After our adventures in BsAs were over, Robin and I hopped on the bus to... Bariloche.
Zigfried had had two Rice kids staying at our apartment, and since we overlapped for a couple of hours, we went to the Sesamo, our new very tasty Mediterranean food place. Possibly the only restaurant in Bariloche that uses spices.
Robin was feeling a little under the weather, and then I caught whatever Robin had, so we spent our time in Bariloche visiting chocolate shops and looking at the mountains. Not climbing them.
Next stop on our itinerary, Ushuaia, EL FIN DEL MUNDO.
Getting all the way down to the bottom of the continent was proving to be quite difficult. All the buses take forEVER because the roads aren’t paved. It seemed like it was going to take us 3 or 4 days just to get there, and then the same to get back. We decided to splurge and buy a plane ticket to El Calafate to skip one 30-hour segment of bus travel.
El Calafate was kind of lame. El Calafate is Park City to Bariloche's Breckenridge. Everything was extra expensive, and the crowd was older. Not a teenager in sight. Much more tailored to the lady who shops while her husband goes fly-fishing than the unemployed recent graduate.
We had a lot of time to kill though before our 2 am bus to Ushuaia, so we walked around. We saw gauchos! And other gaucho related stuff.
Zig looks muy gauchesco. I may have made that word up. I tend to do that in Spanish. And English for that matter.
We walked around the main street, and most of the restaurants had this displayed in the window...
And here's Robin running away from the dead animals....
She's the one in the back in white. She's fast!!
Getting to Ushuaia was quite the adventure...
...Literary aside...
I stole my dad’s copy of
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin and read it on the trip down. Here is my summary:
“I’m going to go down to Patagonia because its hard to get there, speak Spanish badly to the point of reporting incorrect information, and only visit people from my home country, England. Giant sloth. Sheep. The end.”
I liked the stories, but was annoyed that he barely spoke to any actual Argentineans or Chileans, and not even one indigenous person, even though when he was there, there were still actual living Yaghans (the people of Tierra del Fuego), where as now all of them have died (according to our tour guide.
wikipedia says otherwise). Opportunity MISSED. Also, towards the end it was a struggle to finish. I got bored.
One thing I did get out of the book was a deeper understanding of a whole genre of South American travelers. I’ll call them Bruce Chatwin Hipsters.
To explain, one of my favorite activities is hipster watching. Its a type of people watching, but the people are hipsters.
In Spanish, there’s an expression “tribu urbano,” or urban tribe. Those are all the cliques in high school movies. Hipsters are a current tribu urbano. A very common phenomenon. For those of you who may not know what a hipster is, I’ll draw a parallel to another tribu urbano...
I read this article for my sociology of deviance class at Rice called “Real Punks and Pretenders.” Basically, it outlined how there are two kinds of people in punk culture. The real punks are people who have made a serious commitment to the punk lifestyle. For example, they sport mohawks, very large tattoos, and many metal facial appendages, and spend their time attending Casualties concerts and beating up skin heads. These people cannot easily change their appearance to conform to social norms, and thus have trouble holding down mainstream jobs. Ever seen an accountant with a mohawk? The pretenders, on the other hand, dress like punks on the weekend when they also attend Casualties concerts, but during the week look just like every other doctor, lawyer, or Indian chief. They shop at Hot Topic. They have not made the commitment to forever working at bars and thrift stores that the real punks have. The article goes on to talk about how even though the pretenders annoy the real punks, they need them because they have real jobs and thus real money to borrow and real couches to crash on. But that’s another matter entirely.
Scenesters are the real punks. They work at Deidrichs and Buffalo Exchange. They may also have large tattoos and facial appendages. They go to gigs at Mangos and read Free Press Houston because Houston Press is too mainstream. They vote libertarian. They attend concerts and art shows held by the Bohemians (The third group of people who create the Scene by using their extensive artistic talents. They are admirable because they are willing to suffer for their art. You should always tip them when they play music or buy their paintings so that they can eat. Its good karma. And they are usually talented and deserve it.)
Hipsters are equivalent to the pretenders. They are usually younger, so they may also work at Deidrichs, but won’t do it forever. They do lots of the same things as scenesters, but they’ll eventually go to college and wear suits and ties instead of Converse shoes. They secretly voted for Obama even though they told all their friends they were voting for Ron Paul. They make for super fun people watching because you can see them struggling to maintain their super hip identity while not giving up all chances of ever getting into law school.
My friend Jordan and I made a Hipster Scale to use while hipster watching. Its like Magic Cards or Pokemon. You gain and lose points based on your activities, and once you gain a certain number, say 20, you get to be a scenester. For example, I gain points for having gone to HSPVA and buying my coffee at Deidrichs, but lose both of those points for wearing lots of pink and sparkles without any intentional irony and spending much of my free time at Nordstrom. Working your way up the hipster scale ain’t easy. I think I have negative hipster points right now.
