How El Condor Earned His Titles, Part One: Road Trip to the End of the World

A Condor Soars Above Cerro Morado in the Andean Northwest

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp,
drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before
coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and
especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a
strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street,
and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to
get to sea as soon as I can.

           Herman Melville

As July wound to an end the methodical knocking of people's hats was becoming more and more an irresistible impulse. Knocking hats off would have been mild indeed. I suspect that even Melville -- like me -- was thinking more along the lines of stabbing people in their skulls with a screwdriver.   Okay, a marlingspike, to put a more nautical twist to it.

The Bridge at Piedras Negras

Once while visiting Texas I walked across the Rio Grande bridge at Piedras Negras and looking at the southern horizon wondered how far I could travel until I ran out of land.  What would the end of the world look like? That question stayed with me. Not long ago I found out. I booked a flight to Argentina. My plan was to go overland through Patagonia, to Tierra del Fuego. A road trip to the end of the world, or, in Spanish fin del mundo.

Outside the air terminal waiting for the bus to my hotel in Buenos Aires the first thing I had to get used to was the idea of winter in July. In the Southern Hemisphere the seasons are reversed. Buenos Aires is about as far south of the equator as Memphis is north and the July weather was lots like Memphis in January. The sky was slate gray but the cold wind blew from the south, not the north.

My plan was to travel as cheaply as possible. That should be easy; the dollar was worth almost four pesos. The first leg of my trip would be by train. It ran only twice per week but I could make that evening’s departure. Argentine friends had cautioned me about rail service in their country but I wasn’t convinced. You’re making a mistake, they told me. I love train travel. I’d taken trains across Europe, the U.S., Mexico, I rode a train in Russia once. It’s a mistake, they said. I knew what I wanted, and that was to travel by train to Carmen de Patagones, about 600 miles south. They were exactly right. It was a mistake. It was not nearly as awful as the Indian train in “Slumdog Millionaire” but it was pretty bad.

It was after dark when the train pulled onto the platform at Constitucion station. Other, more experienced, passengers loaded their luggage through open windows. I used the steps. The carriage was old, dirty, and uncomfortable. Argentine passengers congregated under the no smoking sign to smoke cigarettes and drink herba mate. There was no soap or towels in the mens room. Indeed, the phrase “mens room” conjures a more luxurious image than the facilities offered. Still, it was cheap, about $23 US, and this was about adventure wasn’t it.

The train stopped at stations with names like Azul, Olavarria, Coronel Suarez (which I learned was populated by Volga Germans). Like the USA Argentina is a melting pot of cultures. Indigenous people had done a better job of surviving than in the USA, and were more in evidence the further south I went. A family, including a little boy, with obvious Indian roots, shared my coach. Argentina is not poor by South American standards but is plainly so compared to the U.S. The economic crisis seemed worse in Argentina than here.

Daylight came and with it an expanse of winter-barren pampas to the west and a low range of coastal hills in the east. Long patches of snow ran along the lee side of the track bed. Sparse herds of scrawny steers were in evidence; huge rabbits bolted away from the tracks as the train passed.  A vendor passed through the coach with a tray of café con leche and croissants, called media lunes (“half moons”). The Argentine national breakfast.

In Bahia Blanca, home to a naval base, the train was shortened for the final leg of the trip. By mid-afternoon we crossed a low bridge over a river that seemed to lie on top of the rangeland. I asked a young father, traveling with his son in the seat behind me, in my poor Spanish, “how is this river called?”

It was the Rio Colorado. We were in Patagonia. I was scarcely a day in Argentina and was in Patagonia. It was exciting but daunting also. The numbers on the telegraph poles alongside the track told how many kilometers we had come from Buenos Aires. By Carmen de Patagones, we had come less than a thousand. My goal, Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, was three and a half times that.

The track stopped abruptly on the north side of a river valley. It was the Rio Negro. I shared a taxi with an Italo-Argentine across the bridge to Viedma. It is not possible to overstate the warmth and kindness of the Argentine people. Wherever I traveled I was treated with hospitality and deference. Even in cosmopolitan Buenos Aires – comparable in size to New York City – people greeted each other and me with a friendliness reminiscent of the American South.

I spent that night in a warm room off a courtyard three blocks from Viedma’s cathedral square. It was 80 Argentine pesos with breakfast.  In the morning I attended mass at the cathedral and caught the noon bus to Puerto Madryn.  I wrote down every detail in a moleskin journal with little squares instead of lines:

 
I stayed at a small hotel near the beach and watched whales frolic in the bay, seemingly close enough for me to swim to and touch.  Another short bus ride on RN 3, through the Patagonian steppe, took me to Trelew, in the heart of Welsh Patagonia. The landscape had become more barren. There were no more cows. This was sheep country; settled in the late 19th century by Welsh immigrants. I visited the new paleontological museum associated with a local university before resuming my southward journey to Comodoro Rivadavia.

There I changed to a local bus and RN 3 became a coastal highway. I watched the South Atlantic in long rollers wash into the arid steppe until daylight faded. We stopped in the dark at places like Caleta Olivia, Fitzroy, Jaramillo; and by midnight reached Puerto Deseado. A kind woman hailed a taxi for me and gave the driver directions to a pension where there was a clean room.

The South Atlantic from the Mouth of the Deseado

In the morning I took my camera to the mouth of Ria Deseado. The rocks that lined the inlet were smooth and dark. They were volcanic – unlike the layered crustacean shell strata inland. Magellan visited here on his way to round the tip of South America in 1520. Deseado is the translation of the name given by an English privateer after his ship The Desire. Charles Darwin explored here in 1833 and wrote in The Voyage of the Beagle, “I do not think I ever saw a spot which appeared more secluded from the rest of the world than this rocky crevice in the wild plain.”

I spent two days there resting for the trip south and exploring on foot. There was a rotiseria, a take out food shop, on the main street. For lunch I had spaghetti in a garlicky tomato sauce loaded with chunks of beef and half a bottle of Malbec. After my nap it was warm enough for a run. I timed myself an hour past the port facility and up the hills that lined the northern bank of the river into the Reserva Natural Ria Deseado. Islands in the river fairly teemed with a type of gull and other large birds. This was penguin territory but all the penguins were in Brazil for the winter. Locals were fishing along the riverbank. Out of the wind it was unearthly quiet. Darwin’s words echoed in my mind.

The next morning I toured a museum that contained artifacts raised from a shipwreck in the inlet. The British corvette Swift sank there in 1770. I visited the old railway station. A wooden railcar in the town center commemorated the rebellion of 1921, when hundreds of rebels, mostly Chilean sheep-shearers, were executed by military authorities nearby. I rolled my suitcase toward the bus station and stopped at a playground to eat a spinach pie from the rotiseria.

There was a problem. One simply cannot drive the provincial highway south of Puerto Deseado. "It´s dangerous, there is no traffic, nothing," I was told. What was worse, at the bus station the tourist information clerk told me that local bus service south on RN 3, the national highway, was not really reliable either and that I should go back to Comodoro Rivadavia and fly or take the express bus from there south.

Jaramillo

I decided to gamble. I would take the midday bus to Fitzroy -- which is a little north of Puerto Deseado but on the southbound highway – and hope to connect. In a pinch I would hitchhike. The ticket clerk told me not to. En route to Fitzroy the bus driver tried to dissuade me. The woman at the only business in Fitzroy, a gas station and café, said the southbound bus would never stop. “Nunca,” she said.

Even I had started to think I had done a stupid thing getting off the bus there. Then I noticed. The station’s name was El Griego. Inside, there was a painting of a Greek island and a small Greek flag on the wall. My very poor Spanish gave way to practically non-existent Greek. Somehow I heard the word patriotismou (“my countryman”) leave my lips. The woman, Senora Demopolis, knew about as much Greek as I did; her husband was Greek not she. Still, somehow it seemed to make a difference. She called the southbound bus driver’s cell phone to tell there was a passenger on the roadside if he would please stop. She scooted me outside toward the highway. In the distance I saw the bus coming. I ran against a gritty cold wind, lugging my suitcase and camera bag. It was a blue Andesmar express that said “Rio Gallegos.” From my place on the roadside it looked to me as big as an aircraft carrier as it slowed down.

