22.04.2006

Torres Del Paine

A better name for this place would be Holy Sweet Mother of Jesus National Park, the only name that remotely caputres the reaction you will have on seeing the place. The Torres del Paine is a group of bare granite moun on the Chilean side of the somewhat ambiguous border. You can actually see the tips of the Torres from near the Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina, but getting to the park requires a long detour to the south, through Rio Turbio and around the impassable stretch of mountains.

The Torres del Paine themselves are enormous triangles of rock, all that remains of a big granitic outcrop that was injected under the earth, like a giant tectonic zit, when this area was still completely covered in ice. Erosion exposed the dome of rock and wore it down to the extremely photogenic snaggle teeth that remain.

Anywhere in the world, this topography would be spectacular, but in Chile it's the sky show that makes the park nearly indescribable.

Consider the life of a parcel of air, circling around the southern ocean. This is home to the most ferocious winds on the planet, as the difference in temperature between seawater and antarctic ice drives massive amounts of air. There is nothing to stop the winds or the waves, which go around and around the planet until they happen to hit the one thing that extends down this far into these latitudes, a wall of rock called the Andes.

If you are interested in what happens when immovable object meets an irresistible force, this is a good place to come. Parcels of air that have been scooting along for thousands of miles, scouring the occasional island and picking up more and more humidity over the open water, suddenly deflect straight upwards

At these latitudes an air parcel can spend months circling the planet uninterrupted; when it finally runs into the walll of rock called the Andes, the results can be dramatic. Air that hasn't encountered anything with more resistance then fiji is suddenly asked to rise very high very quickly.

Consider the life of an air parcel, floating along above the South Pacific. For weeks and thousands of miles, you have been scooting along, picking up humidity over the ocean water, running effortlessly over the occasional island, never more than a little speck of land in the wide blue water. And then, without any notice, you run into a little something called the Andes.

There is a lot of amazing topography in Torres del Paine national park - glaciers have been scouring the place for millenia and have left their usual impressive mark; in fact, they're still there, dropping icebergs into lakes. But you'll be excused for ignoring most of it in favor of the spectacular sky show. Winds arrive at the chilean coast completely out of the habit of being slowed down by anything, and this is probably the best place on earth to watch what happens when an immovable object meets an irresistible force. The one certainty here is that whatever weather you are standing under is not going to be the weather you have half an hour later. The western horizon offers a kind of "on deck" preview of what is to come, although even that can be misleading: the complicated topography makes for a bewildering set of microclimates. The only certitude here is that at some point you are going to be very, very wet.

It is not easy to get to Torres del Paine, which saves the place from being a second Yosemite. The nearest town is Puerto Natales, Chile, a pleasant and delapidated port town two hundred kilometers to the south. with (of all things) an excellent free English-language newspaper with frequent articles about how best to enjoy the park.

I went to Torres del Paine immediately after my encounter with the Perito Moreno glacier. The tips of the Torres are actually visible as you approach the glacier, but the ground in between is so impossibly rugged that the only way to get from one to the other is by a long sequence of bus rides detoruing far to the south. Along the way, the mountains rapidly turn to flat plains, with flamingoes and rhea the only vertical things in the landscape. The trip is only four hours long, but an hour must be devoted to the Kabuki dance of passing Argentine and Chilean border control (both countries insist on seeing you coming and going). The actual border between Argentina and Chile runs over the ridgeline, but neither country wants to put a building up there. So you start with the Argentinians, going uphill, and meet the Chileans a mile later.

The vital work of screening visitors along this segment of the 4000 km

If you like wind, this is the place for you to be. It blows all the time from the northwest, sometimes as a gentle gale, sometimes in more powerful gusts. Waves forming in the glacial lakes are actually lifted up and turned into fine spray by the stronger gusts. Any plant can become a tumbleweed.

The wildlife in Torres del Paine looks like it was bought at a zoo surplus sale - there are flamingoes, foxes, hawks, ducks, guanaco, puma, horses, hares, condor and the elusive and somewhat doleful Geoffrey's cat, a raccoon-sized predator who spends his days sleeping in old tree trunks, hiding from the wind, and his nights in search of frogs and hare. The European hare is really most set-upon animal in this menagerie; all the helpful pie charts in the park main office that show the diet of the various predators in Torres del Paine reserve their biggest slice for a photo of a very frightened-looking hare.

At the Lake Grey hotel, large foxes slink up in hungry terror at the sound of a candy bar wrapper crinkling, begging for food. Condors soar high overhead, sometimes low enough that you can see the gray backs of their wings when they bank. They have a way of flying with their wingtip feathers spread very wide that suggests a certain fastiduousness and pickiness completely out of keeping with what they like to eat. Books will tell you that condors are carrion-eaters, but my friend Jill will tell you that they are sometimes anxious to expedite the process; she got dived on by multiple condors during a geological expedition as they tried to knock her off of a high mountain path.

