Buenos Aires III

One day, after staying up most of the night, we went to Recoleta early in the morning.  It was cloudy and still fairly dark when we walked through the cemetery gates.  The graveyard basically consists of several city blocks almost completely filled with the family mausoleums of the Buenos Aires elite.  They vary greatly in size and opulence.  Some are well taken care of, while others are caving in or seem abandoned.  A lot of doors have been broken, or the glass that lined them shattered, and the old coffins are open to the air.  There are dried out flowers sitting in dirty vases on white marble in the mausoleums.  It is so strange to see these forgotten people in the middle of the metropolis.  Some of the  buildings are like small churches, complete with stained glass windows and altars.  Others are very plain.  There was one with a door that went into a pyramid, which was completely free of any name or text.  There are gnarled old evergreens winding through blocks of the cemetery, some over stone benches in little plazas.  Cats roam around and sit on the tomb statues of old hubristic generals.  It is a bizarre and beautiful place, and easily the best cemetery I have ever seen.

By the time we walked out, there was a band playing old jazz by the archway.  We bought water and walked back into the city.  Another day I went to Recoleta in the afternoon.  A cat, who I named Samuel followed me around the whole time as I looked for Evita.  Eventually a cold rain started falling and Samuel ran off under a bench and looked at me as if to invite me under.  I stood under a mini greco-roman roof on one of the mausoleums and waited for the downpour to pass.

Buenos Aires II

To the north of our apartment in Palermo, there is a large zoo surrounded on three sides by an expanse of parks and gardens.  We went walking around in the area over the course of several days.

The one that by far made the biggest impression on me was the Botanical/Feral Cat Garden on Avenida Santa Fe.  It turns out that, while dogs run society in the two other South American countries I have been through so far, the cats have the upper hand in Argentina.  They roam amongst sculptures and greenhouses mewing, sleep in spots of sunlight, are fed Argentinian beef by old ladies, and, in general, rule with an iron cat fist.  I met one cat with whom I got along particularly well and christened him Snublins.

The zoo was an interesting experience.  Zoos down here are very different from the ones I have seen in the U.S.  The cages tend to be smaller and more poorly maintained.  At the same time, the cages and zoo buildings here were absolutely beautiful.  They made a little precolombian temple for the camelids and a Hindu style edifice for the elephants.  Another interesting difference is that zoo-goers are allowed to feed almost all the animals.  You could buy little bags of grass pellets or something like that and feed them to the zebras and elephants, therefore further degrading them in their sort of miserable existence.  Oh well.

 My favorite of the indigenous creatures I saw was the Aguara Guazú (Guarani for Big Fox).  They are also called maned wolves, but pretty much look like a fox with a dark face stuck on top of long, skinny legs.  They are really quite beautiful.

Buenos Aires I

We came to the Retiro bus station in Buenos Aires in late morning and spent an hour in the bus station waiting with our things before getting  a cab.  I read The Fountainhead.  I didn’t enjoy it; in fact, I thought it was horrible, but I was too far in to stop.  Around noon we took a taxi to the intersection of Thames and Guatemala in Palermo Soho, where the apartment people were waiting for us.  The streets were lined with sycamores.  We crowded into the small room and realized that there was no air conditioning, but it was okay.  There was a loft-style bed and a small kitchen in the same room.  The shower is too small to accommodate both of my shoulders at once.  All in all, I quite like the place.  It is white and quiet.  We paid the deposit and they told us when the maids would come.  After drinking some water, we set out to walk across the city center to the South American Explorers clubhouse in San Telmo, where Borges lived.

It took us about two hours to cross the city.  We walked through the neighborhoods of Palermo, Barrio Norte, Centro, and finally, San Telmo.  One of the stranger sights along the way was the huge and brightly colored Palacio de las Aguas Corrientes, or Palace of Running Water.  I believe it actually houses the waterworks mechanisms of the area.  We also walked by the congress building, which is modeled after the U.S. Capitol building, but has a green copper roof.

