. it is an impressive place, bright and clean, two stories high and home to many bus companies. these can transport you all over uruguay and even into brazil. it feels more like a train station in europe than a bus station. it has an air of bustling properity. there is none of the dreary hopelessness which i associate to bus stations in the united states.

we were there to buy tickets for our departure in two days to the small uruguayan town of colonia. there were so many different ticket counters that we did not know where to go.

jan likes to charge ahead, indulging in a randon search pattern until she finds her goal. she has her students program little robots that way. it rubs off on her. but this time we have to cheat and ask the tourist office where to go. success!

on the way back we stopped at a museum of the gaucho. the gaucho was a sort of wilder cowboy common to both uruguay and argentina. he was unruly and sometimes vicious. his museum is housed in an impressive old mansion with polished marble and polished wood staircases. only in south america!

the essential equipment of the gaucho was on display. there were bolas, four balls at the end of connected ropes. the gaucho had inherited bolas from the native indian inhabitants. bolas are a weapon. they are whirled around and then thrown in an expert manner to tangle in the legs of the victim. thus, bolas make easy prey of the ostrich-like rheas. they can also be used on creatures who walk on feet or on those who ride upon such.

but the gaucho's essential item is his knife. with this he can eat beef, castrate cattle, and slit throats. he is naked without it.

after the gaucho museum, i parted company with jan and bob. their destination was an all-you-can-eat vegetarian restaurant. my destination was an octopus at a parilla in the port market.

the fate of this octopus was to be grilled, to be chopped into bite sized pieces, to be coated with papricka and oil, and to be served with lemon and a delicious salsa of tomatos, onions, garlic, and oil. i included my usual roasted red pepper and washed it down with sparkling water. superb!

i observed the black cod my neighbor was eating and resolved to return at least one more time. i reflect that, if there is a god of all creatures, he or she must be cruel indeed to have created predators like us. we prey upon cod, octopi, langostinos, cattle, lamb, and pigs, among others.

to be devoured must be awful. to be ripped and cut into pieces, to be dismembered in every way, and then turned into excrement cannot be a rewarding experience. i remember the pile of langostino shells and heads from yesterday. i hope i stay on the winning side so that i can continue to enjoy it.

with a cool coca cola light, i concluded my second successful day of eating at the port market. i walk in the heat of the early afternoon to the end of the harbour breakwater. a ship passes near. it is on its way to the open sea. men with no shirts, uruguayan versions of evita's descamisados, fish from the breakwater. no one catches anything. the sun is hot. i go home to the hotel and take a nap.

i awake refreshed and the night is young. in argentina and in uruguay, the night time activity really does not start until nine. it was nine.

i resolved to do something i had never done before. i would eat a mcdonalds cheeseburger in a foreign land.

mcdonalds are everywhere in argentina and in uruguay. they even exist in france. such pervasiveness hints that perhaps we americans are unfairly prejudiced against our own foods. so i marched off to the nearest mcdonalds. it was not far.

i ordered a simple cheeseburger and an orange juice.

i defy anyone to criticize the orange juice in argentina or in uruguay. it is uniformly good. it tastes as if it were fresh squeezed. it is sweet and it tastes like oranges. even when it comes in a carton, this is true.

i took a bite of the cheeseburger. i analysed it as one would a fine wine. it was clearly different from the united states version. after all, it is made of uruguayan beef. that means it is grass fed. it is less juicy but it tastes better. it seems more like the real thing. i gave it a passing grade.

on the whole, i disagree with those americans who automatically rate anything made by mcdonalds as lower quality than its foreign counterpart. there is some bad food out there. foreign food may taste bad. it may have no nutritional value. worst of all, it may contain enough microbes to put you in intensive care.

the late frank peterson, an acknowledged gourmet, was willing to grant that mcdonalds fries were acceptable, if barely. he understood that mcdonalds fries were inferior to those fries which you can get from a stand on a french highway. but he thought mcdonalds fries were okay.

it is a mistake to pit mcdonalds against the foreign best. the best is usually expensive, can be hard to find, and it is usually not fast food. time which you do not always have may required to find it and to savor it. the best foreign food serves a different and higher purpose. on this last point even the most committed food adventurer can agree.

since we know the evils that mcdonalds does, i will not list them here. they are akin to those of wal-mart. these evils existed before wal-mart. it has been conclusively shown that a steady diet of mcdonalds is not healthy. but it takes a long time to kill you.

i have known even the most ardent anti-mcdonalds people to break down in a foreign land and to take advantage of their antiseptic bathrooms. i venture to say that mcdonalds' food and bathrooms are both a result of their business model, to consistently live up to expectation.

i concluded my outing with an ice cream cone made in the traditional argentine-uruguayan way from dulce de leche. it seemed mandatory to have one. it was okay.

the following morning, i decided to complete my research at mcdonalds by having breakfast.

mcdonalds has created exactly one culinary masterpiece, the egg mcmuffin. it consists of a poached egg, canadian bacon, and processed cheese food, all surrounded by a toasted english muffin. there is absolutely nothing that can go wrong with this simple breakfast food. i resolved to try the uruguayan equivalent. the only change is the substitution of an inferior bagel for the superior english muffin. the mcbagel starts with a disadvantage.

the mcbagel and coffee were not bad. indeed, the unwise substitution of a bagel for a muffin made the uruguayan product slightly inferior. but the uruguayan coffee was slightly superior. and, as always, the orange juice was terrific.

my comparisons of national styles of mcdonalds was now complete. i conclude that there was no clear victory for either side.

as i returned to the hotel, i met jan and bob. they invited me to join them for a buffet breakfast at the fancy radisson hotel where their tango lessons were given. as you know, i already had a breakfast, but, since this included the opportunity to spend some time with them and to have a view of the whole city of montevideo from the top floor of the hotel, i decided to join them for a cup of coffee.

the top floor restaurant of the radisson hotel has a panoramic view of the city and its harbour. this impressive view takes place in a setting of marble and crystal chandeliers. it is a fancy place.

it is ironic that the radisson hotel chain takes its name from a french canadian fur trader who would undoubtedly not be welcome in this hotel. radisson and his friend grosseliers were early fur trappers and traders who explored much of canada, including the hudson bay area and lake superior.

think of the two of them dressed in smelly hides which they have not taken off for months. they would not be welcome in a fine hotel.

the coffee at the radisson, while not ascending to the level of capuchino at the cafe tortoni, was fine.

the bill arrived. jan and bob assumed that the bill would come in uruguayan pesos. in that case, their fancy breakfast would cost 16 pesos each, approximately 80 united states cents each. that would be low for a fancy hotel. in fact, the cost was 16 dollars each. they were lucky that the price was not in euros or pounds!

jan and bob decided to improve themselves by visiting a museum devoted to the works of a famous uruguayan painter. since i currently had no such desire for self improvement, i decided to walk along the shore until i reached the major beaches of montevideo.

i had prepared by wearing crocs and no socks. i took off my long pants to reveal a baggy swimsuit below. i was prepared for entry into the atlantic ocean.

one walks along the high seawall looking at the ocean and the rocks below. basking on the rocks are various specimens of humanity, all tanned and more or less attractive, in various stages of undress.

more interesting are the birds, white egrets and black cormorants, fishers all but with different techniques. the egrets stand around and spear. the cormorants swim and dive. these cormorants seem to spend most of their time resting on rocks and drying their wings.

hot and tired, i reached the first white sand beach, the playa ramirez. it was littered with sexy bodies, some exposed to the sun and some in the shade of umbrellas. i waded into the ocean but stopped well short of full immersion. i had to protect my camera from the salt water. but partial immersion was refreshing and fulfilled my goal of sampling the southern atlantic.

as i continued past this beach, i was paralleling a golf course. i sensed a change in the neighborhood. the tourist police had long since disappeared. there were joggers. there were two young men practicing tai chi. there were private fishing clubs. compared to the shirtless fishermen on the breakwall near the old city, these people had more money. there was no need for any tourist police here.

even the shoreside gas station was upscale. it sold cold drinks and had a grassy area with tables and chairs shaded by large umbrellas. i purchased a bottle of cold orange juice. as always in this country, it was excellent. it gave me renewed energy to walk further.

as i reached the second beach, the larger playa pocito, there were shoreside restaurants and, across the shore road there were high rise luxury apartments.

i had reached montevideo's approximation to palm beach. actually, the nearby punte del este is a better approximation, but this was close enough.

the side streets even had bookstores on them! this combination of beach and literacy is a sure indication of an upper class neighborhood. satisfied, i decided to return to the old city and the old port market.

on the boulevard de brazil, i saw a bus with the label "old city." it went off in precisely the opposite direction. i therefore splurged for the price of a taxi to the old port market. in primitive spanish, i told the taxi driver that my purposes were to rest, to become cool, and to eat fish.

next to the old port market were docked two really impressive cruise ships. the one called the star princess had six decks of observation balconies. these were atop an equal height of unbroken hull. the effect was massive, like one of the immense government buildings in buenos aires. on top of it all was a huge glass or plastic bubble. without having seen it, bob made the plausible guess that the bubble covered a huge swimming pool. what made it all more impressive is that stability probably required an equal depth below the water line.

it is obvious that it takes an immense sum of money to build such a ship. it is equally obvious that the passengers must pay large sums to sustain them.

the old port and its surrounding relatively poor neighborhoods juxtaposed with the cruise ships and the flow of tourists through the attractions of the old city was the explanation for the ever present tourist police.

having arrived at the old port market, i seated myself at a parilla well known to me. on a whim, i bypassed the merzula, or black cod, and i ordered lenguado, or flounder.

my spanish is halting at best. there was some miscommunication over the salsa. i wanted to specify that it be grilled and come with a side salsa of tomatos, onions, garlic, oil, and vinegar. while i was saying this, the waiter stopped me in midsentence and assured me that he understood exactly what i meant. i believed him.

somehow, the salsa ceased to be a side. it became a sauce that covered the whole fish. but, since the vinegar had been omitted, the dish succeeded on its own terms. it had a more spanish orientation than i had requested.

the waiter made clear that he was proud of his ability to create exactly what i had requested. i did not have the heart to tell him that i wanted to order something different. the most important thing is that the fish was excellent.

i returned to the hotel where i rested until about nine. then i went out to the ice cream stand in front of the cathedral. i ordered a dish with two flavors, a tropical peach ice cream on top of a melon sorbet. since both flavors were exactly true to their origins, it was perfect.

the only significant drawback of our hotel is that, after dark, the neighborhood is infested by beggars. these are not the truly needy kind, but the ones who do it for sport. it is unpleasant dealing with them. it could be much worse if they were not content to quit after two refusals.

this weekend seems to be special. it is some kind of carnival. at the end of the day young people are painting each others faces in clever clownlike designs. it is quiet until 4 in the morning. then this neighborhood where nobody lives is filled with loud and not particularly cheerful human noise. our hotel is across from a bar which is filled with people. the sounds of police sirens are heard. quiet returns and then the noise level slowly increases, more restrained this time.

for the remainder of the night and into the morning, a crowd of rowdy revelers sweeps by at intervals of approximately every half hour. whatever is going on, it is an aspect of real south american life and it is not being done for us tourists. the hotel staff says that it is just an ordinary saturday night in montevideo.

montevideo is the capital of uruguay. it is a characteristic of capital cities that they are filled with huge monuments. in montevideo there is the plaza of independence. it has a huge equestrian statue of a man called artigas. he led uruguay to independence from the spanish. he and his horse are enormous. they are atop the underground tomb where his ashes lie. the tomb is a sacred place. it records the life and achievements of the immortal artigas and it is guarded by soldiers in seventeenth century uniforms carrying automatic weapons.

south american liberators like artigas often have a period of exile in their life. paraguay is a popular spot. in buenos aires you will find the huge monument to san martin, the leader of argentine independence. at the time, the spanish were in control of many parts of south america. therefore san martin liberated many parts, present day argentina, chile, and peru. he too went into exile and died far from argentina in france. the argentines then had the problem of retrieving his sacred remains. they did so and put them in the cathedral in buenos aires. in the past century, they also retrieved the remains of his parents.

after the retrieval of the remains of san martin's parents, a reporter from time magazine made the snarky comment that they still had to retrieve the remains of san martin's horse. this comment was regarded as extremely disrespectful.

the leading figures in the history of the united states are a mixed lot.
not all of them are associated with military victories and thus with horses. pens were the preferred weapons of adams and jefferson. one does not think of the great lincoln on a horse. but washington, grant, and the traitors robert e lee and stonewall jackson are all classic men on horseback.

