Lesson Learned...

Turns out it´s not a good idea to let your tourist visa expire in Argentina. Also, if your tourist visa has expired, it´s probably not a good idea to go backpacking near the border.

So Ryan and I got detained by the Argentine border police. Ironically, we had every intention of legally renewing our tourist visas by taking a little backpacking trip to Chile, then re-entering the country. However, two people that we spoke to (admitedly not experts) told us that passports were not required or stamped in the backcountry area surrounding the border we had planned on hiking to. We decided to take the trip anyway since it sounded cool, but we went a few days after our visas had expired, figuring we would renew them later and pay the expired visa fine at the airport when we left.

We got a late start and after hiking for a couple hours, arrived at a big casa next to Lago Puelo just as it got dark, in the pouring, pouring rain. There was a sign saying the building was for the gendarmeria but we weren´t really clear on what that meant (¨police of some sort?), and no one seemed to be around, and we didn´t see any signs saying we had to stop. So we camped nearby, and then took off early the next morning for Chile, not really worrying about the passports since we had heard we didn´t need them, and no one seemed to be around.

There was a similar casa 12 kilmometers away in Chile, this time for the Caribineros (that´s what they call the gendarmeria in Chile, we later found out). This time we saw a sign that said ¨control obligado.¨ We got out our translater and it turns out control means registration in spanish. But again, we didn´t see anyone, and we camped a few hundred yards from this building, figuring we would produce our passports if anyone asked, but doubted they would.

We spent two nights in Chile, near a beautiful lake surrounded by old dense forests. Then we headed back to Argentina, and arrived back at the Gendarmeria building in the late afternoon. We were pretty beat, it´s a longish hike with a lot of up and down. We had been hiking fast because we were excited to get home and have some good food and turn the heater on. This time, however, as we passed the building a man was hanging out outside the building, and he motioned for us to come in. He seemed nice, asked for our passports, and then spent, oh and hour or so on the radio trying to work out the bureaucratic conundrum we had apparently unleashed by passing by the argentine station, not getting stamped in Chile, and having expired visas (Ryan´s was a day expired, I was 4 or 5 days).

He then got a bit mean, or maybe a better way of putting it is this is where his power trip officially began. He had been speaking nice, slow Spanish when we first met him, but for the rest of our time with him he spoke a million miles an hour and seemed to enjoy the fact that we couldn´t understand him. I did pick up what I think was a stern lecture about what would happen to him if he had done what we had done, if he was in the United States. A fat extremely condescending man who I think was his boss also came out and lectured us with this really annoying smile on his face, but I have no idea what he was saying. It eventually came out that we would be fined 50 pesos (about 18 dollars) each for not registering at the station the first time, and that to solve the expired visa problem, we would have to hike back to Chile the following day to get our passports stamped, 23 kilometers round trip, plus another 5 kilometers from the gendarmeria station to the bus stop that would take us home. We asked if there were any other options, apparently not. We had almost no food left since we were planning on getting home that night; the fat man seemed to get a kick out of that. Also, we weren´t allowed to get a head start that evening. They kept our passports and told us to camp outside. After what seemed like a really long time of getting lectured and told to wait, lectured, told to wait, sign here, lectured, I started getting seriously irate and muttering sarcastic things under my breath when they were out of the room. Ryan was really patient and calm though, I think he is better at this sort of runaround after all his border crossings in Central America.

The younger, lower position guys at the station were really nice. They tried to chat with us and ended up cooking us a nice dinner, so we hung out inside with them for a bit and watched the first part of a really bad dubbed biker movie. One of them told us that people passed by this station without stopping all the time, and that his boss only stopped people if he happened to be outside. Great, I guess we lucked out.

We asked to get an early start the next morning for our long hike, but when we knocked on the door at 8, everyone was asleep and they kept us waiting for 30 minutes or so, I have no idea what they were doing, staring at the stamp to put on our passport? Just messing with us?