“A donde va?” Someone asked, where was I going?

“Rio Gallegos.”

There were two drivers and an attendant who took my money for the six hour ride. Rio Gallegos may not have been the end of the world but it was the last city in mainland Argentina. I was almost there. I shared the bus with a bored but obviously bright little boy about a year old and with his beautiful 3 year old sister. Their poor mom looked beaten half to death, nursing and otherwise dealing with her baby on a boring (for him) bus ride.

A taxi at the crowded bus station and took me into town to a hotel mentioned in my guide book. It was on Calle Roca, which is the main street. I learned that the prices had become higher the further south I traveled. My room was 150 pesos. I checked in and found a restaurant. I ate two sausages cooked over an open fire parilla-style: one chorizo, pork sausage, the other morcilla, blood sausage, for which I have developed a particular liking. There was a cold beet salad with carrots and boiled eggs and a milanesa, a breaded cutlet as a main course. The total with two bottles of Quilmes, the Argentine national beer, was 60 pesos about $15 US. Not cheap but very good.  Here's a shot of a traditional Patagonian house down the street from my hotel in Rio Gallegos.  That's a corrugated steel exterior to stand up to the wind.  There are no windows on the house's sides.

If you subscribe to the notion that modern humans arose in one place and spread elsewhere you may agree that the indigenous people of the Americas came from Asia via a land bridge; and that ultimately their descendants made their way down the South American continent to what we call Tierra del Fuego. In the morning I would do likewise. A young woman who spoke perfect English at the tourist information office explained my choices to Ushuaia. Each day there was one flight and one bus. The plane took an hour and the bus about 12 hours for the 600 kilometers through Chile and across the narrows at Primo Angostura. Of course, she said, I could rent a car and drive.

There was a store front car rental office staffed by a pleasant guy whose English was flawlessly American and his wife, where I negotiated a week’s rental of a Brazilian Volkswagen 1.6 with unlimited kilometers. They gave me the papers I needed to travel through Chile, pointed me south and wished me well.

I checked out of my room and stopped for provisions: drinking water, vino tinto, groceries, and treats from the delicatessen. For lunch there was a portion (sold by weight) of matambre a la pizza: thinly sliced beefsteak with a layer of sliced ham piled high with mozzarella, tomatoes, olives and spices. Indescribably good. Pizza without the carbs. Why don’t they sell stuff like that at home?

It was a big deal for me to rent a car and to drive in Argentina. Driving is different there than in the U.S. In Rio Gallegos there are few stop signs. One is expected to stop at the intersection of thoroughfares when coming in on a side street; and to proceed according to a system I perceived existed but never did figure out. As for the stop signs themselves well, in Mexico the stop signs say “alta,” which means “stop.” In Argentina they are octagonal and red but the word is “pare.” My Spanish is awful but I think of “pare” as meaning “wait.” A suggestion rather than a command.

Likewise, double solid lines as no-pass zones. The suggestion is not to pass but since it’s Argentina you do whatever you’re comfortable with. Never forget they sell a grade of high octane gasoline called Fangio for the great Argentine race car driver Juan Manuel Fangio. One way to tell the difference between men and women drivers in Argentina is that men pass with absolute impunity against the double line. Women, on the other hand, hesitate and then, before passing, put on their emergency flashers.  Not to worry, there was little traffic on windy Ruta Nacional 3 south of Rio Gallegos that day.  Nobody was passing whether permitted or not.  It looks like this during the very dead of winter:

There’s no way to take a picture of the wind, without which there's no conveying the feeling of that bleak afternoon fifty miles or so from the very southern tip of mainland South America.

Chile began at a low building near a place called Estancia Monte Aymond where RN 3 turned into Chilean national highway 255. First was Argentine customs for the car. I presented the laminated vehicle registration card and the rental agreement. Then came Argentine immigration for me and an officer stamped an exit visa in my passport. An Argentine Customs officer demanded to know what I was carrying out of Argentina.

I walked across the building and there were three more windows: Chilean customs for the car, where I produced the registration and rental paper; Chilean immigration where an attractive carabinera stamped my passport; then Chilean customs for me.

Lastly, I walked back outside and some kind of agricultural inspector said to me. “No hay comedas?”

“No senor, no comedas.” Kind of a lie. There were a couple of cans of tuna and several bottles of wine but he did not look in the trunk. Clearly he was only concerned with fresh produce.

I reached the ferry landing in the dark. There were no lights, no signs, no ticket booth, nothing. Traffic just stopped and I fell in line and waited. Soon the ferry came, a load of vehicles drove off and I followed two trucks and three cars for the fifteen minute trip across the Strait of Magellan at Primera Angostura. They let me pay the fare in Argentine pesos and I spent the trip in a passenger lounge watching truck drivers eat panchos doused with mayonnaise and ketchup.

There were buildings on the other side but what I remember most was the sign that said, “Beinvenidos a la Isla de Tierra del Fuego.” I was no longer on the South American mainland. I continued on through the darkness passing a lighted house from time to time until I saw the signs that said Cerro Sombrerro was five kilometers off the highway. I drove the five kilometers three times past the only guest house in town before I discovered it unlit in a depression alongside the road. This is what it looked like in the morning:

 
The hostel would not accept Argentine currency.  Thankfully I still had some dollars, which was just as well considering that, at $60 US, it was the most expensive lodging of my trip south.  It was a clean upstairs room, warm with a comfortable bed, and breakfast was served in a restaurant at the rear of the low building to the right.

I slept until after 7:00. It was dark outside until 8:00 when a red glow started to show itself in the northeast. A crew of pipeline workers lived in the dormitory across the parking lot. They had eaten and were leaving as I braved a German Shepherd guarding the restaurant door and stepped over a pile of five furry kittens huddled together in the cold morning. Unlike Argentina, where excellent coffee is the norm, instant coffee was served with what was otherwise an unusually substantial breakfast offering of rolls, a portion of Spam-like meat, two slices of cheese and a slab of locally-produced butter. 


When I finished eating I scraped the ice from the windshield, checked out of my room and made my way back out to the highway. I hadn’t realized it in the dark but the turnoff for Cerro Sombrerro was end of paved highway until I got back to Argentina at San Sebastian. This is how the unpaved highway looked starting out.  If you double click on the picture you can my car is still clean; there is only a little ice on the rear window, and the road itself is dry, if pot holed.
 

It took me three hours to drive the 112 kilometers (70 miles) to the border station at San Sebastian. I did not see more than a dozen vehicles the whole morning. Two of them were waiting for this herd of sheep blocking the highway. Doubleclick this photo to get an idea of the local priorities that morning. The shepherds were tough-looking, with skin like worn leather and they watched through squinting eyes their dogs working the sheep across the road. Their saddles were covered with whole sheepskins. I waved at them as I drove by; they ignored me. They were not on vacation. It was cold and windy and they were at work. I spent the rest of the drive translating into Spanish with idiot delight an off-color story whose punch-line went, "El no es perverso Senor pero es solo mi papaaaaaaaah."  The translation is something like, "He is not a pervert sir, he's only my daaaaahd."

The road deteriorated the closer I got to the end.  The ruts became so deep I was scraping the splash pan of the little VW as I drove and was afraid to stop for fear I could not regain traction on the mud.   This picture at the border gives an idea of how muddy the road turned those last miles:

"Welcome to the Province of Tierra del Fuego, Antarctica & the South Atlantic Islands"

 
You can see the road is paved immediately past the border station.  There is a long wide curve to the right and then I saw the South Atlantic for the first time since RN 3 ran along the coast south of Comodoro Rivadavia.  Long rollers came in sets to a wide muddy beach.  Guanacos grazed in the fields on the inland side of the highway.  I passed through the Salesian mission and into Rio Grande, the largest city in Tierra del Fuego.

It was lunchtime and a place right off the plaza called Confiteria Rocca was crowded with locals. Lenny Bruce once said to find the best Chinese restaurant all you had to do was go where all the Chinese truck drivers stopped. By analogy I figured this was the best Argentine restaurant in town. There was boxing memorabilia on the wall. A poster advertising the Oscar Bonavena- Mohammed Ali fight in December 1970. Insanely, I remembered the match. Ali won by a TKO in 14th round. I had seen the fight in Miami on closed-circuit T.V.  Bonavena was a huge Argentine who ended up murdered in Reno, Nevada.