Eventually we came to San Telmo with its lovely antique buildings and cobblestone streets.  I sat on the couch in the clubhouse and read a letter from my mother.

Rosario

We spent several days in Rosario, in another Hostelling International outpost.  This one was more obnoxious than the last, at about the same price.  Rosario itself, however, was quite delightful.  The city sits on the side of the silty Rio Paraná, across from bright green islands.  There is a park along most of the riverbank, with a large monument to the Argentine flag toward the southern end.  On other parts of the waterfront there were clusters of vendors selling popcorn and other things.  People would sit out there with their children in the lazy heat.  The high-rise structures of the city loom up severely in the other direction.  It was a strange and peaceful scene.  The city is filled with many beautiful old structures.  My favorite was the partially abandoned Hotel Savoy.  I have silly images in my head of buying it some day.

We walked around in the afternoon some days, and were almost always caught in a tropical deluge that lasted for half an hour or so.  One time we were walking along the river front by a group of old warehouses that had been converted into concert venues.  When the rain and thunder came we sat under the metal roof overhang of one of the warehouses and listened to the rain.  It was very beautiful. 

Cordoba

The land flattened into miles of fields and pastures outside of Salta.  After the deserts and jagged mountains of Perú and Chile, Argentina seems mild and tamed in many ways.  We arrived in Cordoba early in the morning to take the first Argentinian cab ride.  In a decidedly non-Peruvian fashion, the metered cab ride went smoothly.  We went to a Hostelling International place called Cordoba Backpackers, which turned out to be quite annoying.  I suppose it was my first experience with the mainstream backpacker scene, and I have realized that it is definitely not my thing.  The hostel blasted music at 4 o’clock in the morning and attempted to keep people from bringing in their own alcohol so that they could sell beer at twice the normal price.  I think the worst part was that there was always someone trying to sell some package tour or camping trip through the hostel.  Also, the prices were not particularly good.  In any case, there are a lot of convenient parts to staying in hostels like that.  Cordoba itself was huge and hot.  It is the second largest city in Argentina and is full of universities.  I did not find many of the streets to be particularly attractive, though there were grand old buildings scattered around.  We went into some old Jesuit crypts underneath the city, which had never actually been used, but were architecturally fascinating.  In Nuevo Cordoba, which is a short walk out of the old town, there is a large park and some interesting museums.  We went to a large, slick, modern art museum and saw some good things.  Afterward, we walked around in the park and eventually to a place that was called something like “The Island of Enchantment.”  I started feeding a duck some baguette, when I realized that it was sort of disturbingly ravenous.  I tried to walk away from it, but it chased me around for a while.

Salta

Salta was stylish in a minimal way reminiscent of the early 1900’s.  The main plaza was large and white; palm trees surrounded the central sculpture of some old war general mounted on his horse, surrounded by buxom nymphs.  A chaotic ring of traffic whorled around on the cobblestone streets.  Outdoor cafés surrounded the plaza.  They were filled with hip urbanites drinking espresso and eating little pieces of meat.  One night we sat at one of them, eating a small pizza and drinking beer.  Our waiter was an old man with a lazy eye who was laconically gruff and amazingly elegant.  The next day I walked in the streets further from the plaza, looking for bottles of water; there was an old storefront with antique typewriters covered in gilt lettering.  I bought white chocolate in a store where the clerk was overly helpful.  There was a shelf of maté cups behind him.  We shared a dorm room in the hostel with a German student who had bought a motorcycle with the intent of touring Argentina.  He had already hit a guardrail on it while trying to wave at someone.  His ankle was wrapped in bandages.  “That hurt,” he said.

We walked around the city for a few days, looking at incredibly ornate and brightly colored churches.  There was also a white monastery toward the edge of town with a meek black dog standing watch at the main door.  It rained most days, and a humid haze hung in the air that partly blocked out the verdant mountains that surrounded the city.  We left for Cordoba one afternoon after walking through the parks with our backpacks on the way out to the bus station.

