Or, as we have come to say: “Well, that happened… let’s go find some ice cream”. It was a busy December. Stay tuned.
So here we are in Argentina, having just crossed in from Chile. (Why doesn’t my computer program recognize Argentina as a proper name? Why do I have to keep going back to capitalize it? Rick says I should be able to teach it to recognize Argentina as a country and automatically capitalize the word, but can you picture me teaching a computer anything? Bummer. But you don’t want to hear about all that, do you?)
The road into the area is in the midst of the various parts of the border crossing buildings, which are spread over a couple of miles; part are in Chile, part in Argentina, and part in no-man’s land. So after completing customs, we went back to it. Of course, there’s an entrance fee; and of course they take neither American dollars nor Chilean pesos. There’s no exchange at the border of any kind. The nearest town is Uspallata, many miles away. So we conned someone at the border zone into trading some money with us. All part of the adventure – go with the flow – that sort of thing. But the park was lovely and worth all the fuss.
Afterwards we went on to Uspallata, still very high in the Andes, a pretty little town best known for their poplar trees (Lombardy poplars, I think); it was grassy and green and the folks were friendly. (We have continued to see these poplar trees everywhere we have visited in Argentina, if there’s enough water for them to survive.) In Uspallata we had our first encounter with the Argentine mid-day siesta. We are finding the towns close down after lunch and don’t get going again until late in the afternoon (sort of 1:00-5:00 at its most extreme). So the bank was closed (even the ATM). But the restaurants are all open; so we had a delightful lunch that included (for one of us) chivito – roast kid. The other guy had a pasta dish. Both quite happy.
Well, Mendoza. Everybody loves Mendoza. More bodegas (wineries) than you can shake a stick at. Good food, shopping, happy times. Yeah, but too big. And kinda scary. We hit town, wanted to go see stuff, and were promptly told by at least three very kind strangers that we didn’t want to carry that camera out in the open did we? And to please be very careful. Made us uncomfortable. There are several campgrounds in a huge park in the city; very expensive (and we found out afterwards that people were getting robbed there regularly). We asked at the police station, and they let us park in front of their station for the night (that was great, actually; the station was right in front of a neighborhood park and was delightful). We had business in town, and needed to be there, but weren’t happy.
The next day, a Thursday, we got some business done, and contacted the family of a dear friend of ours (again, Mabelle, many-many-many thanks) who were expecting us to come and visit. They met us and guided us to their home in a suburb. They were delightful and gracious. We spent several days, learning about Argentine life and enjoying their company. They have a small second home closer to the mountains, and we spent part of the weekend with them there; this included meeting lots of neighbors and having a traditional Argentine asado (kind of like a BBQ). I also was introduced to the delightful tradition of maté. It’s not fair to call this sort of an Argentine version of the Japanese tea ceremony, but that will give you some sense of what happens. I loved it.
Reluctantly, on Sunday we waved good-by to these great folks and hit the road again, heading further south. We left armed with honey from a neighbor, suggestions on great mountain lakes to check out, and introductions to other folks along the way.
So what do we know about Argentina so far? Admittedly, at this point we’ve only been in the mountains and one metropolitan area (greater Mendoza is over a million people). We know they take siesta very seriously. Their towns are old (but so far not colonial), and are filled with tremendously huge trees to ward off the sun and heat, making their parks delightful (and well used). They are very proud of their traditions and their European heritage.
There are tons of old Ford Falcons and a few Plymouth Valiants and Chevy IIs on the streets, some in good repair, others looking like fugitives from Cuba. In the states, these cars date from the early sixties, but styling variations indicate that down here they must have been produced until around the mid to late seventies. Lombardy poplars are ubiquitous anywhere they will grow. We’ve seen our first Wal-Mart (whoop-de-do) since we left Mexico. The fresh fruit is fabulous. Diesel is the cheapest since Ecuador. All of the domestic animals we see are healthy-looking, large, clean, and beautiful – horses, cattle, sheep and (most of all) the goats. This is all very good; we are having a good time, despite the usual assortment of issues (stay tuned, she said). We have also confirmed that Argentina is as well known for its splendid chocolate as its (equally splendid) beef. But also – no decent cheese. (We really like cheddar cheese; we haven’t been able to find it since who knows when. Each new country gets a thorough scrutiny, and we may be able to find something that will “do,” but not good cheddar. Whine.)