I selected a lomito completo, another one of those thin steaks covered with ham, a slice of cheese, lettuce, tomato and two fried eggs over easy. I had a glass of wine and tipped the kid for 32 pesos total. $8 US and change. Not cheap by Argentine standards but this was Tierra del Fuego and I would bet that everything I ate had traveled over the same mud road from the mainland that I had just taken.

The wine was probably a mistake but I was celebrating. The worst was behind me, or so I’d thought. I was in Tierra del Fuego, just a few hours from Ushuaia and the end of the world. How bad could it get. I breezed back onto the highway past a naval air station and inland. The view was spectacular:

                                                         


It was a little icy, to be sure, but the road was clear now wasn’t it. The mountains in the distance beckoned. This was the road to the end of the world all right but the part I hadn’t figured out yet was that I had to drive through those spectacular mountains. That they looked snow-covered because they were snow covered. The road turned inland and became progressively more icy and winding. The sun started sinking in the west and the wind became stronger and the air colder. The last 240 kilometers to Ushuaia would take me five hours to drive, I would average a tad less than 30 miles per hour. A body of water appeared on my right.  It was Lake Fagnano.

The road started climbing alongside the lake and switching back on itself. Before long it was covered with snow. I met trucks in the dusk heading north with tire chains jingling. It took a while before I  realized that the road under the snow was not paved. A road crew was scattering sand on the packed snow for traction. I pulled over at the top of a hill and waited for them to get ahead of me. It was Garibaldi Pass and the road went down the last 20 miles or so into Ushuaia.  It was dark but I had made it.

I found a room at the Hotel Los Lagos on Patagonia downhill from San Martin just above the harbor. It was the most luxurious accommodations of my trip at 210 pesos with breakfast. About $55 US. As I checked in I met Sergio Olive, an Argentinean pianist and composer, who said he was currently living in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where he works as piano teacher, performer and composer. He was in Ushuaia for a concert that weekend. We discussed music for a while. I asked if he was familiar with Antonio Carlos Jobim. He laughed and said that’s like me asking if you are familiar with Gershwin. 

What a cool response to my clumsy opening. Jobim is one of my very favorite cultural figures. He is much more to me than a musician.

“You see I have a theory of opposites,” I explained.

I told him that I thought of Antonio Carlos Jobim as the anti-Osama Bin Ladin. Jobim was a smooth, sensual, highball sipping, babe-in-swimsuit-admiring, life-affirming jazz musician who lived near a beach in Brazil, and spoke Portuguese, which is almost music by itself.

Bin Ladin, on the other hand, is a teetotaling, sexually repressed fellow who lives (so I understand) in a tent in “tribal regions” along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier. He was trained as an engineer, speaks Arabic (not to my ear a musical language) and his principal claim to fame is mass murder. I explained to my new friend, that I would bet Mr. Bin Ladin seldom goes to the beach and almost never listens to jazz.

Sergio smiled but I sensed he was uneasy with my observations.

Even at the very end of the world my cultural views seemed questionable.

I stumbled out into the night to a supermarket and bought carrot salad and rice with mixed vegetables for seven pesos. I feasted in my room to celebrate my arrival and opened a bottle of Los Haroldos Malbec that I’d brought from Rio Gallegos.   I slept well that night. I had come so far. I was exhausted. I dreamed of Judy Garland. A voice in my dream, said in Argentine Spanish: “Vos ya no es en Patagonia, Dorethea”

It was dark out when I woke. This was it, I told myself lying in dark room, the question I asked when I stood on the Rio Grande in Texas.  This is what it is like at the end of South America. I walked outside and down to the harbor:

I was cold. I had coffee and media lunas and went back outside to walk around once the sun had come up. Looking up from the harbor I could see the mountains I had driven through the night before.  In a way I guess I was looking back toward Texas.  The big church on the right is the Anglican mission.  Behind it and a block up the hill is San Juan Bosco, the Salesian mission church. I toured the city that day.  I visited the museum of the native peoples, El Museo de Maquetas Mundo Yamana, the churches, fish markets and found, sure enough, a restaurant owned by a Greek Argentine.

But the highest point of my day was a visit to the Museo Maritimo de Ushuaia located in the former military prison where Argentina housed its political prisoners and worst sociopaths until the 1940s. I got to tour the actual cellblocks where mannequins were dressed as guards. It was swell. It was located next to a naval base at one edge of town right above the harbor. To get in I had to walk past a real life guard, an Argentine marine in cammies with a folding stock FAL FN assault rifle and a red beret. I remembered a line in Spanish from a Cheech and Chong movie.

“Ay que guapa rifle!” I shouted, you pronounce it “re-flay.” The guy smiled.  Clearly he loved his rifle and I think he liked that I had noticed it.  Truth is I'd seen a bunch of FALs over the years but never one with a folding stock.

Can you read what I posted from my moleskin journal at the top of this entry?  It says I’d rather be a political prisoner in Ushuaia, Argentina, than an Assistant District Attorney in Oxford, Mississippi. As I left the old supermax prison, I thought to myself, I would, I really would. It's only rational. Political prisoners are a better class of people than one is likely to encounter in the DA's office. For starters they have principals, secondly they have the courage of their convictions, and lastly they are about as far as you can get from moral relativists.

I stopped a guy who looked like he wouldn’t run off with my Leica and asked him to snap a picture of me above the harbor.  This is what I looked like that morning:

Part Two: Adios Patagonia, excursion to the Cordoban Sierras

      

A few days later I was back on the mainland.  I had waked before dawn in room 105 of Hotel Nevada in Rio Gallegos, lay abed, said prayers, rolled out of the sack and did situps, pushups, squats without weights, dips between two chairs and blundered out into the cold to the YPF station across the street for coffee and media lunas.

Ticket offices were closed the previous day, a holiday, Dia de San Martin, and my departure was delayed.  Not to worry, the holiday brought a special treat, locro criollo or simply locro.  It was a kind of  heavy stew, reminiscent of Brunswick Stew.  There was white corn, beans, squash, with onions, potatoes and carrots. There was beef, sausage, cubed pork, bacon and other meats I took for offal, including tripe.  It was served with an olive oil based hot sauce with garlic and red peppers.  I found it heavy with an organic layer that looked like oil in Prince William Sound after the Exxon Valdez ran aground but the locals love it.

That morning was bitter, windy and dark.  I packed, planned my trip north, was waiting at the Argentine Airlines office when they opened. I bought a ticket to Cordoba by way of the noon flight to Bueno Aires and checked out of my room and found a taxi to the airport.  We stopped on the way so I could take this picture.

The Road to the Airport at Rio Gallegos

The plane sat outlined against the Patagonia steppe.  Coincidentally, Adrian, the car rental agent,  was there waiting for a customer.  Since they started direct flights into El Calafate, he said, his business was down to a mere fraction of what it had previously been.  We shook hands and I thanked him again for the car rental. 

Boarding was a painful reminder of the cultural chasm between the more civilized world and the extreme south of Argentina.  I carried on a 1.5 liter jug of water and when my Leica triggered the metal detector a helpful security officer walked it around without running it through the x-ray machine and without my asking.  The plane was a Boeing 737, "Renton, WA" the ID plate said. Coincidentally, I thought, I had not seen an identifiable American since B.A. three weeks earlier. We took off some few minutes late and a fine little lunch of pork cutlets with yellow rice and wine was served.  I could see the South Atlantic on my right and the Andes on my left pretty much the whole flight to Aeroparque. 

Waiting to board the Cordoba Flight at Aeroparque

To make the connecting flight to Cordoba from Buenos Aires, I had to clear security again, only this time the officers weren't as helpful.  The one in charge was a large female, the Big Sergent, I called her.  She insisted on handling my camera.  I pointed at her automatic.  Ay que grande pistola.  Es una Magnum? I grinned lasciviously.  She was no nonsense, didn't think I was funny. She showed me, she confiscated my corkscrew.  In Argentina!  talk about cruel and unusual punishments.