By the by, I made this whole thing up based on people watching in Montrose. Not the hipster part, thats real. See, its on
wikipedia (I'm especially a fan of the quote in the "critical analysis" section where the guy says that hipsterism is the "embodiment of postmodernism as a spent force, revealing what happens when pastiche and irony exhaust themselves as aesthetics..." Thanks dude. I can see I'm not the only one who has over thought this.) Anyway, the rest I made up. Thats what happens when you go to art school, get a sociology degree, and have too much free time.
But I digress. Back to the Bruce Chatwin Hipsters. They do things like losing their passport and not being upset about it. They are completely unprepared for end of the world cold weather because they wanted to “pack light.” They like to give the impression that they just up and decided one day to leave their lives to go tramping about South America for an indefinite period. They like to answer the question, “So where are you going next?” with “I haven’t really thought about it,” even as they tightly grasp their well-tabbed Lonely Planet. They refuse to take Spanish lessons because they figure it can’t be too hard to learn it themselves. They usually have some sort of badly tuned musical instrument and play hackysack like its the 90s. They insist on taking the 2-day bus trip to El Calafate on unpaved Ruta 40 even though there’s a perfectly good daylong route on a paved highway and there’s nothing to see on Ruta 40. Or even better, trying to hitch hike it even though NO ONE drives on it if they can avoid it.
I can see the appeal of wanting to be as cool as Bruce Chatwin, but he did it in the 70s. There wasn’t a paved road option for him. Or buses. He was unique; a pioneer in Patagonian travel. He was cool because he did it first. Now it just seems silly to go out of your way to inconvenience yourself like that.
There’s a funny quote in the Lonely Planet: “’It’s their Bible,’ whispers a Welsh teahouse owner, spying a tourist-gripped tattered copy of
In Patagonia.” I remember reading somewhere that the places mentioned in the book have become HUGE tourist traps since it was publish. I also read that the Welsh tea people were pretty mad about the book because they thought it was an invasion of their privacy. Well now they get to sell lots of tea to tourists, so they win. They certainly made some money off of us.
We discovered the Bruce Chatwin Hipsters because we met one in Bariloche while I was reading the book. Sean had just landed in Bariloche after two weeks in Buenos Aires. He didn’t speak one word of Spanish but when I suggested my Spanish school he insisted he’d pick it up himself, even though he was going to be in Bariloche a month. I had to explain to him how to say “pollo” and “carne.” Who doesn’t know how to say that? Who doesn’t know how to say that who has already been in the country 3 weeks?? I did not have high hopes for his language picking up skills. He wanted to try to hitchhike Ruta 40. The imminent paving of it worried him. He was of the opinion that this would ruin the experience. I’ve read that paragraph in Lonely Planet that warns of this danger too. Zig asked the people at the lab about this, and they said that its been “almost finished” for 10 years. Its just like Kirby!
Anyway, after meeting this guy, the idea was planted, and we saw mucho mucho things to support it. Here is photographic evidence of the many, many hipsters we saw...
Anyone for hackeysack? These guys were from Canada and were taking a semester off before their senior year of college to travel South America. One guy had a guitar on a string. We boarded first, and I joked to Robin that maybe they would sit with us and play the guitar and we could have a 20-hour sing-along!!! Robin, being the daughter of a music store owner, is extremely sensitive about people playing musical instruments badly and did not find this funny. “Don’t make jokes about these things Austin. This is serious.” Well, they DID sit with us! And then Robin told me that if the guitar was out of tune she was going to break it to put us all out of our misery. Lucky for him he didn’t play it until he got off the bus and was out of earshot or could run away...
The dude in the black shirt on the right of the first picture was from England. Some how I got stuck standing next to him in line. He told me this totally awesome story about how he slept on the street in Chile and some guys came and beat the s*** out of him and he had to go to the hospital. BUT, he convinced them to give him back his passport, which was good, because apparently he's already lost it 3 times on his travels. He seemed to be very proud of himself about the whole thing. Good story, man.
THEN, Zig came up and they started talking about Mexico, where the guy had been previously. He kept trying to convince Zig that Guadalajara (where Zig's family lives) is in a different place then it actually is. Zig just kept saying, "Well, no, thats not true." The guy very much wanted to be right. He was not.
Hmmm, what shall I pack for my cross continental journey when all I can carry is a single backpack?? Toothbrush? Check. Underwear? Check. Tambourine? CHECK.
