Argentina La Parte Dos:

This morning was my last in Puerto Iguazú but my time of departure had become an issue. The night before Rodrigo had read out the pickup times for airport transfers, I noted that he indicated that my time was 9am, but when I later checked my itinerary provided by Chimu, it said 11:20. At reception I tried to resolve this but they didn’t seem to know (or understand). Before having breakfast I tried phoning the Chimu reps office in Buenos Aires (I had no mobile connection in Chile but my service in Iguazú appeared to be functioning). I couldn’t get through to the Chimu number in the capital but eventually the hotel receptionist did get on to them and confirmed that the original, printed time (11:20) was the right one (Rodrigid the spoiler had struck again!).

As I sat down for breakfast I remembered that I had asked the receptionist to keep my cholera vaccine in a cool place for me (the restaurant fridge), and that I needed to take the last dose before leaving. I stopped one of the passing staff, and motioned towards the fridge inside the bar annex (only a few paces away from where I was seated). The guy ‘seemed’ to get what I was wanted. I waved my room key with the room number 221 on the tag (my vaccine in the fridge was in an envelope marked ‘room 221′). Before I could clarify further, he said ‘Si, no problema senor” and suddenly grabbed the key and bounded up the stairs to my room before I could stop him. I scurried out to intercept him on the stairs, beckoning him back down to the restaurant. I have no idea what he was going to fetch from my room because he had totally misunderstood what I was after! As he was returning, another staff person walked past and I was able to guide her by the arm to the fridge and finally retrieve the medicine. Neither of the staff seemed to have comprehended the word ‘fridge’ (although I didn’t think it was all that remote from the Spanish, ‘refrigador’). To top off this farcical exercise in miscommunication, the attendant guy didn’t return the key to me, instead the dodo leaves it with the duty person at the front desk, so I had to retrieve it later. Grrrrr! After breakfast I filled in the two hours till the departure time by making a last sweep of the Port shops for souvenirs.

The airport at Puerto Iguazú turned out to be LESS than the sum of its parts … and its parts were not all that flash to begin with! I would give it Fs for communications (big surprise!) and for facilities. The check-in baggage staffer told me my flight departure would be 30 minutes late but the Departures screen said it was on time. Who to believe? … such is South American impreciseness! The regular loud speaker announcements, heavily accented and crackling with static, didn’t clear up this contradiction (so inaudible it was impossible to be sure if the announcement was in Spanish or English, or perhaps Spanglish!). When you go through the hand bags and body search point, it was conducted in the old fashion “touchy-feely, nice to meet you” way – no technical aids like hand scanners here). Amazingly, there were no refreshment or snack facilities available inside the airport. Also, no air-conditioning, so you just had to sit there in the heat waiting for your delayed flight. A tin shack structure, but then again, maybe I’m being a bit harsh, on the positive side Puerto Iguazú was probably quite good by Fourth World standard airports!

Chatting with a widely-travelled Japanese female tourist filled in time until the flight finally got off the ground. It was a shortish trip with no dramas but one curious coda. As LA4025 descended into Buenos Aires and the aircraft safely touched down on the tarmac, the Argentinians on the plane, perhaps momentarily releasing their grips on their rosary beads, spontaneously burst into a prolonged round of very enthusiastic applause! They had done the same thing when the plane had landed at Cataratas del Iguazú International Airport on the way into Iguazú. As this didn’t happen with any flights within or to either Chile or Peru, I concluded that this over-the-top appreciation of piloting and navigational skills appeared to be confined to Argentina and Argentinians. Worryingly, I wondered if it said something about the general lack of confidence in Argentinian pilots.