I arrived as scheduled in Cordoba but wouldn't you know my bag didn't.  They hadn't loaded any bags in B.A.  "Beinvenidos a Argentina," an irate Argentine fellow passenger said to me waiting to fill out lost-bag papers at the Cordoba Terminal. [The flip side is for $105 US you flew 388 miles in an hour and ten minutes without delay, got a sandwich and a napoleon desert with wine or a soft drink.  Cf. Atlanta to Memphis, roughly 50 miles less, almost always delayed, as much as $250 US and you might get peanuts, and not many of them, and a cup of ice water].

Cute little Monica, a petite brunette Argentina Airlines customer service rep gave me her cell number to check on my bag.  Her English was about as good as my Spanish, which is to say there was plenty room for miscommunication.  The next flight in was two hours, she said, my bag might make that plane.  It would take that long to travel to the city center, check into a hotel and come back.  I decided to wait.  There was an internet lounge, I e-mailed home and told Daniel I was in Cordoba.

My luggage made the next flight and I took a cab into town. I settled in to a cheap room near the bus terminal and met Daniel and Rueben, his dad, outside, we drove to his parents' house on a hillside in a gated subdivision overlooking Nueva Cordoba and feasted on parilla. Miriam, dressed from her office, came later. There were embanadas, two kinds of sausages, vacio the boneless flank steak, and costillo, or short ribs. There was green salad, followed by fruit salad, sherbet and sweets.  All washed down with copious amounts of wonderful Malbec.Rueben drove me to my hotel at midnight and I reflected on how far I can come since waking in Rio Gallegos that morning.

In the morning I slept in, had coffee and  checked out of my room by 10:00.  I caught a cab to the house Daniel shared with three girls, dressed down to gym shorts and a long-sleeved t-shirt and borrowed a bike fora ride through the public university campus to Cordoba's centro.   Here's Daniel at the Plaza San Martin with the Iglesia Catedral in the background. Looking intense (as usual), if not pious.  He thinks an awful lot and is entirely too serious for so young a fellow.

A futbol field at the Ministry of Justice

We lunched at a cafe on a pedestrian mall.  Lomitos with vino tinto at $20AR each.  Five bucks.  We biked back near the Ministry of Justice where kids played pick-up soccer games during the lunch hour.  We found a place to do pull-ups and had a contest of sorts.  I won.

The longer I live, the more it comes together.  This park was what I saw from my hotel room on my very first trip to Cordoba, long before I'd met or heard of Daniel or his family.  I'd resolved then to come back, to explore Cordoba and the Sierras and this was my chance.

We dropped two rolls of film for processing, rode bikes back to his house (he taught a class that evening and I was on the road to Alta Gracia, where we planned to meet that Saturday for a drive further into the Sierras).  I slipped back into long pants and rolled my suitcase out to the boulevard and hailed a taxi to a place where suburban buses stopped.  The trip to Alta Gracia cost $4 AR and took 40 minutes, making frequent stops to pick up or discharge passengers.

Rush hour was approaching and the bus was full.  I heard English spoken, there were three British backpackers aboard.  Still another "kindness of strangers" moment when a lovely middle-aged woman sat next to me and engaged me in conversation in my poor Spanish.  "De donde usted, Senor?"  Argentines sense that I am a foreigner and love to ask me from where I come.  She was well-dressed, her hair was styled and so far as I could tell she sold cemetery plots or a form of burial insurance for a living.  She wanted  to speak a little English.  Told me she loved all things north American, wanted  to visit the U.S.A., she suggested a hotel ("Otel Reech," Ritz?), told me where to get off the bus and pulled the cord to disembark herself at a countryside stop halfway to Alta Gracia. She was a delight and a good omen for my trip to the Sierras.

I got it a little wrong but not badly and got off the bus at what I thought was Plaza Solares and wheeled my suitcase instinctively further south until I blundered onto Hotel Ritz.  Sort of seedy but not nearly so bad as last night in Cordoba.  Eighty pesos got me a ground floor room and bath with breakfast off the courtyard garden.  I relaxed, unpacked, showered and changed clothes and explored the centro.   I found a super market with a rotisaria, took out a milanesa completa with a side dish, zapallos rellenos, [literally "stuffed squash"] a kind of roasted cheese-filled squash.  I found a simple corkscrew to replace the one the Big Sergent  took at Aeroparque and a bottle of pretty fair Malbec.  All for less than $10 US.  What a place!  It was too much food.  I ate and fell asleep for the night after a walking tour around the old Jesuit Mission and the Plaza Solares in front of it.

I woke early, exercised in my room, breakfasted at 8:00 in the bar: cafe con leche and media lunas.  It was cool but not nearly so cold as the Patagonian south and I left early on a walking tour of the town.  Here's my first look at the Jesuit mission church of Our Lady of Mercy that morning:  Later I would tour the mission, which had been made into a kind of historical museum but for now I wanted to walk around, stretch my legs and savor this small and comfortable, very civilized town.

Hungry? Have an orange.

I walked along streets that looked like this.  Hungry?  Have an orange.  My first stop would be the the commie shrine of Che Guevara's boyhood home.  But first I had to find it.  I walked and walked and walked some more.  Soon I was completely disoriented, maybe even lost.

At that point I had to ask myself who cared.  It was beautiful, quiet, compact and so very, very civilized. I stumbled  alongside an arroyo in the midst of town where horses grazed untethered on the grass.  Nobody cared.  The horses weren't about to run away.  They had it good, they knew it.  This is what it looked like:



If they had run away they wouldn't have had horse sense.  Finally, I found the place.  Didn't look like much from the street but inside it was a hotbed of commie secular saint worshipers.  One more middle-class kid that became an adventurer, murdered a bunch of people, screwed up a big chunk of the world and went on the menu himself prematurely, but not quite soon enough. 
On the other hand he was a boon to the consumer  economy and highly brand-conscious.

Che Guevara's Childhood Home

For example the famous transformational motorcycle trip was accomplished on a Norton.  He is seen in photographs displayed in the museum holding a Nikon F and wearing a Rolex.  He was a medical doctor and a child of prosperity.  In one of the rooms of his childhood home, much is made of the fact that, as a child, Guevara refused to eat chicken, goat or lamb on the theory animals suffered being slaughtered.  Curiously, his concern for animal suffering did not extend to cattle. Evidence of a highly selective sort of moral relativism.  Additionally, he is widely remembered for his blatantly racist views with respect to both Black people and Mexicans.  In brief he was a nasty little bastard who lived a good bit too long.  Still, tourists to Alta Gracia found time to swoon during the film presentation of his biography in the little museum.

Which is to take nothing away from Alta Gracia itself, or from the wonderful Jesuit Church, courtyard and the museum it now contains and which I toured following my lunch and siesta..  At the supermarket I bought 150 grams of calimari provencale, a cold dish I had discovered in Patagonia, a squid salad, the propulsion apparatus of small Argentine squid in olive oil with chopped onions, tomatoes, peppers and spices and two bastones de queso, a sort of cheese stick.  The total for lunch was $11.90 AR or about $3 US.  I dined in my room with a perfectly serviceable Malbec at about a dollar fifty the bottle!  The early walk and day's activities and the wine made for a long deep sleep and I woke groggy, dressed and blundered out to Plaza Solares and an espresso, passing two plainly American Mormon missionaries, practicing their Spanish on a potential convert.

First I visited the sanctuary of Iglesia Parroquial Nuestra Senora de la Merced.  It was dark and cool inside and smelled of antiquity.  It had been built in the 1750s and was the mission church for a finca or working farm that gave rise to the village, then the town.  The church formed one side of a square or courtyard and the other wings contained living quarters and rooms, including for example a latrine, which as an historical exhibit, revealed the plumbing system the Jesuits built with the help of local Indians and slaves, which they had brought with them.  Here are some other views of the mission:              This first is of an orange tree in the courtyard, beyond which is a well.  The exhibits included narratives of what life had been like in colonial times.  In exchange for their labor, some would say condition of servitude, the indigenous people were Christianized and their children educated or provided trades or other training.   It didn't seem like such a bad deal to me.  After all you got your soul saved and your kids got an education, a chance a civilized sort of life.  Which is the word that keeps coming to my mind when I describe Alta Gracia, or for that matter, Argentina.

