Given the state of the world these past few years, it is getting harder for a middle aged straight white guy from the evil empire to find a welcoming foreign destination. I have all of the United States and to tell you the truth, I don’t think I am all that welcome in a good chunk of them either. So after what seemed like minutes of planning, I traded some frequent flyer miles for a round trip ticket to Argentina.
I looked forward to the long flight as a much needed opportunity to brush up on my 4 years of High School Spanish that had long since been forgotten. There have been 30 years of short term memory abuse since then and I was concerned that 17 hours of travel time wouldn’t result in enough recall to be minimally conversant. Then again, my previous travel experience reminded me that “Uno Cerveza Por Favor” and “Donde Esta El Banyo” would be plenty. Unless of course your Amex card gets cancelled a day before the trip through “mostly” no fault of my own and you forget to tell your ATM card issuer that you are leaving the country.
The cause of Amex card predicament doesn’t add to the story and in fact could put me in a bad light so I will gloss over those details. Started with beers after work one night and ended with Amex giving me the address of their office in Buenos Aires where I could get a replacement card but no directions or even a general location.
I generally have a good sense of direction or at least am pretty good at faking like I know where I am going and am skilled at covering up my surprise when I get there. Being south of the equator adds a bit of complexity that took me a while to figure out. 99% of my life has been spent with the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. Crossing the southern sky as the day progresses. Unless the month has and R in it and I am in Seattle, I can pretty much just look up, see the Sun figure out the 4 points of the compass. In Argentina, the sun crosses the sky to the North, throwing my sometimes flawed innate sense of direction off of reality by 180 degrees. At my age, my brain doesn’t throw into reverse very quickly so every time I went somewhere it was ALWAYS in the opposite direction from where I was hoping to get to. Everywhere I went was twice as far and not counting beer stops, took twice as long. The only problem with this theory is that it happened at night too.
This was the reason why the sun was setting when I finally came across the Amex office and the janitorial crew cleaning the otherwise closed building. I think the security guard said something about tomorrow but days of the week have long since dropped from by Spanish vocabulary. And since I am on vacation, don’t much matter anyway. That is unless some banking is required. An issue that didn’t register until I walked all of the way back there the next day, a Saturday when offices were closed.
No Amex card until Monday but I still had my ATM card that spit money out the previous night to tide me over. When I went to replenish my pile of pesos, my card was no longer working. I spent the rest of the morning checking every ATM I passed but to no avail. I finally figured out that my bank blocked access to my account when they say the previous night’s activity coming from a relatively 3rd world country. The afternoon was trying to figure out how to use a calling card to get in touch with customer service. First stopping in to a calling center that are popular in 3rd world countries because consumer telephone service is either too expensive or so pathetic that people don’t have their own phones. I bought a calling card but couldn’t get it to connect. I think it was because the calling centers use some weird internet service that doesn’t have toll free service. Then I tried to make a collect call but the operator couldn’t figure out what I wanted. Then the telephone store manager tried to translate to the operator but since he didn’t speak English, this plan seemed doomed to failure from the start. Then for some odd reason he grabbed my arm and took me to a payphone on the street. Not sure how he thought a change in venue from a quiet telephone cabinet to a beat up old phone attached to a light pole wedged between a mailbox and a trash can a couple of feet from a busy boulevard would advance my chances but we tried again. A couple of hours of this black comedy left me frustrated and on the verge of pennilessness. I gave up and headed back to the hotel to make a direct call from my room, complete with exorbitant connection charges and long distance rates. Probably one of the most expensive ATM charges ever. But it did solve the financial crisis so now I could go and practice my two Spanish phrases now.
During the day, Buenos Aires is just a big, slightly rough around the edges city where people talk funny. Not much different from any other similar sized city across the globe. Nighttime is when it comes alive. Sure, they still talk funny but everyone is drinking and eating and tangoing all over the place so it doesn’t matter. As with most Latin American countries, B.A.ers don’t even start showing up at the bars and clubs until midnight. Which is a problem because my midwestern upbringing has forever set my internal clock so that I am usually on my 2nd REM cycle by then. But that is the reason to go to B.A., so you just have to step up to the challenge.
