Buenos Aires

I have now been in Buenos Aires for several days. Mainly I have been walking around exploring the different neighborhoods. I met up one evening with Ian (from Antarctica trip) and two of his friends from Germany. We went and had very good steaks (I have had many good steaks in meat-happy Buenos Aires). We had a plan to go see some tango dancing at a place recommended by our travel writer friends (also from Antarctica trip). They had recommended one of the tango clubs (with regular folks dancing) rather than one of the shows (with alleged professionals) but alas, the club that they recommended was not hosting an event that evening. We did peek in at another club near where I am staying. It was a beautiful old cafe downstairs and an equally lovely old dance hall upstairs but when we went up to investigate we saw about 4 senior citizens dancing and about 6 or 7 people watching so we moved on. Eventually we were reduced to going to a touristy bar with a tango show that was rather cheesy and tourist oriented. We stayed a bit and then moved on to have drinks elsewhere. The following morning I got up and met the group at the Teatro de Colon which is reported to be a beautiful theatre but due to renovations we were unable to take a tour. So, we spent the morning at some of the lovely old cafés in Buenos Aires, and well, I guess, the afternoon too until it was time for Ian and crowd to take off for the airport. I then went to the Recoleta area, the rather upscale part of Buenos Aires and visited the Art Museum. It was a really great collection with lots of paintings by European artists as well as Argentine. I then visited the Recoleta Cemetary with its very elaborate mausoleums.
This morning I visited the Palermo area that had a lot of cool shops and restaurants. I had another steak lunch ane then took the subway back to the center. I had not been on this particular subway line before and it was really something. The subway cars were quite old, and nice looking...all wood seats, walls, etc. It looked like a street car out of the twenties. An elderly couple chatted with me at the station and the whole way to my subway stop warning me to be careful on the subway. They were quite kind.
Tomorrow is my last full day and I plan to visit a big outdoor market across town. Monday morning I will go to the airport for my flight home. Once home, I will try to add some pictures (interest) to this blog.

Seven lakes, Seven Argentine retirees, and me

I stayed for a couple of days in the charming village of San Martin de los Andes. The reason I went there in the first place is a bit odd. A few weeks before I took a flight within Argentina. The inflight magazine had an interview with someone that seems to be a famous Argentine magician. One of the questions they asked him was what is the one place in Argentina that he would recommend for visitors. His reply was San Martin de los Andes. So, I jotted it down. It, like Bariloche, and El Bolson, the towns I previously visited, is in the lake district of Argentina. There is a route that goes between Bariloche and San Martin that passes by seven lakes. I signed up for a tour and the minivan picked me up at the guesthouse. Daniela, an Argentine woman staying at the guesthouse was on a different company's van but the same tour. My van featured the driver, Graciela, the guide, and seven Argentine retirees. They were all quite sweet and asked my name and included me in conversation, etc. I took LOTS of pictures for them/of them in front of pretty lakes. And, it was nice having the tour in Spanish instead of also being translated to English. It was a long day, good tour, great views, amazing lakes, snowy mountains, loads of flowers,etc. It is really a stunning area. It was the first day in 2 weeks that the weather was not perfect. It wasn't bad but was a bit cloudy and colder than it had been. The previous week or two featured sunny 75º days, blue skies, slight breeze. It wasn't bad weather, I'd just become accostomed to the perfect weather. Yesterday afternoon I went to the bus station for my long bus ride to Buenos Aires and I saw 4 of the retires there. They called my name and ran over to give me kisses. One of the couples was on my bus for part of my ride. The buses here are quite nice. They have large, first class airplane style seats. Much like the airplane, they serve hot meals, drinks etc. I had wine with dinner but declined the post meal champagne that they brought around. The ride was about 20 hours but turned out to be okay. I slept some...the seats recline nearly to a horizontal position.
And now I am in Buenos Aires. I love big cities but for the last month or so I've been in pretty small villages so it is a bit overwhelming. It is also hot! It was 86 today and it seemed very warm to me. I did a walking tour of the center of town which is where I am staying. It's a very lively place...loads of people out milling around (shopping, eating, walking) on a Wednesday afternoon. Tomorrow I will visit some of the other neighborhoods and hope to meet up with Ian and Stefan who I met on the Antarctica trip. It will be fun to see them again. I still miss everything about the Antarctica trip and enjoy my frequent e-mails from the boat crowd.
I guess I am ready to come home. I didn't visit any of the north of Argentina at all so I guess I'll have to come back some other time to do that.