The slaves, on the other hand, were considered property and although they were arguably treated better than the Indians (because they had cost their owners money to purchase and like any other livestock were cared for to maximize the investment), they were not educated.

This view is actually of the clock tower, which is apart from the church and attached buildings, and of pond that was created to provide water for irrigation during the time of the Jesuits and which survives as part of a municipal park and lake.  I couldn't shake the feeling that I had taken a step backward in time.

I sat for a long time in the courtyard.  The quiet and ambiance of the place was striking to me.  There wasn't much traffic around the plaza outside and virtually no noise. There for the moment it was as though time had stopped that not much had changed since colonial times.   Alta Gracia was not merely not Buenos Aires or Cordoba, it wasn't even Rio Gallegos.  The word "civilized" keeps creeping into my mind.when describing the place.  Long afterward someone said to me, why do you say that?  I don't know.  It's a place where nobody is going to hit you in the head and rob you.  If you fell down on the street the passers-by would stop to help.  It was the opposite of Memphis, Tennessee.  Alta Gracia is Antonio Carlos Jobim to Memphis's Osama Bin Ladin.

The Courtyard at the Jesuit Mission

It was still early and as the light became softer I walked through a district of shops.  I had an ice cream and three tangerines.  I found a little jewelry shop staffed by a cute young girl -- reminiscent of my youngest.  She was 20.  "De donde usted, Senor?" I turned it around on her.  "Como sabe que soy un extranjero?"  How do you know I am a foreigner.  [Plainly she was thinking, because you speak the world's worst Spanish, for starters.]  Her name was Luisianna.  She was adorable but a commie.  Like Daniel, like the whole lot of them.  I bought three sets of  hand-wrought silver earrings at $15AR each.  One for each of my daughters.

I blundered back toward the hotel, stopped at an internet cafe to check e-mails and the market close.  Daniel would be by in the morning in his mother's car and we would drive deeper into the mountains, to Villa General Bellgrano. One last swing past the supermarket rotiseria.  Merluga a la Romana.  Filets of hake, breaded and fried in oil, served with pepper and lemon juice and two more cheese sticks.  I ate back in my room and shared the leftovers with a fat gray Tabbie cat that seemed to own the place.  I finished the Malbec and  went to sleep about 10:00.  I woke to live music about 1:00 a.m., they were rocking in the bar.  I was still in Argentina.  The bastards never slept.  I dozed back off and the next I recall it was daylight.

Daniel appeared on schedule and we drove south and west toward the elusive Villa General Bellgrano.  For his many gifts, his intelligence, his intensity, his sensitivity to his surroundings, his Woody Allen-like paranoia, Daniel has the poorest sense of direction ever I saw.    We did not drive forty miles but it took most of the day.  There were numerous wrong turns.  Multiple stops along the way, where Daniel would announce to a local, "Tengo una pregunta."  The local would explain and Daniel would speed off in the wrong direction.

At one point we ran out of road.  We had come to water and stopped.  It looked like this when another vehicle, a jeep, stopped, engaged all wheel drive and forded the creek:

Fin del Camino

When in doubt, at the end of the road, I self-medicate

What was a guy to do.  It was a warm for winter day in the Cordoban Sierras; we were lost somewhere not far from the village of Villa General Bellgrano.  Daniel wanted to discuss Michel Foucault, particularly the idea of the Narrenschiff, or "ship of fools," from History of Madness.  I was a little carsick from the drive along mountain roads.  I had never read Foucault.  Indeed, I thought, if I were lucky, I never would read Foucault.  The exile of mentally ill persons onto boats meandering down European rivers during the Renaissance seemed insensitive to me.  Listening to Daniel I was beginning to be depressed.  I thought I would self-medicate.  I opened a fresh bottle of Malbec, albeit a better vintage (like all Argentines Daniel was a little of a wine snob and had insisted on a pricier variety than my usual fare).  Here I am enjoying a glass while Daniel figured out we had to turn around and go back to find the village.

For his part Daniel was as happy as could be.  He loved lecturing me about Foucault, or anything else to tell the truth.  I was his perfect foil.  I did not know what he was talking about.  Didn't want to learn.  Didn't care. We turned around, left the end of the road and found an odd trio sitting in front of a cottage on a single lane gravel road pretty much in the middle of  nowhere.  "Tengo una pregunta," Daniel began.

There were two rough-looking guys and what at first seemed a plump rough-looking woman with peroxide hair and too much makeup.  The guy closest to me was holding a starter motor from a car in a greasy paw, he gestured driving directions with his free hand.  Everything was fine. We weren't  that lost.  The others looked at us intently.  We had driven off before I realized that the blond was also a rough-looking guy.  He'd used too much makeup but not enough to cover his beard.  The three of them looked like they just busted out of prison somewhere.  This was truly a Foucault moment.  Prisoners, wandering madmen in exile at the edge of nowhere, a person of indeterminate gender.  We had it all.  Daniel had not finished lecturing me. Inspired by the transsexual person we had encountered, he'd gone on to talk about Foucault's views on sexuality with dark intensity.

We found the village, checked into a Dutch-Argentine hostel at the edge of town, El Rincon, "the corner" it was called.  We shared a room and the total was $20AR without breakfast or five bucks for the pair of us.  We found a cafe in town and had coffee to celebrate.

Daniel lectures me with dark intensity while waiting for coffee in Va. Gral. Belgrano

It was Saturday and Daniel dropped me at church for the vigil mass. But not without first getting a little lost on the way into town from El Rincon.  A blond lady was walking along the gravel road.  Daniel stopped, "Tengo una pregunta," he began. She knew the way, she'd show us, got into our car.  "Aleman?" Was she German, Daniel inquired.   Recall Villa General Belgrano was settled by Germans.  Indeed at least some of the early settlers were seamen from the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, scuttled in Montevideo Harbor in 1940 after the Battle of the River Plate.  "Belge" she said.  Daniel began speaking to her rapidly in French.  We found the church, she got out with me.  "Bonne devotion," she said and wandered toward the town's center.

When I describe Daniel and his Woody Allen-like neurosis I am not joking.  Daniel seems obsessed with his own Jewishness, the nature of Jewishness (is it a religion, an ethnicity, a social cross to be borne), Nazis concern Daniel.  Daniel is unduly preoccupied with Woody Allen.  Indeed, during a brief sojourn in New York the previous year, Daniel and my daughter Clarke, with whom he was staying, at his insistence, attended a New Orleans Jazz Band performance at the Hotel Carlyle.  Woody Allen's clarinet was not the star of the evening but Daniel sure was.  Here they are together, captured by Clarke's digital camera:

I include this, not merely to name drop or otherwise to wow you dear reader but because it fits perfectly into the story.  Reuben, Daniel's father, actually lived in Israel for several years with his own parents who had emigrated there and served a mandatory stint in the Israeli Defense Force.  Daniel had Bar Mitzvahed as a youth, could still recite prayers and readings in what sounded to me like Hebrew (make no mistake, Daniel is nothing if not polyglot, with Spanish as his first language, he speaks excellent English, good French, passable German, Italian, Portuguese, a smattering of Ukrainian from his grandparents with with bits of Yiddish, Ladino and apparently Hebrew thrown in as cultural lagniappes).  Daniel once wrote an essay on the subject of  his taste for pork.  He scoffed at the idea of attending temple or otherwise observing the Jewish religion and yet, without a trace of irony, declared in no uncertain terms that he would bury his parents according to the Jewish custom in a Jewish cemetery.  In the same sense Daniel was unduly concerned by and in constant fear of encountering Nazis.  This is significant in light of our visit to Villa General Belgrano.  About which more in due course.

Mass was in Spanish.  During a homily I could not understand,  my mind wandered.  I considered the Battle of the River Plate, one of my very favorite naval battles. Who won?  There are a couple of ways to look at it.  First, obviously a serious loss for the Germans, but wait, Admiral Graf Spee had won the actual engagement. Seriously damaged HMS Exeter.  Although herself damaged she was poised to out perform what remained of the British task force which awaited her, actually only two light cruisers, Ajax and Achilles.  Exeter was out of the fight.  Keep in mind that the British ships were steam-driven, Graf Spee was diesel powered and much more responsive to power demands for speed and thence maneuverability.  Also she had an advantage in the range of her guns.  Not only could she outmaneuver  the British cruisers, in theory at least, she could shell them whilst remaining out of their range. Skullduggery carried the day for the British.  False intelligence convinced the German captain that he would be decisively outgunned on leaving the sanctuary of Montevideo.  He ordered his ship scuttled in the harbor to avoid its capture.

