“Tramping Through Holiday in Argentina”
Many travellers have a place they are headed to and others have something the are headed away from, but what of those who are not so intended on what they are doing. Those who only know that they want to extract themselves form what is the day to day. Open to whatever they may find if anything at all. I suppose it would be impossible to find nothing. Is it the same as asking, “why climb a mountain?” “Why ski off that cliff?” “Why ride that motorcyle through the air?” “Why surf that 50 foot wave?”
“Ah might as well jump, JUMP!” David Lee Roth.
First Impressions – Getting to know you
When my friends Erin and Greg asked if I wanted to go on a ski trip to Chile I was in the midst of selling a house I’d built and, at least temporarily, shuttering a construction business I ran with a partner for the previous six years. My romantic life was a mess. I had a friend, Tim, who six months earlier moved to Cordoba Argentina to go to graduate school and teach english. With Cordoba a day and a half buss ride from Santiago Chile and nothing but freedom, like it or not, on the plate I of course said, “YOU BET! I’d love to go.” I, however, had no intent of returning with them after the week of skiing in the Andes.
It is September 17th when I say my good byes to Erin and Greg after a week of resort living excess and skiing. I am back on the South American continent for the first time in a decade and much like last time I am headed out alone on the road here with some contacts and not many plans. The following morning I catch a buss for Mendoza Argentina. September 18th is the national day of independence for Chile and while I am excited to be headed for a country I have never seen I enjoy watching the Chileans spanned out all over the land enjoying the holiday with family and friends.
From my window seat on the afternoon buss we pass through wine country in Valle de Aconcagua toward the 3000m/9850ft Portillo Pass that connects Central Argentina and Chile. Every house flaunts their national flag and the fields are full of picknikers and children flying kites. I spent a good bit of time in Chile in the past and know the intense pride Chileans take in their country, but their current affluence allows them the luxery of travell over this holiday and when I arrive in Mendoza Argentina the town is full of Chilleans.
In Mendoza, as in most all latin american cities and towns, there is the central plaza. Like most every town in Argentina it is a monument for their liberator General San Martin, who between 1813 and 1818 routed the Spanish from Argentina and Chile. His crossing of the Andes to take the war of independence from what is now Argentina to Chile is a military legend. From Chile he fought his way north into Peru where after successfully wresting Lima from Spain declaring the country’s independence on July 12, 1821. He met up with the other famous South American liberator Simon Bolivar in a secret meeting a year later on July 22, 1822. After the mysterious meeting he abdicated his post as Protestor of Peru and resigned his command of the army. Shunning politics and military service he retired to France in 1824 never to return to South America.
The Plaza de Independecia in Mendoza is a large one square block park surrounded by four smaller plazas arranged like the five face side of a die. The other four plazas are San Martin, España, Italia and Chile. On the night of my arrival Plaza de Chile is overflowing with jubliation. Beer flows and folks sing their national amthem with drunken gusto while tripping down the streets of a foreign country. I wonder if many of us estadounidenses, folks from the US, do the same thing in Canada every year. It just strikes me as odd to celebrate one’s nationalism on foreign soil. It seems to me leaving home would be about getting away from nationalistic fervor.
It was late in the evening when I arrived and hearing that all the accomodations downtown would be booked with Chileans I took a room in a private house. Joe, a 65 year old firecracker of a woman, was advertising her room at the bus station. This is a common practice all through Chile and Argentina and often affords the traveller with a much more local experience, but demands a basic level of spanish to take advantage of. Joe’s house was in an outlying neighborhood near the bus station. She is committed to being the best danm host this side of the Derien Gap, the roadless piece of jungle seperating North and South America at the Cloumbian Panamanian border.
El barrio de Joe (Joe´s neighborhood) is a typical Latin American suburb. To my gringo eyes it appeared a bit run down. The houses are all built out of brick and concrete, replacements for the adobe construction of old. They are wall to wall and the sidewalks are broken, the storm sewers open and a fine layer of dirt over everything. Once any traveller adjusts to the apereance of things and gets to the street and interacts with the folks living there they realize the beauty not provided in the sharp facades of North America. Tranqi, a local shortened form of tranquillo (mellow or calm), is an apt description for the feel of the street outside Joe’s.
Hungry, I asked Joe where to eat. She through me and two other gringos she’d picked up at the bus station in her car. In the midst of telling us there was a great little local shop around the corner she drove us to the mall. To her surprise we protested noting that this was pretty much like being at home and we’d much prefer the local reatuarant. Baffled but consenting she brought us back to within two blocks of her house and made sure the folks would fill us up, which they did.
The shop is a tiny little whole in the wall serving mainly walkup folks piazza and lomos (grinders/hot subs). The food was fantastic. Served up by a blatently Italin family, at shortly before midnight they were still cutting prep foods. Argentine dinner time is ten o’clock and later. After dinner I went alone to purvey the Chilean celebrations, but nursing a cold and a broken rib I’d received skiing I soon returned to Joe’s for a welcome night’s sleep.
The morning after the party the streets are quite and the buss station full with Chileans headed home. There will be a week of marches and militarty parades back in Santiago, but I am sure most of the Chilean exodus is for work. The hotels empty out and I find a room right in the heart of town. Strolling out into town I pass workers cleaning up the remains of last night’s party. I walk past a canal flowing along downtown’s south flank and realize that most of the garbage will end up there.
All of us westerners have this out of sight out of mind mindset about garbage. The abundant ammounts we generate at home are seldom seen again once they are out of our hands. My home town, Seattle, spews it’s trash all over the desert in eastern Oregon, along with most other metropoli on the west coast. Here, in Mendoza, the streets are clean but the lovely canal passing through town is full of trash. I think of Oscar The Grouch while looking over the river and hum to myself, “I love trash.”
Regardless of the garbage I am falling quickly in love with Argentina, at least on first impression. It is new for me in Latin American to not be a stand out. I am blonde and blue eyed and often have gringo or yankee hollerred out to me while wonderring a town. Passing through Manchu Pitchu ten years ago I was such a novelty that a class of some thirty school girls one after the next kept me captive while they each took a picture with me. While it may be nice to be cherished by school girls the desire to blend in becomes overwhelming. Today I have peolple on the street asking me directions as if I lived here. I may not have the most common face in the crowd, but it is my foreign accent and poor spanish grammer that give me away.
An old Dodge pick up lumbers down the road; it reminds me of life at home. There are many ups and downs in travelling. I have travelled alone a great deal in my life and often these times afford the greatest reflection and contemplation of the world, but they are accompanied by the reality that there is no one there to share it with. It can grow into loneliness and depression if it goes on for to long. I am looking forward to my friend’s house in Cordoba.
So I sit on this bench next to the trashy river after walking a good portion of town. There is a potters shop across the street. The nighborhoods I walked through remind me of Europe with their cafes and small kiosks dotting the street. All sorts of small cars travel down the road alongside the big american models. I passed a golf course on my walk and inquired about green fees, but it was mebers only. Argentina unlike other Sauth American countries I have travelled through seems to see itself more a part of European culture than Latin American, but it is distinctly a part of the Americas and especially, even with all it’s eurocentric cultural leanings, Latin American.