The 20 mile hike was long and tiring, but not too bad since most of it was done without packs. It´s pretty amazing how fast you can go without them. We had a little oatmeal and coffee left, also a few nuts, a rectangle of chocolate, a packet of soup, and some dried peaches. This ended up sustaining us ok. Ryan did some excellent foraging work and got us a bunch of pine nut type things with our lunch. The Chilean border policeman was about the opposite of the Argentine guys, he was very straightforward and polite, and looked like he hiked a fair amount himself. He stamped our passports with only a few questions.

To anyone who might still be reading this...

So my blogging goals clearly evaporated at some point on this trip. But I´ve uploaded some new photos, which you can view by clicking to the links on the right. My 8gb flashdrive seems to have crashed, so I have probably lost all my photos from the rest of our time in Cordoba and in Bariloche. Very sad. But here are the ones from March, we were in Southern Patagonia for most of the month, exploring the FitzRoy range and surrounding areas. We then headed up north again to the Esquel area and the Parque Nacional de los Alcerces (pictures to follow, some of the coolest forests I have ever seen...). Then we headed a few hours north to the wonderful town of El Bolson, in the Lake District of Patagonia. We love it here, so have rented a little apartment, and plan to spend a month here. Fall is arriving, and the leaves are starting to turn, but due to a warm microclimate in the valley, all the fruit and berry trees in our backyard are still producing. We are surrounded by spectacular dramatic mountains and trippy gnome forests. Three times a week there is a big artesan market in the main plaza and everywhere you go you find lots of yummy organic food from the surrounding farms. Wish we could stay here forever.

A Very Pleasant Surprise

As you may have guessed from what I´ve written so far, I found Buenos Aires to be a bit overwhelming at first. So when my friend Kristina started trying to get me to go to a remote village on the beach in Uruguay with her, it was very, very tempting. But I dragged my feet for a few days becuase I had no idea how things were going for Ryan as far as getting rid of his car in Central America and flying to Buenos Aires. I figured it was a given he would show up unannounced and surprise me, but I really didn´t know if that would be in days or weeks. I tried to get some information from him via email but of course that didn´t work. Finally I got an email from his brother Dan saying that he had heard from Ryan and that he was a day´s drive from Panama. At that point, frustrated and disappointed, I told myself I had been stupid to get my hopes up that he would arrive so soon, and I told Kristina that I wanted to go to Uruguay with her the next day.

I woke up at 7 am the next morning for the trip, just as everyone else in the hostel was getting home from the clubs. As I staggered towards the bathroom half asleep to brush my teeth, I saw someone out of the corner of my eye who looked a hell of a lot like Ryan. But this guy looked right at me, turned around, and walked towards the stairs. It was very surreal, but I tentatively said his name, and he turned around. I guess he didn´t recognize me with my glasses on and didn´t want to do more than glance at people as he wandered around the rooms of the hostel :) Anyway, once we both figured out what was going on it was a very, very happy reunion. We hadn´t seen each other in 3 months.

I will let Ryan tell the story of how he managed to get to Buenos Aires so quickly, because it is pretty complicated. We spent several more extremely happy days together in the city and then caught a bus to Cordoba.

A Historic Tour of the City

One of the first days I was in Buenos Aires a couple of history students from the University of Buenos Aires came to my hostel offering a free tour of the city. Well free for the first hour, then about 15 bucks for the rest of the afternoon if we wanted to continue. It ended up being a great tour, at least for a history dork like me. It was cool to have students about my age taking us around town and describing the history, they had a lot of interesting opinions about how Argentina has evolved over the last 50 or 60 years.

Our first stop was at the headquarters of the Confederacion General de Trabajadores (I may have gotten the name wrong), where Eva Peron (Evita) had her offices. That's her picture on the building.