"Creo en un solo Dios Padre todopoderoso, Creador del cielo y de la tierra . . ."  The homily was over and the faithful were reciting the Creed.  I muttered along in English, so far as I could.

Daniel met me outside at the conclusion of the service.  We walked to the village strip together.  Some festival or the other was going on.  There were clog-style folks dancers in Gaucho outfits.  We found a restaurant and had supper and a bottle of wine.  There were babes walking around, Argentine ice cream. Before long we found our way back to El Rincon where Dutch Argentines were celebrating an event of their own and turned in for the night.

I rose early.  It was still dark.  The Southern Hemisphere constellations are indescribably foreign, strange to me.  Daniel stirred and we drove into town together, found an all night filling station and cafe.  Revelers were there from last night's festival.  We had cafe con leche and media lunas and drove back to El Rincon.  Dawn broke and we dressed to run in the cold morning.  We found our way to the town's center and a park with a chin bar.  I won another chinup contest; we did dips and situps and found a bronze statute of a gaucho with his arm around a young fellow wearing lederhosen.  A monument to Argentine German settlers. Back at our room we showered and dressed and checked out.  We made one last pass through town as the Sunday crowds began filling the streets.  It looked like this. Can you make out the Teutonic Script on the sign for the Graf Spee gift shop across the street? How about the Bayer Aspirin Alpinist in the foreground?

Sunday morning in Villa General Belgrano 

A Little Wine on the Way

We found the road to Cordoba, stopped at a market at the edge of town for provisions and drove all morning.  It was a fantastically clear day in the sierras and we stopped to picnic on cheese, crackers and of course, Malbec.  A horseman with his dogs rode by beneath us.  Can you make him out?  For my part I was happy to have a little wine to ease Daniel's typical Argentine driving.
It was Sunday in Cordoba and Daniel quickly called cute little Agostina.  We went by her house and the three of us went on an adventure.   Just as Buenos Aires has a Sunday flea market and street festival in San Telmo's Plaza Dorreigo so then has Cordoba its own version.

Sunday Flea Market and Festival in Cordoba

We walked around and caught the sights but mostly they had eyes for each other.   By and I checked into the Hotel Canada.  Which is where I stayed during my first trip to Cordoba two years earlier.  We said our good-byes, in the morning I would head out for the desert Northwest.  I settled in for an early night and caught up my diary, sketched a plan in my mind for the rest of my trip.

Daniel and cut little Agostiina

In the morning I took breakfast, media lunas, ham and cheese, along with excellent cafe con leche at the hotel, packed, took one last look at the Cordoban skyline and hailed a cab to the bus station.  It looked like this.

Cordoba skyline from Hotel Canada

The driver asked me where I was going and explained that there was no bus service.  What he didn't understand is that I didn't understand Spanish.  He tried and if I had been a little sharper I would have figured it out.  There was a strike and the only bus service was inter-urban, to the outskirts of Cordoba.  "Oh-oh," I thought, but I should have thought "ho-ho" because the joke was on me.  It took a while but I figured it out and quickly caught a cab to the airport, bought a ticket for Mendoza, checked my bag and made the flight.  Little Monica, the petite customer service rep from my lost bag adventure took my ticket at the boarding gate.  I had been there long enough to recognize the service staff, I needed to branch out some, or so I told myself. 

My Cordoban adventure ended with a forty-seven minute flight to Mendoza.  I had made the flight before but this time began my great retrospective tour of the Andean Northwest.  I had been in Argentina almost four weeks and had eight days until my flight home left from B.A.  Truth is I was tired.  I had done what I came to do, which was to travel to the end of the world.  I did that.  Daniel had told me he would be hugely insulted if I left the country without seeing him and I did that.  We had a fine time and a wonderful adventure.  A saner person would have left, flown to B.A. and booked an earlier flight home.  But not me,  I wanted to ride the wave until it crashed and I got a big fat dose of that when I landed in Mendoza.  The pilot -- again an Argentine, still no doubt thinking about Juan Manuel Fangio, came in for landing much too fast.  I know what you're thinking, you're thinking how could I possibly know that?  I'll tell you how I know.  I am not a pilot but when I fly I have an obsessive fear of landing at too shallow an angle of approach, too slowly, and "stalling" or losing lift and coming down tail first. "Crashing on landing" as the news reports like to say.   So I pay attention and even if I had not paid attention I can still smell brake lining when it burns, and burn it did at the end of the runway upon which we touched down in Mendoza, thrust forward in my seat against the lapbelt to keep from coasting off the runway into the desert.

In a way the smell of brake lining was hugely symbolic and was the beginning of my greatest adventure.  About which, more in due course.  Labor on gentle reader.

Part Three: A Run to the Border

Mendoza, Clean and Well-Guttered.  Note the Gutter.

 The Mendoza that tourist see is a clean, well-guttered colonial city with excursions to wine and olive producing estates, easy access to the Andes for skiing or mountaineering.  The gutters alongside every street and sidewalk provide a way to drain the runoff from the mountauins in the spring.  Still, you don't want to be stepping into one.  English-speaking babes escort tourists through bodegas complete with wine-tasting and a little snobbishness about local cuisine. Olives are sorted in vats for packing and export.  There is an American  casino, the Sheraton Mendoza, in the heart of the tourist district with well-dressed bouncers manning the doors. The part they leave out is that Mendoza Provence has something like two million inhabitants, lots of poverty and a hell of a crime problem.

Truth is there are lots of people in the valley that runs just east of the Andes

Olive Sorting Bins

and lots of people translates, even here, into plenty of crime.  It's not BA but it's worse than Cordoba.  I took a room at the Hotel Puerta de Sol, a moderately priced tourist hotel popular with Argentines.

As for the local cuisine, my first stop was to visit "Super-Pancho 250" a fantastic hot dog stand where, at least during my most recent previous visit, one could dine on a foot-long hot dog (actually only 250 millimeters) with two condiments, not counting the usual mustard, catchup or relish, for the absurd price of $2.50 Argentine.

Of course nothing that good could last very long and sure enough when I found the place it had changed names.  It was now Pancho V.  The "V" being code for five, which was how many pesos the foot-long now cost.  Talk about increase in the cost of living!  But the product was still to die for, or likely to kill you depending on your view.  Was it Ralph Nader who said the hot dog was America's deadliest missile?  He would love Pancho V. Here is the place displaying salsas especiales. Check out the names.

Crema de verduritas.  "Cream of little vegetables?" Not bad.  Crema de Provenzal. "Cream of Provecal?  It's a hot dog stand!  Cebolla piquante.  "Spicy onions?"   Double click on the photo and see how the prices have been recently changed.  A dollar and a quarter for excellent street side fare.  Another six bits and you've got a bottle of water AND they're open all night.  I had two with chimichurri and black olives with peppers and garlic, acetunas negros con morrones y ajo.  Not bad.

And here is the product, this specimen partially consumed . Note the swell "shoe string" fried potatoes as an additional no-charge topping.  It's an order of fries free for nothing. 

If life gets any better than this I do not want to hear about it.  I retired to my room for a nap, consulted my guide book for car rental agencies, dropped a load of laundry at a shop I had used before and walked past the Sheraton to a short block with several rent-a-car choices.  One was staffed by two young fellows who reminded me of myself as a youth.  I had rented cars for Avis in Fort Lauderdale and New York and knew all about whacky old-timers looking to save a buck. 

