South America 2014

The Wonders of Salta

Thu, 16 Oct 2014 16:11:56 -0300

Salta the Linda (Salta the Beautiful) in the far North of Argentina, bordering the Andes, was full of surprises. Benilda and I had heard and read about it as a colonial outpost with beautiful scenery but that does not do justice to both its history and its geography. Salta was the capital of the Argentina province of Spain at one time and therefore developed not as a rural town but a very prosperous cultured city, blessed with rich agriculture (mainly tobacco and sugar cane), metal mining and natural resources. But its attitude is one of a relaxed friendly village --- the whole city closes down for siesta from 1-5. Every store is closed. And when night time comes, it is fiesta with whole families, children of all ages, enjoying life together in the main square and surrounding pedestrian-only streets. Like elsewhere in Argentina, restaurants do not begin to serve until 8:30 pm and the streets are still alive at 10-11 o’clock at night. This is early spring and yet it is very hot which may contribute to the outdoor festival atmosphere. The manager of our lovely historic hotel said that it is warming unusually quickly and even the fireflies were out in the countryside.

Benilda and I left Marge, Rae and Paula on Wednesday morning -- they headed off on a day trip at an Estancia Ranch before spending one more day in Buenos Aires and heading home. The report I heard was ecstatic, as pictured below -- gauchos, great grilled meat, horseback riding in the pampas which Marge has dreamed about, and even chocolate tasting somewhere along the way. A thoroughly satisfying conclusion to their journey. You will need to hear more directly from them.

Benilda and I flew off the same morning to Salta, saying goodbye and separating from our lovely travelmates. Locals told us that having experienced the vibrancy and sophistication of modern Buenos Aires and the flawless beauty of Patagonia with its small towns and large glaciers, we should taste another part of this diverse country by visiting the descendants of the incas and the extension of the Andean culture in Salta as well as the city’s colonial charm and the countryside’s very different kind of natural beauty. All if which we did. View upon landing:

The heart of the city is the July 9 Plaza, surrounded on all sides by old buildings reflecting its history, an old Spanish style government house, French style city cultural center, large ornate baroque cathedral, and a remodeled theater with small stores and offices filling the spaces in between. There is a beautiful summer gazebo in the park with stained glass, the ubiquitous statue of a war general on a horse in the center and groups of children, in their white smocks, in evidence everywhere. There are many museums, including a contemporary art museum with an interesting exhibit we greatly enjoyed, and a world-class archeology museum. This small modern museum houses 3 inca children, ages 6, 8 and 14, frozen in time following their ritual sacrifice on top of a snow-covered volcano and discovered by high-altitude archeologists in 1999. They were given a drugged drink to put them to sleep and then buried alive with small religious artifacts. This visit was an incredible experience, watching videos of the find and the conservation of these children, completely intact with skin, hair, eyelashes, clothing, looking like they went to sleep yesterday, said to be the most well preserved human bodies ever found.

But the star of Salta are the mountains and countryside surrounding this green city watered from the hills. We took a 12 hour tour into the uplands, with bushes and low trees just coming alive in springtime, purple jacaranda and Ceida trees with brilliant orange blossoms on the hillsides and then moving with elevation into high dry mountains, with scattered cactus of various varieties the main vegetation.

And the color of the mountains! Easily equal to the shades of purple, red, core, brown of the U.S. South West and its great national parks. Some old volcanic mountains, worn by time, with green fertile valleys along our roadway. We stop at several local villages, square adobe buildings and a main square in each place, with tourism the main industry and piles of similar andean weaving and wool clothing (hats, glove, scarves, sweaters, dolls, wall hangings) in each shop and roadside stall. In one village is an old church, with beautiful interior paintings, and in our final destination, Humahuaca up at almost 10,000 feet, the Incan ancestry of the local inhabitants is obvious by their beautiful faces.

The greatest wonder of this trip is our visit to Tilcara, an archeological site which reconstructs some of the homes of the inhabitants of the region at the time of the clash between the Incans and the Spanish. Set amidst a world of large cacti and brown earth, there are square stone buildings with mud roofs, low and humble, with courtyards for cooking and perhaps keeping animals, in the most beautiful landscape with red-pink hills. Nearby water is running through stone irrigation canals to feed the garden in the same way the locals have farmed for at least a millenium.

Benilda and I walk up the hill and wander around these buildings, amazed at the beauty of the hills, the sparseness of the surrounding land, and the green lush vegetation just a short ways below.