My Buenos Aires hotel, blandly but inaccurately named La Gran, was in Marcelo de Alvear in Microcentre (the hotel diagonally opposite is a drab, one-and-a-half star hotel tongue-in-cheekily called ‘The Sheltown’!). La Gran is close to a square dominated by an imposing statue of San Martin, the especial Liberator of choice, I gather, for much of South America. Before coming to the Americas, based on my superficial grasp of Latin American colonial history, I had always thought this handle had been the property of one Simon Bolivar, but around here, San Martin is the Liberator getting the bulk of the adulation (in BA alone you can find a Teatro San Martin, Centro Cultural San Martin, Palacio San Martin, San Martin Partido, General San Martin Metro, etc, etc). Chile also elevated him to the pantheon of their national heroes with the mandatory plaza statues, but in that curiously-shaped, tiny Andean republic, the exotically named Bernardo O’Higgins monopolises most of the bragging rights as Libertador of his nation.

Looking around the streets of BA I notice a real cosmopolitan flavour in the faces of the Portenos, compared to the more homogeneous-looking Chileans. Whereas Chileans tend towards a mestizo or native countenance and are shorter in stature, Argentinians, in the capital anyway, tend to have more of a European appearance (Spanish/Italian/German). The women, especially, on the whole are appreciably taller than Chilean women, and with a high proportion of blondes. I observed the cosmopolitan nature of the city within the hotel as well. The bellhop helping lug my suitcase up to the room was a friendly, young Armenian migrant called Haug. I engaged him in an interesting conversation and mention a curious incident in Australia which more than intrigues him (given his ethnic background), the backstory behind the mystifying murder of the Turkish consul in Sydney in the 1990s.

In the evening I walked around the square to get an idea of the meal options. I discover almost immediately that my hotel is very close to the BA “red light” district, I have to say I wasn’t looking for this – seriously! Wherever I go I seem to have a knack of effortlessly stumbling in no time into the part of that particular city that houses this, most pliable of trades. I change tack and head down to Plaza Lavalle in Tribunales, where I found plenty of options for dinner. Before dining, I happened upon a nocturnal street performance of tango dancing in the plaza. Portenos call popular tango dances in plazas milongas (where punters can pay to go and take the floor to live music accompaniment), but this was a demonstration by tango enthusiasts who were basically buskers (immaculately and formally-attired buskers it should be said). Moonlight strollers milled around the canvas mat square, some in appreciation of the elegant performers throw money into the containers that had been strategically placed at different ends of the mat. I had positioned myself a bit back from the action, up against the shop front, which seem to earn the ire of the dancers who were waiting their turn for a spin. They loudly exhort me (and other apparent transgressors) to move up to the edge of the impromptu dance floor to get a better view, (more to the point I suspect their motive is to ensure the audience is within reaching distance of the containers!).

I selected a restaurant in Lavalle to eat, a pizza place that looked OK, it wasn’t very well patronised when I went in at around quarter to nine (fairly late time for dinner for me), only a sprinkling of customers, but the place looked quite presentable. I had a leisurely pizza and a couple of Quilmes’ (actually I was an inordinately long time choosing the pizza as there was only a marginal different between each one on the menu!). When I finished and was leaving, at around 10:30, the restaurant milieu had transformed, it was packed with people having, and still coming in to have, their evening meals. I was to learn that this was characteristically Porteno in behaviour, as late, even very late (post-midnight) dinners, are the norm for urban Buenos Aireans. Walking back to my hotel close to midnight and seeing how alive the place is, I come to appreciate what I had heard about BA, this is a city that pulsates and parties more and more the later the hour!

