Ushuaia Argentina, Patagonia

A couple of weeks after I went to Mar del Plata I met a couple of Germans in Shoeless Joe's. The guy was a pilot and the girl was a flight attendant for Lufthansa. We were talking and they told me they were going on a cruise around Cape Horn and then through the fjords of Patagonia. I told them I would love to make a trip like that but that it was too expensive for me. He told me he could get me a special rate and he picked up his phone and made a call to his travel agent. In about two minutes I had a reservation on the week long all inclusive cruise for $527 dollars. The normal price for the cruise was about three grand so I got a real deal and had to jump on it. Then he booked my flight from Buenos Aires to Ushuaia for me and gave me the card for his travel agent to go pick up the tickets the next day. He also got me pilot rates on the flight to Ushuaia.

The big problem is I only had a couple of days to get packed and down to Ushuaia and the airlines in Argentina were on their seemingly perpetual strike. It was only a go slow strike not a complete strike. Basically they just messed up the schedules so that everybody flying had to sit around and wait for hours at a time. The schedule was just a piece of paper to drive the passengers nuts. I picked up my tickets and booked a hotel for the nights before the cruise departure. After throwing my stuff into my backpack I took a taxi to the airport and hurried up to check in only to sit and sit and sit at the airport. I wondered if we would ever take off but eventually we did. The flight was very long with a single stop along the way to drop off and pick up a few passengers. When we flew over Tierra del Fuego we could see beaver dams and all the trees down from the beavers. Tierra del Fuego is overrun with beavers. Ships were taking live beavers back to Europe from Alaska and the ships sank going around the horn. The beavers swam to shore and established a colony and with no predators they have multiplied to ridiculous numbers of beavers. For a while people tried to raise them for their fur but due to the mild climate the beavers stopped having the deep thick fur that was wanted for the fashion trade so nobody would buy the second rate furs. They gave up and all the beavers are wild now. We could also see the tail end of the Andes mountains, the Strait of Magellan and Cape Horn the southern most point of the Americas as we circled for landing at Ushuaia and Tierra del Fuego.

I checked into my hotel and walked around town. My travel agent had thrown in a day tour so I went on that. We drove West and rode a little train around for a nice view of the Andes diving into the sea. We also visited a sled dog farm that looked like it was right out of Alaska. I walked along a stream and saw some of Argentina's famous big trout in the stream, unfortunately the season was closed for fishing. When I got back from the tour I went to the town museum for an hour or so before heading back to the hotel for an early night. I enjoyed the little quirky museum. The Story of Shackleford and his men was told and they had lots of artifacts from their ill fated attempt at the South Pole. Those guys were tough in a way that not many people are today. How they survived like they did is just amazing. Wiki has a good article on the survival ordeal here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Shackleton

There was also a history of the penal colony that started Ushuaia as a city. Many infamous prisoners were housed in this remote prison and the museum tells their stories. There was also the history of Tierra del Fuego including the original inhabitants. When the first European ships approached Tierra del Fuego they saw large fires burning on the land. The original people who lived there were a tall race of indigenous people that wore no clothing what so ever even though the temperatures were freezing in the winter. They would build big bonfires to keep warm. When the European sailors landed the indigenous people died off from diseases that the sailors brought with them. There was a picture of the last three surviving natives at the museum but they have all died off. The women used to grease themselves up with seal oil and dive for food in the icy cold waters. How they survived without clothing in that harsh climate I can not imagine. They were tough like Shackleford I guess.

Ushuaia is a small town that looks like it would fit right at home in Alaska or Norway or someplace like that. The houses are mostly built in a nordic style. There was some manufacturing of electronic devices, some oil drilling and processing and a few other small businesses along with a bit of tourism and commercial fishing. Not much else happening there. I did go to a local bar and ended up talking to a local girl that wanted me to take her traveling with me because she just wanted to get out of Ushuaia. She worked as an assembler at the electronics company in town. We talked and had a few drinks and hung out at my hotel for a few hours. We had fun so I told her to contact me in a couple of weeks and she could come visit me in Buenos Aires but she never contacted me again.

The next day we loaded on the boat for the cruise.