I negotiated a deal for $155AR, per day for a week, no limit on miles, for an Argentine-made Chevrolet.  I arranged to have the car delivered to my hotel in the morning and walked back to get my laundry and a take-out lomito completo to kill the flavor of the hotdogs.  I gave visible offense to an elegant young Argentine woman riding up in the elevator to my room who was grossed-out by the lingering bouquet of acetunas negros con morrones y ajo.  I will say that the lomito was amongst the very best things I have ever eaten.  It was hot and wonderfully greasy.  A gigantic slab of bread on which were piled the lomo, a thinly-sliced steak, sliced ham, melted cheese, onions, lettuce, tomatoes, and the obligatory fried eggs with running yolks -- my favorite things.  I drank half a bottle of wonderful local Malbec and fell asleep studying maps of the Andean northwest.  I would drive through San Juan Province, Salta, visit Inka ruins at Quilmes and, God willing, traverse the Alto Plano past San Salvador de Jujuy to Bolivia.

I rose feeling a little plump in the morning, recited morning prayers (  Psalm 51, "Lord open my lips, and my mouth will proclaim your praise . . ."  Paternoster, 3 aves and a gloria).  After light exercise in my room, a short run and the breakfast bar for hard-boiled eggs, cheeses, salami and cafe con leche it was time to head north.  I blundered onto Ruta 40 north toward San Juan as far as a turn-off for the hamlet of Media Agua.  By then it was lunchtime and I was a little hungry.  Uneasy from the drive up a modern highway, complete with a stop at a police checkpoint outside Mendoza, and an impromptu excursion up a dirt road to an abandoned finca in the desert where I wondered if it was my destiny to just stay there until I die.

Is this my destiny?  Maybe not.

Go ahead double-click on the photo.  The second line of hills in the distance is the Andes.  They're high.  This is remote.   I would just move in, squat, repair the roof, buy a mule to ride into Media Aqua for supplies.  I would fast, pray, do penance for my former dissolute lives, become a desert ascetic.  My wife, abandoned at home, would start dancing and might never stop.  Once, well into my mid-sixties, after an evening of too much wine, I attempted to initiate an amorous interlude. Unaroused, my wife merely shook her head. "Nothing," she said, "flat."  Her hand moved sideways, parallel to the ground, open palm facing down, mimicking the flat line of a cardiograph connected to an animal whose heart had stopped beating.   That was a pivotal moment in my life.  I knew then that no matter what, no matter how frisky I felt, how drunk I was, how much erectile dysfunction medicine I took, my sexual usefulness was finished.  In a way it was sad, but also liberating.  She might miss me, as a source of income, but she would do just fine.

Media Agua is where the offices for Sarmiento Department, San Juan Province, are located.   It is roughly comparable to a county seat.  It is laid out around a plaza in a grid six blocks east-west and three north south.  Facing the plaza is the church of San Antonio de Padua next to which is a school.  The village has no more than five or six thousand residents and when I drove in, school was breaking for the lunch-siesta recess.  Fathers rode bicycles to pick up their children, who rode the handlebars home.  I blundered into the church, said prayers, stopped at a grocery and bought water, wine, cheeses and salami, found a bakery for fresh bread baked with dried tomatoes.  A normal person would have continued up the highway to San Juan and followed the main route northward.  I was off to the shrine of  Correa Dinfunta near Vallecito and I would go cross-country.  You can say what you will about me, dear reader, but normal I ain't.  It took two or three hours but I found the place.

The devotion to La Difunta Correa  [literally "the dead Correa"] comes from a popular legend.  Deolinda Correa's husband was conscripted by Montoneras [one faction during the 19th Century Argentine civil wars].  He became ill and was soon abandoned by the Montoneras. In an attempt to reach her sick husband, Deolinda took her baby child and followed the tracks of the Montoneras through the San Juan desert. Exhausted and dehydrated, without proper equipment, she died.

"This spot is where muleteers encountered the lifeless body of D. Correa with her son whom they found suckling."

Tokens of thanksgiving to the Difunta

Her body was found days later by drovers who were moving cattle through [although they are specifically described as arrieros which means muleteer]. They were amazed to find the baby still alive, feeding from the dead woman's "miraculously" ever-full breast. The men buried her body in what is now Vallecito and took the baby with them.  A popular semi-pagan cult developed around the legend or story and continues to this day. The Difunta is a model of motherly and wifely devotion.



On highways all over Argentina one sees small shrines to the Difunta with bottles of water, left by her devotees to slake her thirst. The Church does not recognize her as a saint.  I am not sure if I do.  The shrine lies in the midst of literally acres of offerings and other signs of gratitude for her heavenly intercession and answered prayers.  I don't know if she is a real saint or not. If sensus fidelium is any indication, she ought to be.

I turned back onto the now two-lane highway RN 141 and thence north via a lesser provincial route toward the village of Valle Fertil de San Agustin.  There was ample daylight when I found the town, nestled in an area of temperate micro-climate in the midst of the Andean desert north.  It was a stark contrast to the surrounding desert; with fruit trees and other agriculture.  There was a lake and resort area with cabins for rent.  I found a spotless modern motel style room for $100AR including  breakfast. I had driven 416 kilometers from Mendoza that day.    

Town Plaza in Valle Fertil

I opened a bottle of wine, glanced at a map for the next day's drive and set out to explore the village, which was even smaller than Media Agua, having no more than 4,000 residents.  I found an internet cafe with telephone booths and checked my emails and telephone calls.  There were three year old twins toddling around the computers.  For a moment I missed my own children, although they were long since grown.

Back in my room I was dressing for supper when someone knocked on my door.  A local artist was making the rounds of tourist rooms offering for sale her wares.  She was a blond woman in her thirties, very poorly kept who spoke no English whatever.  I was given to understand that she lived nearby in the mountains with her husband and son.  She worked in mixed-media, which included sticks, yarn and gourds.  It was plainly very primitive and I was a little frightened of her.  I attempted to give her money but she was insulted and would not accept any.  One more time I missed my chance to do the right thing -- which would have been to buy something, anything, and be done with it.

After dark I strolled to the town plaza and was puzzled by hearing public prayer being broadcast on loudspeakers.  I asked an old man what was going on.  It was the Novena of St. Augustine, patron of the village.  I went to the church and joined the congregation.  How cool was this, I thought.  It was really the 21st century and yet not much had changed since the 18th century.

It was still dark when I rose for the day.  I ran north through the village past a dry river bottom and an agricultural and technical school and turned back to the east-west thoroughfare and to the edge of town, marked by a police checkpoint.  Children were walking to school.  Goats, dogs, chickens greeted me on my way.  It was cold until the sun came up.   The breakfast offering was rudimentary, cafe con leche and media lunas.   I showered and left early for the 80 kilometer drive to Parque Provincial Ischigualasto, which is also known as Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon) owing to its moonscape terrain.

At the park's visitor center I learned that I must hire a guide to ascend Cerro Morado.  It was described as a three to four hour climb to the summit of the 1,750 meter promontory.  Not all that high, on the order of 5,800 feet; but the last 800 meters, almost half the climb, was straight up.  A mere hike but a difficult one for an old low-lander such as myself. My guide was Mario, a builder from Valle Fertil, who was officially

moritorus te saluto

Here's where we left the car.

licensed to lead idiots such as your humble narrator up the rock trail of the Cerro.  He was a fine fellow and that was just as well because he could have killed and eaten me at any time, he might have pulled out my gold restorations with a pair of old fishing pliers, taken the rented Chevy to the local chop shop, sold the parts (probably to the trio which included the fellow of indeterminate gender I encountered with Daniel back in the Sierras) and no one would ever have been the wiser.  Indeed, as previously mentioned, my wife might have been relieved.



We stopped en route to the parking area at the base of Cerro Morado for me to pose next toEl Abuelo, the Grand-Dad of local cacti. The Latin is my stab at "I, about to die, salute you."  Any classicists out there? Did I get it? The highest point or actual peak is toward the center of the other snapshot, set back from the edge of the Cerro.   Here's a view down from the top, looking east-northeast, taken about three hours later.

Can you make out the little Argentine Chevy in the parking area?  Neither can I.  Actually, I think we are pointed in the wrong direction.  I was wheezing like an old hog.  My head hurt.  My heart thumped.  My knees were giving out.  I was worried a little about Mario -- my ending on the menu that morning was a real, if far-fetched concern.  As for my guide, he was just fine.  He posed near the summit puffing on a Phillip Morris straight, no filters, no fancy stuff, just real tobacco taste.

Yep, that's a Phillip Morris.  Made me glad to own Altria shares.