the remains of lee's horse traveler are buried with respect and honor. jackson's horse little sorel has his hide mounted in the museum at the virginia military academy. little sorel shares that honor with another famous horse, the immortal trigger in the roy rogers museum.

this reverence for the remains of horses is part of a much more extensive common bond between puffed up military cultures such as the united states, especially the southern states, and south america. the root is that both cultures had a structure of rich landowners living off the work of oppressed peasants and slaves. it breeds an arrogant type, sensitive to insult and putting a high value on the remains of horses.

it is sunday morning. our neighborhood which is ordinarily bustling with tourists is completely closed down. even our mcdonalds is closed. there is not a cup of coffee in sight.

minus breakfast, i head out with jan and bob to a sunday open air shopping fair. this is not just for tourists. it continues for block after block. vegetables and fruit are stacked for this single day in remarkably artistic arrangments.

there are uruguayan cheeses and sausages which can be purchased to take home or to eat right there. vendors are making empenadas which they will fry for you.

tables are filled with used books, mostly in spanish but a few in english. you can get a copy of "el ultima mohicano" by james fennimore cooper.

you can get old photographs, both of unknowns and of 1930s celebrities. charlie chaplin, greta garbo, and the omnipresent carlos gardel are quite popular still. the cast of gone with the wind is still selling the movie.

since we are near argentina, you can purchase and old biography of adolf hitler. the graf spee was a german battleship which was scuttled outside the port of montevideo after being trapped by the british navy. its sad story lives on in old books sold at the market.

if you need inexpensive shoes, they have many types. t-shirts bear the likeness of che chevara and or marylin monroe. you can get belts to hold up either long and short pants. we can also buy the pants.

and for the ladies, there are gaudy undergarments in bright colors like purple and red. guaranteed to produce results!

for the repressed gaucho, they have knives designed to cut and slash. for the handiman, there are old and new tools.

there are old and new fixtures, like doorknobs and fuacets.

it short, it is a flea market on a large scale. we saw one young man being hustled away with his wrists handcuffed behind his back. probably, he was a pickpocket.

in the end we purchased little. jan and bob bought some spices for their hotel cookery. bob bought some metal hooks for a coat rack. i bought nothing.

our purchases were few but the visit was worth the insight gained into the ordinary lives of the locals. it reminded my of maxwell street in the chicago of my youth.

we concluded the first half of the day with lunch at the old port market.

jan had grilled shrimp with oil and garlic. except for the fact that the shrimps were shelled, it was similar to the langostinos i had had a few days ago.

bob had a chorizo sausage and some rice.

i had baby beef. they called it ribeye but it was more like a tenderloin. accompanied by a local beer and a salad of tomatos and onions, it was an appropriate last meal at this temple of grilled food.

i cannot not mention the wonderful and simple side salsa which i use to accompany grilled food. it consist of tomatos, onions, garlic, red peppers, and parsley, all chopped together and in a bath of vinegar and oil. you can add a little salt and pepper to taste. it improves most everything!

we parted with handshakes with all the waiters. over my four days of eating, we had become friends.

9. far away in patagonia

we left montevideo on a bus headed to the small uruguayan town of colonia. the countryside looked prosperous and populated with many animals destined for the grill. the people here lived a far better life than most people in appalachia.

the united states thinks of itself as an island of prosperity in the sea of the third world. when you visit mexico you see the truth in this.
but in canada and in europe you see its falsity. i see the falsity now in argentina and in uruguay.

argentina and uruguay resemble europe. the streets are no more filled with urchins than the streets of the usa. buenos aires has tall office bulidings. these are emblems of economic power. there is no reason to believe that the american people are a particularly gifted and chosen people. i have taught american youth for a long time and know this firsthand.

the americqn life style will decline as the american educational level sinks. instead of correcting this, americans, democrats included, continue to be satisfied with a bad educational system with an overemphasis on sports.

american infrastructure continues to be impoverished by a bloated military budget. in uruguay, the roads seem better maintained than those in upstate new york. this is not to mention the superb upkeep of german roads!

we arrived in colonia, gateway to buenos aires. we deposited our luggage in a delightful hostel in the center of town. they kept our luggage securely locked up while we explored this little town which was founded by the portuguese. it was a uruguayan version of niagara on the lake, which is a tourist town but still nice.

it began to rain. the streets became shallow white water creeks. we retreated under the awnings of a cafe. i had a coffee. it was pleasant to be out of the rain. the little town had an unhurried feel which was a contrast to the more hectic pace of montevideo and especially of buenos aires.

colonia was a treat. when we went to retrieve our luggage, the hostel refused payment of any kind. it would be a nice place to go back to. jan has tentative plans to take her berea students there on the way to or from montevideo.

we took the ferry from colonia to buenos aires. since we had lost some little pieces of paper, we had to pay a tax of 25 dollars to leave the country. it was something involving documentation that we had payed some taxes. bob found his little piece of paper and escaped the 25 dollar charge. we felt some resentment that we had not been told how valuable the little pieces of paper were. but it was a small enough fee.

the ferry was crowded. there were many children and few bathrooms. it was not as nice as the previous ferry. but it got us back to buenos aires. we said hello to eduardo and claudia, went up to our rooms, and immediately began to pack to leave for patagonia the next morning.

patagonia has more altitude than buenos aires. and it is nearer to the south pole. it can get cold there even in the summer. thus, packing for patagonia requires hard choices. there is a desire to not take too much and there is a desire not to freeze.

jan discovered that we are allowed forty four pounds of checked luggage. the argentines allow this weight to be in several pieces. they care only about the total weight. this means that we can take enough to be warm. the extra fleece jacket goes in!

we arrive in patagonia after an uneventful flight. as alison had warned me, the winds are very strong here. the town of el calafate sits on a plain which is next to the mountains. we have come to the argentine national park called "the glaciers." the glaciers are spawned by the vast patagonian ice field, the third largest in the world, surpassed only by those in antarctica and in greenland.


the differential in altitude must be the cause of these strong winds. the cold air on top of the ice field spills down into the warmer valleys. thanks to alison's warning, we all have goggles here to protect our eyes from blown sand. so far this has not been necessary.

we have a pleasant hostel with wireless internet in el calafate. we need to arrange guided walks on the nearby perito merino glacier. the staff are very helpful. but the big tour on the ice is impossible to schedule. it involves a three hour glacier walk. their insurance company forbids this to anyone over 45. that excludes me and even bob who is 48.

in bob's case exclusion from the hike is extremely unfair. bob is very fit. to maintain his investment in a power dam he regularly does heavy labor. for example, he manhandles huge metal gates which protect turbines in the kentucky river. so bob is disappointed. we shall be reduced to doing the glacier tour which involves only a one hour glacier walk.

but my opinion is: if you spend one hour on a glacier, you have spent all the time you need to spend on a glacier.

el calafate is a pleasant little town. it has a definite jet set feel. that being said, it is on the edge of the wild. there are some serious outdoors people around, for example, climbers on the way to climb the serious fitzroy tower.

dogs are plentiful in el calafate. these dogs lead a good life. there are bright eyed intelligent dogs exploring the town. they are independent of owner and leash. this town must have many things which make a dog's life interesting and fulfilling. for example, there are many restaurants, half of which are meat grilling parillas. most of all, there are many jet set tourists who like to feed dogs. this makes dogs happy.

it is a contrast to buenos aires. there the dogs are walked on leashes. there the sidewalks are strewn with dog poop. the sidewalks of el calafate are devoid of dog poop. in their freedom, the dogs of el calafate have found other more discrete places to poop. therefore, humans are not bothered by dog excrement. people and dogs are happy.

the dogs of el calafate are very polite. they are not aggressive. i would surmise that they are for the most part descended from a very sociable sheep herding dog.

the terrain here is similar to that of northern california. it is wilder and bigger but it has the same dry golden vegetation one finds just east of san francisco. there are dry barren hills which preface the coming of the green forests in the mountains.

el calafate sits on the edge of lago argentino, a turquoise gem of a lake. the turquoise color comes from the glacial silt and the sky. the lake is quite shallow. i believe it is not over 10 meters deep anywhere. it is obviously much shallower in many places. there are sand bars far out into the water.

lago argentino may be argentina's largest lake but it is actually a rather small body of water. the far shore is always less than 15 kilometers away and is never out of sight. my impression is that it is smaller lake than, for example, lake champlain on the border of new york state and vermont. the strong winds here create whitecaps on these turquoise waters but they lack the power of waves on really large lakes.

the next day we took a bus. it took us to a boat launch on an arm of lago argentino. a boat carried us across the arm to near the foot of the perito merino glacier. we hiked through green forest. then our group put on crampons for a guided hike on the glacier.

this glacier was not flat like the columbia glacier in canada. this glacier was broken into many, many tall seracs. some of them were ready to fall and, while we were there, some did.

our competant guide led us on a carefully chosen path. we stepped over narrow safe crevasses. she avoided the worst of the crevasses. when necessary, she stood between us and the abyss.

we gazed into ice holes. glacial melt water rushed down these holes into the depths. with our crampons on we went easily up and down ice hills. crampons make footing secure on ice. you just have to be careful not to trip over them.

our guide was an athletic young lady named rosanna. one of the advantages of getting old is that rosanna paid special attention to my well being. she kept me right behind her lead. she made sure that i was stepping properly and would not trip. she also gave me a steadying hand whenever she thought i needed it. thus, she gave first class service. she completely deserved the generous tip i eventually gave her.

the guides had set up a table on the glacier. our ice trek ended there. glasses of excellent scotch whiskey were served over ice. even though it was a blended scotch, the whiskey tasted good. the alcohol was provided at the end so that we only had a short walk afterwards to get off the ice. everyone was steady enough to make.

one of our party was accompanied by his 13 year old daughter. the cute kid clearly had earned her drink of whiskey. she did not get it.

as we left i saw one of the guides washing our glasses with cold glacial water. her fingers must have gotten quite cold.

we took a short trip back across the water to the bus. it took us to observation balconies overlooking the glacier. we had a fine view of the vast extent of the glacier and of its parent ice field.
we could watch and hear the thunderous calving of the glacier into the lake. this glacier is one of the few in the world which is advancing. it is miles across and its square miles exceed thos of buenos aires. it is huge.

the bus then returned us to the town of el calafate. our day had been quite full enough of ice trekking on a glacier. three or more hours on the glacier would have been way too much. it was good that the insurance company had forbidden us.

today we transfer to el chalten to see the immense tower of rock which is the fitz roy. the plan is that we will hike up to a view of it. then jan and bob will continue higher to camp for two days while i return to our hostel. i plan to take it easy and hope to take a boat ride on lago viedma ending up at for dinner and overnight at an estancia. i may even ride a horse. we shall see.

then i plan to return to the hostel to rejoin jan and bob.

this morning we began the transfer from el calafate to el chalten. we decided not to take a taxi. this meant that we had to carry all our luggage from the hostel to the bus station. i had three bags to carry and the last part was uphill. it was heavy work. it probably was a mistake not to take a taxi. i felt that i had done the equivalent of a major hike.

the three and a half hour bus ride went smoothly. as we neared el chalten we could see the impressive height of the towering mount fitz roy. fitz roy is a pillar of rock in the shape of a giant tooth set amidst ice and snow and surrounded by lesser towers and seracs.

i am told that fitz roy is difficult to climb because it requires frequent switching from ice to rock and back again.

as we stepped off the bus, the wind hit us. it was full of power. walking into this wind was tiring and slow. we had to walk two blocks into it carrying our heavy luggage.

we arrived at our hostel, the rancho grande. this was a crowded and noisy place. it was filled with many trekkers and climbers. it was the most popular place in town. the buzz of activity showed that it was not going to be a restful night.

we saw a heavy pack and other gear in our room. we were going to have to share the room with a complete stranger! who knew what sort of monster he or she could be? traces of feminine products indicated it was a woman. but no picture was provided.

furthermore, bob and jan planned to camp and abandon me for two nights out of four nights there. hence, i would have to sleep in a dorm with even more unknown people, probably with three of them. again, no pictures were provided. the prospects were frightening.

all of this was going to cost me 50 united states dollars a night. this might be a reasonable price for a room of your own but it is not for a bed in a dormitory in argentina.

so i was unhappy. jan, bob, and i went on a search for new lodgings for me.

i had four nights scheduled at the rancho grande. but it was clear that they would have no trouble replacing me if i cancelled my reservation. there were so many travelers in town and our hotel was the most popular place in town. it was ideally located on the main street in just past the bus station. the internet had made it well known to all arrivals. it had more customers than it knew what do to with.

