Postcard from Patagonia

One thing I have noticed on this trip is that generally when confronted by a spectacular landscape, the Argentinians like to mess with it. In most places this means stringing telephone wires across nice views, but occasionally they find a place so arrestingly beautiful that they really have to go for it. Bariloche is one of these places, with gorgeous sapphire lakes ringed with snow-topped mountains and dappled forests. How can we naff this up, then? you can imagine the town planners of yore debating amongst themselves. Fortunately they called in the Disney corporation and the 1980s, so the resulting effect is all faux swiss chalets, stone cladding and triangular Smurf houses. The town is a heady mixture of ski shops and souvenir shops selling novelty items made of wood-, huge curly handled spoons, cute hanging signs for the bathroom showing winsome children with their sweet little buttocks sticking out, and that sort of thing. There is also a bewildering array of local collectible goblin-gnomes. I hate goblin-gnomes, and these ones are particularly toothy and malevolent, causing me to yelp and leap backwards when I find one peering at me from a shop corner. Added to this for some insane reason the shop mannequins have labrador heads where there should be human faces. This is really, really scary.

Currently Bariloche is suffering from the after-effects of a nearby volcanic eruption over the border in Chile, which tipped piles of ash everywhere, rather as if someone had up-ended the contents of a hoover bag over the whole area. This weird gritty stuff, combined with freezing temperatures and all those ski lodges, gives Bariloche a sort of perma-Christmas après-ski vibe. At night everything is lit up with warm golden lights and becomes rather lovely. Of particular note are the chocolate shops which are like little jeweled palaces crammed to the ceilings with every possible size, shape and flavour of the good stuff. These, and the hot chocolate served in the tea parlour at Rapa Nui Chocolate, which came in a cup and saucer with pink roses on it, are worth the journey to Bariloche on their own. Throw in some excellent hiking in the surrounding area and you can forgive the town itself for its fondness for fondue and kitsch.

Pleased with Patagonia we caught an overnight bus to Comodoro Rivadavia, 15 hours south, where we hoped to break up the epic journey to the Perito Moreno Glaciar at El Calafate, 1000km to the south. The minor pleasantries of welcoming Bariloche had left us completely unprepared for this horrible little hell-mouth attached like a veruca to the atlantic coastline. I have seldom experienced such an instant and violent hatred for a place. It wasn’t just the setting- a gruesome parody of the alpine setting we had just left, with the mountains replaced by a wind-whipped, petrol stained sandbar strewn with plastic bags and dirty nappies. It wasn’t even the fact that there was a huge concrete car park squatting like a toad in the middle of town, where everywhere else has a leafy tree lined plaza. What really took our breath away was the prices. Without even the slightest embarrassment the patrons of various hostelries asked us the most ludicrous prices for their shabby accommodations, perhaps 3 or 4 times the going rate anywhere else in the country. Comodoro Rivadavia- let’s be clear on this fact, in case you are ever in the vicinity, is an unrepentant shitsack of a location. It makes even-tempered people (Chris) laugh mirthlessly at each new thoughtless oversight or carefully contrived rip-off. It made not exactly even- tempered people (me) positively psychotic. Had it been in my power I would have called in an airstrike. And the people! Why don’t fat people realize that leggings are not for them? Why do people with a huge trolley full of shopping push in front of you in supermarket queues when they can see you only want to buy a packet of crisps? Do you so lack even a drop of human kindness that you cannot put a left luggage area in your capacious bus station so people don’t have to lug their backpacks around? Why yes, you do! By this point I was actually hurling expletives at passing cars and crossing the road on purpose to kick locals and dogs. Even the murals on the playground wall at the kindergarten looked like they had been painted by demons instead of normal human children.

‘We are LEAVING!’ I stormed at Chris ‘Why aren’t you taking better care of me? Take me to a pub at once!’ (It was 8.30am). Instead, we decided to go to the bus stop and buy the first ticket out of there. The choice we were given was to stay until 9.45pm and then catch the overnight bus, or to leave at 3pm and spend the night on the bus station floor at Rio Gallegos. No contest. I childishly flicked V signs at passersby as we glided out of town on the 3pm bus. And I say to the municipality of Comodoro Rivadavia and its inhabitants and I have never meant this sentence more sincerely- FUCK YOU.

Teargas before bedtime

"...So, you need to take a scarf for your nose and a lemon for your eyes"

"And tell me again, how do I know if I'm about to be teargassed?"

"Well, you'll see a big tank coming, and lots of people running the other way".

I am sitting in the upstairs room of a pub in Barrio Lastarrias, Santiago, picking up survival tips from my friend Liz, who is married to a Chilean guy and who has rather wonderfully invited us to stay with them and their crazy dog Mousetta. Santiago looks and feels like the last place on earth which is likely to be the scene of a riot, but the students are protesting again- the cheapest university entrance is twice as expensive as the minimum wage, and they want cheaper and better education. Sound familiar?

Staying with locals is a completely different experience to the guidebook route and we were totally and utterly spoit, with wine and cheese every night and beautiful food. We were also given an insight into the real Santiago, where people live and work, as well as all those secret little places that no one from the guidebooks ever finds out about. And steak. And wine. Did I mention the wine? My God, the wine. It practically comes out of the bathroom taps in this country. Many times I have wandered off in the supermarket and had to be fetched out of a dreamy reverie in the booze aisle.

In between slugs of wine we visited the house of Pablo Neruda, the Chilean Nobel prize winning poet (look him up). In between admiring his furniture and art (with me mentally cataloguing which pieces I would have stolen and put in my own house) we learnt about the Pinochet regime and the purges and disappearances of the intellectual class in the 70s and 80s. Recent South American history really is quite disturbing, especially when you think that it happened while you were in primary school. The national football stadium was used as a torture centre for twenty years under the regime, and is now the football stadium again. Chileans believe it is cursed and that is why national team keeps losing there.

