Loose End In LatAm

"In London you have the Blues, in Buenos Aires we have the Tango"

Last night I found myself crammed into a tiny bar somewhere out to the west of town, off the usual tourist-beaten track with a room full of Porteños just a couple of other "extranjeros" listening to a couple of old guys singing tango songs - which sounds fairly dreadful but was an incredible night out. The whole experience was enhanced by the wonderfully friendly local crowd.

There were the inevitable digs about "The Hand of God" and a more serious moment when, in relative good humour, the Falklands War came up in converstaion. I´ve found it´s generally easier just to act ignorant in both situations!

Today it has been chucking down with rain and I have retreated into the hostel with a stack of alfajores (very chocolatey things), while they fumigate the rooms for bed bugs, hmmm....

Campo 1 : Ciudad 0

Cordoba, the province, is beautiful... the city however I found a bit so-so. To be honest I didn´t give it much time, I spent a day wandering round the various sites, and an evening out, at the bar-club which left me less than enthusiastic about the well reputed nightlife of this student town, despite the 8 pesos entry which included a litre of beer... we trundled around dwarfed by the oversized buckets.

Perhaps I didn´t really get to grips with the city having travelled over night still carrying the hangover I inflicted on myself in Mendoza for a good 24 hours or so. So, probably not in the best shape to take on the world. That said before I left Mendoza I managed to attend a presentation on a cartoneros collective in Sao Paulo at the university... no, not by accident. I met the woman who gave the lecture on the trek up Aconcagua and wanted to find out more. The cartoneros (the impoverished people who eek a living from sorting through South America´s rubbish bins to gleen anything recyclable), have no official standing, representation, working rights or welfare provision, and seen all but ignored by the better off sections of the general population, as is their potentional as an economic force. Hopefully the small scale project in Sao Paulo will bring some recognition and benefits that can be spread around the rest of the continent.

From Cordoba I travelled out of the city and visited a number of ancient Jesuit estancias with varying degrees of success: one, (Santa Catalina), which promised to b the best, but also the most difficult to get to, had been closed by the owner for the day, because he had some mates round. I also saw Che Guevara´s childhood home. I am disappointed to tell you I was prevented by the staff from taking a photograph of a sign hanging above the toilet in the house, that read ¨Please don´t use this, it´s part of the museum¨... I also realised this meant you couldn´t sit in a place where you could say with absolute certaintly Che had, either.

Another overnight trip and I find myself in Buenos Aires, and once more in the company of Poe and Tone - horrah!

Try saying that after a couple Frenets & coke!

I should show you a picture of me heroically standing next to a glacier, at the base of the mountain at 4200 meters, whilst surrounded by devastatingly stark landscape. But instead here´s one of me dancing on what passed for a table in the camp kitchen tent after a few too many of said Frenet´s - another drink the Argentinians seemed to be vaguely obsessed by.

If you´re ever in this part of the world...
It´s sooo worth the easy trek, but when you think you´ve packed, stick in another layer... it was so cold (-3 at7 am, so God only knows what it was in the night).


Oh OK...here´s a small one of the heroic shot too.



Odd thing I noticed:
You know people sell posters outside rock concerts... well there´s a guy outside the hospital selling posters with diagrams of the human body on it!

Pass the pants:
The pair of my brothers boxer shorts that I acquired in my laundry when I was in New York have dissappeared in a laundry in Mendoza. If you find them please give them a good home. They´re easily identifiable: blue with "M Voss" and "Thursday" written inside the waist band

Odd bits of sentances you hear in the street:
American girl: "...I accidentally got into bed with this little boy...". I have no idea when this happened because she sleeps in the bunk above me in the hostel, and I´m sure she was already in her bed by the time I got to mine this morning!

Where the hell have I been?...A quick summary

Easter Island - amazing big heads:

It´s a very strange, spiritual place that has an atmosphere you find very rarely and is impossible to describe. Thankfully it isn´t too over commericalised, except for overly long organised tours which accompanied with endless uncoroberated speculation about the who-what-why of it all. Instead I took an unofficial tour, with an unofficial guide: a french man who just said "I don´t know but no one does" a lot whenever I asked him questions.
(photo courtesy of Tone and Poe)

Jerome moved to the island after he met his wife, an islander, whilst on leave from the French Army stationed in Tahiti - she was the airstewardess on the areoplane over. That sounds quite romantic but then he told us that the guy he flew out with married her sister, and then his brother married another islander... and then you just start thinking it smacks of some strange kind of colonisation.