Here the greatest danger to falling off a mountain isn't a bird but the wind, which can knock you down if you turn a corner unprepared. There are times and places where you have turn around and squat down for a few seconds to endure the stronger gusts.

By the time I arrived in Torres del Paine in March, the hiking season was winding down. The inaccessibility of the place means that only two kinds of people visit here - young hikers or very wealthy Condé Nast people past middle age, who can afford to stay in luxury places like the "Hotel Explora". The latter do their best to isolate visitors from the rigors of the climate, but there is the great democratic equalizer of the rutted gravel roads you have to cross to get anywhere. You don't see families or young children at Torres del Paine. Not only are they the perfect size for condor snacks, but it's just too physically demanding to cart them around on these roads and make them take eight-hour hikes. There is no oppressive family fun here.

The xxx xxxx is thee stayed in the cheapest of the hotels, a place next to the park administrative center that offered a room with twin bunk beds for $90 a night. The hotel was almost empty, and full of mysteries. If Kafka was an outdoorsman it would be the kind of place he might describe. Silent figures would flit through in the background. The proprietor would walk by, preoccupied, paying no attention. Occasionally a pair of workers in coveralls would drive away. The place was heated by a wood stove outside the rooms, so the only way to get heat was to keep the door open, but this would be mysteriously closed by some gentle hand if you stepped

There is no communicaiton with the outside world other than radio. That was an exciting sense of isolation. In a movie, you would expect a fearsome thunderstorm to come through and break off all contact with the outside world, but in reality clouds even the biggest storm would whip through in under twenty minutes. At the end of my stay I was astonished to learn that I could pay with a credit card. The payment method consisted of the manager getting on an open radio circuit to puerto natales, audible to every bus and van in the region.

ATENCIÓN ATENCIÓN TENGO UNA TARJETA DE CREDITO VISA NÚMERO CUATRO DOS DOS SEIS...

Torres del Paine is one of those rare pieces of habitable land that never had an indigeneous population. It's simply too remote, to The park covers an enormous expanse of land.

Did I mention the wind?

The appeal of the park is as much in the sky as on the ground. The wind blows so strongly that no kind of weather lasts too long, and in the sky you can see a variety of clouds at all levels, moving relative to one another and all scooting along fast along the ground. The major mountains create their own clouds; in teh rainy periods you see big nimbus trailing off of them, and when it is sunny they form lenticular clouds that are pulled into long ovals as they coast downwind. The wind is the only sure thing, it blows relentlessly from the west and makes hiking a challenge.

A boat goes out to visit the Grey Glacier, at the head of Lago Grey. The name comes from the color of the water, filled as it is with sediment (glacial flour) from the scraping taking place up at the head of the lake. At its southern end the lake has several massive, Ti-d-Bowl blue pieces of ice that have drifted up onto shore. They are easy to mistake for large pieces of cheap blue plastic. The grey glacier, like nearly every glacier in Patagonia, is receding into the mountains, but still puts on quite a show.

The entire boat ride felt scripted. As the boat pulled away from shore, a lone condor soared out about a hundred meters above us. If you have seen a condor, you know its wingspan is about three meters, so it is an impressive bird to see at such low altitutde. I half-expected to see a button on the boat pilot's board labelled "launch condor". Coming up to the glacier, the sky clouded up completely and it began to rain. But as we pulled within fifty meters of the ice, a lone sunbeam struck the ice from the side, and a rainbow appeared to the south of the boat. Just then, I heard a tinkling sound of ice against glass and the question "pico sour o whisky?"

Three cocktails later, I considered the grey glacier to be the best glacier in the world.

The unsettling thing about Torres del Paine is that visitors come in two types - either young people doing vigorous hiking, or older and very, very rich people who can afford to stay at one of the high-end hotels on teh place.

We stayed at the no-frills, $90/night room at the administration center. There was a wood stove in the hallway, but to get it to heat your room you had to prop the door open and wait and wait.

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13.04.2006

Argentina On Two Steaks A Day

The classic beginner's mistake in Argentina is to neglect the first steak of the day. You will be tempted to just peck at it or even skip it altogether, rationalizing that you need to save yourself for the much larger steak later that night. But this is a false economy, like refusing to drink water in the early parts of a marathon. That first steak has to get you through the afternoon and half the night, until the restaurants begin to open at ten; the first steak is what primes your system to digest large quantities of animal protein, and it's the first steak that buffers the sudden sugar rush of your afternoon ice cream cone. The midnight second steak might be more the glamorous one, standing as it does a good three inches off the plate, but all it has to do is get you up and out of the restaurant and into bed (for the love of God, don't forget to drink water).