We return to Salta and meet a full-scale rainstorm in Jujuy (pronounced “Hu-hu-ee” and watch the local school children smile and play as they are drenched by the warm rain. And visit their famous church and puplit. We understand why they are so happy when we see a news story the next day that it was 45 degrees Centigrade in the Salta region -- which is 113 degrees Fahrenheit. It did not reach us in the mountains.

I find an organic vegan restaurant in Salta and thoroughly enjoy my quinoa and vegetable dinner. The town is less busy tonight and we walk home as the city quiets down and returns to its slumbering state once again.

Colonia del Sacramento

Mon, 13 Oct 2014 19:49:55 -0300

It is only an hour high-speed ferry boat from Buenos Aires up the Rio Plata to the small city of Colonia del Sacramento in Uruguay but it is a journey to another point in time. Although the current age of wifi and pizza restaurants are part of the expanded city, it retains an historic core from its Portuguese settlers and rulers in the 1700s, later replaced by the Spanish. The old center includes a beautiful collection of all colonial homes, beautiful grass squares, and a surprising number of museums for a site its size. It is around the curve of the river so fishermen are seen on its shores and a lighthouse next to the remains of an old nunnery speaks of its former role as a port. Old cobblestones, unevenly worn down to a smooth surface, comprise the streets. And the older homes were built with irregular stone walls and wooden beans of low construction.

Our first night we ducked down to enter an old winery cellar on the “street of sighs”, so named because the wind blows down the cobblestone-lined central water channel, creating the sound of a sigh. The very small dining room was lined with wine bottles, blocks of cheese and hanging salami -- which is almost all they serve.

Eating in Argentina, as well as Uruguay, has been challenging for me and not easy for gluten-free, dairy-free Rae either. Everything has meat and cheese and a lot of bread and pasta. I have probably eaten more pasta dishes in the last few weeks than several prior years combined. After many searches leading us into unknown corners of unknown cities, we have determined that soy milk is almost non-existent in Argentina (I did actually find a box of sweetened soymilk in Colonia at a small health food store) and if I came again I would definitely bring a jar of peanut butter which is not available either. But breakfast has unlimited fresh squeezed orange juice and other fresh fruit drinks are available. We found a Japanese restaurant in Buenos Aires that has tofu and rice and a organic restaurant with tofu as well. But I am definitely protein starved at this point and looking forward to the riches available to vegans in the U.S. For example, today for lunch I had a salad and some boiled potatoes. At the wonderful wine bar restaurant in Colonia, I had some small vegetable tarts and olives. And for lunch, at a fabulous all white restaurant on a terrace overlooking the sea, we all dined in style and I had a salad with roasted pumpkin and delicious fresh pea soup.

I asked Benilda about the difference she found between the citizens of Buenos Aires and Colonia. She said the people in Colonia were nice and pleasant but small town people without the vibrancy and strong opinions of people in Buenos Aires. Benilda has been striking up conversations in Spanish with our taxi drivers in Buenos Aires and they usually respond full bore, with a non-stop stream of information and viewpoints about the political and social issues of the moment. One Buenos Aires taxi driver told us, after I found out he had a daughter who was finishing her medical residency and another daughter who was finishing up her final practicum to be an elementary school teacher, that the doctor would start by receiving about 15,000 pesos per month and the teacher would start earning about 11-12,000 pesos/month (about $1000/800 per month) but that the doctor’s salary would greatly increase over time but the teacher’s not very much. So what’s new!

Colonia even has its own very large prehistoric animal skeleton, found on the beach when the tide was out.

Walking around Colonia, in the evening, in the morning, was peaceful and our historic hotel has a lovely pool surrounded with trees and lounge chairs. We would all have liked to stay longer and enjoy the atmosphere of this exceptional place.

Jewish Buenos Aires

Sun, 12 Oct 2014 14:10:25 -0300

I thought I had some idea about the history of Argentina -- the succession and conflicts among the Portuguese, the Spanish, the French and the British. Not to mention the story of the indigenous peoples who were simply exterminated in mass genocide because they could not be easily subjugated to do menial tasks: it was easier and more profitable to import kidnapped slaves from Africa. But our tour with an outstanding scholar, ordained Conservative Rabbi and a native of Buenos Aires, gave us 5 hours of continuous intense education about the role of Jewish immigration and culture in the context of the greater history of Buenos Aires and Argentina.