The next day is the city tour – our group was guided round BA by a tall, slim, dark-haired young woman who looks as much like a model as a guide. We headed first to the central Plaza de 25 Mayo where Diana the guide-model gives us a rundown on the Square’s critical function as a platform for Portenos to protest against the excesses of authoritarian Argentinian rule. Some of these protests have a ritualistic nature, such as the mothers who regularly gather at a particular spot (an X literally marks the spot!) in the Plaza to stage a vigil, a silent protest with placards against the unaccounted for disappearance of their children (la desaparecidos). Our tour takes in the ritzy neighbourhood of Retiro, the more fashionable, comfortable eastern suburbs such as Barrio Norte and Palermo (which has several parts, one ostentatiously called ‘Palermo Hollywood’), San Telmo, the dockside Puerto Madero (once a rundown slum area now reconstructed as aspirational middle class), and La Boca, one of the city’s tourist highlights. Along with large numbers of visitors, we strolled along the safe part of La Boca, El Caminito, a triangular walkway lined with convertillos (rows of oddly-connected buildings in a dazzling diversity of bold colours), beautiful murals, sculptures, souvenir shops, art and craft markets. In the plaza tango dancers demonstrated their steps whilst visitors eagerly snapped pictures. A popular feature of the brightly-painted museums in Calle Caminito is the presence of dolls on display on the balconies which are caricatures of famous Argentinians. Maradona, Evita and Juan Peron, and other, less recognisable figures, gaze down on visitors from second floor balconies. Maradona worship is of course alive and well in Argentina, and nowhere is this more on display than in the heartland of his former team, Boca Juniors. In Caminito there are a number of similar caricatures in doll or other form which gently and affectionately poke fun at the flawed football maven.

Our BA city tour ended at Recoleta where we visited one of the most fascinating cemeteries in the world, Cemetaria Recoleta, whose most famous expired resident is Evita Peron. For a cemetery, it is a constant hub of human activity. BA Walking Tours advertise their tour of Cemetaria Recoleta as being “fun, comprehensive, in-depth (but not literally”)”. The amount of time that Argentinians appeared to spend here, I concluded that they can’t all be here ONLY to see Evita’s tomb. Many of the curious visitors seem to come to explore its dozens and dozens of rows of vaults in hope of discovering some famous statesman or general (very many of which are interred here), for whatever reason it exacts quite a pull on people. Diana, our ciudad guide, recounted her own father’s experience that he was initially very reluctant to visit when she suggested it, but once there, he ended up staying for five hours! Recoleta is a large, crowded cemetery, comprising countless large vaults and towering monuments, many very old, all tightly packed together in rows separated by narrow lanes. Open space in the Cemetery is at a premium, all the land is taken up with conjoined vaults and monuments, many of which are examples of impressive and elaborate masonry.

Whilst Argentinian visitors to Recoleta Cemetery delight in discovering the monuments to the famous personages in BA history, the number one objective for the majority of non-local visitors is to locate the burial monument to its most internationally famous resident, Evita Peron. Given that Argentina’s one time First Lady was so famous (and became so much more famous posthumously thanks to the Rice and Webber musical), there is a surprising complete absence of signage pointing the way to her tomb. I used the directions provided by the Lonely Planet Argentina Guide to trace the indirect and convoluted path to Evita’s tomb. I’m pleased to say the book did accurately guide me to the precise location of the tomb. Also surprising, there is nothing special or distinctive to mark the final resting place of Evita, its not gold-lined or especially ornately grand or even large in any way, it is like all of the other family vaults around it. Actually, she is buried in HER family’s vault (the Duartes), rather than in the presidential Peron vault (in fact Juan the dictator is buried separately to Evita in a different cemetery in Buenos Aires! There must be a story in that.) There was no big crowd milling around the Duarte vault, just a constant trickle of visitors coming up for a look and a photo and then quickly moving on. I had a short conversation at the vault with a couple of nice expatriate Persian women who were now domiciled in London. They were interested in Iranian migrants in Australia, I told them how they had split into three distinct camps based along political/religious lines (uncharacteristically of me to go off-topic, I probably hadn’t done this for at least a day!).

Cemetaria Recoleta is home for untold numbers of cats, moggy strays in all manner of colours, shadings and patterns. They look pretty comfortable and settled in this “city of the dead,” I suspect that cemetery workers and the odd local visitor provides food for them. One sight that I came across intrigued me a lot. In one of the lanes, about four rows west of the Duarte vault, there, crammed in between two family vaults, three cemetery labourers were sitting and eating in a tiny box structure (about 2 metres wide by 4 metres long), which was their lunch room! For these workers, there was no sense of distance from the subjects of their labour, even in their off-duty moments.