The afternoon steak is the workhorse steak, the backbone of the day. It's the steak that gets you around the city, ensures a successful nap, steers you into the bar and (most importantly) gives you the mental clarity to choose the right cut of meat in the restaurant that night. Misorder the first steak and you will either find yourself losing steam by eight o'clock, when no restaurant is open, or scampering to find an awkward third bridge steak, to tide you over until dinner.

All you need to know about the quality of pasture in the pampas is that cows went feral in Argentina. You can still see them grazing pretty much anywhere there is a horizontal patch of grass, all now firmly back in the hand of man, but still with a happy grassy glint in their eye. This most docile, placid, and passive of large herbivores stepped off the boat, took one nibble at the pampas and made a run for it. It knew that it wanted to spend the rest of its life eating the pampas grass, without outside interference. And the settlers, once they caught some of the early escapees, began to feel the same way about the beef.

Eating steaks in Argentina feels like joining a cult. You find yourself leaning on friends to come visit, and writing YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND in all caps more often than feels comfortable. Argentine beef really is extraordinary. Almost all of this has to do with how the cows are raised. There are no factory feedlots in Argentina; the animals still eat pampas grass their whole lives, in open pasture, and not the chicken droppings and feathers mixed with corn that pass for animal feed in the United States. Since this is the way of life a cow was designed for, it is not necessary to pump the animal full of antibiotics. The meat is leaner, healthier and more flavorful than that of corn-fed cattle. It has fewer calories, contains less cholesterol, and tastes less mushy and waterlogged than American meat. And the cows spend their lives out grazing in the field, not locked into some small pen. You can taste the joy.

When the meat is cooked, it is roasted in thick pieces over open coals by obsessive meat chefs who have been cooking meat all their lives, for other people who have been eating meat all their lives, in a country that takes its meat extremely seriously. You are not likely to be disappointed.

Steaks here are ridiculous - not so much in diameter, since they rarely overhang the plate by more than an inch or two - but in thickness, having roughly the proportions of an American canned ham. But what the Argentines have really mastered is flavor. Strange cuts of meat that would be ground into flavorless paste up north come to your table here infused with a delicious texture and flavor, provided they are cooked right. And they are invariably cooked right. The waiters are solicitous about asking (in English) how you want your meat done, but if you let them make the call, you get a two-inch thick of meat that transitions seamlessly from carbon to bright pink and back.

As you would expect, there is a forbidding amount of terminology around beef-eating - bife de chorizo, asado de bife, churrascos, [...], lomo, vaco, bife de costilla, ojo de bife, various more exotic portions of the animal. However the basic principles are simple. Meat is prepared in two ways, either on a parrilla (charcoal grill) or an asador (a system of iron crucifixes circling an open fire). The crucifix shape is suggestive and amusing. An excellent essay on Argentine history by Martín Caparrós may give a clue to its origin:

Juan Díaz de Solís, a Sevillian and a gentleman, arrived in the Freshwater Sea in February of 1516, when none of this existed yet. He voyaged in three ships, as is fitting, and when some shameless natives made him a signal of welcome, he readily leaped onto the shore with his cross and his sword, only to land without further ceremony on the coals of a banquet: he was to be the main course.

His companions, who watched him slowly tranformed into a dish from the boat, then told the world of those who bury their dead that Argentine history had begun as an asado of their captain, skin and all.

Surely Solís was wearing one of those crucifixes that shows Jesus actually hanging from the cross. It must have been a simple mistake on the part of the natives, who saw him as a friendly gift from the visitors on the boat, complete with a serving suggestion suspended around his neck. In any case, you will now see crucified lambs and calves in the front window of many a larger parrilla, roasting for hours in front of unfazed diners.

At dinnertime, meat is served in a state of nature, which means you don't get any default potatoes, salads, or side dishes - not even a sprig of parsley. The Argentine steak stands alone, towering three inches over the plate, its edges hanging delectably over the sides of its silver platter. Daytime steaks may be more coy. While the parsley sprig as garnish is unknown in Argentina, you will sometimes encounter a fried egg, an olive, or a strip of pickled red pepper, sometimes even a combination of all three:

This gorgeous specimen is called a lomito; it's a standard lunchtime steak, clearly so thin that the Argentines are embarrassed to send it out into the world without a protective wrapping of ham and cheese. An American who didn't know better might greet the lomito as an old dinnertime friend - the choice sirloin - but it bears about as much resemblance to a full Argentine steak as a rubber duck does to a battleship.