Patagonia? or not?

I thought I had left Patagonia some days ago when I entered the Lake District. But it seems, possibly, this is just a geographical designation made by the Lonely Planet guidebook. I last wrote from kind of hippie-ish town of El Bolson where I stayed at the kind of hippie-ish guesthouse. I met 4 wacky Spanish gals, as well as a nice German/Spanish girl who was working there. They were great fun and it seems we made some sort of loose plans for me to visit them in the springtime in Ibiza where they live. I did a lot of hiking in El Bolsón to include the afternoon that I walked to the "Hidden Waterfall" which was so hidden that I got lost. I finally made it there and was about to head back to town and a man surfaced from a nearby farm to tell me that it would be dark before I made it back and that he would drive me back to town. This guy, Pablo, showed me his compound. He has his own sawmill where he makes his own boards and has built lots of really cute little cabins. He plans to open the compound (cabins, camping, etc.) to tourists probably next season. He also has a small organic farm and has taken on some German travelers to help him out. THen he tells me that for a few days that "a Jef from Chicago" was staying there and helping out. I couldn´t believe it as I had met Jef from Chicago while in Ushaia and he has been e-mailing me with travel tips as he is about a week ahead of me on roughly the same route. It was quite a coincidence. He introduced me to the young Germans and to the Argentine brother and sister who are working for him as well. Then he drove me back into town which was a good thing as actually it got darker earlier than I had anticipated. After 2 or 3 days in El Bolsón I went to Bariloche which is a town on a beautiful lake with snowy mountains all around. The setting is stunning but the town has become very touristy and overgrown. So, I have moved up to another charming lake town, San Martin de los Andes. The town is much cuter than Bariloche but Bariloche´s lake is more scenic. All of these towns have restaurants with authentic "Patagonian" fare. The souvineers all say "Patagonia" so I guess it is still Patagonia. I was perplexed but according to wikipedia there is not a clearly defined limit to Patagonia. So, I guess, I am in Patagonia. Tomorrow I will go on a tour of the route of the 7 lakes...a dirt road with villages and...shockingly 7 lakes. It should be good. The following day I go on my LAST long haul bus ride...about 21 hours to Buenos Aires. I still haven´t been able to add photos but Michael and Adele, a couple from the Antarctica trip, sent a link to some of theirs which are much better than mine anyway. The pictures towards the bottom (with seals, green grass, etc) are not of Antarctica but are Tierra del Fuego. Here´s the link: http://gallery.me.com/mwgilbert2#100321&bgcolor=black&view=grid Sorry that I am unable to highlight it. I don´t know how to do that. They are really good pictures though so you might want to cut and paste.