Argentina at Last

On one of the last days in Calama, we took a micro to the “cementario” on the outskirts of town.  I had not yet been so aware of the magnitude of the Atacama Desert; it was the sort of scene that overwhelms one with its inconceivable emptiness.  We walked through the cemetery, skirting around a funeral, and into a plain full of low bushes.  Lizards darted around, sometimes stopping to look at me, twitching their heads up and down.  As we walked along an old barbed wire fence, I heard a screeching cry and looked up to a small owl sitting on one of the fence posts ahead.  It had a bright white, warlike face, and soon went flying away into the adjacent field.  On the way out of the cemetery, I saw people sitting in front of the raised, concrete tombs of their family members, which looked like a number of square, glass-fronted dioramas stacked on top of each other.  One man held his hand out to the tomb for a moment and then walked off. 

Before going back to town, we sat at a little flower stand next to the road and drank the national soda, Bilz.  It was a great relief to get out of the dirty and hectic center, where it seems we were daily assaulted by the sight of stray dogs acting on their amorous desires, among other unsavory things.  The next morning, after being forced to pay more than we owed because of the innkeeper’s mathematical error, we got on the bus to Salta, Argentina.  I was very glad to leave.

The ride was obscenely beautiful.  At first, it seemed no different from any of the other recent rides.  The desert stretched on and on.  Plumes of smoke from the mines loomed in the distance.  The landscape was a seemingly endless, lifeless plain.  A few hours in, though, we started climbing in thick fog, and when it cleared, the scenery had completely changed.  There were lakes and beautiful snow-capped mountains in the distance.  We went past small herds of vicuñas and alpacas.  The stone of the mountains blazed blue and red.  There was the same sort of vast emptiness, but it was somehow much more alive.  We rode through salt flats that reflected the beautiful clouds, and past canyons cut in painted rock.

Around 10 PM at night, we arrived in Salta.  It was hot and humid as we walked through the night streets to the hostel.  After putting our bags in the room, we walked out into the city, which was still bustling at what must have been midnight or later.  Beautiful, slightly dilapidated buildings towered up all around us.  Intimidatingly attractive people sat in outdoor cafés and assessed us as we walked by.  I am glad to be in Argentina.

Tacna-Arica-Calama

A few days ago, we returned to Arequipa from Cotahuasi. The bus ride was perhaps the most eventful yet. Around midnight, the bus stopped and the lights went out. After receiving no information for 15 minutes or so concerning this curious development, I got my flashlight and clambered out of the bus. It turned out that the bus ahead of ours was stuck in a patch of deep and remarkably adhesive mud. There was a group of men digging out the wheels of the bus, and another group of people watching. The landscape was utterly surreal, as we were in the middle of a 15,000 foot mountain pass, well above the timber line. It was raining, and we seemed to be the only lifeforms for miles and miles. I went walking off to the side of the road into a field of boulders and large mounds of green moss. Finally I got back onto the bus, and within another 10 minutes we were moving again. Another part of the road seemed to have turned into a river, and though the small pickup truck behind our bus stopped at the side, we went barreling through. It made me sort of jumpy, but seemed to work out fine.

Despite the delays, we wound up in Arequipa at the projected time of 4 AM, and almost immediately boarded another bus to Tacna, which is the Chilean border town. As the sun came up, we were passing through sand dunes littered with red rocks. Food and newspaper vendors started boarding the bus around 9:30 and hawked their wares, and the steward deemed it the appropriate time to put on some absurdly violent movie. The desert spread out into long planes with hills in the distance. In one place there were dozens of dust devils in the distance, some seemingly towering up to 50 feet or so. The sand was dotted with little oases occasionally, and one large one toward the end that turned out to be Tacna.