Steaks come with a condiment called chimichurri, which is intermediate on the condiment spectrum between salsa and Worcestershire sauce, and can appear in any viscosity from liquid to little diced cubes. Chimichurri is made from garlic, hot peppers, oregano, parsley and vinegar, in varying proportions. Some of the best I've had resembles pesto, with barely any hot pepper and thick bergs of garlic; other chimichurri is much spicier and red in color. It is there to help you - something about the sauce helps the steak go down without fuss - and you should let it do its job. The same goes for Argentine wine; it is excellent and designed to get you safely through the large portions of beef.

There is a darker side, too, to Argentine condiments, and it is called salsa golf, the unholy alliance of ketchup and mayonnaise. This will sneak up on you when you least expect it, including in eight-star restaurants and the most delicate of seafood dishes. Any trip to an Argentine supermarket should give you fair warning: you can find yogurt, for example, in little containers ranging up to about 200 mL in size, but mayonnaise is sold in foil bags (bags!) of up to two liters in size. These are great fun to drop off your balcony.

The Argentine meat obsession is intense but completely democratic. Steak is a staple food here, and you don't have to contend with Peter Lugar-style snobbishness. You are dealing with a food of the people. Argentina is number one in world beef consumption, weighing in at 65 kilograms (about twelve steaks) per person per year, half again as much as Americans (!) eat. There are amusing reminders of this everywhere. The one-touch settings on the microwave oven in my kitchen are marked:

1. Ham
2. Chopped meat
3. Chicken (whole)
4. Pork
5. Beef (rare)
6. Beef (medium)
7. Beef (well done)

As you might expect, vegetarians will have a somewhat rough time here. For most people in Argentina, a vegetarian is something you eat. One's diet will accordingly lean heavily on pastas, gnocchi, salads, and (for the less squeamish ) fish. Vegans will not survive in Argentina. However, even egg, milk and cheese-loving vegetarians should be careful not to get cocky. Two vegetarians have visited me here during my stay, and from both I had to listen to many glowing words about the quality of Argentine fries, unable due to my impeccable upbringing to ask what they thought it was that made the fries taste so wonderful, or why they looked so deliciously yellow. On even the most innocent box of crackers, in the slot where you would normally expect to find "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil", it reads simpy "beef tallow". The homemade cookies bought in the minimarket downstairs taste of steak.

It should be no surprise that the land of beef also has excellent milk and butter. The milk comes in plastic bags that would give any American marketing department a heart attack. They proudly advertise "GUARANTEED 100% BRUCELLOSIS AND HOOF-AND-MOUTH FREE". One brand even brags that its bacteria count *never* exceeds 100,000 per mL, and prints daily statistics to prove it (only 82,000 bacteria/mL on Monday! mmm!). Meanwhile, the butter here either has a different name than in the rest of Latin America ("manteca" usually means "lard" ), or else Argentine lard is the best I have ever tasted.

You might think that fruits and vegetables would get short shrift in this animal paradise, but they are actually delicious. Tomatoes, for example, have odor, flavor, and are colored red, an intriguing novelty. You can get excellent salads in any restaurant, although just like with the steaks, you get only what you ask for. Celery salad is a bowl of celery, with nothing else; carrot salad is a bowl of shredded carrots. You need to be explicit, and you need to be firm in rejecting Mazola in favor of olive oil as a dressing. Most places offer it, but some waiters have the superstitious Argentine fear of seasoning and will try to dissuade you.

There is a strange duality to dining in Argentina. By every measure the food is wonderful, yet foreigners who have been here for a while will get a strange, glazed look when you try to rave to them about the cuisine. After you've spent some time here, you realize this is because the entire country operates off of a single master menu:

This menu is delicious, but with rare exceptions it is all you are going to get. People coming for more than a few weeks are advised to bring a discreet bottle of Tabasco sauce.

With any order from the master menu comes the Bread Basket, which should be treated as you would treat a basket of wax fruit, that is, as a purely decorative ornament. It is considered bad form to actually eat anything from Bread Basket, as this will force the restaurant staff to send someone down into the bread cellar for a replacement roll before placing it on the next table.

In fact, you won't find good bread anywhere in Argentina. You can buy day-old baguette segments in a plastic sack, or else purchase the large sheets of white American-style bread used to make their triangular canapes (sandwiches de miga). The latter are actually punched out of the bread sheets like cookies from rolled dough - I would not be surprised to see miga bread being sold on a giant roller, paper-towel style.