Mario smoked his cigarette while I caught my breath.  We walked around the summit and before long he asked if I wanted to see a condor.  A condor! Of course, I did.  I did not know much about condors, although I had seen a mounted condor at the museum back in Welsh Patagonia at Trelew.  It was gigantic.  I recalled learning that a large specimen might reach 1.35 meters in length, and as much as 3.2 meters wingtip to wingtip; that's four and half feet long by ten and a half feet wingspan.  They weighed 10 to 15 kilos and lived as long as a human.  Indeed 100 years in captivity.  They are carrion-eaters, of the New World Vulture family cathartidae with  swell curved beaks, all the better to rip flesh from a rotting carcase.  If you think about it, their bald heads are hygienic adaptations allowing for the high altitude effects of dehydration and intense UV light to sterilize their featherless skin.  The males have brown eyes but the females have deep red irises.

This is an open-source photo of an immature female Andean Condor  taken near Bariloche by Hugo Pédel 

Mario began bellowing like a gored cow.  I was skeptical.  He kept on. By and by I looked up and sure enough there was a condor riding thermals high us above looking to eat me for an injured quadruped.  Oh the wonder of it all, I thought, here I was in the middle of the Southern Hemisphere winter somewhere in the Andean northwest of Argentina completely dependent on a fellow I was convinced who would, given half a chance, kill, butcher and eat me, getting the once-over from a bird bigger than my little rental car.

He kept at it and by and by another, bigger bird came.  The first one was a juvenile, this one was an adult, or so he told me.  It was big.  We worked our way down the hill, I paid Mario’s fee and a tip for calling up the condors and left by 2:30, backtracked on the provincial route to RA150 at Patquia, a desert crossroads, or, more accurately, a desert-T, where there was a truck stop, Argentine style.  I stopped for coffee and turned north at the T on RA 38 a busy albeit two-landed thoroughfare which followed an agricultural valley, passed through the city of La Rioja and then, well after dark, brought me into the teeming and slightly seedy San Fernando del Valle de Catamarca, or merely Catamarca, capital of the province of the same name.

I found a room with off-street parking and a parilla stand opposite the plaza in front of  the hotel where I ordered a lomito with a glass of wine.  The proprietor engaged me in conversation about how much nicer his life was here than in Buenos Aires.  I agreed, it made sense to me.  I stumbled back to my room and turned in.  I slept well, tired from the drive and from climbing Cerro Morado.

Catamarca's Cathedral Plaza

After a breakfast of juice, a media luna with butter and jam and café con leche I found the cathedral square and visited Nuestra Senora del Valle.  One keeps hearing how the Catholic Church is no longer important in South America, how secularized the people have become and how nobody goes to mass anymore but at 8:30 on a Thursday morning, no feast day, no mass, nothing special, the Cathedral was doing a brisk business of people stopping in for a prayer on their way to work.

Penitents waiting to confess

There was a line for confession and plenty of passers-through.  Even outside, of those who did not stop, few passed without a bow, or having turned to the church’s doors to cross themselves.  Such small acts of piety or at least faith are amongst my favorite things about Argentina.  Skeptics say that the province is so poor and so corrupt that there is little for the locals to do but pray for a better life.  I don’t know what the faithful are praying or thinking, or what they believe, but they believe something.  For all I know there might not be anything there but there ought to be.  I walked to the Archaeological Museum Calchaquí and toured the collection of pre-colonial artifacts of the indigenous peoples as well as historical items.  Two young women showed me around, both spoke English and were gracious.  Outside, the midwinter day had turned hot.  It was 32 centigrade at 11:30, about 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

My day’s driving plan was ambitious.  I hoped to spend that night at the Inka ruins at Quilmes.  There was, or so I understood, a hotel nearby, Hotel Ruinas de Quilmes. It was the off-season and I didn’t think I needed reservations.  I would drive up RA38 to porvincial highway 307 and thence up through a range of mountains to the village of Tafi del Valle and out onto RN 40, la quarenta on the Alto Plano near Quilmes.  It was about 400 kilometers total, not more than 240 or 250 miles, slightly less than I had driven either of the two preceding days.  Still, it was ambitious because it involved some mountain driving and because it was Argentina.  What might have been a four hour drive in the United States stretched out to double that in the Andean northwest of Argentina, and that was only after one found the correct road.  They don't waste a big bunch of money on road signs in Catamarca province.

I blundered past a swell provincial prison right near the heart of town and then, snaked my way north on Route 38, but only after I traveled south or the way I had come the night before, in the mistaken belief there must be a way to by-pass the city. I stopped an hour or so up the road at the village of La Merced for roast chicken and rice with vegetables and a Coca-Cola and continued north through an agricultural valley behind tractors pulling wagons of freshly cut cane. Before long I came to the turnoff for highway 307 at Acheral and began climbing through an area of almost tropical flora.  It looked like this:

RP 307 heading west and up toward Tafi Del Valle

The road wound its way higher alongside a creek, doubling back on itself and making a little carsick.  A tourist bus came up behind me and I pulled over onto a wide place in the road to check out the creek.

Rocky creek east of Tafi

It was slow-moving indeed but interesting how the climate went from tropical rain forest to bleak desert alto plano within 30 miles or so.And it did. I emerged from the green hills to the high planes village of Tafi del Valle by late afternoon.

It looked like this and reminded me of ski resorts in the mountain west of the United States, of course without the snow and skiers. I stopped long enough for gas and coffee.  This is what Tafi looked like when I got to town:

Tafi del Valle

When I had finished gassing up I drove back out to the highway and turned west to continue ascending to the Alto Plano.  The pavement stopped a couple of miles out of town and I continued on gravel up through the hills, past an astronomical observatory and intermittent pastures as the shadows lengthened and I approached the ruins at Quilmes.  I was thinking about the Inkas or the pre-Inkas or whoever it was that had lived here before the Spaniards came.  They were a highly civilized people.  Very moral, educated.  There was a network of roads, mathematics, a religion, military structure, trade, agriculture.

The road to Quilmes

Things are seldom as they seem.  Who knew how long the route I was traveling had been used?  Did it replace, or follow the path of a Pre-Colombian road.    The day was fading and I was tired of driving.  I was tired of thinking about the Inkas.  The air turned colder as the sun set and daylight started to fade.  I emerged from the hills onto the plain and followed the signs off Ruta 40 to the ruins.  It was about 5 kilometers to the parking area and former Hotel Ruinas de Quilmes. Yeah, I said "former," the place was buttoned up tight as a drum.

A lone untethered llama kept a silent vigil.  I parked my car and ran up the hillside with my camera.  It looked like this:

One day you walk around singing and dancing.  Everything seems just fine.  You have figured out zero, or the concept of zero. Tomatoes, peppers, quinoa to eat.  Coca to chew if you got to feeling sad and blue. There was Pachamama, the earth goddess, the mother of humans, lots of gold (which gives you a terrific inflation hedge). You did not really use the wheel much but who cared.  There were plenty of slaves to carry stuff around.  No wheels, no problem. There was a standing army of 40,000, a network of roads, law and order.  Not much really to worry about and then here comes Pizarro riding into town on a horse. You had never seen horse before, but still, not much to worry about.  You have 40,000 troopers, all the Sun Virgins a guy could use.  There's plenty to eat, the aforementioned gold (there I go thinking like a Spaniard).  Hey, here you are, an advanced civilization and up rides a guy on a horse with his 180 cavalrymen, all wearing funny outfits. How much trouble could these guys be? 

Like I said, things are seldom what they seem.  And for John Q. Inka, everything just changed as surely and finally as if he had been a star-traveler who had careened a tad too close to a vast black hole in the depths of space.  Just a little too close but past the event horizon and he was toast. Or, like panini to be precise, toasted but also subjected to a huge amount of pressure, where everything, the salami, ham, mozzarella cheese, roast peppers, everything just kind of runs together and he did not have a clue until until he went to stab the closest Spaniard with his bronze-tipped spear and the point snapped off because the suit, in addition to looking funny, was also made of steel.  Your little village of Quilmes with its law and order and 5,000 souls, instead of today being a quaint little antiquated but still quite functional commercial center -- like so many places in say Spain -- was reduced to looking like this:

Ruins at Quilmes: cacti grow where houses once covered a hillside fortress.