We checked into a hotel in Tacna, took baths, and then walked around town. It had a different sort of feel than any of the other towns so far. Maybe a little more European. There was a sand colored cathedral on the plaza with beautiful, circular stained-glass windows. Some of them had masonic imagery for some reason. Further down in the plaza there was a large cast iron fountain that had been made by A.G. Eiffel and shipped over to Perú. He apparently made quite a mark on the towns in the area.

The next day we bought tickets for Arica at the quaint train station. It seemed to have been relatively unchanged for years, though a sign painted onto the traincar proclaimed that the Peruvian government was “on the edge of the future” or something like that. We rode to Arica in a combined engine and passenger car. It was bright yellow and green, and carried us through a familiar landscape of amazing desolation. Eventually I could see the sun reflecting in streaks in the Pacific. We arrived in Arica at about 7 o’clock with the 2 hour time difference.

It was immediately evident that we were in a different country. Chile is much more European in feel than Perú. There are many more privately owned cars, and thus many gas stations with coffee and junk food, including delicious packaged flan. It also seems to be more consumer based, with lots of pedestrian malls selling clothes and electronics. A lot of the youth are painfully fashion conscious. In general, it felt more like the U.S. than anywhere I have been so far. The prices are accordingly high across the board. I cannot understand Chilean Spanish nearly as well as Peruvian; it seems much more rapid and slurred together. After spending a night in a french owned hostel, about which roamed a cat named Napoleon, we got on an annoyingly expensive and uncomfortable bus to Calama. We were stopped twice in the middle of the night to get out and open our bags for inspection by the police.

Calama is in the middle of the Atacama desert, which is the most arid in the world. It is a fairly nondescript city, apparently the retirement place of miners from the nearby hills. It has a large shopping mall and a small downtown that is somewhat unattractive. When I hopped on the wrong bus one day, I saw the paved streets dead end in the desert. While the downtown is crowded with ostentatious construction, the people out in the far reaches of town live in corrugated metal shacks. Groups of stray dogs roam around. While walking in the plaza one day, I saw a dog show that involved a bunch of the unfortunate beasts being dressed in tutus. I thought of it as just one more reason to be in Argentina soon.

Cotahuasi

We came to Cotahuasi in order to get off the beaten track to some degree, and also to see what is apparently the deepest canyon in the world, Cañon del Cotahuasi.

The bus ride there was pretty incredible. At 5 PM in Arequipa, we embarked on a 12 hour journey over rocky roads and through a 15,000 foot mountain pass in a bus that was absolutely stuffed with people. Some had apparently bought standing room tickets and were standing/sitting/sleeping in the aisle. One man opted to use my shoulder as a head cushion for most of the night in the sweltering bus, despite my frequent squirming in the opposite direction. At least they played Legionnaire, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. It was dubbed in Spanish.

At any rate, the ride was beautiful. Before it got dark, we rode through rolling desert hills and martian landscapes of red rock partially buried in white sand. There was an amazing sunset of vibrant, hot-pink hues.

We came to Cotahuasi around 6 in the morning and stumbled into a 3 dollar/night hostel. Alojamiento Chávez. The town was beautiful. We didn’t see any other foreigners for several days, and the Andes towered up all around us. You can buy the ingredients for several meals for about 2 dollars in one of the many small shops that line the main street.

I went on several walks down to the edge of the river gorge outside of town. The road wound through thatch-roofed buildings, fields, and pastures full of sheep and cows. Everyone I passed seemed to say hello, and though I got some negative gringo-oriented attention, the people were for the most part extremely kind and polite. Anyway, the rude ones were drunk 15 year olds wandering around on Año Nuevo-eve trying to impress girls, so I suppose they can be forgiven.

It rained every day in the afternoon, and rivers of cloud flowed over the tops of the mountains. The thunder echoed between mountain slopes in the distance and sounded to me like the rumble of coal cars running into one another on the train tracks in Dagsboro.

