OK, this is the blog post we’ve all been waiting for, especially me: the last blog post.

I’m sitting in the Buenos Aires airport with Sharon and Judy ready for our midnight flight to Miami, an hour and a half from now.

Last night we did the tango show at El Viejo Almacen – The Old Store. It’s said to be the oldest tango venue in operation in Buenos Aires. But it opened in 1969, the year I graduated from college so that makes me El Viejo Hombre by quite a bit.

Tango, the dance, certainly was showcased but so was tango, the music. There was a five-piece band for the tango, including a piano, double bass and violin plus the stars of the show the bandoneons – two of them, which is traditional. The bandoneon is a concertina-like device (I’d say accordion, but then what do I know?) that is pushed apart and pulled together. There are keys on either end but the keys play different tones when pushed than when pulled. So to play this contraption you need to learn four different fingerings, two for each of two sides. The guys in this band seemed to be really skilled. I don’t know if the dancing was done correctly but the music sounded like a truly professional result. They played to accompany the dancers and as an interlude between dance sets while the dancers changed costumes and recovered their wind.

There was also a four-piece group that played traditional music as an intermission. Actually, the guitar was pretty modern but there was a banjo-sized string instrument and bongo drum-like set that could have been traditional. But the star of the show was a recorder player who played not only a recorder but some multi-tube contraption that defied belief. Each tube played a different tone. To play a song he had to move his lips from tube to tube, blowing into each and doing so at a rapid rate. It had to be seen and heard to be believed. Judy will post a video I’m sure.

Then there was a woman singer. Her songs were all in Spanish, but it was clear that she’d fallen madly in love with only me. She was that good. I almost called to cancel my ticket back home.

There was an old guy who sang and chanted what were surely traditional tango songs. Some Argentinians at the next table sang along so I guess they were popular. But frankly, our guess is that he owns the place and gives himself a spot on the program to stroke his ego. He seemed pretty pleased with himself. Us, not so much.

But really, what we all came for were the dresses slit up to HERE. Am I right, or what? We were not disappointed and the dancers exhibited finesses, style and athletic ability. And yes, it’s a sensuous dance. It’s a far cry from what Judy and I learned in November . . . T. . .  A . .  N.G.O. 

So there you have it: transportation from and to our hotel, stage-side seats, two drinks and an almost two-hour show, all for $50 U.S. per person. What a deal!

This morning Luis and another local guide took us to the Recoleta Cemetery where Evita finally found a place to rest. We heard the whole Evita and Juan Peron story again. I’m going to summarize so I don’t forget:

Eva was the illegitimate child of a wealthy man in her small home own. She came to Buenos Aires, became a singer and actress, met Juan and they were married. She served as an unofficial member of Juan’s administration, styling herself as an ambassador for the common people. But she also lived an extravagant life and became friends with Franco, the fascist dictator of Spain. So today she is either loved or hated, depending on which restaurant waiter you talk to. She died at age 30 of an STD, the same one that killed Juan’s first wife. Juan had Evita’s body embalmed and placed on display around the nation, just like Mao and Lenin. But the military coup and dictatorship intervened in 1955 and her body was moved into hiding. Bogus bodies were created to throw the military off the scent, so to speak. When Juan returned to power in 1973 he reclaimed her body and Evita took up residence in the Pink House along with Juan’s third wife. Isabel. Juan fell in love with Isabel at a bordello somewhere out in the countryside. She became Vice President and when Juan died Isabel became president. She didn’t have a clue; she was manipulated by her handlers. To gain some level of popularity she started appearing at the balcony just like Evita (and Madonna), talking to the people. She told them that Evita, with whom she shared the palace, was giving her advice and consul. That tactic didn’t work; the military took over in 1976. Evita now lies in a mausoleum vault owned by her brother-in-law’s family. Isabel is still alive and lives in Spain.

There’s an Evita II role in that story somewhere for Madonna.

Next, a nice, hour-long boat ride on the Tigres River (the 16^th-Spanish explorers mistook a puma for a tiger). I’m too lazy to look up all the stats about the river, but suffice it to say it connects to La Plata, the big river that separates Buenos Aires province from Uruguay, which is visible across the water. All rivers in this area are muddy brown, filled with silt as the water makes its way from the Andes to the Atlantic.

The interesting thing about the river is that it has carved out a series of small islands, which today are populated with summer cottages reachable only by boat. Water taxi’s and delivery barges are plentiful. This being summer vacation (think July up north) lots of people were out enjoying the nice albeit hot and muggy day.

The bus trip to the museum and the boat ride passed by large, million-dollar-a-unit apartment buildings and lots of regular families out enjoying their holidays. That raises the question: how, in a country as messed up economically as Argentina, can people go on leading normal, middle class and upper class lives? Carla responded that people learn to cope. If they have money, they buy. If they don’t, they wait until they do. And there is lots of poverty; there is a ratio of haves and have-nots just like everywhere. Indeed, we saw lots of low-income shantytowns on our way back to the hotel. But they live in those quarters rent-free. They receive water, electricity and cable service that the government doesn’t bother to charge for. They piece together a living however they can. They don’t live paycheck-to-paycheck, they live day-to-day. So Argentina has lots of seemingly insolvable problems but somehow life goes on and people live their lives. 