The Old Patagonian Express & The Young Argentine Students

I took another bus West across scrubby Patagonia back to more moutainous, pretty Patagonia to the town of Esquel. I´d only planned to stay one night but the place I stayed was very comfortable and they had very nice, crisp, white cotton sheets. This may not sound like a big deal but they are quite a step up from the pilled, thin polyester sheets that some of these cheapie places have. On my first day I went to take a train ride on "La Trochita" the steam train named by author Paul Theroux as "The Old Patagonian Express". The "express" part is meant to be a joke as it goes at about 10 miles/hour. Really. It now runs as a tourist train. I did not buy a ticket in advance and the legions of Argentine retired folks milling about the station led me to believe that maybe the train was full. This fact was confirmed by the young ticket agent so I decided to pull a Pamela Russin (a woman that I worked with in Korea who always managed to obtain the unobtainable) and said, "Are you sure you don´t have one more seat available?" It seems he did. One seat but without a window. Due to the lack of view I got the discouted Argentine student price which at one third the foreiger price was a good deal. I will have to pull the Pamela Russin a bit more often. When I got to the train car it was occupied entirely by a group of high school students. They sat anywhere they pleased to include my non-window seat which they said they were happy to have so I got a window seat. THey were actually all quite sweet and referred to me, initially as "la señora". As in, "watch out, the señora is walking by" or "no, you can´t sit there, that´s the señora´s seat". They were from Gaiman, a town that I had visited a day or two before. Evidently many people came to Patagonia from Wales in the late 1800s. They have many villlages with street names like "Diego Williams" or "Pablo Evans" or "Rhys Hernandez". These kids were very nice and when they got wind that my name was Laura, they all (the entire car) sang some pop song called "Laura". THe train went to a little Mapuche (native people) village and then back to Esquel.
The following day I went hiking all day at the very beautiful Parque Nacional de los Alerces (trees that are kind of like the giant redwoods). IT was a beautiful day and an amazing park...moutains, lakes, glaciers, flowers. Just incredible. I really enjoyed it tremendously. Oh, and the Lupine Lady has been around here as the entire 2 hour bus ride to the park, and within the park itself, the road is lined with purple and pink and white lupine flowers. It is really lovely.
Now I am in the nearby town of El Bolsón. It is very warm here and sunny. THere is a lot of hiking in the area. I will do some this afteroon and maybe tomorrow as well. I have finally made it out of Patagonia and am now, just barely, in the Lake District. I will also visit the town of Bariloche and maybe another village before making my way to Buenos Aires for my last few days. I´m somewhat eager to come home but there are still so many places I want to see. OH, and yes, I still REALLY miss Antarctica. I´m dashing off a email to young Pablo to suggest that if anyone should quit, that I could fill in for the rest of the season. Ideally I could be an assistant bartender to Hugo, who doesn´t really need any help but he has good views of the icebergs from the lounge area.
Oh, and I believe today is Thanksgiving. So far I have celebrated with a tasty vegetarian pie from the Hippie flea market in town.

Heading North (relatively)

After bidding the crowd farewell in Ushuaia, I took a series of several very long bus rides to go to Puerto Madryn. The bus ride started out well...sunrise over Ushuaia and then through the south of Tierra del Fuego...beautiful snow covered mountains and amazingly rich forests. Then,through the Northern part of Tierra del Fuego which looked very much like Argentine Patagonia...lots of scrubby plants in dirt. Then I got back to Patagonia and saw many, many, many miles more of scrubby land. I did welcome the return of the guanacos, sheep, cows, ñandus, and even a few flamingos and a fox. Finally I got to Puerto Madryn near the Valdes Peninsula. At first it was quite a shock for me as I lumbered off the bus after nearly two days of travel decked out in fleece and wool and saw people wearing sundresses, shorts and frolicking on the beach. It was a far cry from my beloved ice of Antarctica and frankly I´d rather have been wearing my parka and walking with penguins. My walking, by the way, was rather wobbly once I left Antarctica and probably prolonged by the long bus trip but has since returned to normal. I went on a whale watching trip which was fabulous... in the bay there are hundreds of Southern Right Whales and they are quite amazing. They would come right up by the boat and poke their heads up, breech, go under the boat, dive with their tails up in the air. Mainly we saw mothers and their calves...probably about 5 pairs. On a few occasions there were 4 or 5 whales near the boat at one time. I then went on a tour of the peninsula where we saw hundreds or thousands of seemingly lazy and fat elephant seals resting on the beach. We also saw the cute Magellanic penguins that nest on a dirt cliff. It seemed strange to see penguins on dirt rather than snow and stranger still to stand behind a roped off nesting area with maybe one or two hundred penguins rather than the thousands in Antarctica walking right past.
So, I think I´ve rather exhausted Patagonia for this trip and am heading a bit north to Argentina´s lake district. It is reportedly nice. I might meet up with some of the others from the Antartica trip. We´ll see. Just two weeks remaining now...I´m happy and sad at the same time.