We decided that these guys were a very confused and lost gringo mariachi band that had grown out of their clothes and lost their instruments. They literally had handkerchiefs on sticks carrying all their belongings. I was amused that instead of carrying them on the bus, they threw them in the under bus storage with all the giant backpacks and suitcases. The baggage people didn’t even bother to give them tickets to collect them at the end. Not worth it.
(OK, so since I started writing this post forever ago, Kaia has joined us on our journeys. She took one look at these pictures and said, "Those guys aren't a mariachi band. They're
journeymen." in a tone of voice that said "you guys are idiots." So I guess they aren't hipsters after all. Who knew????)
PS, I’m getting really good at taking pictures of people without their noticing it. Maybe I should add that to my resume.
Anyway, we did meet this one guy, above talking to Zig, on the bus down to Ushuaia who seemed to be the real punk in this situation. Dean was an Australian geologist with one of those extra large passports with twice the number of pages. Even with the extra pages he had almost filled the whole thing. He really did do things like decide one day to pick up and go spend two weeks in Mozambique. He had a genuine interest in Argentinean culture. And, even though he had never taken Spanish, Zig successfully taught him how to say “please put the customs stamp here” to the customs guy. He didn’t want the stamps to take up too much space because he didn’t want to have to get a new $300 extra large passport anytime soon. When I asked him if he had read
In Patagonia, he had never heard of it.
Anyway, to get to Ushuaia, we had to cross the Chile-Argentina border TWICE. You’d think they’d have streamlined the system, but no. Chile and Argentina do not seem to have a very amicable relationship. When you go to Uruguay from Buenos Aires, they two customs people sit in the same little booth and stamp your passport all at one time so you can be on your merry way. In comparison, the Chileans and Argentineans have two different buildings RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER. You have to stand in two super long lines. Then, Chile is apparently desperately afraid of fruit and wooden objects, so they have to search your whole bus. I would say at least 8 hours of our 20-hour bus ride were spent in customs. We now have 8 new passport stamps apiece, and we didn’t even stay in Chile. I will have to get a new passport when I get home because I still have to get at least 6 more stamps (4 to leave before my 90 days are up, and 2 to get back to the US), and that will use up most of my last two clean pages. Thanks jerks.
We did see some super cool signs on our journey. And we went on a ferry and saw toninas overas, or Commerson’s Dolphins. And also some penguins. On the way back, we went down while we were waiting for the ferry and touched the Straight of Magellan. It was cold.
"To the Province of Tierra del Fuego, Antarctica, and the South Atlantic Islands."
Anyway, we FINALLY got to Ushuaia at midnight and made our way to the hostel we called on the bus. The agonizing bus trip was well worth it. When we woke up in the morning, we could see the Beagle Channel!!!
We had three days, so we spent the first day exploring. Ushuaia has about 60,000 people. It seems to be very similar to Bariloche. There is one main area by the water for tourists, and then the rest of the city extends around it, getting poorer the farther out you go. The tourist area is super expensive (even more than Bariloche because everything is imported), and the rest is cheaper, but still expensive. Almost all of the activities are outdoorsy.
On day two, Zig and I went on a hike to the Ushuaia glacier. Robin woke up that morning feeling really, really sick, so decided to stay in to rest. The mountain with the glacier was behind the city (which is how we saw the poorer parts of town. and also found a pastry shop with 10 pastries for 3 pesos. thats a dollar. success!). We walked all the way up, but there was also a gondola that families were taking up. When we got to the top of that, we decided that we didn’t care enough about seeing the glacier to exert ourselves further, and just wanted to stare at the view of the town and the Beagle Channel. My pictures are so, so, but Zig’s fancy camera got some good ones.
Where else would you see the intersections of Magellan and Darwin Streets??
Also, I love the way they pronounce things down here. Magellan (spelled Magallan) is pronounced mah-gah-SHAN. And Beagle is pronounced bee-gleh. It only makes sense.
On the way down, we went off the road on a trail through the woods. It was an adventure.
We were very excited when the trail stopped winding around and we finally got back to the road.
We met up with Robin mid-afternoon to go in search of two very important things.
Numero Uno: We read somewhere that if you go to the tourist office you can get a stamp in your passport that says you’ve been to the end of the world. SO TRUE. Success!!
Numero Dos: Ushuaia has the world’s southernmost microbrew, Beagle Beer. Or, Cerveza Bee-gleh. Lonely Planet points out that it does not have the world’s southernmost bar. That is in Antarctica. Those scientists have to have something to do down there.
We found our pints in an Irish slash Sports bar. It seemed to be a sort of volatile combination of two especially rowdy groups of people. There was a game on between two Buenos Aires teams, and we made a special effort not to appear to prefer either just in case.
We also saw a monument to the Falkland Islands, or Islas Malvinas if you're Argentinean.
And some pretty flowers...