It is a familiar story of struggle between desire for assimilation while maintaining an individual social identity. There are 250,000 Jews now in Buenos Aires with Ashkenazi Jews mainly from East Europe and Germany and with Sephardic Jews comprising Syrian Jews from Damascus, Syrian Jews from Aleppo, Moroccan/Tunisian Jews from North Africa, Jews from Greek Island of Rhodes, and Turkish Jews -- each with their own synagogue. And, like everywhere, divisive power struggles between various factors advocating different protocol for prayer and study. Our guide was raised in the Syrian Aleppo community, and we visited an orthodox temple founded by his grandfather’s cousin in the 1880s. It was Sukkot, and the men were praying en masse with luluv and esrog, with tallit and yarmulkes. Beautiful stained glass windows and carved wooden bima and cases for the torah scrolls, which were never laid down but read standing upright. Not a woman in sight. Separate roles and definitely not praying in the sanctuary much less on the bima.

Below, the memorial to those killed in the 1992 terrorist bombing that destroyed the Israeli embassy, killing 29 people and injuring over 200, followed in 1994 by a bomb destroying Jewish community offices.

We moved from discussions about the early role of Jews, fleeing Portugal with the Inquisition, conversos with sons joining the Franciscan order as a coverup, the rise and intermarriage of successful Jews and local ruling families so that many generations later the anti-semitic aristocracy were shocked to discover they have Jewish blood. An exposition of the pograms of 1912 that randomly massacred citizens of the Once area of the city as many of the leaders of the socialist/workers movement were Jewish. He took us to personally experience the contrast of the French architecture which defines the city from the Golden Age between 1880-1910 and the Bauhaus architecture exhibiting the Argentine leaning toward Germany after WWI and eventually the acceptance of Nazis into the country. Some of the significant dichotomies of the Peron legacy - accepting fleeing Jews from Europe before and after the war while at the same time knowingly harboring monied Nazis running from prosecution in the post-war era. Economic excesses and class disparities eventual leading to a military coup and the great repression of the 1970’s where many Jews and non-Jews “disappeared” overnight.

Bauhaus next to French architecture, below:

We were taken for a panoramic view of the dockside and railway area of the Retiro area to illustrate the story of early Jewish immigration with Baron Hirsch around 1880 buying large tracts of land in Argentina and Brazil to bring the Jews from Europe to a place they could call their own. These immigrants arrived off boats from Eastern Europe, were given a hotel for 5 days and then put on trains heading for the pampas and hard agricultural work, of which they knew nothing. The beneficial interaction between the gauchos herding livestock on horseback and the new Jewish immigrants who declared they grew wheat so their children could get an education.

A view of the railroad station with distant docks where immigrants arrived into Argentina:

And we learned so much more that our heads were swimming with the intensity of the information by the time we ended our tour in the San Telmo Sunday Market. This crowded and boisterous market is both a flea market, with tables of antiques in the plaza square, and an artists market with stands selling handmade goods from cheap knick-knacks to finely crafted hats and leather goods.

There were musicians along the streets and some tango dancing in the square toward the end of our time there. We followed a group through a doorway into an inner courtyard where a school fair was going on -- children’s games, food for sale, and some (amplified) music was about to begin.

The local population seems to play hard -- enjoying their free time and each other. As we are doing as well, eating well and exhausted by the end of the day.

It was another wonderful and beautiful day.

The Waterfalls of Iguazu

Fri, 10 Oct 2014 00:00:00 -0300

The town of Porto Iguazu owes its existence to tourists coming since the early 20th century to visit the great waterfalls. The demarcation between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay is down the middle of the river that runs nearby. So 3 languages are spoken in the area, Spanish, Portuguese and Guarani, the indigenous language of Paraguay.

The first day we saw the falls from the Argentina side and the second day we entered Brazil, going through immigration and customs in both directions. The National Parks on both sides are considerably different in style and content. In Argentina, the pathways were fairly recently built/rebuilt of steel cage material, so that you can see below as well as have some traction against slipping as the falls water is spraying across some of the walkways at all times. And there are strong side banisters and child-proof siding. These Argentinian pathways cross the very top of many waterfalls so that on one side is the rushing brown water, jumping over green vegetation and rocks in the riverbed with thick tropical trees at river’s edge before dropping straight down with a continuous roar on the other side. And you float right above this tremendous force. Sometimes there is spray which feels wonderful in the hot climate and many times there consequently are also rainbows arching over the water beds from the sun reflecting on the mist. There are upper and lower paths so that one can see the falls from various vantage points, all of which are uniquely beautiful.