our first try at relocation was a new, fancy place high on a hill. it dominated the town. it was a smaller imitation of the grand hotel built in banff by the canadian railroad. it was loathed in all the guidebooks.

faced with this bad press, the clerk there seemed overly eager to get my business. she even promised free dinners and free massages. she did not specify who would be giving the massages. but she gave me a special deal of only 500 united states dollars for two nights.

this was a steep price for a room in patagonia. in most places, 500 dollars can buy more than a massage. i decided to pass on the free massage unless she could guarantee that it would be given by nicole kidman or naomi watts. she could not guarantee either.

we continued our search down a side street into an area off the main road. there was a just opened place, the hosteria lago viedma. the manager said that he had a room. he would be glad to rent it to me. but he did not seem to desparate to rent. he was just content to rent. his quiet manner won my confidence. since the room was quiet, clean, and inexpensive, i realized that i had won a trifecta and decided to stay here for four nights.

jan and bob were envious of my good fortune. they decided to join me at this hotel.

thus, all of us abandoned the rancho grande for the lago viedma. we knew that the rancho grande would have no difficulty filling our rooms. the rancho is well publicized on the internet while the lago is unknown. this is why one is filled to overflowing at high rates while the other has available rooms at lower rates.

the manager explained to be that he used to have satellite internet. the company had upgraded to fibre optic cable and now the internet rarely works here. since he pays for it, this is a source of frustration. but he feels that all of this is part of the strains of modernization and is preparatory to a future time of profits.

the main advantage of our new place is that it is tranquil. it is a hotel with just 4 rooms and at most 8 guests in them. in fact, a hosteria is a small hotel in a house, what we would call a bed and breakfast. it is neither a hotel with a lobby and a clerk nor is it a hostel with dormitory beds. in these quiet surroundings, i will take a few short day hikes. nothing too strenuous. it will be relaxing for me. of course, i will eat well at the local restaurants.

meanwhile jan and bob will be hauling uphill the freight of their tents, packs, food, and bodies. thus, they will demonstrate the equivalence of gravitational mass and inertial mass. einstein will be pleased.

jan and bob will add boiling water to packages of knorr's soup and subsist on that. don't get me wrong. i like knorr's soup but some cooks can do better.

the dogs of our new town, el chalten, enjoy the same leash-free life as the dogs of el calafate. but they are more aggressive to each other and not as friendly to people. these dogs bark sporadically and angrily in the night. they poop on sidewalks. it is enough to indicate that they are unhappy about something.

since the dogs of el calafate and el chalten are of the same breed, i suspect that the difference in temperment is caused by the lack of jet setters in el chalten. visitors to el chalten are serious trekers. they have no time to waste on being friendly to dogs.

in addition, the national park staff request that trekers discourage dogs from following them up the trail. these dogs harass an endangered species of argentine deer. thus the park rangers wish to limit the freedom of dogs. alison, as a curator of a westchester park who values birds, is like that too. thus the rangers inculcate a sense of hostility.

perhaps influenced by this, the manager of our little hotel is also anti-dog. when an unaccompanied dog walks by the hotel, he rushed out to shoo it away. he considers dogs running freely to be a blot on the town. he swears that they sometimes attack people, even tourists. it is bad for business.

all this hostility lessens the quality of life for a dog. it must have a negative effect on their personalities.

we ate dinner at a bistro. i had roast lamb. it was delicious. lamb is very traditional in patagonia. bob had something even better, a nicely poached patagonian trout. jan had a wonderful vegetarian mix with beens and corn. all selections were great. i ended with a chocolate mousse.

it was a pleasant meal to end a hectic day.

in el calafate, i had bypassed my chance to eat lamb. i saw lamb being prepared in the traditional patagonian way. the lamb is gutted, the meat and the skeleton are flatteneed into a sort of plank, this is put on a cross like frame, and it is placed next to a hot fire until it is cooked.

you must feel a deep sympathy for this now dead creature. it has been disemboweled and crucified. there is no dignity in the cooking. no being who is not the founder of a major religion should be forced into such a position.

this method of cooking does not give a consistant result. it is too difficult to control the heat distribution over the whole corpse. so i postponed my lamb dinner. this day in el chalten is the day of my first consumption of roast patagonian lamb. they had roasted it in an oven. i felt better about it.

later i may try the more barbaric method of preparation.

today i hiked up to the lake called lago capri. i had the company of jan and bob for the first part of the hike. they were loaded with camping gear and i had only a light backback. still, their pace was a little quicker than mine. i would have preferred a slower pace. but it was not so quick that i could not keep up. since i would not have been able to do so with a heavy pack, i was happy not to be camping.

we arrived at the viewpoint mirador. here, we got our first close view of mount fitz roy. it was often obscured by clouds. the clouds would part to reveal brief glimpses of this imposing pile of rock and its surrounding ice. it was easy to see lots of opportunities for climbers to get themselves killed here. many have.

i ate lunch, drank tang, rested, and took in the view.

while i rested, jan and bob left me to continue to a higher camp for two nights. i got up and caught up to a stalled jan and bob. after an brief conversation, i turned off on a side path to my destination at the lake. with no racing younger folks in the lead, i had the great pleasure of setting my own pace.

lake capri was beautiful. the view of fitz roy was still superb. it was a good place to be. but the pleasure of the lake was slightly spoiled for me by lack of solitude. at the ideal spot for enjoying the view sat a group of four people who were, to say the least, a distraction.

two adolescent girls were fencing with hiking poles. they did quite good imitations of errol flynn in his prime. their play was nice but had nothing to do with the surrounding view.

the girls and their two boy friends kept up a constant stream of chatter. without ceasing, they began a lunch of sandwiches. instead of paying homage to some of the best mountain scenery in the world, they concentrated on photographing each other eating. these photos were not set up to include any of the stunning background. the emphasis was entirely on the sandwiches entering their mouths. the chatter continued with no break.

this group might as well have been in a school cafeteria. they were oblivious to everything but their usual pleasures. they did not care who they bothered.

such narcisism is strongest when it is reinforced by a group. this was the case here. the presence of figures of authority tends to dampen narcisism. there were no such inhibiting factors here.

narcisism is not peculiar to the young but it is strong in them. it sometimes needs to be curtailed.

after a little while, i thought that i had had a sufficiency of both the view and of the adolescents. i headed down and back to town.

on the trail back, i met an interesting fellow named will. will was from edmonton, alberta, canada. will was a trucker. he had abandoned his job and the canadian winter for two months to visit chile and argentina. when his bosses told him that he was crazy and that he might not have a job when he returned, will replied: "i have to be crazy to work here. i am leaving for two months."

so here he was in patagonia, hiking and nursing a sore knee. for the future he had an offer to tend sheep in argentina. i had to admire his courage.

will was an older fellow, about my age of 60 or so. so it was slightly troubling that he was overly focused on the physical attributes of young ladies. and he enjoyed sharing his mildly licentious observations. as several attractive young ladies passed by, he would comment to me in detail on the quality of their breasts and nipples. some of them were fine indeed. but it seemed unseemly for two old guys like us, who had just met, to focus our conversation on this subject.

not that the girls, particularly one with a light blue shirt which she filled out well, weren't interesting. the male of our species is wired to take an interest in them. but, believe it or not i try hard not to be a dirty old man. i think that means that you do not stare at young ladies, much as you might appreciate their charms. and you comment on such charms only to trusted friends. marty bendersky comes to mind as a kindred spirit who can be trusted.

in short, while in the presence of attractive young women, one tires to behave with courtesy, what used to be called "like a gentleman."

will was staying in the rancho grande, the hostel which we had just abandoned. he was thrilled that he had an attractive young lady sleeping next to him in the dorm. well, i might be too. to judge, i would have to see her and to hear her. otherwise, it is a difficult thing to evaluate.

will was proud that his setup at the rancho grande was a great deal for 50 pesos a night. no, i said, it is 50 dollars a night. no, he said, 50 pesos. he was right! just to be sure, i checked with the staff at the rancho grande when i got back.

jan had gotten the rates wildly wrong! she got it wrong over the internet and also yesterday in person while talking to a clerk who was fluent in english.

but still, the luxury of private rooms and baths at our new lodgings was worth the increased price. the best part of it will be in the telling of jan about her mistake!

but i will always be troubled by the thought that i might have missed the chance of sleeping next to a young version of nicole kidman or of naomi watts for 50 pesos a night.

in the absence of nicole kidman or naomi watts, i will be content with a young patagonian trout. it is more reliable and the flesh is as tender and as sweet. trout, the young cousin of salmon, is almost always good.

this morning i arranged for a bus ride to and back from the hosteria el pilar. el pilar is 18 kilometers north of the town. the bus driver was also a tour guide and spoke incessantly in spanish. he would ask if their were any english speakers, hear si or yes, and respond with more rapid and louder spanish. he had a very piercing voice. it sounded like scratching enamel. i took an intense dislike to him.

the driver made it clear to me that, if i wanted a return ride, i absolutely had to be a the pickup spot at 1:30 pm. under no circumstances would he wait even a minute. i liked him even less.

i arrived at el pilar. it was a charming place. but it was closed for the morning. it is supposed to serve a nice lunch. but to wait for it to open would be boring. i decided to walk back and enjoy the scenery. this would be a 5 hour walk but it was a great decision. i was not going to have to be on time for the bus! i was not going to have to listen to the same driver talk! happiness and calm settled over me.

i set off through the forest of lenga trees. the lenga trees grow only in chile and argentina. pride in this tree is one of the few sources of agreement between these two countries. lengas are a sort of overgrown labrador tea bush. the leaves are similar, small, tough, triangular, and waxy. lengas are able to survive the high winds of the andes. the winds bend lengas into shapes that would give joy to a japanese gardener of bonzai.

my first treat was a view of a splendid hanging glacier. this glacier falls off the base of fitz roy and spills into a gorgeous glacial lake.
the weather was beautiful. the sky was blue with just enough clouds to enhance the view.

the best view was of fitz roy itself. there were no clouds to hide it. on this day every photo of fitz roy was of "screen saver quality."

with the assistance of my initial bus ride, i was near the valley near where jan and bob had camped the previous night. but they had left. no matter, the valley was beautiful. it had lots of little glacial ponds. best of all, it had spectacular views of fitz roy and its attendant ice.

this hike was one of the best hikes i have ever taken. great views of a legendary rock, a beautiful glacier and lakes, and an attractive meadow.

everything was perfect except for one thing. on the descent back to town, i really missed having a hiking pole. the third leg of a pole gives stability and cushion when taking big steps down. my knees no longer enjoy descent. i descend like an old man, carefully and slowly with no joyous skipping down. the joy is only in the heart!

i enjoyed a dinner of argentine beef stew. it was immersed in a curry-like sauce to which you could add a spicier curry. i made the addition and what had been bland became delicious. i washed it down with a locally brewed pilsener. i did not know that my sense of well being was about to be shattered.

when i returned to my hotel, i sought for two guidebooks which had been entrusted to me. they were nowhere to be found! i unpacked and unpacked all my luggage. i did this several times. i even got out my headlamp and looked under the beds. i reasoned that i had checked every place in the room where i could have put them.

guidebooks are important. trips can be ruined without them. without them one might not find good places to eat! one might be regarded as an idiot by jan for losing them.

it was only 10:30 pm and businesses in argentina stay open late. in desparation, i retraced my steps through the town for the last two days. i asked everywhere i had been if they had found two guidebooks.

i went to the restaurant i had eaten at the day before. they remembered that i had been reading the books during dinner. but no, the books were not there.

i had bought a t-shirt at a shop next to the restaurant. perhaps i had laid the books down while contemplating styles and sizes. i could have easily forgotten to pick them back up.

the lady now on duty at the shop was not the one who had waited on me. she knew nothing about the books. she seemed to know nothing about the shop. when i asked her when the other lady would be back, the gulf in our spanish was too wide to cross. we both got totally confused. as near as i could figure, she was saying the other lady would never come back. i suspected that was not what she meant.

i regarded the t-shirt shop as the most likely place where i could have left the guidebooks. i needed to talk to the other lady! i went back to the adjacent restaurant and borrowed a bilingual member of their staff. with her help, i was told that the lady who had served me would be back at 10 the next morning.

at 10 in the morning, i went to the shop and was happy to see the lady who had sold me the t-shirt. she remembered that i had been carrying two books but, alas, they were not left there. my hopes were crashed.

i knew that i had gone directly back to the hotel from this shop. since the books were not in the hotel, i must dropped them in the street on the way back. the books were irretrievably lost!