That night we had SEAFOOD. I miss seafood so much. So much much much. Ushuaia is especially proud of its king crab. They were humongous. Zig and I split a stew with king crab and mussels and trout. Robin had vegetarian spaghetti.
The hostel had a Siamese kitty!!! We made friends with it, and it slept in my bed all night.
Ushuaia had a million cats. I didn’t take pictures of them because I thought that would be a little overboard. But they were everywhere!! All of Argentina’s cats have moved south. They know whats up.
On Day Three, Robin was feeling even worse. She decided to rest again, and then go souvenir shopping. Zig and I went on a canoe trip and hike through Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego.
This island is claimed by the guy who lives in this hut near the entrance of the national park. He’s the king, he says. He sells stamps. Nobody actually lives on the island.
Our guide told us about how rabbits and beavers are introduced invasive species that they can’t get rid of. The rabbits have been brought under control, but she told us that if we could figure out a way to capture and kill large numbers of beavers, we should let the government know. They are eating all the trees and clogging up the rivers. I think its the only time I’ve ever been encouraged to kill an animal in a national park.
We asked and she said she’d killed one and ate it but it was really tough and tasted bad. This is apparently the crux of the problem. They can’t get hunters to come kill the beavers (even though the Argentinean government will pay you 10 whole pesos for each one) because it takes a lot of effort (they are smart and only come out at night) and there’s very little reward in it (except the satisfaction of a job well done). She didn’t know how to describe the taste in English. So then I taught her the word gamy.
This park protects an area that was previously inhabited by the aforementioned Yaghans. They lived naked in absurdly cold temperatures, and even swam naked in the absurdly cold Canal Be-AH-gleh. They didn’t get hypothermia for two reasons, 1) they rubbed seal blubber all over their bodies, and 2) they carried fire with them everywhere, even onboard their canoes. Creating your first fire was a right of passage. They were sort of nomadic in that they would move around the area but leave their houses for others to inhabit or to come back to later. These mounds are the remains of dwellings. The guide said that the mounds were made because the Yaghans weren’t very tidy. They would eat lots of mussels and oysters, but then throw the shells around the outside of the house. Like that Hoarders tv show Aunt Suzanne was telling me about. So the mounds are giant piles of oyster shells covered up with grass. Interesting.
The guide then told us that the Yaghans perished not only because of the usual lack of immunity to European diseases, but also because missionaries forced them to wear clothes. When they went swimming in said clothes, they froze to death because clothes are not as insulating as seal blubber. Being naked was the superior option. Go figure.
After the hike we had a nice little lunch in the tour company’s tent. They made us soup and gave us wine and cheese. It was tasty. At lunch we made friends with our tour mates. There was a Dutch guy and a girl from Chicago who both spoke English but no Spanish, so I translated for them what Zig, an engineer from Brazil, and our tour guide were saying about the upcoming Rio Olympics and its civil engineering implications. Or I did as best I could.
Then the guides brought us our canoeing clothes, which consisted of head to toe waterproofing. The girl from Chicago and I were very concerned about what this outfitting foreboded for the canoeing trip. This wasn’t extreme canoeing was it? Our guide said its just because if you get wet you might get hypothermia. Better to avoid it then, I say.
We canoed down a river to the bay, which was particularly eventful due to extremely strong and multi-directional currents and a curious sea lion. The two canoes that didn’t have a guide in them (all the non-South Americans) kept getting hung up, and then the sea lion would poke her head out, clearly wondering what the hell we were doing and why we didn’t just swim like any normal person. She kept splashing us, so I was glad I had on my protective clothing. Then we would get distracted by the sea lion and started watching her instead of trying to right ourselves, so the guide had to come back and tie our canoe to his. We eventually made it, and now I can say I’ve been mocked by a sea lion.
Do you have a flag???? Every tiny, uninhabited Argentinean island had one, to distinguish them from the tiny, uninhabited Chilean islands. This island with the mountain is divided down the middle between Chile and Argentina. You can’t enter the Chilean side of Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego from Argentina. Quite the little sibling rivalry they’ve got going on down there.
The very coolest sign I’ve ever seen is at the end of the park. It marks the very end of the Pan-American Highway. 17848 kilometers to Alaska, it says. That’s a long way.
We made it back, and met up with Robin for a final stroll around town. We saw an old shipwreck and a bunch of shipping crates, some of which must have been going to Antarctica!
I looked into Antarctica trips, but they all cost like 5 grand. Even last minute discount tickets are $3000. Slightly outside my budget. Zig wants to work on Ice Cube, the physics experiment there, so hopefully he will get to go for free!!! Jealous.
Ok thats enough for one post. I may catch up documenting this trip some day. I hope.
Chau!!!!