Then it was over; nothing to do but wait for the 7:30 bus and the midnight flight. We had helado one last time at Freddo’s and, at Luis’s suggestion, dinner at an Italian restaurant that makes its own pasta.

Thanks for following along!

Our trip to Glaciers National Park took a couple of hours, driving along the valley that contains Lago Argentino, the largest lake in Argentina and the third largest in South America. It’s fed by numerous glaciers and drains via the Santa Cruz river into the Atlantic Ocean. It represents an important source of fresh water for the Santa Cruz region.

The lake splits into three arms, two of which connect at the base of the Moreno glacier. I should say “sometimes connect,” since periodically the connection is blocked by ice discharged from the glacier. When the connection is blocked one of the branches has no outlet and the water level can rise by 90 feet or more. When, on an approximately four year cycle, the connection is broken, the water level drops back to its normal state.

In 1902 Chile and Argentina reached agreement as to the border between the two countries (the Pope interceded in the negotiations). Argentina then began a campaign to attract mostly Europeans to move to Patagonia. The area next to Lago Argentina was particularly desirable since it received more than average rain and had the lake as a source of fresh water for people and livestock. Settlers from Ireland, Scotland, Croatia and elsewhere built homes and established ranches on the banks of the arm subject to flooding. Things reached a crisis level in 1937 and the local residents talked the government into sending the air force to bomb the obstruction. That and several other equally hair-brained schemes failed but soon enough the passage way opened naturally.

The Moreno glacier, like 330-odd other glaciers, is fed from the ice fields top the nearby 10,000-foot Andes. It’s the same ice field that feeds the glaciers in Torres del Paine where we were yesterday. All but two glaciers fed from this ice field are retreating. Only Moreno and one other are growing. (The other is recovering from a volcanic eruption whose heat melted more than the usual amount.) Moreno’s ice moves forward an average of six feet per day. Overall, Moreno is the size of Buenos Aires and its ice weighs a conservatively estimated one zillion tons.

After 32 tourists were zonked on the head (and died) from calving ice thrown off by Moreno over a 20-year period, the government reacted. They built a series of steel-grid walkways that lead down to excellent, but safe, vantage points. The only knock on this system is that the walkways are slippery when wet. And today was a misty, rainy day and so we had to watch our step. This was the first really rainy day of our trip; we’ve been very fortunate!

Tonight seven of us are helping Sharon with her packing problems by meeting in our room for a glass of her wine from Chile; anything for a cousin. Then we’ll go out for a “dinner on your own” at a restaurant that serves lamb cooked on a spit. 

Tomorrow we fly back to Buenos Aires for our farewell dinner. Eleven of us are arranging, with Luis’s help, to go to a tango show. I hope Judy and I are able to resist the urge to jump up on the stage and join the dancing, using the steps we learned in our four-week tango class back in Sun City Center.

We’re here after an eight and a half hours on the road. Thankfully, not all of that was on the road time; there were several diversions to keep us occupied. We only had one nap in the entire trip!

Alejandra, our Chilean guide, led us to a stop in the first hour along a lake where unusual rock formations were to be found. These rocks, resulting from interaction of the calcium chloride in the water and certain bacteria and algae, are found only here and a few other places around the world. Those rocks on the shore were porous and said to contain fossils. The rocks still partially submerged in the lake are actually growing, living things. Alejandra pointed out that these rocks blur the line between living organisms and inanimate rocks that we normally experience.

The shore also had a wide variety of medium-sized stones of all colors and makeup. They represent the rocks dug up by ice age glaciers as they made their thousand mile journeys.

Next stop: the border. The process of crossing into Argentina involved:

• Lunch at the only restaurant and gift shop at the border. For once I was glad to see a gift shop. We had 64,000 Chilean pesos, worth about $100 U.S. Fortunately we found just enough stuff to buy so that I was left with a lonely 1,000 Peso note, which happens to portray Torres del Paine on one side. I’ll have to frame it I guess
• Chile passport control
• A fifteen minute ride through no man’s land to Argentine passport control
• A bus transfer to an Argentine vehicle and a Gordy, our new local guide

Immediately after entering into Argentina our driver pulled off at a roadside shrine to Gauchito Antonio Gil – Little Cowboy Antonio Gil. Without getting into the details, Gauchito Gil stole from the wealthy and gave to the gauchos who needed some simple luxuries for life on the steppe: a knife, cookies, beer and so on. Finally he was caught. The sheriff started out with Gauchito Gil to see the judge, a two-day ride. The sheriff said, “Antonio, everyone knows you will be found guilty and hanged so to save me a two-day ride each way, I’ll just hang you here.” So he cut the Gauchito’s throat and hung him by his heels. Before he died, Gauchito Gil told the sheriff, “You’re son is ill and will die. If you give me a nice resting spot when I’m gone I’ll see if I can help from the other side.” The sheriff didn’t believe Gil, left him hanging by his heels, returned home and found his son deathly ill. He hurried back, cut Gauchito down and gave him a decent burial. The son recovered. So now many, including most truck and bus drivers, stop and pay homage to Gauchito Gil by leaving a token, mostly beer, wine and whisky, at one of the many shrines spread around Argentina. We stopped and left a couple of cans of beer and, guess what, our trip was uneventful.