But onward. To orient you concerning Argentina, and to over-simplify, there are two Route 66-type “mother” roads going north-south in this country: Route 3, which runs from Buenos Aires to Tierra del Fuego, on the east (Atlantic) side; and Route 40 (the famous La Quarenta) in the west, running the length of the country, paralleling the Andes and somewhat east of those mountains. To keep it simple, you can get to the bottom either way.
The next morning, we discovered we had a new problem – the inverter had quit on us. Rick took the thing apart, poked around, and finally determined the inverter had flaked out on us for good. Now the inverter is important. For you RV people, inverters, of course, mean you don’t have to run the generator for most stuff. We do for baking, but not otherwise. The inverter runs the microwave, and (most importantly) charges the batteries on our computers. So, “Well, that happened.”
Arriving in San Rafael we started asking around and following up on leads for propane. As we did so, we were noticing that we really liked this city of about 100,000 busy and contented folks. They were working hard to have a nice, clean place to live. There were nice parks, a wide and friendly main street or two, and we saw evidence that good ice cream was available. Lots of people were riding their bikes around town. We even found a very nice restaurant with pretty good wi-fi that was happy to have us spend a couple of hours on our computers while we had a long and leisurely lunch.
Mid-afternoon the next day, we finally got squared away on propane. The fellow told us the truck was coming in the morning, and we should be there about 7:30. Needless to say that estimate was optimistic by about seven hours. Anyway, we puttered around town and got settled for the night.
After our detour, we rejoined the Route 40 road and continued south. The fields were full of sheep and goats, hay (in bales), windmills, or just high steppes. A bit north of Malargüe we detoured into the mountains again, this time to explore a road leading up to the Las Leñas ski resort. We were curious about skiing Argentina-style. Looked like any other ski resort in the summer time – nothing going on and nobody there. But we really enjoyed the scenery, and spent the night along a river running through the canyon.
The next day we tried, without success (even though we followed every sign quite carefully) to find a reserve that was a wetlands (flamingoes supposedly were in residence); no such luck. Bummer; and it was suddenly getting much warmer. Summer had hit, we guessed. Moving on, we found ourselves in the strangely-named small town of Chos-Malal (never found out why). Pulled up at the edge of a pretty little park (actually, this is a charming small town, and we were very well treated here). Rick looked at the front of the truck and noticed that the engine hood was all wacky with one side sticking up about four inches. Investigating, he discovered one of the pivot points of the hood had broken. Local folks guided us to a welder (continuing our world tour thereof….); we waited for him to come back from siesta, and had the break welded. “Well, that happened.” An ice cream cone later, we settled in at the park for the night.
We were still moving south. More and more frequently, we would see gauchos on horses leading pack animals and moving large herds of goats along the road. They patiently move aside for us, then the herd swings along again. We surmise they are moving the critters to summer pasture.
Suddenly, we crossed the Rio Colorado and officially entered Patagonia. We high-fived it, grinned, and kept on our way. It was like crossing the 60th parallel in northern Canada. And…we looked at the calendar. It was just a year ago today that we left the United States and headed south into Mexico, on the first southern leg of our journey to the bottom of South America. Awesome, dude!
Arriving there, we confirmed what we’d been told: San Martín de los Andes is bigger and more developed (and much more touristy); but just as pretty. San Carlos de Bariloche is the next town down the road, and it’s supposed to have gone from charming to way-too-much; San Martín is trying to stave that off, and is an easy town to like. We enjoyed wandering through the little shops and checking out the fancy jams and olive offerings and such; there were plenty of good restaurants (we found one for lunch and then sat in another for the afternoon doing wi-fi and had dinner there – yummy and a good opportunity to catch up). We even had the laundry done. We felt good about being here and were very happy we had visited.
We stopped at a small lake in the Nahuel Huapi National Forest for two days on our way. We had free camping alongside Lago Villarino in an open meadow, with cows to keep us company and mountains all around. Plenty of wildflowers to enjoy, including – for the first time – foxglove. Also two German couples we chatted with. We would have spent more time except first it rained a bit, then hard, then dropped into the 30’s and turned to hail. The next day it was still nasty (and there was fresh snow on all the peaks around us), and we wanted to get to Bariloche so we moved on.
There are several small communities, all of them resort-oriented, along the shore, but the main town (city, actually) is Bariloche. Plenty of good restaurants, shopping, “tourist infrastructure” as they say; it’s still a great destination. And there were tons of folks there to enjoy it with us. You have to remember that for us, as North Americans, the holidays are a two-week period. For South Americans, they are the beginning of the summer vacation period, which lasts for two months or more. And summer, up here, is a relative thing. At lower elevations it is very hot (think California’s Central Valley in July), but in the mountains it is cool and breezy. Absolute heaven. It seems that Bariloche is a destination for end-of-school outings, too; we saw absolute gobs of color-matched high school kids trooping from pillar to post every few minutes, doing all the things high school kids do world-wide. We enjoyed watching them.