Bit depressing, no? The next thing we did was a four hour walking tour led by a chain smoking maniac. Despite giving the impression of being an inveterate glue sniffer he gave a surprisingly lucid and thoughtful tour of the city, helpfully pointing out earthquake damage and points of historical interest, as well as the odd bit of social commentary or insider knowledge. For example, ever heard of cafe con piernas? It means 'coffee with legs'. I thought this meant take away coffee, but apparently it's more literal than that- it's the men-only stand up cofee bars all over town where businessmen go for a midmorning caffeine hit and 20 minutes of flirting. The waitresses wear tiny little tight skirts and high heels- hence the legs bit. In the olden days they used to pull down the shutters for 'happy minute' and strip on the tables although apparently this is now frowned upon. Sort of a cross between Starbucks and Spearmint Rhino. Naturally this offends my feminist principles, or would if I had any, but it makes a good story nevertheless. The tour thoughtfully included a break for sandwiches and a large glas of SauvignonBlanc so of course gets a very high rating here. No sign of the student rioters in town, which was a bit disappointing. Although we later realised we had no idea what to do with the lemons. Over a perfect afternoon of Chilean asado/South African braai- in short, the best woodsmoke barbecue in the world- we debated whether you suck on lemons for teargas or squeeze them in your eyes (yikes). We also discovered that the weird, throat burning and runny nose 'chemical spill' we had walked through on a street in Valparaiso had (probably) BEEN remnants of teargas! As you all know I am exceptionally brave, and had apparently been so without even realising it. Obviously this called for more wine.

So that's Santiago for me: rich, full-bodied, sophisticated, great with red meats and cheese, and with a slight indefinable aftertaste. Definitely worth a visit, people.


P.S We also went to a chavtastic tacky theme park called Fantasilandia and went on loads of roller coasters- but this was such a guilty pleasure that I am typing it very small...

Homes from Homes

Good news folks. I didn't fall off the bicycle. I did dink a parked car but only ever so slightly. The wine tour was wonderful, especially when it was discovered that in addition to the lovely wine there was also jam, oil, liqueurs, chocolate and a stop in a beer garden for some home made lager. Add to this a crisp spring morning and some blossoming trees and it was altogether a grand day out. I had hitherto been perfectly happy to consume wine with no idea how it works, but now know everything there is to know about oak aging and Argentinian grapes. Who knew alcoholism could be so educational?

We stayed in Mendoza for almost a week, which is probably more than it needed, but we had met some nice people in our hostel and the laundry was a bargain, and more problematically, the border to Chile was closed due to some freak weather. This meant we said goodbye for several people each morning, only to greet them again at lunchtime as they threw their backpacks back down in the hallway, cursing under their breaths and grappling with a fold out map of south america before they decided, every time, to screw Chile and go to Buenos Aires. We really wanted to go to Chile so we decided to wait it out. By the time we left, our hostel felt like we had lived there forever. Chris had even started referring to it plaintively as -home-.

Fortunately Chile is definitely worth the wait. We had some more fun at the border while they searched for contraband. This time we had been handed a long, long list of things you had to declare before you entered the country. This turned out to include the cheese and butter in my sandwich-but not the bread- and some interestingly shaped seedpods from Bolivia which I had been carrying in my wash bag. Failure to declare, it was stated, was punishable by thumbscrews and racking. So I dropped the seedpods onto the bus floor, with a pang of regret, and fessed up to the ownership of the sandwich, but the only real scare is when Chris=s backpack went through the X-ray and they thought his sandwich was an apple. Apparently these draconian anti-fruit controls are to stop the pernicious spread of fruitfly. Although one might assume from the name that fruitfly have evolved measures to evade border patrol. Still, it was nice to wait in a snowy mountain pass in sub zero temperatures in case a rogue Coxs Orange Pippin had attempted an infiltration.

First stop in Chile was Valparaiso, a higgledy piggledy town set across about 40 hillsides. UNESCO has declared this one part of the Patrimony of Humanity too. In fact, why they havent saved an awful lot of trouble by declaring the entire continent a world heritage site, I don-t know. We have been to literally a hundred. But I digress. Valpo is universally described as charming, bohemian and hip. It is in short the Brighton of South America. The top half of town, on the hills, is full of vegetarian cafes, interesting street art, and a preponderance of shops selling olive dishes. The words artesan and boutique appeared an awful lot. Naturally I love all this but cant afford or carry any more decorative spoons or wolf dreamcatchers at present so we came back down in an ascensor. These Valpo institutions are ancient crumbly funiculars and there are maybe twenty around town. You sit in a sort of shack on wheels and they inch you up to hill level. Brilliant. We found very cheap accommodation in a haunted mansion in the suburbs which was an added bonus. We also did a harbour tour and saw a sealion, which thrilled us, and stumbled across a VW beetle show called Valpowagen which thrilled us too. Further along the beach at Vina Del Mar we strolled along the Pacific coastline in the winter sunshine on a boardwalk and ate the best barbecue ribs ever. For added fun we checked on the weather reports back home. How we laughed.

We are now in Santiago for a week, seeing the sights. Santiago looks and feels a lot like London to me. This makes me wonder if I havent actually just started gravitating towards the places that remind me of home, or some sort of romantic ideal of home. I've developed a pressing need to watch the Muppet Christmas Carol while drinking mead in front of a log fire. Even the thought of going back to work doesnt seem as dreadful as it once did. Eight months of travelling certainly warps reality.

P.S. If anyone is wondering, I am typing this blog on a computer whose punctuation keys have gone to hell in a handcart. Sure, I can do upside down question marks ¿¿¿¿ but what use is that without the apostrophe?