Other dangers lurk in the Argentine pantry. Worst and most puzzling in a country settled by Italians is the horrible ground coffee. Most cafés and restaurants serve good espresso, but you are in the wilderness as soon as you try to find something you can brew at home. The idea of purchasing beans to grind seems to be a great novelty - it took several days of hunting to find both a grinder and something to put in it. Grocery store coffee is inevitably sold pre-ground and roasted with sugar, giving it a dark color and the taste and aroma of burnt socks.

It's possible that coffee, like Argentine yogurt, is just meant as a delivery mechanism for sugar. The sugar cubes here are the size of Lego bricks, and when you order an espresso you are given three packets of sugar the size of a small wallet. Every pharmacy has an aisle devoted to artificial sweeteners, for those who must do without, and there is a general inability to imagine a dessert that does not make your teeth hurt. Items are preventatively glazed with sugar whenever there is be the slightest doubt as to whether they are supposed to be sweet or savory; this is what prevents the otherwise excellent Argentine croissants (medialunas) from being the king of breakfasts.

There is a more serious kind of confectionary panic that goes beyond glazing, and it brings us to the true dark side of Argentine cooking. I am talking about dulce de leche.

Dulce de leche is a culinary cry for help. It says "save us, we are baffled and alone in the kitchen, we don't know what to do for dessert and we're going to boil condensed milk and sugar together until help arrives". This cloying dessert tar is so impossibly sweet that you wish you were ten years old again, just so you could actually enjoy it. It is everywhere. There is a special dulce de leche shelf in the supermarket dairy case, and the containers go up to a liter in size. Even the churros are stuffed with it - the churros, Montresor! For anyone who has had pastries in Europe, the added horror is that dulce de leche is identical in color, texture and consistency to a number of much less sweet, tasty fillings, like the earthy chestnut material the French call crème de marrons, or the tart kind of plum butter popular in Eastern European bakeries. You see a thick layer of dark brown jam-like material and think, this couldn't possibly be caramel, there's just too much of it. And so worldliness leads you to great giant bites and then disaster.

Thank God, therefore, for the ice cream. When the Italians came here at the start of the century, they took one swig of the fine pampas milk and knew what they had to do. The ice cream in Buenos Aires is easily the best I have ever eaten, and the parlors that serve it are everywhere. The secret seems to be an insistence on making it from scratch in each heladeria, since the only remotely similar ice cream I've tasted was the kind our chemistry department in college used to make from liquid nitrogen in its annual bid to attract new majors. Liquid nitrogen ice cream (recipe: heavy cream, walnuts, liquid nitrogen, sugar. Stir) is delicious because the ice crystals it forms are so very small; this also makes the ice cream melt very fast. The same is true for Argentine ice cream; there is no guar gum to contend with, when you get a cone you have to work fast.

I spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out how meals work in Argentina, and they remain a mystery to me. Dinner is clear enough: people tend to go to restaurants beginning at ten o'clock (for those with small children), with the main rush around eleven, and dinner is pretty much over at one or so in the morning. And breakfast - or rather, its absence - follows as a logical consequence of eating a steak the size of a beagle at midnight. But I have yet to figure out whether people eat some kind of meal in the afternoon, and if so, when. Wander into any bistro or restaurant between eleven and six and you will be served a delicious lunch-sized meal, but you are likely to be the only person there, with the waiter mopping floors in the corner and the parrilla stacked with raw meat for the midnight dinner rush.

I've come to think the culprit in the missing Argentine lunch scene is yerba mate.

What Tim Horton's is to Canada, mate is to Argentina - a national obsession whose appeal is inexplicable to outsiders. Where the ignorant foreigner may see just another kind of herbal tea (yerba mate is a very unassuming shrub that grows in the northern parts of the country) the Argentine sees a taste treat of unimaginable subtlety, and a tonic for all his problems. The Wikipedia article on proper mate preparation should give you a warning of the level of obsessiveness attainable here (the Urugayans are even worse). To the virgin palate, mate tastes like green tea mixed with grass clippings. The beverage is traditionally drunk out of a little gourd, through a metal straw called a bombilla, with hot (but not boiling!!) water poured into it (without wetting the surface!! clockwise!!) from a thermos. What distinguishes mate from coffee and tea is the social context - two or more people share a gourd, with a designated pourer in charge of refilling it with hot water after each turn. The ritual is low-fuss but indispensible. You can buy mate gourds and thermoses in any grocery store, and get your thermos filled with hot water at any convenience store or gas station, but you will never see mate served in restaurants or sold in little disposable paper gourds, to go. it's not that people refuse to drink mate alone - anyone working a solitary shift will have a gourd in hand - but that the concept of being served mate by someone who does not share it with you seems impossible.