Had a delightful time meeting some friends of a friend, who turned out to be absolutely amazingly fascinating people. A wonderful lunch. And just in the nick of time. Rick had a bad tooth and needed a dentist. They found one for us, and we met with her for an exam. She said root canal; we opted for a week of antibiotics and would meet with her Monday after Christmas. So we can, again, say, “Well, that happened.” Life goes on. “Monday after Christmas” was going to be a busy day! Folks back home often ask what we do if something health-related happens, and this is it. Ask around, find a little help here or there, locate a doctor or dentist, and things will be fine. It turned out that in this particular incident neither the doctor nor her receptionist spoke any English. On realizing that Rick was a touch uncomfortable at not being able to understand what was being said, they were kind enough to call someone who could interpret for him. Nothing really out of the ordinary… except that the person they called was a colleague, a fellow Argentine dentist who just happened to be practicing now in ENGLAND! She graciously spent time explaining the problem and the planned procedure until everyone was comfortable.
This time I was better prepared for the B.B.’s, and coasted through pretty smoothly. One interesting thing was that they didn’t even ask me about some of the stuff the B.B. at the Peru/Chile border was a real bird dog for. Hmmm. Afterwards, we had a quiet talk, and Rick convinced both of us that “B.B.s” was pretty harsh; perhaps we could call them the Aduana Iguanas instead. Okay, she said… for now.
Coming down the west side of the Andes, we were immediately struck with how bucolic and green the countryside was. We thought we were in Wisconsin! Low rolling hills, cattle grazing, raspberries for sale along the country roadside. Delightful. We spent a quiet few days enjoying the countryside, then hiked back over the hill again, back to Bariloche. Now here’s a wild one: at the border, no one even did a produce inspection; go figure!
Back in Bariloche things got pretty wild for a couple of days. We arrived on the Monday after Christmas, as expected, and Rick prepared to face the music on the dental front. We spent a couple of hours wandering, taking our computers to do wi-fi and enjoying the town, came back to La Tortuga in time to drop stuff off and go to the dentist, and found out the rig had been broken into and all our camera gear had been stolen, along with all our secreted extra money and the electronic computer backup devices. We had done everything right (the truck was thoroughly locked, in a well-traveled area, all the usual), but they’d broken the lock on the driver’s side. Probably there a total of 2-3 minutes, and then gone. “Well, that happened”! A little bit harder to say this time!
A couple of unhappy puppies, that’s for sure. Not even enough ice cream in town to cover this disaster! We spent time with the police, Rick visited the dentist (who decided the antibiotics had done all the work necessary, and goodby – slightly weird, but appropriate to the day), and, somewhat shell-shocked, we went on to El Bolsón to pick up the inverter.
Upshot on the inverter front? Argentina says it is black-listed in this country and cannot be allowed out of customs. This after many phone calls and intervention by an acquaintance who spoke Spanish calling and trying to get it released for us. So….that happened, too.
So, we have gone back to Chile; everyone says you can buy “stuff” here. We have found a replacement (quite a bit smaller) inverter, and have actually ended up in Santiago buying new cameras. We are now headed back for Argentina, resuming our trek to the bottom of this incredibly lovely, exasperating, sometimes very difficult continent. We continue to be very happy with our chosen path in life, although there are sometimes difficulties along the way. But you can get killed just trying to cross the street, too. Life is just life. We are, however, hoping that 2009 will get off to a better start than 2008 ended!
Our best to all of you for the new year; we have heard from many of you in the last few days, commenting on and responding to our self-portrait and request for e-mails. A big thank you to y’all; we love you and want to know what you’re up to. Keep those cards and letters coming!
Rick and Kathy
PS. Forgot to tell you – when we crossed back into Chile this last time, after everything that had just gone wrong, those damn Aduana Iguanas became Border Bastards again – they ransacked my refrigerator and took away a whole bunch of things no one had even asked about at any other time since we had entered South America! Would you believe it?
PPS. Oh, for any of you who happen to enjoy our somewhat eclectic movie references (we certainly hope there are some of you out there), our theme for this article is taken from the David Mamet classic, State and Main, where “...that...” happens to Alec Baldwin.
Click here to view more pictures from Argentina