dreading jan's judgment concerning my unreliability, i attempted to buy substitute guidebooks in our small town of el chalten. that would make everything well.

finding guidebooks to all of argentina or patagonia seemed a forlorn hope. el chalten is a very small town with a few restaurants catering to climbers. it sells food, climbing gear, and little else.

or so i thought. i was told of a bookstore in a recently developed part of town. i went there and discovered el chalten's small oasis of literacy.

they had, in english, shackleton's account of his epic antarctic vogage.

they had, in english, st. exupery's "little prince." st. exupery had been a pilot on a mail route over the andes and even had a local mountain named after him.

they even had, in english, a completely uncritical short biography of evita, complete with nice photographs. distracted for a moment, i decided to buy this!

most of the books were in spanish. but, best of all, they had exactly the guidebooks i had lost. and they accepted credit cards! it was almost as if replacing the books cost nothing.

i bought the biography of evita and the two guidebooks. i experienced a sense of complete redemption. i would not be the subject of jan's scorn.

hence, i walked happily back to the hotel. once there, i happened to look into a drawer. i had never gone near this drawer before. but lying there out of sight were the two lost books!

i discovered that the wife of our hotel manager had cleaned my room and put them there.

when i said that she had given me a fright by putting these books out of sight, she asked: "do you want to live in a world of chaos?" i answered: "yes, i do provided it is chaos created by me and understood by me!"

i sensed that my spanish was not good enough to convey such an abstract concept. a deep concept sometimes requires fluency in language. so i acted it out. i took my room key and hid it under a tablecloth and said: "bad thing, no?" she reluctantly agreed that it was a bad thing to put a valuable room key in a place where she could not find it.

i had a pleasant lunch of motzarella cheese and prosciuto made from local wild boar. washed town with a pleasant pink grapefruit flavored tang.

in the evening jan and bob returned. independently, we had met the same set of two men on the trail. and they had booked at our hotel. we joined up with them for dinner. they were both meat eaters. with bob and me, that made four of us.

jan ordered her usual salad and vegetables. but us four meat eaters ordered the mixed parilla for four. the pile of meat and sausages was the argentine version of the british mixed grill. the argentine version was a much more substantial thing. the quantity of meat was huge. i chose a lamb chop, a chorizo sausage, and the most wonderful blood sausage. a bottle of agua con gas completed the successful meal.

today is our last day in el chalten. i purchased some churros and a sweet roll from the local bakery. the excellence of the pastry in the out of the way town of el chalten convinced me that i must have more argentine pastry.

i visited the little chapel dedicated to climbers who have died in expeditions to local peaks. the chapel is called the "toni eggar memorial." he was an austrian climber who was one of the first two to succeed in climbing the cerro torre in 1959. but he died on the descent, taking the camera and all proof of success with him. there were doubters.

for years there were no successful attempts on cerro torres. his companion went back. he drilled many bolt holes and used these to climb cerro torres again. thus he proved that it could be done. unfortunately, using these bolt holes was criticized as an unfair method. sometimes it is hard to win.

there is a name which preceeds toni's in the memorial. a french climber named poncenot drowned crossing the fitz roy river. he was a member of a the first successful climb of fitz roy led by the great lionel terrey. for his effects, poncenot has his name in the chapel and on the adjacent peak.

i returned to the hotel, retrieved my luggage, and walked to the bus station. the wind was a fierce resistance.

i arrived with plenty of time to catch the bus to el calafate. the bus ride was uneventual except for a brief rest stop where they sold amazingly good plum tarts. once again, argentine pastry proved its excellence.

after our return to our old hostel in el calafate, we headed out to a bird sanctuary on lago argentino. in the marsh we saw ibis, white swans with black necks, and a large flock of very pink flamingos. it was nice to see these pink creatures fly.

after the birds, we went for a grilled lamb. this lamb was cooked in the barbaric style where they flatten the skeleton, crucify the remains, and prop it up next to a fire.

the lamb was fantastic! the meat was tender and juicy. the best i ever had! the vinegar salsa with tomatos, onions, parsley, and garlic was a perfect enhancement of the taste. the french fries were crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. perfect! i washed it all down with a cold quilmes beer. the meal ended with almond ice cream and coffee.

the lamb was a wonderful way to begin a temporary vacation from meat. now we go to puerto natales, chile. it is on a fiord of the pacific ocean. i will switch to seafood. i look forward to conger eel, king crab, among others.

over and out,

joe n


10. it is chile south of fifty

we left el calafate on a bus early in the morning. our goal was the chilean town of puerto natales in southern patagonia.

we turned onto route 40. route 40 is argentina's version of the alcan highway as it used to be 20 years ago. services of any kind are scarce and the road is unpaved. flying gravel has given most cars shattered windshields. thank god for safety glass! might as well wait before rushing to replace the windshield. it will only be shattered again.

that being said, route 40 is a major road and is well kept up for an unpaved road. i am told that the primary fear of driving route 40 are the fierce patagonian winds. they can and do blow cars off the road. since services are hard to find, this is a bad thing.

we finally saw an abundance of larger animal life. first we saw sheep, domesticated of course. then cows, also domesticated. at least we were seeing larger forms of life in abundance!

finally, we saw wild things, a flock of rheas, the ostrich-like bird which roams these parts. the rheas ran away from us. but they neglected to use their signature zig-zag moves. if we had been expert with the bolas, they would have been dead meat! i bet they have huge drumsticks!

then we encountered real nuisances. i refer to the chilean border guards. the had orders to systematically search our luggage. everything had to be opened and displayed.

the guards confiscated a selection of products. juice was permitted entry. cheese, nuts, and any form of meat, even cured, were forbidden. these must to be immediately eaten or they would be seized.

the chileans have an especially strong prejudice against any product made in argentina from deer. we had to eat our smoked venison, even if it was vacuum sealed. since they have the same deer on both sides of the border and they cross freely while alive, i do not see the reason in this.

many of the people on the bus gave away food rather than waste it. and, since the border guards were nice about their confiscations, it was not a bad experience. but it did take a while to be allowed into chile. 2 hours in total. someone pointed out that this was less than the usual holiday wait at the united states-canadian border. so one cannot be too critical!

a sign said that the importing of semen was forbidden. logically, this means that every man should be barred from crossing the border. alternatively, before being allowed to cross, the men should be given a picture of nicole kidman and sent to a small private room.

at the border crossing there were photos of escaped criminals and of missing children. i noticed a large portrait of the lady who is the current president of chile. probably, the latter is a chilean reaction to the fact that argentina also has a lady president. chile cannot bear to be behind argentina. the spirit of hillary clinton is really blossoming down here!

safely across the border and into chile, we arrived at the town of puerto natales. puerto natales is a port town located on a fiord of the pacific ocean. it is 51 degrees lattitude south. that is rather far south. for example, edmonton, alberta, canada is 53 degrees north.

60 degrees south would be the antarctic circle. the only land inside this circle are small islands and the continent of antarctica. thus, we cannot on this trip achieve more than inside of 50. we will not see the inside of 60.

on this trip, we will reach as far south as ushuaia at 56 degrees south. ushuaia is the port of departure for antarctica. we do not go there.

we checked into our pleasant hostel in puerto natales. i have an single room with a private bath. it is approximately 20 dallars a night.

jan and bob are departing immediately for the national park torres del paine. they will hike and carry heavy packs. i will not. it is raining.

here is a report of the dogs of puerto natales. there seem to be more dogs than people. i am happy to report that the puerto natales dogs have as much freedom to roam as the dogs in argentine patagonia.

despite the fact that these dogs often congregate in little packs, resting and alert on the street corners, still they are as welcome here as the dogs of el calafate are there. these dogs often trail a person to see if some food is forthcomming. if you whirl around, they quickly retreat. so they must have had some bad experiences.

except for the fact that the dogs of puerto natales are more oriented towards obtaining food, these dogs seem to lead a good life. but they might be a little hungrier than the argentine dogs.

we abide in this area for six days. my plan is to stay in this hostel for two nights, then to switch to a hosteria in the park for two nights, and then to return to this hostel for two more nights.

i have two motives:

one, to spend some time in puerto natales and to sample its seafood.

two, to hike in the park, to see some wonderful views, and to not camp. in my old age, i avoid carrying large weights for long distances.

i should be able to do what i plan. but it has been curiously hard to pin down that i actually have a reservation at the hosteria in the park. jan tried to call for me. after the words, "do you speak english?", they hung up on her and thereafter no one would answer the phone. this is not a good way to get customers!

i got a little help from the jan and the hostel manager. finally, with my own primitive spanglish, i got a reservation.

i should add that the hostel manager here in puerto natales was totally on my side in my plan to abandon his hostel for two nights. this is so since i have made it clear that i am willing to pay him for 6 nights even though i only use 4 of them.

for our first dinner in puerto natales was to be special, the best fish restaurant in town. the restaurant called "the glacier fish" was down at the waterside. the guidebook raved about how fresh the fish was.

unfortunately, the glacier fish had transformed itself. it changed from a solid basic seafood restaurant into a mediterranean restaurant. in southern patagonia, one does not seek out mediterrranean food!

the chef and/or the owner had acquired pretensions. he sought to improve or mask the flavor of his crustacions and of his fish by sauces. this was a very bad idea. he was missing the main point, the wonderful flavor of fresh seafood! he was throwing it away. he would not be the first or last to do so.

such an attitude, the absence of any customers, and the pervasive jazz musack convinced us to walk out of there.

fortunately, we passed by the restaurant, "el ultimo esperanza." the guidebooks had also rated this highly for seafood. we liked the look of the place. there were customers dining there, a good sign. and they looked happy. and the menu had everythine we wanted.

we had, for a surprisingly small price, a delicious dinner of conger eel, king crab, and abalone. you can't get much better than that! all of it was simply prepared, no frying or sauces. the seafood taste came through!

the king crab was fresh king crab, sweet and succulent> enough said! after all what can you say about the taste of crab or of lobster which has not already been said?

the abalone had a subtle taste and it was tender enough. it was not beaten flat the way they do it in california. the californians worship abalone and therefore devote a maximum effort to tenderizing it. tenderizing it pays off.

in patagonia they just eat abalone without the pounding. it is good enough that way. most important, it is plentiful since it has not been fished out here like it has been in california.

the conger eel was a new food for us all. it is a marine eel with a taste similar to cod and a texture similar to lobster. it is supposed to have a nasty disposition. it likes to steal food from other fish.

conger eel tastes like a muscular cod and is superb with garlic!

later we would discover that the best way to have conger eel was in a soup with spices and vegetables. you must add lemon to get the right taste!

the male conger eel has a curious ending to its life. before spawning, its gonads swell to become one third of its body weight. afterwards it dies. i am unable to evaluate whether it is a good way to go.

this feast was seasoned by the excellent accompaniment of a salsa. the salsa here in south america adds something to almost every food, meat and seafood included. it is a simple mixture of tomatos, onions, garlic, and parsley immersed in vinegar and oil.

we also had some frites, a mixed salad, and a plate of sliced avocados. all the ingredients were simple and good, even the frites!

we washed it down with some agua con gas. dessert was an ice cream made from calafate berries. in argentina, calafate ice cream is very expensive. it is a bargain in chile and just as good.

in fact, the above meal was very reasonably priced, a feast at approximately 15 united states dollars a person.

in our hostel, i met "alaska girl." alaska girl is a middle aged woman, muscular and chucky. she is divorced from the cqptain of a crab boat. this crab boat and the captain appear on the cable television show "the most dangerous catch."

alaska girl was both wife and the cook on the crab boat. when her captain husband left her for another woman, she was awarded a half interest in the crab boat. this legacy allows her to lead a life of leisure and travel.

alaska girl is accompanied by a teacup yorkie which she expertly smuggles through customs without papers. it is a small and quiet dog, easy to hide in a purse. she was outraged that some british lady had once turned her in to customs. she had a hassle getting the necessary papers.

alaska girl seems to be looking for a hookup. the first thing she asked me was "are you traveling without a woman?" i said yes and no. i was traveling with a married couple. she though that was weird. maybe it is.

following in the footsteps of jan and bob, i took the bus out to torres del paine. i arrived at the hotel in the park.

i had explicitly requested a mountain view. they said there was no problem with that. when i arrived, they gave me a so-called garden view. the garden view faces away from the mountain! only after insisting did i get the mountain view i had contracted for.

i discovered again and again that the chileans are a friendly people, eager to please. but they are a sloppy people. they do not get it right the first time. to get what you expect, you have to be persistent. chileans and russians are similar in many ways.