The Brazilian Park, on the other side, has worn slippery concrete steps, old wooden railings and no protection for children, built into the earth and rock hillside with various vantage points to view the massive waterfalls across the river in Argentina and curving into Brazil. Its biggest advantage over its neighbor is that it has a newer platform that extends out into the river over which there is a continuous fine spray that moves with the wind so that everyone gets drenched with wet hair and skin and clothes. And which provides an awesome vantage point of the layers of waterfalls from top to bottom, all the way around in a 360 degree panorama of beauty. Brazil also built a tower right at the end of one of the waterfalls that rises (we waited about 20 minutes for the elevator) to the very lip of the falls so that you reverberate to your very bones with the roaring power of the cascading water.

Entering each park costs about $35. The Brazilian Park seemed more commercial than that of Argentina, with more gift shops, eating choices, and optional tours. In Argentina, there is a boat ride to the base of two of the falls, which Benilda and I did (without any signed waiver), in a large motorized rubber boat, wearing life vests and plastic ponchos, speeding around the falls and at the end going close enough to be totally battered by sheets of water from the explosion of force when the falls hits the river floor.

It is not only the waterfalls that are the stars of this show. This place is a lepidopterist’s dream. There were many different kinds of butterflies in the parks, which we were told inter-mate and create new forms each year. And the park is plagued by guati, a form of raccoon, which steals food from tourists around the cafes in the park and creates a dangerous nuisance. Here are a sample of the beautiful that flit all around.

At the end of our Brazilian-side tour we went to a bird park, a very tropical bird park, with fabulous birds in large caged areas (in reproductive mode), heavily forested paths with orchids and bromiliads, and very large caged sections which we were able to walk through containing the most fabulous colored parrots and toucans and other tropical specimens. And a butterfly enclosure where fabulous colored “mariposa” fluttered their lives away in a tropical paradise.

Once again, our weather luck has followed us into this part of Argentina as we had a perfect sunny day -- we are told one of very few as it rains 3-4 times a week, allowing the green lushness, and is often cloudy as well. Our luck did not hold with our flight back to Buenos Aires, however, which was over an hour late but that is the experience of travel, the good, the bad, and the unexpected and learning to manage with all of them with patience and acceptance. A lesson for all of life.

Ice & Glaciers

Tue, 7 Oct 2014 00:00:00 -0300

Glacial ice -- slow moving and powerful - created the landscape in Patagonia and the economy of El Calafate, this town close to the largest glacial front left on earth, the Pepito Moreno Glacier. This is a tourist town and there is little to do here but visit this massive glacier and walk the main street in town, both of which we did. We spent most of the day at the Argentinian National Glacial Park (we crossed form Chile back to Argentina after we left Torres del Paine Park) - and some time on the town‘s streets visiting the local market in search of soy or rice milk for me (non-existent), gluten-free products (for Rae), and various pharmaceutical and toiletry supplies. There is a wall of tourist shops together with a large Casino and a wonderful coffee shop we found, filled with books, comfortable chairs and good food.

The boat trip to the front of Pepito Moreno was what we had earlier expected on our visit to Lago Grey -- easy -- a modern catamaran, walking onto deck from an flat walkway, and a crowded cruise where we stopped in front of the huge wall of ice as tourists jostled for a place for the best photo. Here I hold a piece of the glacier that was picked up with a net by a ship’s mate.

We all preferred the excitement and sense of adventure of our tugboat visit in Torres del Paine but the size of this massive ice floe is astounding. And it moves 6 meters a year, the only growing glacier, so that if you are patient and wait quietly in the cold air with your ears open you can hear the internal movement of the ice as pieces fall both in the interior and at the edge of the glacier, sharp cracks that sometimes lead to reverberating roars as large pieces sheer off and meet the water. An unforgettable experience to see enormous blocks of blue-white ice shearing off the glacial front or to see smaller pieces avalanching straight down to the lake with a large splash and spray of water, creating additional floating ice bergs and concentric waves of water moving out from the point of impact.

Our active day was completed with a visit to the Glaciarium which tells the story of the history and exploration and science of glaciers. We finally think we understand why the ice is sometimes blue (but don’t ask us to explain too much when you see us next). And finally an excellent dinner where I finally got some protein in the form of lentils!

Tomorrow is a heavy travel day as Benilda and I leave for Iguazu Falls and Margery and Rae return to Buenos Aires.