Mate aficionados will tell you that mate contains a special compound, mateine, that serves as a tonic and mild stimulant, promoting alertness without making it hard to sleep, reducing fatigue and appetite, helping the digestion and serving as a mild diuretic. Scientists will tell you that mateine bears a suspicious resemblance to a chemical called caffeine. Mate aficionados will then grow indignant, explaining that mateine is really a stereoisomer (mirror image) of caffeine, with different effects, which will in turn irritate the scientists, who will snap that caffeine doesn't have a chiral center, so it can't have a distinguishable mirror image, and why don't the mate aficionados just put a sock in it.

Since I am writing this from Argentina, I will just diplomatically state that mate includes a constellation of chemicals, whose presence may affect the way the body absorbs caff... er, mateine, giving it a unique physiological effect.

The national love affair with mate doesn't just affect lunch. It has the dire effect of making Argentines less than enthusiastica bout booze. The wine here is very good (something has to stand up to that steak), but Argentina has no liquor to call its own, relying on whiskies like Old Smuggler and the low-maintenance Don Juan cognac to carry the flag.

Beer is ubiquitous and comes in a bewildering variety of sizes, although there is a skittishness about the full-on liter. Things level off at 970 mL. In my case, it means I end up drinking 1940 mL of beer as a kind of personal protest, and all is well with the world. To make up for the abundance of sizes, beer comes in only one variety, Quilmes, which inevitably comes served with a tripartite platter of snacks - nuts, salty cylinders, and aged potato chips. On rare occasions, you may even get a four-leaf platter (olives), this is considered lucky.

Once you have had your afternoon chopp and its accompanying beer snacks, there is nothing better in the world than switching on the television to watch one of the many cooking shows that seem to be so popular here. You can take your pick from superhip (filmed at an angle, chef has sleeveless T-shirt) to extremely low-pressure shows for frazzled moms (today's dessert: whipped cream!), but they all pale in the face of the program called "Dulces Tentaciones", starring the Swiss radical nun Sister Bernarda. This fantasy grandmother shows you how to make tarts, tortes, and other old world desserts, carefully cleaning her work area in between recipes while classical guitar or flute plays in the background. It is the most relaxing television program ever created, better than any drug, better than any steak.

If you're really curious about Argentine food, or you are planning a trip here, you might want to take a look at Food And Drink in Argentina. This guide was originally written for foreign residents in Argentina and contains a lot of useful information; some basic tourist info has been bolted on to widen its market, but it still looks like a good resource. permalink

03.04.2006

Argentina Paintings

I've put six paintings in progress from Buenos Aires up on the painting site. There are some glitches in the dates; please ignore those for the moment.

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03.04.2006

Land of Fire

There is a place called the 'Valley of the Beavers' at the Chilean edge of Tierra del Fuego national park, where you can go to see miles of beaver dams in the otherwise dense coastal forest. A giant beaver (presumably with a person inside) roams the streets of Ushuaia with his companion, a giant penguin, waving at terrified children and trying to convince their parents to go on a guided "ecological tour" to see the beaver dams, which is a little bit like going kudzu-spotting in Georgia. The beaver is applying its legendary industriousness to destroying every part of Tierra del Fuego it can get to.

I have never trusted the beaver. I find its obsessive work ethic disturbing and its Canadian origins suspicious. In its natural habitat, the main value of the beaver is as a conveniently packaged snack food for more relaxed animals like the wolf and bear, but neither of these predators has made it down to Tierra del Fuego, and the beaver continues to chew down the forests here unmolested. As the local park pamphlet will tell you, the beaver was introduced to Tierra del Fuego in the 1940's by "the man with economic purpose", on the assumption that the animals would thrive in the local forest and could be trapped for their fur. An equally indestructible rodent called the nutria had been introduced to Louisiana from Argentina shortly before, for the same reasons - why Argentina could not trap the nutria, while Americans focused on the beaver, is unanswered. In any event, both species have thrived wonderfully, while the market for natural fur has not.

The beavers have now overrun the entire island of Tierra del Fuego, and to everyone's alarm some of the more athletic among them have managed to swim or float to some of the smaller surrounding islands. The beaver has no predators of any kind in the southern forest, which it finds tasty and commodious, and everyone is afraid of what will happen when a pair of the animals finally makes it to the South American mainland. There have been efforts on the Argentine side to eradicate the beaver by allowing unlimited hunting, but some evidence suggests that hunting pressure may actually cause beavers to increase their population as a defense. These guys are wily.