on the day of my arrival, i hiked up towards the best view in the park, the close up view of the torres del paine. i had already seen these torres after which the park is named. i had seem them from a distance and they were spectacular.

but, on my hike up to the great view, when i reached an intermediate point with a good but partial view, the clouds were rolling in. i had to forgo the close up view. no matter, the far away view was great too.

i decided to skip dinner at the hotel. i needed to eat my trail food. i had chorizo sausage and swiss cheese. it was tasty enough.

i had a local pear as a dessert. the natural taste of the pear seemed to include a faint taste of brandy. very nice.

all i could get to drink was a curious form of reconstituted peach juice. it was made by adding water to a powder. since it was really fruitlike, it differed from something like tang. i liked it because it seemed real. but i also like the taste of tang which i know is not real. by the way, in chile they have an excellent pineapple flavored version of tang.

before my hike, the hotel was kind enough to lend me a walking stick. this pole helped my old knees survive. but the knees still hurt enough that i began to analyze the problem.

when you get old, you get to be too careful on the descent. in your caution, your steps become too small. you are always stopping, always jarring the knees. you have no flow.

in an effort to be safe, you are always stopping your momentum. this causes pain in the knees. hence, it is far better to be less careful and to flow down the mountain. this is what most young people do. and they are as safe or safer than us older guys.

in the evening, the clouds had become rain. i decided to take the so-called "full paine tour." if any visibility was possible, then, in one car ride, i would see the whole park. and i would stay dry. and my knees would not hurt.

i was in luck the next morning. the day was bright and clear. there was no rain, we had fantastic views of the torres del paine. to be sure, these views were from a distance.

we had great views of the cuernos, the rock "horns" which are the symbol of the local beer, austral.

we visited a roaring waterfall. it was a torrent of gray glacial water, very cold. the wind at the crest of a hill by the waterfall was the strongest i have ever felt.

gravity is the only force holding you down. hence, it did not matter how strong you were, if you had nothing to hold on to, you could not stand up in this powerful wind. you would be blown away.

you could not look into this wind. the wind would sandblast your eyes. alison's warning of the need for goggles in patagonia had come true at last!

the best part of the tour was the animal life we saw. it goes without saying that we saw large herds of guanacos. they are common in the park.
they are smaller relatives of the llama. they are very graceful and flexible. they run like a cross between a camel and a giraff. and they can twist their legs and necks like they are a pretzel.

one guanaco allowed us to approach within ten feet. it was completely tame. i guess it had learned that, in the absence of vicious bola wielding gauchos, it only had to watch out for pumas.

in the park and often outside of it, we saw flocks of pink flamingos. the flamingos become pink because of the crustaceons they eat. i cannot see how this pink coloring can have any survival value. i would think that evolution would devise a less noticeable coloring. this must mean that pink flamingos have no significant predators. maybe they taste bad.

we saw many condors soaring overhead. with wingspans in the neighborhood of 9 to 10 feet, they soar effortlessly in the andean wind.

we even saw a condor nesting 300 feet away on a cliff side. we could see clearly the white feathers on its wings. it is a majectic bird.

the guide explained that juvenile condors cannot fly for a full year after they are hatched. until they can fly, the young condors are fed by the adults. but since condors live up to 50 years, this time span is not such a burden on the adults, at least by human standards of 20 years or more of feeding the young.

we saw a tufted bird which looked like a giant carnivorous parakeet. it was just eating some vegetation. but it looked like it had an attitude. the guide said that it liked to steal the eggs of other birdsl

in the yard in front of the hotel, horses were grazing on grass and ibises were using their long beaks to probe the ground for something, probably worms. they seem to get along.

the full paine tour ended with a boat ride to see the glaciers calving into lake grey. once again, there was an intense wind. the resulting waves made boarding the boat very challenging. it seemed to even be dangerous.

first you walk out onto a floating 60 foot pier with only an intermittent railing. the waves make the pier bob up and down with a 2 foot amplitude. keep a wide stance and focus on your sea legs!

then you step off the pier into an equally unstable zodiac. the zodiac takes you out to a larger boat. you step off the unstable zodiac onto the fairly stable boat.

the boat drives through the wind and waves. when the boat is in motion, going outside would mean an instant soaking. eventually the boat stops near the glacier. it is not a very active glacier but the water has a few ice bergs which have calved off it. since the ice is very blue, it is a pleasant sight. but this glacier is not in the class of the perito merino!

the boat heads back. to disembark from the boat, you reverse the process of embarking: go from boat to unstable zodiac to unstable pier and walk the 60 feet back to dry and firm land.

one of the virtues of having bright sun and also the threat of rain is that we had so many gorgeous rainbows on this tour and at other times. this park is indeed a park of rainbows.

at the hotel i had a dinner of grilled conger eel. it was served in a nice mustard sauce. but the chef had placed entirely too much emphasis on the sauce. he used the excellence of the sauce as an excuse for not properly cooking the fish. in short, he overcooked it, the greatest sin in fish cookery!

the result of overcooking this muscular fish is to make it very tough, even chewy. my judgment of the chef was confirmed by other diners who had something different. they said the chef overcooked lamb also, so much that it was dry and chewy.

this confirms my conviction to stick to restaurants which get the preparation right. they concentrate on simple preparation of good ingredients. they do not overprepare food. they do not try to hide overcooking with a sauce. they let the real taste come through. that is the current universally accepted definition of the best cuisine.

my stay at the hotel ended with examples of typical cheerful chilean sloppiness. they get it wrong, they keep on smiling, and they fix it in the end.

first, they added a 19 percent surcharge which they could not explain.
this substantial charge was not included in the price. if you paid in dollars, it was not charged. but, if you were a foreigner paying in chilean pesos, it would be charged. they claimed it was an unspoken rule.

if necessary, they would convert the price in chilean pesos to dollars and the 19 percent surcharge would be eliminated. on the other hand, they converted chilean pesos to dollars by charging another 19 percent surcharge. so they won either way.

some dutch tourists were particularly upset over this.

guests leaving the hotel are entitled to a free shuttle to the connection with the bus to puerto natales. this shuttle left at one. the desk clerk was telling everyone that it left at two. fortunately, enough guests were well informed and corrected her several times until she understood that she was wrong. so no guests would be stranded. or so we thought!

some college age students from the united states were staying at the hotel. they were exchange students, mostly from southern california but with one from princeton. they wanted to catch the shuttle to leave. the male students had no problem but the shuttle refused to believe that the female students were legitimate guests. understand this much, none of the guests had any proof that they were guests. only the young girls were disbelieved!

only the united support of all of the departees convinced the shuttle driver to let the girls on.

as the girls said, "we're just girls. how could we be hotel guests?" it must be something about latin america!

the exchange student from princeton was an obama look alike. he was a student at the woodrow wilson school and was studying economics abroad at the university of santiago for one semester. he said that most people he met in chile would complement him on his resemblence to obama.

this princeton student has everything going for him. he is a good looking guy. he has the same lighter coloring of obama. he is not a really, really dark skinned fellow. in american society do not underestimate the advantage of coloring!

the princeton student seems to come from successful parent. he has a confident expectation of future success for himself. best of all, he is a smart princeton undergraduate with a strong work ethic. i do not think he needs to have great luck to be successful in this life. i think he would need very bad luck to fail. would you have been able to say that about any black student 30 years ago?

i returned to the hostel in puerto natales and then went out to a pharmacy to buy some necessities like toothpaste and a bic razor.

in the pharmacy, i encountered a disturbing american. he was an older man, definitely well over 60. he did not seem totally coherent. he said he was from alaska. i will call him "alaska guy." i told him that there was a woman in town who also was from alaska. he was totally uninterested. too bad. hooking up might have made both of them happy or, at least, happier. he definitely needed someone or something.

alaska guy spoke very loudly to everyone, always in english, even if he was speaking to someone who understood not a word. loud as he was, he still adopted a conspiratorial tone as if he were telling important and dangerous secrets. he often shielded his mouth while communicating in a stage whisper.

he said to me, "i have a secret. we all have secrets!" he thought everyone in the pharmacy should hear this. i do not know why. i do not know why he was in the pharmacy at all. he made no attempt to buy anything. he just kept talking to the pharmacist about how she did not know anything about him. he might as well have been speaking to a wall since she understood no english. he seemed surprisingly content to have any audience, even one that ignored him.

the next day, i went to get a bowl of conger eel soup. this is the way to have conger eel! it was delicious in a spicy soup with potatoes, carrots, and onions. a little added salsa and lemon juice made it just right.

while i was eating, alaska guy came into the restaurant. he stood in the middle of the floor and shouted to the staff, "damn it, just give me some food! i don't care what it is! i want food!"

when a waitress handed him a bread roll, he said, "this is sure food alright!" but then he must have reconsidered and thought that he had settled for too little. so he said, "i can see that john (his name must have been john) is not wanted here!"

"i know i am a tramp! but i am the best god damned tramp in the world."

before he left, alaska guy came over to me and, in his stage whisper, said "we used to be warriors!" then he left.

if what alaska guy said was true, he must have been a former member of the united states military. since this military no longer had a use for him, he had no purpose. he had no settled life. like blanche dubois in a streetcar named desire, alaska guy wandered the world depending on the kindness of strangers. who knows what damage his military service had done to his mind. his mind did not seem to be all there.

jan and bob returned from their hike in torres del paine. we took the bus to punta arenas. the first few kilometers out of puerto natales were marred by a great deal of litter. it was in the form of plastic bags caught up in the vegetation. i was speculating whether this was a terrestial version of the island of floating plastic that sits in the pacific ocean. then it ceased and the landscape became neat and unspoiled.

as we neared punta arenas, i got my first sight of the straits of magellan.

three thoughts occurred to me.

one, the straits are a wide and significant body of water. it would have been difficult for magellan to miss them. he almost had to turn into the straits. but that does not diminish his courage in continuing to go through the straits until he came out the other side.

two, at least at punta arenas, the shores of the straits are low and sandy. in fact, punta arenas is spanish for sandy point. often the shores of the strait are described as rocky and mountainous. i think this is true further along in the straits. the sand here is much more inviting. magellan could easily have landed here. so his journey seems a might less perilous.

three, the tip of south american is called tierra del fuego, land of fire. magellan saw fires burning on the coast. the natives wear little clothing and use large bonfires to keep warm. it is significantly different to imagine those fires on a sandy shore rather than on a rocky one. it somehow seems less supernatural.

when we disembarked in punta arenas, our walk to our hostel involved hauling all our gear up a long and steep set of concrete stairs. this is what i was trying to avoid on hikes in the park torres del paine!

we made it to the hostal only to discover that they did not have room there for all three of us. they had room but at another location. the other location was nicer and would cost me twice as much. that meant that the cost per night was still only 34 united states dollars per night. not bad.

we walked to the main square. a heroic statue of ferdinand magellan graced the square. foot planted in front, he looked boldly up at the sky, the classic pose of a farseeing hero.

i let myself be distracted from my main goal of eating krill at one of the best restaurants in punta arenas. i had king crab salad for lunch and garlic soup for dinner. both were great.

but tomorrow for lunch it will be krill. the chef insists that he has it on the menu. the food of the whales is difficult to get anywhere but here.
i cannot miss the opportunity.

it would be nice to have some sea urchin also. i hear it is a specialty here and it should be in season. but i have not seen it on the menu anywhere.

it is getting progressively colder as we go farther south. when we reach our final destination of ushuaia, we will be over 3000 kilometers south of buenos aires. it is hot and humid there. it is not so here. we now wear warm hats and a layer of fleece under our jackets. jan has even begun to wear long underwear.

today we will take a boat to see penguins on isla magdelena, an island in the straits of magellan.

first, we will eat krill!

krill is nothing but a very small shrimp-like creature. the main obstacle to mass human consumption of krill is that it would be tedious to shell all the little fellows. but a restaurant here has some means of doing so. the results are terrific!

bob, jan, and i decided to share three things.

one, we had an appetizer of various forms of tempura. tempura sweet peppers and tempura carrots were superbly done. but the stars of tempura were the krill, hake, and chilean sea bass. i have never had tempura that was this good. i have never had any other form of fried fish that was as good. it was all simply melt-in-your mouth good! crisply coated and totally juicy, the apotheosis of fried food.

two, we had hake and krill baked in a thin pastry crust. this was perfectly succulent in a sauce of pureed zuchini, parsley, and lemon.

three, we had lox, goat cheese, and watercress. it was as good as any lox and cream cheese. and that is good indeed.