Iguazu Falls

I did a trip up north to Iguazu Falls. Iguazu Falls is at the border of Argentina and Brazil near the border of Paraguay. It is 275 waterfalls about a mile and three quarters long that drop between 210 and 275 feet. During times of flood it is basically a single waterfall. Iguazu Falls is in the running to be listed as one of the wonders of the world. It is an awesome place. The waterfalls are surrounded by tropical jungles full of birds like toucans and parrots with monkeys in the trees. From the air flying into the area the falls are visible from a long way off as a big cloud. Then as you get closer the details start to emerge and the clouds become sprays of water coming up from the roaring falls. There are rainbows in the mist. The river leading to it winds in a serpentine fashion and then spreads out into a wide shallow lake like lagoon before plunging over the horseshoe shaped edge for more than a mile and a half.

I spent my first day there only looking at it from a distance off my hotel balcony because I arrived in the late afternoon, too late to make the hike to the falls and back in the dark. I checked into my room and went downstairs to the outdoor bar/ restaurant to relax after my hard day of traveling to get there from Buenos Aires. It should have been a simple short flight to get to the falls but the airline was on strike and the workers were intentionally making travel slow. It seems like from what people told me that the airlines are on perpetual strike in Argentina. Such is life. I still made it it just took a long time.

While I was sitting at the patio drinking my beer and munching on some food the people around me started to look behind me and then they all got up and were taking pictures of some monkeys climbing on the balconies of the hotel. Everybody thought that they were real cute and they took lots of pictures. I had seen a lot of monkeys and they had destroyed my condo in Costa Rica three times by breaking in and throwing a wild party inside with food fights and pissing and shitting all over inside. So I did not think they were quite as cute as some of the people watching them. I talked to a girl from Norway that I met at the table next to me. She was traveling alone and we agreed to hook up later to do some hiking and to have a drink in the bar later on that night. I wanted to take a shower and rest a bit before I started to go out for the night. So I went back to my room to clean up.

I unpacked some of my clothes and straightened up the room in case I had any visitors later and then jumped in the shower. I took a nice long hot shower and shaved, brushed my teeth and the whole shebang. I thought I heard someone in my room and I rushed out of the bathroom naked to find three large monkeys sitting on my bed eating my oreo cookies I bought for the plane ride. I yelled at them thinking that it would make then run away but they just sat there eating my cookies totally unafraid of me. I went back into the bathroom and got a big glass of water and a towel and I raced back out into the room making as much noise as I could while swinging the towel over my head and whooping. Then I threw the glass of water at them. They stood up on the bed and bared their teeth at me and the largest one got up on all fours and growled at me. I called the hotel and asked them what to do and they told me there is nothing I could do and I would have to go out in the hall and wait until the hotel staff told me the room was safe again. I told them I would wait in the bathroom but they insisted that I leave the room. So I stood out in the hallway wrapped in my towel.

I think a couple of bus loads of tourists had just arrived because while I stood out there a hundred people must have walked by thinking I was some kind of perverted flasher. The staff showed up and they opened the door and watched until the monkeys decided to leave. They kept giving me grief about leaving the door open. I had closed and latched the balcony door but I had not locked it. The monkeys knew how to open the door if it wasn't locked with the key the hotel staff told me. In a few minutes the cookies were gone and after a quick sniff around to see if there was any more food they just went back out the balcony door. The hotel went in and cleaned up my room for me with a stern warning to lock the door with the key in the future every time I went in or out of the door. Ok I had learned my lesson.

Buenos Aires Argentina

I am sorry but I have no pics from this part of my trip. I lost them when my computer crashed before I had backed them up. It was a good lesson to me.

I decided to see if I liked living in Argentina so I flew down to check it out. I had heard that there was some awesome trout fishing there for gigantic trout. I arrived after a 23 hour trip from San Francisco, California. I was exhausted from the long flight and the delays in the trip. Travel days involving international airports always hurt me because I have mobility issues walking and trouble sitting for long periods of time. They both cause my chronic pain to increase dramatically. After a long trip like this one I am sometimes unable to get around for several days. So in anticipation I had already arranged a week in a nice hotel with transportation from the airport prebooked.