The history of Tierra del Fuego is full of this kind of well-intentioned bumbling. In addition to the beaver, at various times the land has been beset by European rabbits, muskrats, foxes, Anglican missionaries, and the Argentine navy. The latest invader is the cruise ship tourist, rapidly turning the Fuegian city of Ushuaia into a boom town while making sure, along with the beaver, that you can spend long hours there without feeling like you have left North America.

Tierra del Fuego proper is a large island, shared between Chile on the west and Argentina on the east, and separated from the South American mainland by the very narrow Straits of Magellan. The region is part of the Andes, which curl eastwards at the bottom of South America and gradually descend underwater, describing a slow U turn on the ocean floor before climbing out a thousand miles to the south as the Antarctic Penninsula. The mountains in Tierra del Fuego are heavily scarred by glaciers, which have carved them into an endless series of islands and narrow waterways. They have a rugged and intimidating look to them - treeline is only a couple of hundred feet above sea level, and the peaks all look like they've been freshly sharpened. The sawtooth mountains seem to be tearing the bottom out of clouds that run into them at high speed from the Pacific side.

All of this is just for show. The island has a shockingly equable climate. It rarely gets hotter than sixty degrees in summer, or drops below twenty degrees in winter. The rain may be blowing horizontally, but you will never face a hard frost in Tierra del Fuego. The meteorological theatrics will make you forget it, but the island is at the same relative latitude as Denmark or northern England, temperate rather than subantarctic. While the winds ensure that nothing will grow too high, many species find the island a great place to live. Charles Darwin, of all people, writes a nice introduction to the flora and fauna (pre-beaver) of Tierra del Fuego, in his account of the voyage of the Beagle through these waters almost two hundred years ago.

The only substantial city on Tierra del Fuego is Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world. You will learn this interesting fact at the (southernmost!) airport and have it repeated it to you a dozen times before you can get to your southernmost hotel. Downtown, next to the Falklands Memorial, you will see an enormous sign reading "Welcome to the End of the World!"

The End of the World is reachable on any of sixteen convenient weekly flights from Buenos Aires, which treat you to what has to be one of the most beautiful landings in all of commercial aviation - a descending 270 degree turn starting a thousand feet above the Beagle Channel. Remoteness takes on an interesting meaning in the age of international jet tourism, when being notoriously hard to reach can be an attraction in itself, giving a place like Ushuaia the top-notch infrastructure it is legendary for lacking. In terms of actual effort required to get there, the city is now about as remote as Topeka or Cleveland, although I won't discount the psychological impact of getting on a plane in Buenos Aires, itself one of the southernmost of large cities, and then flying due south for four more hours. In any case, for all its crowds and end-of-the-earth silliness, Ushuaia is as welcoming and pleasant as any Argentine city. World-weariness does not seem to be a part of the culture.

Most of the visitors in Ushuaia don't fly in, but arrive on one of the giant cruise ships that dock here during the summer, on the South American circuit. As a result, the city is an empire of steakhouses and porphyry penguin gift shops designed for people with five hours of shore leave. You can pretty much buy the southernmost anything you want, if you can stand the markup. Last year over a hundred thousand people - twice the local population - floated in to Ushuaia, and more are expected in the year to come. Not surprisingly, most were American, and a lucky twenty thousand or so were headed to Antarctica.

In the old days, to make it to Antarctica you had to convince a science team to pay your way, get yourself conscripted into a Latin American army, or figure out a way to iceproof your private yacht. The fall of the Soviet Union and the general rise in cruises as a form of tourism changed all that. Suddenly there was a large supply of ice-hardened research ships and people willing to fork out the money to ride in them. Nowadays it costs around four thousand dollars to take a two-week cruise to the Antarctic Penninsula, all amenities included, zooming along the icebergs in Zodiac rafts and gawping at the wildlife. And so Antarctica has come within the reach of the kind of people who wear cat sweatshirts. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but being on a Russian boat for three weeks with middle-aged soccer moms from Oregon may not match your mental idea of Antarctic exploration, or at least mine, which looks more like this:

Without the four thousand dollars, you can still have an excellent time on one of the small boats that tours the Beagle Channel from Ushuaia. The water in the southern oceans is some of the most productive in the world, so any exposed piece of rock will have a colony of some kind of well-fed aquatic animal. Seabirds predominate, but seals and sea lions are numerous, and there are occasional orca sightings. A Magellanic penguin colony hangs out further east along the coast. My own personal favorite is the steamer duck, a local orange-footed resident who swims in the Beagle Channel but cannot fly. When agitated, he spins his wings like paddle wheels and motors along the water at a surprising clip.