One day we took a walk past the bullfighting arena and cemetery down to the riverbank. There was a suspended cable bridge there from which I could see the rushing river below and throw rocks in an immature manner. The walk there was very interesting. We passed many people on the way who carried large bunches of mint and water containers. Part of the path was a tunnel carved through the side of the hill, which was made up of some sort of ancient conglomerate of rocks and mud. It evened out into a plane of boulders and cacti.

In Quechua, Cotahuasi means: “Star House.” When the clouds of the rainy season did not obscure my view of the sky, I could see why they gave Cotahuasi its name. The stars were amazingly beautiful.

Our next destination is Tacna, via Arequipa, to cross into Chile. There is an antique train that goes across the border for $1.50. I am very excited.

Arequipa I

I arrived in Arequipa at 6 in the morning fueled by 2 hours of sleep, but having had a much better overnight bus experience than the last.

We came to the Terminal Terrestre after rolling through miles of perfectly desolate and beautiful desert.  The city loomed up beneath El Mistí, its snow-capped volcano.  Much of the city is built out of a white volcanic rock called sillar.  It looks something like a dense pumice with flecks of mica and other impurities throughout.  Our first hostel was an old colonial structure built from the stone.  It had a large courtyard, a garden, a cat, and a curvy roof upon which I scrambled about enthusiastically.  We cooked stir-fry and noodles the first night.

The city itself was fairly spectacular in many places.  The sillar façades of banks and churches were covered in beautiful and delicate carvings.  Flagstone sidewalks and stately churches were everywhere.

One day we walked to a suburb across a river called Yanahuara, apparently a cloister of the rich.  There was a beautiful park in the center of the neighborhood, with a lookout, or mirador, that consisted of sillar arches inscribed with poetry in a beautiful Spanish Nouveau script.  I could see the curve of the earth from there, with the simple houses sprawling out toward the mountains.

Christmas cheer, I suppose, called for music to be blasted from the main cathedral every night, along with a psychedelic light show on the front of the building.  They played classics ranging from Alvin and the Chipmunks to Louis Armstrong.  It was truly bizarre. 

On Christmas eve, I went to a grocery store on the plaza to get Panetón and wine, and experienced once again Perú’s drastically different regard for personal space.  I find myself squished into impossibly small spaces with impossibly large numbers of people here on a regular basis.

Later that night, we made dinner and sat on the rooftop terrace of our hostel, La Casa de Margott, and observed the festivities.  Around 11 PM, the city exploded in fireworks.  I could see and hear them from all directions, from all over the city.  Even the policemen standing watch on the corner set some off.  Cars honked their horns even more than usual, and in general, the excitement was contagious.

On Christmas day we took a walk up to the city’s main park, Selva Alegre.  There were lots of wholesome family-enjoying-Christmas-in-the-park scenes, including one in which some kids and their father messed around with one of the grasscutter alpacas that was tethered to a tree.  It got very mad and spit at them.  At one point I was afraid it was going to hurt one of the smaller children, but in the end nobody was injured.  It was just some good old Christmas alpaca torment.  Later on, in another part of the park, we observed some caged animals, including a monkey that grabbed my hand.  When it realized that I didn’t have any food, it lost interest.  It was sort of like shaking hands with a miniature old man.

On my last night in Arequipa, in la Casa de Margott, I drank several Pisco Sours with Andy, the desk clerk, and a German traveller.  It was fairly amusing to try to learn how to make them through communications in a combination of both germany and spanishy englishes.  The main thing I understood was “mas pisco.”  I guess you can never go wrong with that.

The basic recipe is:
-1 egg white
-1/4 cup Peruvian lime juice
-2 tablespoons sugar
-mas pisco
-ice water
-bitters
-cinnamon

You pretty much blend everything but the last two together until it is white and frothy and then sprinkle the bitters and cinnamon on top.  I quite like them.

The next day we got on a bus to Cotahuasi in the afternoon.