i closed with a mate flavored ice cream. this was good but sad to say it was not as good as its japanese green tea flavored cousin.

then we boarded a boat to see the penguins. the boat was a cross between a small ferry and a large military landing craft. you got on the same way you got off, through the open ramp at the front.

the boat took us out into the straits of magallen to the isla magdelena. two months ago, 300 thousand magellanic penguins had nested there. many had departed. there were only 100 thousand left. it was enough.

the penguins did not seem to mind us walking among them. they looked at us with interest.

we were warned that, if the penguins started waggling their heads side to side like charlie chaplin, it meant that we were too close. they might bite us with their powerful beaks. to my knowledge, no such violence occured.

the boat returned us back across the straits to the dock we had departed from. it was cold, dark, and windy. it was like coastal alaska. we were indeed a long way from hot and humid buenos aires.

the man who was supposed to pick us up was not there. we stood in the wind and the dark watching all others leave. eventually we took a collectivo, a small cab which plies a regular route for a cheap price. it took us back into the center of town.

we walked into the hostel. there was our delinquent driver, the husband of the manager of the hostel. he claimed that his wife had forgotten to remind him to pick us up.

she offered us supper. somehow, this offer changed. we were driven to a buffet which was said to be both excellent and cheap. it turned out to be an attractive but not so cheap place. so we walked home and stopped for some salad, fries, and a roast beef sandwich on the way.

tomorrow, we get up at six in the morning to catch the bus to ushuaia. this is a 12 hour bus ride involving a ferry across the straits of magellan and a border crossing. but it will be our last bus ride on this trip!

joe n


11. beyond the straits of magellan

we leave chile to go back into argentina. i must report a disturbing discovery. our small sample indicates that george bush is popular with the common people of chile! a traffic cop gave a two thumbs up gesture as he mentioned the name of our expresident.

and our hotel maid said that she liked him for his character and personality!

i remember that this is the country that was ruled by pinochet. pinochet is a role model for republicans. when i asked our maid if she liked pinochet, she smiled and said, "no, but he brought order."

i asked the maid about allende. she said she liked him. but he was too far in the past for her to know much about him.

in argentina, bush is despised by even taxi drivers. they blame him for the economic crisis which is hurting their lives. chileans do not seem to be aware of the global economic crisis. argentines are more cosmopolitan.

i have heard a rumor that george bush is going to buy a farm in paraguay. chile has the same right wing tradition as paraguay. it might be a good place for him.

chileans are clearly superior to argentines in their appreciation of fish. the argentines are an excessively beef oriented society. even in argentine patagonia, beef is prized over every other food, even native lamb.

argentines say, "why should we eat fish when the beef is so good, when we have so much of it, and when it is so cheap?" the love of beef is an obsession with argentines!

our bus went on a ferry across the straits of magellan. at some time in the past the chilean navy took complete possession of both shores of these straits. at points the chileans only have a thin strip of land but the argentines have no possession of any shore. this is a clear demonstration of navel dominance. if i were an argentine, i would be more upset over this than over the falkland islands, the so-called malvinas!

after crossing the straits, we reached the border. going from chile to argentina was much easier than going the other way. the chileans stamped our passports and were happy to let us go. we crossed a surprisingly long no-man's land. these two people do not get along. they need to be separated by kilometers!

the rivalry between chile and argentina has bitter roots. it is similar to that between france and england or to that between france and germany.

over time, neighbors tend not to like each other. when we asked what filling was in a cookie, a chilean shop girl would say, "it is like dulce de leche, but it is chilean so it is better."

unlike the chileans, the argentines did not seem to care what agricultural products we brought in. they let us in without searching our luggage for seeds, meat, or even semen.

our bus went through the argentine town of rio grande. rio grande has a huge trout sign to signal its entrance. it has a legitimate claim to being the trout capital of the world. early residents brought rainbow and brown trout to the rivers. the fist went out into the atlantic. they ate much good seafood and returned in record sizes.

the town of rio grande is a surprisingly sprawling industrial town. it is set in boring golden dry plains. yet its trout have lured movie stars and ex-presidents to it. it is a long way to go to catch a fish.

the landscape and climate changed dramatically when we passed by rio grande. the trees became greener. there were more of them. lumbering became a major industry. soon we were driving through real mountains. it became colder and damper. from the dry plains we had entered a wilderness which resembled parts of the canadian rockies.

we arrived in ushuaia. it was raining. this is often the case in ushuaia.
we took a taxi to our hostel. the owner, the indomitable alba, immediately took charge of us. she told everything it was possible to do in ushuaia.

alba is not only a vegetarian but also cannot eat most grains. jan formed an immediate bond with her. jan's good friend keela also has these dietary restrictions.

alba divided ushuaia into two parts, one part where tourists eat and one part where locals eat. her knowledge was mostly second hand since alba could not eat anywhere except at home. thus, i did not regard alba as a reliable guide to culinary excellence. but she meant well.

the first night in ushuaia i resolved to let jan have her way. she needed a salad. so we would all go to a restaurant which would have salads.

inspired by alba, jan and bob led us to a take out place. when it is cold and damp a take out place is not the best of choices! it also seemed to have run out of all their stuff.

so jan agreed to try a restaurant i had selected. it claimed to have salads. in fact, what it had was an all you can eat lamb parilla with a salad bar. when jan explained that she did not want the lamb, the waiter proposed that she only eat salad. for this, she would get a microscopic discount.

this too did not seem like what we wanted. so we wandered off into the cold damp night. by this time, jan's spirit was broken and she agreed to try one of my top two selections of a fish restaurant.

the restaurant did not fullfil jan's desire for salad but it did have good pasta. jan was happy. even bob was happy. prices for these things were not too high.

jan and bob seem to feel that food should cost almost nothing. otherwise, they feel that they are being cheated. my mother was that way. but my mother had the excuse of living through the great depression. in my mother's mind, prices were forever set by the prices of the 1930s.

most important to me, my fish restaurant made me happy. i had a black hake in a lemon cream sauce with bits of king crab and mussels. not bad! but it wasn't cheap. all in all, it was good value.

unfortunately, all the wandering in the cold and damp night had brought on the beginnings of a cold for me. i bought juice and cough drops on the way home. once there, i put on a hat and went to sleep. i have discovered that sleeping with a hat and being very warm often can cure a cold or lessen it.

jan programs little robots to search things out. it is based on a random search. it ends eventually in finding what you want. jan has unwittedly programed herself. so jan charges off in an arbitrary direction and adjusts to find the goal.

bob is more organized. he generally has some idea where he is going. but he is a very fit walker and really doesn't care how much out of the way he walks. jan usually keeps up with him. jan and bob are often about a half block ahead of me, charging ahead and immersed in talk between themselves.

except for the too rapid pace, i like the solitude i get on these walks.

this time even jan could not keep up with bob. she asked him to slow down. bob came up with an original explanation for not doing so. he said that he could not do so because it would hurt his knees. true, going slow can be hard on the knees when going downhill. but we were not going downhill all the time. so i fail to see the logic in bob's explanation.

the next day the cold infection had arrived in me. we had scheduled to take a boat trip on the beagle channel. this was not to be missed.

we begab with a visit to an island with comorants and seals. our boat was a catamaran and, without landing, brought us very close. both birds and mammals did not seem to mind. the seals continued to play their game of king of the hill. the largest ones secured the highest points, got lots of sun and the best views.

we continued down the channel, green mountains on both sides. we passed the chilean naval base of port williams. ushuaia claims to be the southernmost town in the world. port williams is actually south of it. but it has only a few navy people and the last remaining aboriginal woman.

we made a quick visit to a penguin colony. this was the second time we saw magellanic penguins. megellanic penguins migrate north from here up to warmer parts of chile and argentina.

we saw another species, one that migrates south to antarctica. except for its pecular vacation ideas and a yellow beak, it looked almost the same as a magellanic penguin.

our catamaran landed us at the historic estancia halberton or halberton ranch. the founder of the ranch, thomas bridges, was an english missionary to the aboriginies in tierra del fuego.

bridges made the first and only dictionary of the aboriginal language. since the aborginies have all died off of starvation and disease, his dictionary is not much used now. but he seems to have had a genuine respect for them. at least one of them is buried in the family cemetery.

as an english missionary in argentina, thomas bridges was a well connected guy. when he asked for an estate so that he could have something to leave to his children, the argentine government gave him a large one, maybe 80 thousand acres. it is complete with sea shore, a protected harbour, mountains, streams, and lakes.

bridges' argentine friends lent him the money to get started, for example, to build a house. it cost a lot since it was shipped from england. they did not expect to be paid back. even dick cheney would have liked the deal that bridges got. but at least bridges earned his good fortune by sincere missionary work with the aboriginies.

the bridges estate is quite isolated in the coastal mountains. for years, the only access was by sea. but now there is a road. it was built in the 1970s by the argentine government. there was a near war with chile at the time. the argentine government wanted a good road to send troops. it might be necessary to repel a chilean crossing of the beagle channel. that is similar to the way that the alaska-canada highway got built. the japanese were invading the aleutian islands at the time.

the bridges raised sheep and cattle. the sheep are gone now but the shearing sheds and equipment remain.

the cattle remain also but they have gone wild. every once in a while, the staff goes hunting for beef. some unsuspecting creature is blow away and hauled back with a tractor. some of i the beef is turned into a delicious vegetable beef soup. they sell it here in the tea room. i had some.

by the way, the staff prefers to hunt bulls. bulls are both more tender and less wary. otherwise said, the male of a species is often lazier and more stupid than the female. in one way or another, males pay a price for this.

we had gone to halberton ranch by catamaran. we were to return to ushuaia by bus over the road built by the government through the wilderness.

some silly canadian had an idea. he would to make a fortune by importing beavers into the wilds of tierra del fuego and trapping them. since beavers have no predators here, they do quite well. as jacques lewin will testify, the result of beaver infestation can be devasting. streams are dried up and valley are turned into swamps. we saw one of the little creatures. he was busy as the proverbial beaver.

just before town, we stopped at the world's only center for patagonian huskies and dog sleds. the argentine owner was particularly proud of the breed. they were able to withstand cold well. since alaska and siberian huskies can presumably do that just as well, i did not see the reason for developing a new breed.

most of the huskies were attached by chains to posts. they walked in circles around these posts. it was the repetitive pacing seen in zoos.
these dogs did not have the freedom that other dogs in patagonia enjoyed. this was a dog prison, a dog andersonville. this civil war reference was obscure enough not to draw any criticism from jan.

the huskie owner was proud of the fact that he had once run his dogs in the iditarod. in order to create dissension among his staff, i told one of his women assistants that there is a saying in alaska:
"alaska! where men are men and women win the iditarod!"

after never winning the iditarod for many years, women have become dominant. they are tough enough. they seem to take better care of their dogs. the dogs love them. since the dogs are the real athletes, that counts a lot.

the woman assistant did not think that her big strong argentine boss would like to hear that.

when we got back to town it was raining. this was not good for my cold. but i decided to join jan and bob for pizza. we had two pizzas. they were not bad. most important, the crust was good. you cannot mess up mozarella cheese. but the boiled ham on top of one and the diced hard boiled egg on top of the other were not inspirational.

i walked home through the cold rain. sensing my fragility, dogs barked angrily at me in the night.

i drank a large quantity of a liquid called multifruit. it consisted of a mixture of orange juice, peach nectar, and apple juice. this concoction was all i could find at the supermarket. pure orange juice is sometimes rare in patagonia and in tierra del fuogo.

i put an extra blanket on the bed. i put on a winter hat. thus fortified against the cold, i went to bed.

i woke up the next morning feeling better than i expected. my voice sounded bad. i was coughing up phlegm. but the energy level was not too bad.

i stayed at the hostel while jan and bob went out to see the prison museum. ushuaia had been founded as a prison. i reminded jan and bob to think of the patagonian huskies while they were there.

near our hostel there is an all purpose medical clinic under the sponsorship of the metalworkers union of argentina. it proudly asserts that it was founded by eva peron. its sign even has a picture of her on it. i am pleased that the military and the oligarchs have not succeeded in wiping out all traces of evita.

i read that some republican congressman, zach wach, from tennessee asserts that health care is not a right, it is a privilege. it shows how far the republicans have retrogressed. they are far behind where evita was in the 1940s!

i walked into town and up a hill to what the guidebooks call the best fish restaurant in ushuaia. the view of the harbour is spectacular. so was the patagonian sea bass with black butter and capers. this fish, also called patagonian tooth fish, is very slow growing. it lives in very deep water. it has a great flesh, moist and flakey. it is so popular that many fine restaurants will not serve it anymore lest it be fished out. i figure that, if you can't eat it here south of patagonia, where can you eat it? of course, the logical answer is nowhere. forgive me, i am unlikely to ever have it again.

the owner of the restaurant is a lady who speaks fine english. as an educated argentine, she is delighted to see bush go. she agreed that the economic recovery is going to take a long time.

also consistent with her being an educated argentine is her mixed feelings about evita. she does not approve of evita's methods. she gives evita credit for doing something for the poor. she feels that evita bought the votes of her supporters.

i ask, "what politician does not buy the votes of his supporters?"

the chef pointed out a ship in the harbour whose next destination was south georgia island. south georgia is 66 degrees south. this is very far south, well inside the antarctic circle.

south georgia island has a pub with a famous collection of women's bras. a woman can get a free drink there by exchanging her bra. since this pub was founded to serve lonely british sailors, i suspect that the bras of transvestites or transsexuals are also acceptable currency. you can probably also get a drink for a jock strap.

it is not so far south here. nevertheless, it snowed here last night. in the wintry north, that might not impress you. but recall that early march here is the equivalent of early september there!