Antarctica: El Capitan

Ah, el capitan. So, all of the passengers are invited at any time of day or night to go up to the bridge where the crackerjack crew is hard at work. At first I really felt in the way, especially in the ice. They have radar to show where the ice is, but pretty much the captain stands and stares out the center window calling out numbers in a slow steady voice and the crew sets the equipment and the boat turns. He does it pretty much by vision and he does it quite well. So, for days,I kind of hung back and watched pretty amazed. The crew works so hard. They work back to back trips (with no break in between) from November through March. Then they take the boat up to the Arctic and they do artic tours all summer long. In the icy parts, the captain is often on the bridge for all but 2 or 3 hours a day. I was first impressed by how extremely polite he is with everyone, his crew, the waiters, the passengers. But, he is fairly quiet and serious so I didn´t bug him much...until he started spotting the whales. The eyeglasses in the photo are decidedly NOT his as he does not need them because he evidently has the best eyesight in the world. He was always the first to spot the killer whales and more often than not, it would take the rest of us a long time to spot them even after he pointed us in the exact direction to look. So, after steering us through the ice, and dropping anchor, I figured he´d take a rest while the guides took us out on the zodiac excursions, but no, as the person ultimately responsible for everyone on board, he bundles up, goes outside on the deck and watches all of the excursions with his binoculars. We first got wind of this when some of the crowd was in a zodiac and they heard the captain call Jordi, the guide, on the radio to reprimand him for passing through the center of the iceberg, telling him it was too dangerous. The next day, we were all on the beach at an old whaling station with a bunch of old, decaying buildings. We´d been told by the guides not to go into the buildings so we did not. We were quite far from the ship and walked to the open doors of one of the old buildings and, without entering, peeped our heads in. Young Maxi, guide, came running over at top speed saying, "the captain said he saw people going in the buildings". We assured him that, in fact, nobody had gone in. Then we turned to the boat, waved wildly, tried to gesture that we had not entered the building, and blew kisses in the direction of the Captain. It was then that Maxi told us that they all call him "The Eye" because he sees everything. It was also at that point that we would pretend to all talk like the captain on the walkie talkies calling the guides. We did this a lot. Pablo would even try to coach us, and say, "no, he sounds more like this".
One time I was up on the bridge and was standing near some equipment and the Captain moved over toward the equipment and I jumped out of the way thinking it was important boat stuff. But alas, he was just putting on his music which he enjoyed singing along with. His choices, U2, INXS, Aretha Franklin, etc. were much better than the music that dear, sweet, bartender Hugo played in the bar/lounge area which fluctuated between Musak versions of Madonna and random 70s unloved songs along with PHil Collins marathons. Like nearly everyone else on the ship (except for me), the captain had an expensive camera with a big ass lens attached. When I commented to Sergio (2nd in command)that the scenery was amazing for us newcomers but for them, who see it routinely, could it possibly lose it´s appeal. He said "No, look at the captain taking pictures." And, sure enough, the captain would dash out the side door of the bridge every few minutes to take a picture. I liked the fact that this amazing place has not lost the magic for those who have been there often.
In addition to his skills as a mariner, the Captain is quite the looker. In our crowd I started referring to him as "Capitan Guapo" and my crowd, in turn, referred to him as "Laura´s boyfriend". Fortunately, el capitan remained blissfully unaware of any of this nonsense and just spent the trip steering us around the ice. Additionally amusing is when he would periodically respond to the crew in English by saying things like "okey dokey" which I found pretty funny. In any case, he is a very competant captain and I hope the stress of his schedule and having the responsibility of all of those lives in his hands does not send him to an early grave. It would me.