Outside of its congested center, Ushuaia rapidly transitions into a muddy warren of dirt roads, angry dogs, and new construction. Buildings are going up as fast as people can pour the concrete. The city is expanding quickly, with a Hobbesian approach to zoning, and given a choice between finishing one building and starting another the builders invariably choose the latter. This gives the outer town a rather stark, Romanian feel, with bare cinder block walls and little in the way of coherent urban planning. A series of identical multi-story apartment buildings stands in the background, up against the mountains, housing an earlier wave of new arrivals.

The mountains prevent any of this from getting you down. Ushuaia sits in the middle of mind-numbing scenery, and fifty thousand people are not enough to even make a dent in the postcard beauty of it all. A walk through the outskirts of town soon takes you uphill, past the wonderfully named Buena Esperanza water treatment plant, and up a slalomy road that passes hotels of increasing swankness until reaching the world's southernmost ski resort and chair lift. This takes you up to the Glaciar Martial, a sad patch of snow with sensational views of Ushuaia and the Beagle Channel. The glacier is seriously ailing and predicted to disappear completely within about five years, part of a general retreat in the Patagonian glaciers, but you can still get a good steak along its southern edge. There is a frequent afternoon effect where the ground is sunlit but the sky behind it is heavily overcast, making it appear darker than the ground. This is a very cool thing to see, when you are staring at Chilean islands to the south and eating steak.

The natural history of Tierra del Fuego is spectacular and grandiose. Its human history is pretty much one of unremitting misery. The earliest natives settled here while the glaciers were still covering a substantial part of inland Patagonia (not exactly a sylvan paradise even after the glaciers receded), and as near as anyone can tell, they spent their lives hunting seals and being very cold. Books and anthropologists will tell you that the tribes adapted to the weather, but if you are smearing yourself with seal fat and keeping an open fire in your canoe, you have not adapted. Tribes further to the west were able to hunt guanaco, and in the surviving photographs of them standing in a guanaco-hide poncho you can see a look of palpable relief.

The first white people to visit - for example, Darwin's captain FitzRoy, - had an unfortunate habit of taking locals back with them for display and religious education in England. While these kidnapees were well-adapted for the damp cold and monotonous diet, they were not at all prepared for English diseases, and in the end it was deemed more practical to bring Jesus to the natives. Anglican missionaries duly arrived, learning the natives' fascinating language and mythology in order to provide them with a translation of the world's dullest religious text. After the missionaries came the Argentine navy, bringing measles and other diseases that suddenly rendered the missionaries' obsession with the afterlife extremely relevant. The Argentines built a provincial capital here (two buildings) and recognizing the potential of this remote, damp and miserably cold location, a prison.

And then the beavers came.

Other places with this kind of history might grapple with how to present it. But the Ushuaia prison, now a museum, neatly sidesteps the problem by treating the whole episode as a wacky historical adventure. The prison is built in the shape of a starfish, with each arm holding about sixty cells, and inside each one is a haphazard assortment of documents, a few photos, a mannequin, or the occasional model ship. One part of a wing is dedicated to prisons the world over, showing photographs of various penal facilities in India, Indiana, Britain and France. Another wing has been left completely untouched (and unheated), so you can vividly imagine the wacky, fun life of an Ushuaian prisoner for yourself. The cavernous central hall holds a bar and gift shop.

The prison here closed down in 1947 and the town resumed its status as a backwater. In 1976, when a military coup deposed Isabela Peron and installed the vicious period of dictatorship, the province was considered so unimportant that the junta didn't even bother to secure it - the residents only heard about the coup by radio. It's only recently that tourism and natural gas have drawn people here in significant numbers.

Outside Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego remains remote and almost unvisited. Sandwiched between the western edge of the city and the Chilean border is the lovely Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego, offering that rarest of Argentine park amenities, the comfortable day hike. The park has a variety of forest habitats along with a nice coastal trail; a fun exercise is to compare your own experience to Darwin's, who schlepped across the same piece of land without a trail, exhaustively cataloging plants and animals as he went. It gives you a newfound respect for the skills of a nineteenth century naturalist.

Darwin aside, it's impossible to write anything about this part of the world without feeling the shadow of Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia , an extraordinary travelogue from 1977, which devotes a long section to Tierra del Fuego. Chatwin has a spare writing style that seems exactly suited for a book about Patagonia, and he has a talent for finding improbable, strange stories. The Fuegian chapters of In Patagonia are a mixture of history and local character sketches, both of them extremely engaging. Rather than parrot them here I will just point to the book as an example for anyone who wants to write about travel, and especially to anyone intending to go to Patagonia. The beavers, incidentally, nearly broke Chatwin's leg.

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