12. last tango in buenos aires

we fly from ushuaia back to buenos aires tonight. we should arrive at one thirty in the morning.

as we leave behind patagonia and tierra del fuego, i have some final reflections.

since buenos aires, i have not seen a macdonalds, not in el calafate, el chalten, puerto natales, punta arenas, or ushuaia. there seem to be no macdonalds in all of southern patagonia or in tierra del fuego.

but i have seen a carrefour supermarket. europeans know the name carrefour. carrefour exists in portugal, spain, and france, among other european nations.

there is a carrefour in ushuaia. it is not too small, either. thus, carrefour has a branch in the southernmost town in the world. and macdonalds is not even close. somewhere south of buenos aires, macdonalds ceased to care.

there is a monument in ushuaia to the poor argentine sailors and soldiers who where killed in the malvinas-falklands conflict. these boys were left out to die while their generals and admirals sat safely in buenos aires. the evidence suggests that even the captain of the belgrano did not go down with his ship. only the sailors next to the exploding torpedo were blown to bits.

but people never learn. the monument shouts that "the malvinas are ours! we will return!" and probably get whipped again by a superior military force.

i have mentioned that evita's work lives on here in the presence of a medical clinic. today i saw a tribute to her, almost a shrine, on the main waterfront street. the hands of the oligarchs reach here but they cannot squeeze too tightly.

today i visited the old prison which was the reason for the town's founding. it is bleak place. the cells are small. it is cold and damp. the stoves are far apart. the guards were sadists. books and mail, even sunlight, were often restricted. i think that even the chained up patagonian huskies have a better life than those ushuaian prisoners had. the prison was finally closed by juan peron.

for my last meal in ushuaia, i choose to have (tierra del) fuegan lamb. this lamb is prepared in the patagonian style, a method which combines the best of crucifiction, flaying, and being burned at the stake. a juicy and tasty piece of meat is the result.

i began with a thick piece of leg. this is a very luxurious cut. no effort is required to love this.

i continued with some lamb ribs. one feels very carnivorous eating ribs. lions must feel this way. but with a little bit of work, ribs have overtones of taste which the leg cannot match.

completely satisfied with my meal, i walked back along the waterfront, past the huge cruise ships amsterdam and star princess, and returned to the hostel to rest and further recover from my cold.

i phoned alison using skype. skype is very cheap. i know alison liked her visit to ushusaia many years ago. i thought she would like a call from ushuaia. i was eager to set a new record for distance.

alison told me that i had missed the main attraction of ushuaia, which is the town dump. alison is a birder. the town dump is where the rarest gulls are to be found. since i was nursing a cold, i had a good excuse to miss the town dump.

our taxi driver to the airport was a lady. she told us that there were many women taxi drivers in the south of argentina. but women were not allowed to drive taxis in the north. it is supposed to be too dangerous for them. i do not know why the south is safer than the north.

we were near the edge in terms of weight allowance for luggage. carry on pieces do not count as weight. so jan and bob suggested that i detach the small backpack attached to my main pack and take that as a carry on. brilliant! it made me so little above my weight allowance that the check in agent decided to ignore it!

but as i went through security, the x-ray detected a swiss army knife in that small backpack. swiss army knives are strictly forbidden in carry on luggage. they are dangerous weapons! far more so than two bottles of gasoline masquerading as bottles of calafate liqueur! this is allowed.

i had to take the knife back to the check in. fortunately, the agent there recognized me and remembered the large backpack. he quickly retrieved it and i stored the weapon there in checked luggage. this is a good example of argentine efficiency.

we were prewarned that there would be a two hour delay in our takeoff. no problem! we just arrived two hours later than planned.

once on the plane, we were told that all electronic communications were down. hence, there would be a slight delay until we received the clearance to fly.

new extensions of delay were periodically announced for two more hours. this is a good example of inefficiency. i was somewhat relieved. i had an unbroken record of 4 years of travel with always an airplane screw up. my record remained intact!

there was a stewardess who looked much like evita. many blondes in argentina look at least a little like evita, especially if they pull their hair back tightly. if they also possess a characteristic argentine look which flickers between a stern seriousness and a bright smile, it can be quite a turn on.

after every announcement of a new delay, this stewardess would walk up to my seat, lean over, and patiently explain to me in english the reason for the delay. she had identified me as the worst spanish speaker on the plane. i clearly needed help.

my stewardess was pretty. she wore a blue skirt uniform which was slit for flexibility. and she happenned to be wearing white nurse stockings. i bet she could do a mean tango in that uniform. i looked forward to our little chats.

evita has been described as a cross between a fantasy of the bedroom and a saint. the same may be said of my stewardess!

the last announcement before takeoff informed us that the national airport in buenos aires would be closed by the time we arrived there. we would land at the international airport. we would have the option of taking a bus to the closed and empty national airport.

we chose instead to take a taxi directly home to eduardo and claudia. we arrived at a dark house at 4:30 in the morning. we removed our noisy boots, let ourselves in with our key, and quietly went up to our rooms.

i was surprised to find that my room was a mess. although she was not there, it was clearly being lived in by a woman. feminine items of clothing and personal care were strewn all about.

the mystery was solved when i discovered a sign pointing to a new and better room. the sign said "jose" which is spanish for my name.

i quickly went to sleep. when we woke up, eduardo and claudia were gone. we took a taxi for a final shop at the fairs at recolleta cemetery and at san telmo.

after buying some gifts, including a purse for lindsay's graduation from high school, i took the opportunity to visit evita's grave in recolleta one last time. as before, there were many flowers.

i remarked that evita was the only really important person in this cemetery. the remainder were all useless oligarchs. i was overheard. someone pointed out to me that general roca, the man who exterminated most of the indians of argentina, was also there. it is unfortunate that evita's corpse is forced to keep company with the corpse of such a man.

after a quick salad at san telmo, i returned to eduardo and claudia's.

i met the exchange student who now occupied my room. her name was claire and she looked to be about twenty. she was studying here for six months. she fully realized how lucky she is to be able to stay with eduardo and claudia.

after a while, eduardo and claudia returned. it was good to see them. quiet as we tried to be, they knew that we had returned at some awful hour in the morning. i told claudia that i missed hearing her english. she did not believe it when i said that hers was the best english i had heard in all of argentina. i was sincere. claudia's english is has a caring quality to it. it feels good to listen to her.

in the absence of my vegetarian friends, i went to the local parilla. i ordered fries, which were exceptionally fine, and bife de costilla, which is a sort of beef chop. with the standard salsa, it was a classic argentine meal, beef to the core and very good.

the next day, bob and jan went off to see the famous race course called the hipodromo. kentuckians just have to pay respects to horses! but i do not. i planned an independent day.

i went back to the same parilla and ordered mollejas, sweetbreads, and frites. a perfect lunch, very difficult to get in countries with a restricted culinary tradition, such as the united states.

then i took out my old battered subte pass and attempted to use the subway. it would not work. but the guard saw that it was still valid and passed me through.

i got off at the plaza de mayo. veterans of the malvinas conflict were there. there motto was "south of 42 it should be ours!" if so, they have a beef with both britain and chile. since the navies of both britain and chile seem superior to the argentine one, the situation is bleak.

just off the plaza is a large equestrian statue of general rocas, heroic exterminator of indians. argentina's achilles heel is that too many of their early leaders are on horseback. the achilles heel of the united states is that we were founded by lawyers. but lawyers are preferable to generals. lawyers have a less efficient process for killing people.

i walked to the cafe tortoni. i took another look at the statues of the author borges, the dancer gardel, and the poet storni. the actor robert duvall has a photo there. i had a capuchino italiano. very civilized.

i walked back home to eduardo and claudia's house. this is a long walk. it took me two and a half hours. of course, i stopped for an excellent orange sherbert along the way.

the street rivadavia goes past the impressive congress building. the majesty of the congress would make one think that argentina had a long tradition of government by legislation.

afterward the congress plaza, rivadavia is a pleasantly commercial street all the way home. i had ample opportunities to buy shoes, shirts, underclothes, groceries, ice cream, and pastries.

just before reaching home, i purchased a carton of orange juice and, to take back to the united states, another bag of yerbe mate.

we gave to eduardo and claudia presents to thank them for all they have done for us, fine kentucky bourbon for eduardo and fine soaps and incense for claudia.

i did intensive packing for the plane trip home. one is allowed two pieces of checked in luggage, each not to weigh more than 50 pounds. if either piece exceeds 50 pounds, draconian fines are imposed!

the problem is to distribute the weight properly. the large bag with wheels can easily carry more, perhaps even a 100 pounds all by itself. the large backpack cannot carry nearly that much. it is hard to make it carry 30 pounds.

the large backpack has a useful feature, a way of encloding the straps so that they will not catch on the luggage conveyer belts. eureka! that creates an enclosed space which can be filled with clothes. weight problems solved!

on this note, i end my last communication from argentina. i may write again. it will be from the united states when i have had time for digestion of the whole trip. over and out! i need to get a steak before i leave.


13. the way we were

when i was growing up in chicago, every few blocks had its own church, its own saloon, and its own bakery. in my neighborhood, the churches were catholic, the saloons were dark with most room being taken up by a bar, and the bakeries emphasized bread but some also sold pastries. wonderful plum tarts were available from the german bakeries on the north side. german butcher shops sold wonderful cold cuts like head cheese, blood sausage, and a warm liver meat loaf called leberkaese. trust me, leberkaese was very good. my late cousin pat remembers that leberkaese was reserved for adults and never given to children. she was not totally correct. i got my share.

there was even a place on the near north side of the city where you could pick out a live chicken and have it killed and gutted. plucking was optional but most had it done.

those days are long gone now. they were part of a varied life. the churches, saloons, and bakeries were what the society most valued. they were valuable and honored places, shrines to aspects of life. if the food was less consistent than now, it was often fresher and better tasting.

in buenos aires, every few blocks has its own parilla, its own empanada shop, and its own bakery. those religious places still exist here. jan would argue that the milongas, the places where tango occurs, should be included. but the milongas seem to be too widely spaced. every time someone goes to milonga, they seem to have to go far across the town of buenos aires. claudia tells me that there are no more than 30 milongas in all of buenos aires!

so i conclude that tango in buenos aires is alive and well. but few people practice it. in old chicago as well, there were dance ballrooms. there were places to hear jazz. but they were few and far between. ballroom dancing and jazz were only a tangential part of most lives.

fans of tango like eduardo, claudia, jan, and bob must be content to be special people. they are not part of a vast majority consisting of tango fanatics. they are like antelopes mixed in a herd of water buffalos.

since tango is like religion, the newer converts are the most fanatical.

the true religions of argentina are the empenada and beef. if the empenada is the religion of the common people, then beef is the religion of the middle and upper classes. evita's decamisados, the shirtless ones, must have eaten empenadas. evita herself certainly must have enjoyed a good steak now and then. she did not deny herself the good things in life!

in argentina, those who die young live on. evita and carlos gardel are good examples. in the united states, elvis lives on. but i think his image is fading. nonetheless, he retains the largest current income of any dead person.

i know that charles schultz and albert einstein rank high in income among dead people. the comic strips and calenders continue to sell. but neither died young. i suspect that richard feynman's estate has a good income. but his is not a mass market.

if buenos aires is the big apple, then montevideo is its boston, only smaller. montevideo has the same things that buenos aires has. in fact, montevideo's parillas in the old port market cannot be matched. but montevideo is so much smaller. in size, it is more like a large suburb, albeit a suburb with class. and better beaches.