Antarctic: The Boat People

Antarctica alone would have been amazing, but the fun folks on the boat made it even better. Of the people working on the boat, I guess I´d divide the crew into three main groups: 1) the crew who actually drive the boat, maintain the boat, etc. 2) the "hotel" staff--housekeeping, cooks, waiters, waitresses, bartender, receptionist and 3) the expedition leaders/tour guides--the guys who would take us out on the zodiacs and give lectures on wildlife etc. The crew was, almost entirely Chilean, and really great fun. The waiters and Nicole, the lone female waitress, were incredible. The boat would really be tossing and it was so hard to walk and they´d come out with their huge trays of drinks, meals, etc. and balance them amazingly and only very rarely did they drop anything. A couple of them were clearly not doing well with the seasickness but they motored on with their jobs. Hugo, the bartender, was wise to my water drinking habit and would send me off everynight with a huge bottle of water (everyone else got little ones). The expedition leaders, or guides, were really kind of the heart and soul of the ship. They were, for the most part, young and funny guys who know a lot about Antarctica. The second day when we made a landing, the Captain called them back to the ship early due to changing weather conditions, and it was then that I really learned to trust and respect these guys. The ice started to freeze up, the snow and wind were so strong that visibility was really tough yet they expertly got us through the ice. We were the second to last zodiac to return but had to go back to help the last one ...to guide them out. These guys (Pablo, Rodrigo, Maxi, Jordi, and the others) were great. Pablo was the leader and the one who generally made daily announcements, etc. They were the ones who we had the most contact with as they had their meals with us, took us on the excursions, etc. The crew was great too. I´d sometimes hang out with them up in the bridge, especially early in the morings before breakfast, and it was great fun. The worthy Captain merits a few paragraphs all his own which will follow in a future post.
So, we had quite an array of passengers...about 65 in all. We had the Chilean film crew, headed up by Celine, Jacques Cousteau´s granddaughter. They are filiming a 12 part series for Chilean TV about the oceans around Chile. They were fun and would share a lot with us about what they were doing. They did a lot of scuba diving in the below freezing temperature water. Commrade Olga was my roommate...she is Russian and in addition to running a travel agency is a free lance journalist writing mainly travel articles. She was allegedly writing a piece for Russian National Geographic about this trip. She had approximately 100 pounds of cameras, computers, recording devices, etc. ALthough she was nice,I did not enjoy her setting the alarm daily at 6:15 a.m. which, evidently alarmed only me as she slept until 9. She stayed in bed the first 3 days and the last 3 during the crossing of the sometimes choppy Drake passage. I don´t think there was a time that I was ever alone in the cabin but alas, the early morning wake ups enabled me to hang out with the a.m. shift on the bridge as there was nothing else happening at that hour. My crowd mainly consisted of the New York criminal defense attorney (who brought a Snoopy snow cone maker to make snow cones with glacial ice. Sadly,what with her departure date so close to Halloween she was unable to procure the full sized penguin costume as it was out of stock. She had hoped to wear it on the landings to greet the penguins. Her two friends were with her, a couple, also from New York who are free lance writers on year 4 of an adventure through North, Central and South America. THey too were great fun. Wacky Ian, British guy who lives in Germany was also in our crowd along with several others to include Julie from Arlington who I will be meeting up with upon return home. We also had a few fun Australians. There were several passengers from Holland, some from Spain, Britain. OH, and we spent quite a bit of time with the ¨ship´s doctor¨and his wife. He is an OB/GYN from Chile and his wife did all of the paper work for him to be assigned to the boat so that she could go too. THey were great fun.
Of course, our crowd was selected to make the end of trip slide show presentation which was quite funny. Also, when the guides lost the "Crossing the Antarctic Convergence" contest results, they came to me the last day to tell me that they would just announce that I had won and to act surprised and then upon receiving my gift of a bottle of champagne, I could share it with them.
It was a really fun group and I miss them. I might meet up with Ian in Buenos Aires before each of us departs which would be fun and, I think, I might run into some of the others elsewhere in Argentina as well. We have already sent loads of email back and forth...alas not the hard working crew who went out for another 11 day trip the same evening that we returned and are without phone/internet access.