One of my forays out in to the night started with a $20 steak dinner complete with a nice bottle of wine. It was 7PM, dark and my brain was calling out for a bed but still plenty of time until B.A. came to life. Ignoring the wisdom of age, I ambled around a few neighborhoods, killing time over an occasional beer hoping to run into some fun people with a similar sleep cycle. I had not planned on ramping up as quickly as I did but the beers there are HUUUGE!!!. So big that they come in specially designed Styrofoam coolers because most people can’t finish them before the beer gets warm. And better yet, they cost less than a US dollar. By about 9pm, the trials and tribulations of the trip so far had been washed away like so much cheap beer and I was pretty happy. I walked past a crowded bar where the people were drunker than I so I walked in and ordered a beer. When I put some pesos down to pay, the bartender said it was already covered. This raised my worry antenna because I rarely get covered drinks. It was dark and it took a while for my eyes to adjust to whatever mess I had just gotten myself into. Looking around, I saw a good looking well dressed crowd of men and women. I said thanks and set out to figure out what was going on. Without appearing too much like the party crasher that I was, I learned that ever since the little fracas with Argentina over a couple God forsaken wind swept rocky islands sticking out of the frigid South Atlantic, the British have been trying to mend fences. The effort to get back in Argentina’s good graces translated into free drinks for me. I had just stumbled upon one of their little “Can’t we all just get along” parties and the night was young. I ended up having a good time chatting up bureaucrats from both sides of the Atlantic.  I think they knew I was of little use to their reconciliation efforts and more likely a hindrance. Nobody that was still there was paying for the party, so they didn’t seem to mind. To tell you the truth, I think they were kind of impressed that I crashed it to begin with. Not impressed enough to line me up with any more free parties but one was plenty and I was tired and the distance back to my hotel was going to be twice as far as it actually was so I headed back to the room.
I continued to try to stay out late each night but spending the day walking in hot humid B.A. and not having AC prevented any napping to prep for a long night. Luckily, I found several bars where other travelers congregated so we hung out until late (ish) hours drinking beer until a bunkbed in a hot sweaty dorm seemed like a better idea.
Finally, on my last night before an early flight out of town, I decided I was going to stay out until the sun came up and I would catch a cab right to the airport. I would sleep on the flight. Filled with conversations in English and Spanish because there are no language barriers at 4am, everyone sounds about the same. Left the bar, got to the room without incident. In fact I was ahead of schedule. So much so that I sat down to read a bit and fell asleep just long enough to watch my jet take off from the backseat of the taxi. I rescheduled my flight for later in the day and found an out of the way corner and lay down to get some shut eye. I am not sure how long later, but I felt a nudge on my shoulder. Opening my eyes to a couple AK 47’s attached to a couple of young but stern looking soldiers. They said that they received a report that a man was on the ground and was not moving. The concern was that there was foul play afoot and I was the result. I assured them I was fine but they said I must sit in a chair for the duration of my stay at the airport. Since I hadn’t been rolled or thrown into some Argentinean jail for vagrancy, this was as good as I could have hoped for. I was still tired though and was getting whiplash as I kept vigorously nodding off in an upright position. I was extremely happy when I finally watched B.A. fade into the horizon heading off to the more fun and frivolity.
This brings me to the main reason I took the trip. I wanted to check off another place on my list of places with really cool signs….Ushuaia. The southern most city in the world, that you can drive to at least. I was disheartened to learn after I left that there was boat ride to an isolate fishing village a few more miles south. It is the port town where the Antarctica cruises leave from and since the cruise season had just ended there wasn’t much going on. While I was there, it was either just about to rain or torrentially raining. I was lucky to get a weather break for a few minutes and ran to the “Fin Del Mundo” sign to get my picture taken next to it.
A perfect example of coolness simply by association.
But with the photo op out of the way, my Ushuaia itinerary was pretty much completed and I still had a couple days left. Everything was closed or closing for the season so I had to scramble to fill my time. I started with a pub crawl. I know that every single person reading this letter knows that a pub crawl involves drunken debauchery spread over several drinking establishments usually ending up with some quiet time on a nice cool bathroom floor. Believe me, that was the goal, but my tour included all of one bar. Every time I left and headed 20 feet in the direction of another bar, it was raining so hard, I just turned around and went back into the first place. So the pub count was a bit low but the crawl distance was about right. The rain did put a damper on the need for any time with the tile so the time that was originally penciled in for recovery was otherwise spent on a bus tour to see some penguins. I also spent an afternoon testing the Coriolis Effect. This is the impact the earth’s spin has on whether it drains clockwise or counter-clockwise. The results were inconclusive and subsequent internet research says it was a load of crap propagated by hucksters that live on the equator trying to get money out of idiots like me and I could have better spent my time working out a real pub crawl. Ushuaia was a nice place to be but it was an even nice place to be leaving. I hopped a flight back to B.A. with a stopover in Patagonia (the region, not the store).
I have to admit that my knowledge of Patagonia was based on pictures from the catalogue; the jagged Andes towering above azure blue glacier fed lakes. So I was surprised by how much of Patagonia is vast emptiness, mile after mile of windblown rock and scrub brush. It covers an area about the size of France and Germany combined but has the population density of Montana. Actually seeing anything good requires a car and some patience. I rented an old fiat and slowly drove about 150 miles of bumpy dirt road (the main North-South Highway in Argentina!) to get from my Patagonia base city of El Calafate to Glacier National Park, the Mt Fitzroy area. The mountain is shrouded in clouds most of the day because of the fog coming off of the ice fields surrounding it. An afternoon hike to a viewing point revealed only a wall of clouds. I learned that the best chance of seeing it is at sunrise, before the sun hits the ice.
Getting up so early wasn’t too difficult. Between the snoring from the hostel mates and the howling wind literally shaking the hostel all night long, I was up way before the sun. Took some pictures and headed back over the bumpy dirt road and the flight back to B.A and then home to Seattle.