except for food, there is a complete disconnection between buenos aires and southern patagonia. beef and empenadas still reign but lamb begins to be a major competitor to beef.

the new element in patagonia is the wind. even on an ordinary day in the right spot, the wind can have the power to blow you over. it happenned on the ridge between lago nordenskold and lago pehoe in chilean patagonia. it is not a question of strength. when the only thing holding you down is gravity, you cannot increase that. you blow away.

to look into this wind was to be blinded by flying grit. alison's suggestion of goggles proved itself!

that was a strong wind!

thirty years ago, i encountered strong winds, as strong as the winds of patagonia.

i crossed the cabot strait from sydney, nova scotia to port aux basques, newfoundland. i and my car were on a huge ferry carrying both cars and trucks. we were in a high gale, one step below a hurricane. i went out on deck. the waves were twenty feet high and the wind blew the tops off the waves. the cars and trucks were chained in place. except for the pitching of the ship, it did not seem very windy.

i drove off the ferry and out of port aux basques. i saw a sign saying, "warning! winds occasionally in excess of 100 miles per hour." after experiencing the high gale, i did not believe this! then i felt a powerful force pushing my car off the road.

for safety i pulled into an unfinished motel. many others had done the same.

i saw a pet dog running loose. the wind lifted him off the ground. he was carried 60 feet through the air. the dog hit the ground running and continued into the nearby woods. i do not think his owners ever saw him again.

a camper was blown over by this wind. the woman yelled that her baby was inside. i leapt out of my car and ran to the camper. the woman's older daughter was already inside. she was calm and in control. she handed out the baby to me. i handed it to the mother.

later, this woman had no memory that i had been the one who handed her baby to her.

that wind was probably as strong as the winds of patagonia!

back then, i could hike many miles without stopping, say 20 miles over rough country and carry a full pack.

i hiked in the hoh river valley on the olympic peninsula in washington state. i hiked two days in a row, mostly up the first day and mostly down the second day. i hiked up to where the trail to the glacier was washed away. the threat of death made me stop and camp. the next day, i hiked out. 40 miles in two days made me quite tired and sore. but, despite heavily blistered feet, i could do it.

i believed that i would never tire completely. after a short rest, i could keep walking forever. it did not matter how heavy the pack or how difficult the terrain. i was young and very naive to believe this even then.

if i was not carrying a full pack, then i could hike more miles and do more uphill. for example, i could start late in the morning and still go up and down mount katadhin in a single day.

west of jasper, alberta i did a 15 mile hike to berg lake, back and forth in a single day. i slept in the car until 4 am, hiked past a perfect mirror of a lake, into the valley of 10 thousand waterfalls, and up to where a glacier spilled off mount robson and caved into berg lake. i had lunch. with my bear bell tinkling, i hiked back before nightfall. that was probably the hardest and most beautiful day hike i ever did.

those days seem gone. age, too much weight, and a dissection of the aorta have slowed me down. now, in torres del paine park in chile, i avoided carrying a full pack. now, i never do too much uphill in a single day. so i never get the very best views. but i get some very good ones!

my friend chuck mcgibbon is an inspiration to all older hikers. older than me, he ascended last year to within 100 meters of the summit of everest. i can hope that the loss of 40 or more pounds will enable me to do better than i do now. but i will never do everest!

i grew up in chicago with frugal parents. we ate some fish. in the midwest, the fish i ate were all fresh water fish. but they were good fish.

we could catch our own perch from the chicago shores of lake michigan. sometimes it was slow and required patience but sometimes it was quick and exciting. we used simple bamboo poles with a line and bobber attached.

sometimes we would use a multihook device called a trolley. hooks on weighted wheels slid down a rope anchored to the bottom. a bell signaled a strike. the bait was sometimes worms, sometimes minnows, and sometimes the tails of crawfish.

from commercial fisherman came delicious and succulent smoked chubs. these lake fish were far better than the drier and more expensive smoked sable. they were sold from a fish store located next to a bridge over the chicago river. luckily, the fist came from the lake and had little to do with the river!

my mother loved whitefish. she went to a market downtown, the so-called stop and shop, to buy these fish. i now think that lake trout is superior to whitefish in texture but both fish have succulent flesh that lends itself to baking.

on vacation, we would go to wisconsin and catch walleyed pike. the bait for walleyes was always minnows. a rod and reel were used in a boat with a bobber. there was almost no casting. my parents way of fishing was to sit and wait.

walleyes are really a large perch, very succulent, tender, and flakey. unlike northern pike, it has very few bones. fresh water fish often have a delicacy that slat water fish lack. walleyes are great that way. so are all forms of trout.

i did not have salt water fish until i went to college. i think david eisenbud introduced me to the noble striped bass. striped bass are very rare now, almost totally fished out. but it was a superb fish, tender, very succulent, and nicely flakey.

striped bass was fully the equal of the chilean sea bass. until recently, chilean sea bass was known as patagonian tooth fish. the marketers changed the name. unfortunately, it is so excellent a fish that it too is getting rare. and it is a deep water fish which grows very slowly. once threatened it will take a long time to come back.

in ushuaia i had chilean sea bass. i was great! i felt guilty since i know that it is being overfished. i had to have it once on this trip. and no more!

conger eel was the fish revelation on this trip. not overcooked, it tastes like cod with the texture of lobster. it makes an exceptional fish soup. i have never seen it in the united states and may never see it again. i will miss it!

the taxi ride to the buenos aires airport is one of the most frightening rides in the world! high speeds, high density, cars frantically switching 4 lanes at a time, it has everything required to be a gran prix race. and more. at the toll booths, there is incessant honking which has no purpose. this loud honking is a traffic version of wagner's ride of the valkerie!

nonetheless, we arrived at the airport with no problems.

i had to pay a 150 dollar penalty for overweight luggage. it was a flat fee, not a prorated charge. being unwilling to throw away large amounts of stuff, i had to pay it.

we arrived in lexington, kentucky with no major problems. we were completely exhausted. nonetheless, before going to sleep we were to have two good meals, a buffet at an indian restaurant in lexington and then some thai food in berea. our main idea was to stay awake. but the good food reminded us of the limitations of south american cuisine.

argentines would improve their food if they would be more adventurous with spices. their ingredients are superb. they know how to cook. they do not overcook. but their preparation can be a little bland. they limit their seasonings too much, mainly to salt, pepper, garlic, and oregano. they add a nice salsa. the results are consistent and very good. but there is a sameness in the tastes, a lack of adventure which can be a little boring. they could do a lot better.

for example, consider hash browns. argentines know that salt and pepper help hash browns. but hash browns are much improved by the addition of some onions, even onion flakes. and if i dare say it, hash browns soar with the addition of ketchup. argentines should reflect on this.

after a good nights sleep, it was time to head to columbus, ohio and to see my old friend paul panomarev. the route to columbus goes through cincinnati. i stopped for a 5 way cincinnati chili and was reminded of how good it is. i had it the right way, with regular shredded cheese, not the halepeno version, and with minimal hot sauce. in short, i had it in the good old classic cincinnati midwestern way.

the classic midwestern way fits with the argentine way. both are suspicious of overspicing. none of the hard stuff for either. but cincinnati chile is spiced with cinnamon and maybe even a little cocoa. it is a cincinnati version of mole.

i drove past a sign for the cincinnati zoo. alison and i had visited that zoo once. that was long ago and far away.

i called alison on my cell phone to remind her of it. in turn, she reminded me that we had seen the play evita together. her wallet was stolen during the intermission.

i cannot understand why the braodway play evita asserts that evita did not do much. evita had 33 years in her life and 6 years as first lady of argentina. among the things she accomplished were:
1) to get women the vote,
2)to establish a system of health clinics which still exists,
3)to cause to be built a community of houses called evita city,
4)and to found a social security system.

much but not all of evita's work was dismantled by the oligarchs after the overthrow of peron. except for joanne of arc who was burnt at 17 i cannot think of any woman who did more than evita in less time.

i met paul at a nice coffee shop in columbus. he was explaining some mathematics to a dance instructor named nichole.

afterwards, the three of us went to a restaurant. we had a late snack of fried pita, eggplant, hummus, and chardonnay. the food was terrific, once again reminding me that argentine food had some weaknesses in spicing.

paul frequents this restaurant, nichole works there, and we were served by paul's friend tony, the wine steward. tony appreciates fine food and looks down on cincinnati chile. it is his blind spot. but nichole understands cincinnati chile and appreciates it.

as nichole pulled her hair back she looked like evita. nichole has an intense liking for anthony bourdain, even more than i do. after all, i am just a guy.

paul is a descendent of cossacks. he has their ruthlessness.

my companions at the restaurant, nichole, tony, and paul seem to mirror the icons of my trip. icons such as evita peron, anthony bourdain, and che guevara have their mirror images in real life.

the temple of grilled food in montevideo, the place of fired up parillas, had its mirror image in a final dinner at the columbus whole foods. the columbus whole foods is a special place with a sit down food bar. i had an appetizer of mussels and a dinner of halibut with a mushroom risotto. the wine was a chardonnay.

life goes on. evita, anthony, che, and the temple of grilled food are replaced by nichole, tony, paul, and the food bar at whole foods. it is not a bad exchange.


14. the suppressed jan and bob letter

this is the one letter i had the good sense not to send during the trip. i am sending it now but i have removed one of the addressees. i decided that, if you spend 6 weeks with someone and this is all the irritation you express, the situation must have been pretty good.

one day as we were about to leave the house of eduardo and claudia, i happened to say to jan something like "we are ready to go now" or something like that. i spoke it in a normal voice. it is true that i have been told that i have a lecturer's voice. anna ravenel has told me that my voice makes it embarassing to eat dinner with me. i think i am just speaking in a normal way. but her mother agrees with anna so there must be some truth in the accusation.

the projection of voice is something that one fosters over years of performing in front of calculus students. it keeps them awake. together with a few jokes and a little clarity of thought, it is the key to being a popular teacher. but it is true that the voice can become too loud without the speaker being aware of it.

jan hushed me in a very unapproving tone. she said that i would disturb eduardo and claudia who were, as far as i knew, sound asleep up on the second floor. jan said that sound travels up a stairwell.

what is ironic about this is that jan is a math lecturer too. especially when jan is straining to speak spanish, she has a very loud and expressive voice, akin to that of a middle level singer of lieder by shubert. in an attempt to make her spanish be understood, jan speaks large. her version of spanish is similar to the way english is spoken by maurice chevalier. jan's voice is a form of light opera and impossible to ignore if you are in the same house.

jan now has the company of bob. bob is a takeover type of guy. for example, in the bed and breakfast situation at eduardo and claudia, he goes to the supermercado, purchases eggs, potatos, and onions, and, as far as i know, without asking permission, marches into the kitchen and cooks breakfast for everyone. to paraphrase what woody allen said of his crazy uncle who thought he was a chicken: we could cure him but we like the eggs.

bob is now talking about cooking in the hotel room when we get to montevideo. while climbing with tony bahri and chris stretch in the french alps, our group cooked its own food.

cooking meant heating cans of lentil soup and combining this with french bread, sausage, and cheese. it was not a terrible diet but i rebelled then. at least i succeeded in getting a nice coq au vin in a french cafeteria. even then i realized the folly of cooking your own food in a country with a culinary tradition. this is especially true in france. but it is true in other places too.

the great anthony bourdain is an apostle of getting to know a country by eating and enjoying its food. i am one of his disciples. subsisting on a diet of club sandwiches and mcdonalds hamburgers are not the only sins in the religion of anthony. camping out in a city comes a close second. it is permitted only if this is the local custom, or if you are a pathetically poor student traveler. in our case, neither is true. we should sample and enjoy the food.

bob has other ideas. he comes fully equipped with a camp stove and a pot.
he has already bought nuts and dried fruit and tomatoes for trail food. it not clear whether this is for camping in patagonia or the hotel in montevideo.

in montevideo, i at least will not cook my own food. i hear that montevideo has a parilla which serves marvelous grilled meats in the port market. i will go there. together with a capuchino and some medialunas, that is, croissants, for breakfast, i will eat fine.

i hope the hotel does not throw jan and bob out. hotels tend to frown on cooking in the rooms. it encourages pests such as rats and roaches. and, as we get nearer the rainforest jungle, who knows what other pests might be nearby? the creatures in the rain forest exhibit in the zoo give one pause. they are large and look ferocious.

cooking can even burn down the hotel. the hotel might object to that.