If you ever come to this part of the world...
...you only need a few days really. I had 6 days there which was a great relaxing time for me, but I´ve met people who have booked two or four weeks there, and you´d really run out of stuff to do, unless you try to build a moai yourself I suppose.


Valporaiso - Pablo and Pisco

This is one of the places a guidebook can never do justice to. Some people hate it, I love it.
Up the road is Viña Del Mar, Marbella 6000 miles out of place, and if Viña is the flamboyant, rich nephew, Valporaiso is the old maiden aunt: colourful, excentric and sometimes a bit smelly.
On the flat of the "Plan" the grid of streets buzz with the port traffic and hubub of urban life, while the old town is a cluster of multicoloured corregated iron buildings, stacked on top of each other up the hillside, where you either have to hike up the winding streets and alleys or take ancient finiculars that trundle up and down the steep slopes. I stayed in a great hostel, Casa Aventura. An easy walk to various fabulous cafes and bars, awash with Pisco Sours.

Pablo Neruda (Chile´s beloved poet) loved this area also and built two houses, on in Valporaiso and one an hour away at Isla Negra. On the way back I noticed a burger bar call McCola - all the world´s evils into one outlet - and a shop with a sign outside that just said "Hay cosas" ("There´s things" - there´s also a magazine here call Cosas, a bit like Hello, but they didn´t sell it).



Santiago - Spanish learning curve

The homestay was odd. Uka the Bruka, my landlady, had a stream of odd people wandering in and out and seemed more interested in practising her English than helping me practice my Spanish. However the school was great, with wonderful staff and fellow students alike. My Spanish has deffinately improved, but there is an awful lot more work to be done!

In the weekend in the middle of my course we trundled off to La Sorena and the Elqui Valley. This area is known for is amazingly clear skies as well as the national drink, Pisco. We visited an observatory and looked at the stars. From there you can even see the Magellen clouds, our nearest galaxies, without the aid of telescope... it was nothing less than awesom. The weekend also included many drinking games involving pisco and my room mate, Brad, waking me up a 5.30am for a couple of piscolas... it would have been rude not to have joined him.

Santiago is a fabulous city, and while many people that visited found plenty not to like about it, (it is huge and rambling, has it´s fair share of social problems and it´s nasty tourist areas, and a lot of smog), coming from a big city I found it very comfortable and felt very at home there.


Púcon - Just call me fat face:

Climbed a volcano, went fishing for trout (and caught some) - sorry to any angling enthusiasts but I´m not really sure what all the fuss is about - stayed on a farm with cows, pigs, ducks, sheep and all sorts wandering around, and washed my clothes in the stream: a rural delight...

...except I got an infection in my mouth which meant I got a hugely swollen left side of my face, so I also got to experience the Chilean medical service at first hand! Was slightly discouraged when I returned from hospital and the people at the farm generally agreed that I should have gone to Temulco German clinic instead of putting my faith in the good doctors of Púcon, that said I´m all fixed now.

If you ever come to this part of the world...
...stay at Kila Leufu just outside Carrawahue: absolutely idyllic


Matt - I can´t lose

I can´t mention Santiago and Pucon without mentioning Matt, who lived in the bruka´s house and travelled south with me too. A really great guy, all 7 ft of him, who only caused a problem when we tried to climb the volcano for the first time: We had to cancel because they didn´t have boots big enough for him!! His favourite phrase seemed to be "I can´t lose", which roughly translates as "I don´t mind what we do", which made such easy travelling.



Puerto Varas - Reina de Rosas

If you ever come to this part of the world...
...stay in Puerto Varas, Puerto Montt is horrible!
It´s as easier a place to visit all the local stuff and plan onward journeys

Puerto Varas is a prettty little town, with amazing view of Volcan Orsorno, and a huge casino and another one being built up the hill. And this year is was the Region´s captial of tourism, which basically meant there was lots of things going on in the town for the summer: concerts, firework displays, and one evening the final of the Reina de Rosas, the local beauty competition.
The whole thing was very odd, all of the six finalist seem to win some sort of prizes, were then smothered in kisses from a rather rancid looking man and weighed down with vast bunches of flowers... the eventual winner gave a tearful speach almost to the extent of mimicking Paltrow´s "and I´d like to thank my dead cousins" Oscar acceptance speach. I´m not really sure what she excelled at to win, but my hopes weren´t high for it being anything too challenging: the teenage girl in front of me said "I can spell her name better than she can". Ah well so much for feminism in Chile at the moment.