After leaving the Cemetery I removed to the Recoleta Mall directly across the road from it to have some lunch with two Chinese/American women from the tour. We went to Macdonalds (or, in Spanish America, should that be called Macdonaldos?), the girls enthused about how much better the Angus beef burger was in Buenos Aires compared to California … “Really?”- but what caught my eye whilst we were eating, was that the side balcony of the Macdonalds store offered the optimal, elevated vantage point to get great overview photos of the vast, sprawling cemetery, which I duly took advantage of!

The tour activity that night was a trip to San Telmo to see the Ventana Tango Show. As the result of some random selection process I was seated at a table with a Francophone and frank-talking Gallic woman and a non-English speaking Columbian technician. The Frenchwoman (let’s call her Clare, that sounds familiar), had a reasonable handle on English, was quite loquacious, and she seemed to have a lot of opinions (doesn’t really sound French, does it?). Being sociable, I tried to engage in conversation with the non-English speaker at the table, the Columbian guy, but clearly I was making no headway. Several minutes of frustrating and awkward attempts at conversation ensued. At first, he would appear to follow my question (or at least not look discomforted by it), but whenever I tried to extend this line of enquiry, I would lose him totally.

Despite these setbacks I was determined to keep the conversation going … somehow. I remembered that Clare had mentioned at the introduction that she was a teacher, or had been a teacher, one or the other, I wasn’t paying that close attention. So I developed this, well, I’ll call it a method for lack of a better word, to get the conversation past the stillborn stage. I would proceed with an opening gambit, a question to engage the Columbian (his name incidentally was Pablo), and then when, inevitably, the conversation would get log-jammed and Pablo would register that blank and uncomprehending look that was becoming familiar, I would turn to the only-too-eager-to-help Clare, and repeat my statement in English to her (with a bit of hand-gesturing and Spanglish thrown in for emphasis). The over-keen Clare would then pick up the threads of my floundering question and try to translate it to Mr Columbia using the limited amount of Spanish she commanded. I would sit back and watch Clare struggling to translate my question with Pablo looking more and more uncertain. Admittedly, this did not get us very far in the direction of a flowing three-way dialogue, but it served to get me off the hook that I had put myself on in the first place! I felt kind of bad for Clare’s discomfort, but I figured that, being a teacher, she would probably view the whole thing as a pedagogic exercise and maybe even relish the challenge! At least that’s what I told myself. And, it did eat up some time while we were finishing our dinner and waiting for the show to begin. When the tango show finally got underway, we were seated right at the front and so had an excellent view of what was an enjoyable performance. But as the show went (and on), I started to get very tired (the comprehensive lack of sleep in Santiago had at last caught up with me), and I could hardly keep my eyes open. The show itself, when I could focus on it for any miniscule amount of time (constantly drifting in and out of the “half-dream room” as I was), comprised tango dancing supplemented by some other auxiliary activities on stage (eg, a comedic performance of rapid fire rope snapping by an urban gaucho). Clare, unsurprisingly, was NOT impressed by these extra-curricular acts. I kind of agreed with her about the lack of purity in the performance, but at that stage I was just happy that it was finally over and I could get back to the hotel.

On the bus returning to the hotels a couple started addressing me in Spanish, when I indicated to them through gestures and expressions that I had no español (or at least, to put a very generous spin on it, un poco español sólo), they apologised for mistaking me for being Hispanophone and switched to talking in halting English. I discovered that the couple were los recién casados, newly-weds from Madrid, this was the second time in three days that I had crossed paths with Spanish honeymooners from Old Castille. In Madrid it must be the “lets honeymoon in Latin America” season, but more to the point I realise that it makes logical sense for Spanish outward-bound tourists to gravitate towards Latin America – for convenience of communication, and out of a curiosity about a geographically distant set of countries which share a common language with Spain but are distinctly different types of societies to it.