I arrived at my hotel in Recoleta after a nice ride from the airport. I went straight to my room, took some meds and crashed for a couple of days. I was barely able to get up to get food. After a couple of days I felt better and took a short walk around the neighborhood of my hotel. The first thing I noticed were all the young men and women that were obviously hookers along the streets. Prostitution is legal in Argentina and it is clearly popular judging by the amount of workers on the streets. The second thing I noticed is how cheap everything was, especially meals in nice looking restaurants. For five to ten bucks I saw great looking fixed price meals. The fixed price seemed to be a popular option in the restaurants. There were a lot of places specializing in grilled meats, in fact most of them did. Beef is king in Argentina. Huge steaks with sides included were the favorite choices in the restaurants. I picked a place that had a sign for six bucks and went in to eat. I sat down and told them I wanted the fixed price steak dinner. It was around 9:30 at night and I was the only person in the place. The waiter asked me if I was eating this early or was I going to have a few drinks first. I chose to eat then so he told me it would take about a half hour to serve me because they weren't quite ready to serve dinner yet. Argentinians eat their dinner at around 11:30 to 12:30 at night so I was a couple of hours early. The meal included a huge steak, potates, salad, mixed vegies, two tall glasses of wine, bread, coffee and dessert for six bucks. I could not eat it all. I took my time and watched all the nice girls walking by my outdoor table, and there were lots of them. I thought right away that if I don't get some self control started right now I am going to gain a ton of weight eating like this every day unless some of these hotties walking by were going to help me work off some calories on a nightly basis.

After I ate I had to walk around to feel better. I headed for the famous graveyard in downtown Recoleta. It was too late for me to want to walk around inside but it clearly was not too late for the local people because the streets were packed with people. It was around 11pm and the sidewalks were crowded with well dressed people. I half expected them all to be fat with the cheap food but almost all were very fit looking. They were not real friendly. I did not see many people greeting each other or acknowledging it when I said hello to them. They all seemed kind of cold. But if they were greeting one of their friends then they were effusively friendly but in kind of a mechanical way. I did not see much warmth.

I continued walking and saw lots of theaters with various plays and different types of music in them. The theaters were very popular and even the small ones had long lines of people for the shows. The cafes were all crowded with people drinking coffee or wine and beer. Most of the tables were crowded with groups of four or more people all talking together and drinking. It was fairly reserved for the number of people and the amount of booze being consumed. I found out later at around 2 in the morning that the booze does indeed do its thing as the crowds were loud and very animated by then. I went up to my room at that point because I was still tired from my trip here. Three or four am is the peak of the night for entertainment in Argentina. Most of the clubs don't even open until at least midnight or 1am and then they party hardy until dawn when everybody spills out into the cafes again for some coffee to wake them up before going either home or frequently straight to work. I don't know how they do it staying up all night and going straight to work. They have to still be drunk when they get there no matter how much coffee they drink. But they do.

I looked around for an apartment to rent the next day and I found a very nice one bedroom apartment fully furnished with all utilities included for six hundred dollars a month. It was right in the heart of Recoleta which is the heart of Buenos Aries. I moved in a couple of days later. I was on the ninth floor so I had nice views out my windows and from my balcony. The store down the street where I went to stock up my new apartment with food and drinks was a very modern American style supermarket. The food prices were kind of high except for the staples which were cheap. I stocked up on all the usual foods I like to eat. Anything imported was very expensive. So if you wanted to eat American foods from the States you were going to pay dearly for that. I don't eat much prepared foods so to me it was no big deal that imported goods were expensive. The ice cream was my weakness and they had Hagen Das if you were willing to fork over the cash for it and I did.

In my neighborhood there was a bar called Shoeless Joe's that gave away free local draft beer. No bull just free beer. The place was packed. There were a lot of American students hanging out in this bar which was run by a couple of Americans. They had sports on like baseball, football or basketball. They took the signals from the internet so the pictures was kind of bad a lot of times but when the playoffs were on the picture was good enough to follow the game as you pounded down free beer. The had a restaurant with typical American bar foods and comfort foods. They made their money on the food and the hard alcohol that people drank.

The place was a lot of fun for me. I picked up lots of the young American college aged students and some tourists from this bar. There were also the usual hookers working the bar. I got to know all the ones in this bar after a couple of weeks. Not from going out with them but just from talking to them in the bar. I helped them write their online profiles in English. The internet was a popular way to find the prostitutes for tourists that came to Argentina for the sex trade. There were a lot of sex tourists. Some of them were American but there were planes full of Europeans that came on packaged sex tours from Spain and Germany. It was a crazy place.

I also hung out at an Irish pub a couple of blocks from my apartment. There was dancing there and a lot of girls were available any night of the week. I just wish the places started earlier. The American bar and this Irish one were the two earliest starting places I found and they were just a couple of minutes walk from my place. I met most of my friends in these two places.

There was a lot of other things in the area including a zoo, polo field, soccer fields, pools, lots of parks, a yacht club, a fishing club, horse racing track, malls, movie theaters, clubs of all sorts, good medical care and just about anything I could think of or want.