People get really excited about her here, still. In the CGT building, a nice old man leads tours and maintains her old office as a museum. He told us a few things about her life and work but spent most of the time talking about all the places her body got moved (including Italy for awhile) in the decades following her death by various factions of various governments, who I guess didn't want her grave to be used as a rallying or meeting point for her supporters. At the end of the tour, this man (I can't remember his name!!) described waiting with throngs of people for 20 hours in the cold to view her body right after she died when he was young. He then started to cry, quite dramatically. I asked our tour guides later if he cried everytime he told the story of Evita's death, and the said yes. I asked if they thought it was genuine, and they said, yes, definitely yes.

Our next stop was spooky and very strange. We went to a dirty loud highway underpass which had an area fenced off. It turns out it was an archaeology site, and what they were digging up were the remains of a detention center from the Dirty War (the military dictatorship that occurred in the 70s that resulted in I think 30,000 people being tortured and "disappeared"). This site is literally in the middle of the city, right downtown at a busy intersection, and there were many, many more. The pictures I took aren't very good. It is strange to come to a place where atrocoties are so recent in a country's collective memory, and so unresolved. Our tour guide (Ignacio) said one of the most notorious officers of the Dirty War lives 5 blocks away from him, under house arrest but in relative luxury. Many of the officers from this time are just now being tried, but last year a key witness disappeared a few days before he was set to testify, leading many to believe that these war criminals still have a certain degree of power.

At the end of the afternoon, we walked down a major road whose name I can't remember now. It connects the Plaza de Mayo and Congress. I never really got the roads or geography down in Buenos Aires. Anyway, Ignacio talked to us as we walked down this road about all of the chaos that surrounded the economic collapse in 2001. We stopped by an HBSC bank which is now permanently fenced off and guarded by police. This is because a policeman stationed on the third floor of this bank shot and killed several men who were protesting in the street below in the days following the economic collapse. There is obviously a lot of anger about this still.

Anyway, that was pretty much the tour. I was incredibly sunburned by the end and ended up getting completely lost AGAIN as I made my way back to the hostel, despite Ignacio´s directions, and despite the fact that the hostel was only about 8 blocks away. Ah, Buenos Aires.

Buenos Aires, continued

There was a storm the first night I was in Buenos Aires, and the next day was probably 15 degrees cooler. That combined with some rest made everything seem much more manageable. I met a cool girl from Victoria named Kristina in the hostel and we explored the city together for a few days. We checked out a tango show one night, which was touristy but very fun. The music and dancing was wonderful, as was the steak! It is true that Argentine steak is really, really, really good. It will be hard to go back to anything less. I have some videos of the music and dancers which I will hopefully figure out how to upload soon...

Buenos Aires

I did not realize how difficult it would be to write a blog while traveling when I promised everyone I knew that I would keep in touch by this means! I hope you will all forgive me :)

Anyway, I am in beautiful hot crazy Argentina! Landing in Buenos Aires was a bit of a shock. I was too excited to sleep on the plane, and I arrived on an especially hot and humid day. I took a shuttle from the airport to the middle of the city where, sleep-deprived, red-faced, and sweating more than I ever have sweat in my life, I managed to get seriously lost trying to find my hostel. It was a pretty extreme shift in environments, going from Logan Utah in the middle of winter to Buenos Aires in the middle of summer. January is vacation time for Buenos Aires, so the city is much less populated than usual, but I was still amazed by how busy and hectic it was, at least around Retiro Bus Station. I wandered around the city for hours with all of my gear, crossing and re-crossing the Avenida de nueve de julio many, many times. This is one of the largest roads in the world, with 20 lanes of traffic. I was just seriously mixed up about which way north and south were. You might ask why I didn't hail a taxi, which is a pretty good question. Part of it was stubbornly wanting to figure the city out myself, but a lot of it was being scared to communicate in Spanish. Don't worry I have since gotten over that for the most part.

Anyway, I finally arrived at my hostel, which is located in the San Telmo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. This is the view from my room. There are more photos in my Picasa album which I will hopefully figure out how to link to on the left.