Puerto Varas was also a deciding point for me... I spent a day being drenched in a very rainy Chiloe, to the extent that I just got on the bus back to Puerto Montt - I asked a woman what the weather was going to be like for the next day: I didn´t catch everything she said through her laughter but I got "mañana" (tomorrow) and "peor" (worse) and that made my mind up. I also decided that maybe I´d missed the best of the weather for heading further south and made arrangements to head over the border to Bariloche, Argentina!

Bariloche - I left my boots in Bariloche:

I arrived late at night in the rain that had followed me across the border. The hostel I was going to stay at was full but the receptionist kindly said I could doss down on the sofa... not that I needed it, instead I went to Pacha Bariloche for the night, by the time I got back my bed was ready!

I had a very "I´m Sparticus" moment whilst in Bariloche: a new (English) couple arrived at the hostel, while I was mouching around one morning. The conversation went something like this:
Me > Hello!
Him > Hello, I´m Barney
Me > What?
Him > Barney
Me > Yes
Him > What?
Me > I´m Barney
...how we laughed...
But it really was very weird. I´ve only ever met one other Barney before and here we were two English Barney´s in Argentina in the same town, hostel, dormitory. Weirder still was that that morning an American girl called Bonnie had left the hostel... we´d also had a vaguely similar conversation, as in her Montana drawl Bonnie sounded just like Barney, as she commented "You say your name like I say mine!"

After a few bits of scrambling around Bariloche, I realised my boots were just about done for trekking (not much grip, and gaffer tape and superglue keeping at crack in the toe at bay). So I left them with the hostel with instructions for them to go to a charity, and being the fabulous hippies they are I´m sure they did.


I didn´t really plan very well, which meant time and inclination, I must admit, worked against furhter travel plans for the South. But sadly, this meant I left Poe (Finnish) and Tone (Norwegian) in Bariloche as well. They are a lovely couple I originally met in Puerto Varas, and I miss them. So, as they headed south I headed north, with promises to try and catch up somewhere else along the line, if not in LatAm then back in the UK.



Mendoza - Wine and women, not much song

In Mendoza the fountains are running pink (literally - they´ve coloured the water pink) as the town is in the throws of Vindimia, the wine harvest festival, the highlight of which is the choosing of the new Queen - I don´t want you to think I´m just on a tour of tacky beauty parades, it´s just coincidence, honest.

Here the contestants are paraded about on floats. Each float has a guy on it with a special stick for lifting up the low slung telephone wires so that the float can get under. Last night one guy misjudged a set of wires, the stick slipped and he gave the queen on his float a glancing blow, thankfully she kept her ballance and her dignaty...just. The contestants throw flyers and sweets from the floats as they pass, someone told me they threw watermelons, which I can´t believe - you´d kill someone. However I did see one throw a carton wine (about 2 pesos at any good supermarket) into the croud...if someone doesn´t catch it the carton explodes on impact covering all the spectators in close proximity with plonk.

I also took a flying visit upto Valle de la Luna, a spectacular Triassic period landscape. Apparently this is the only area where the range of Triassic layers are exposed on the earth surface in one place, and they also found the oldest dinosaur fosil yet discovered. Quite spectacular.

I travelled up from my hostel in San Juan with the hostel owner and a couple of people who worked at the hostel, drinking mate (local herbal tea Argentinians are obsessed by) and telling dirty jokes on the way. It did my Spanish a world of good. And the hostel owner offered me a job! Well, accommodation in exchange for work - but Frankly San Juan is the Coventry of Argentina, having been decimated by an earthquake in the 1940´s, so that was an easy decision.

Tomorrow I will taking off on a three day trek up a chunk of Aconcagua. Apparently it´s "one the seven" mountains of mythical status for climbers - I hope for my sake the other six also include Highgate Hill and Angel station when the escalators aren´t working.