Luis was once on a trip and learned from his mother-in-law that his wife and daughter were in the emergency room. Being hundreds of miles away he could do nothing but did leave a bottle of expensive bottle of whisky at a Gauchito Gil shrine. A few hours later his mother-in-law called back to report that both wife and daughter had fully recovered. Luis has no formal religion but he can only shake his head and believe in Gauchito Gil at least.

Gordy gave us a rundown on a variety of topics, starting with the San Miguel region through which we were passing and in which Calafante is located.

Talk about a desolate place! It receives 4 inches or rainfall in an average year and the Patagonian winds dry that up quickly. Only 5% of the land is suitable for crops; sheep grazing is the only real agricultural operation that is viable here There are three things going for the region:

Oil. Forty percent of Argentinian petroleum comes from Santa Cruz. But, the federal government owns all mineral rights in Argentina so little revenue flows to Santa Cruz and the people who live there.

Tourism. People thought he was crazy but President Kirchner spent $13 million to build an airport in Calafate, the center of nowhere. But the strategy worked: make Calafate a tourism center for the glaciers of Torres del Paine. Private enterprise invested $200 million in the region and today over 500,000 tourists pass through Calafate.

Wind energy. The wind blows a lot in Santa Cruz. Why not build a wind farm and use the energy to power new industrial operations that require cheap electricity. The jury’s still out on this one.

Gordy went on to talk about Argentina’s economy in general. There’s no way to sugar coat it: it sucks. Inflation is the biggest symptom, as I discussed earlier. The underlying problem is that government employees are added willy-nilly and the government printing presses pay generate the pesos to make payroll. The problem is that against foreign currencies the peso is funny money – just like the bills in Monopoly. Smart people hoard foreign currencies – U.S. dollars, Euros, Yen, whatever. They convert to pesos right after a devaluation, which occurs about every six months, and immediately buy whatever goods they need. Unemployment is only 9%, but still . . . 

When we were at the home-hosted dinner in Buenos Aires our hostess and host said corruption is the biggest problem in Argentina. “What can be done to fix the Argentine economy?” I asked Gordy. “Set of a bomb in Buenos Aires,” he said. In other words, no politician has the nerve or political ability to fire the workers who do nothing but destroy the economy. Corruption? Maybe excess public-sector employment is the same thing as corruption.

The scenery matched Gordy’s description – dead-appearing grass with little green, few animals and virtually no habitation. The land was generally flat although we traveled down a broad valley, obviously carved out by glaciers, surrounded on either side by low mountain ranges. 

Calafate is a town that’s grown from 3,000 or so to over 25,000 since the airport was commissioned. It has a main drag tourist district and lots of new housing for the newcomers. There’s also a rather large park, actually a road with broad sidewalks that faces an arm of the Argentina lake. Nestor Kirchner, when told he needed exercise to combat heart disease, had the road built so he’d have a place to walk. Walking downtown didn’t work out for him because everyone in this small town knew him and would stop him to ask for favors. He did not run for reelection but rather supported his wife, Christina, who was elected to replace him. Nestor oversaw a surge in economic growth. Not so his wife, who became mired in a corruption scandal. Nestor died of cardiac arrest during her term in office.

Tomorrow’s our last full day of touring. We’ll visit the Glaciers National Park and the Moreno glacier. 

Today’s story came from Luis after breakfast. He told us of his father, an orphan at age 11 with no one to care for him. Somehow he managed to survive, marry and father a family. With little education he took whatever jobs he could find. This was in the 1950s and 1960s when, according to Luis, Chile was a country of abject misery and suffering. His wife was uneducated and so he taught her how to read and write. 

Luis’s father took a job as a janitor for a Santiago newspaper. This was at the time of the military coup in 1973 that unseated the democratically elected Marxist, Salvador Allende. Unfortunately the newspaper was a leftist publication. Luis’s father was swept up in the cleansing of Marxist-leaning citizens and spent 10 years in a concentration camp. Somehow he survived and all of his children graduated from university. His father died at age 68 of cancer. His mother is still living. 

We have a local guide, Alejandra, who conducted our two hikes yesterday. She is licensed to guide not only tourists like us but also trekkers – those who do Appalachian trail kind of outings. She’s very knowledgeable, interesting and a good hiking companion. She, like yesterday, gave us three options for today’s hike: stay home, a short walk or a long walk. Judy and Sharon chose the short walk and dawdled their way back, admiring nature, sitting by a babbling brook and taking pictures. I, of course, chose the challenge trek. The only problem was that when we reached our goal Alejandra informed us that what was supposed to take 45 minutes took us an hour and a half. Too much admiring nature, sitting by a babbling brook and taking pictures. they arrived back at base camp 15 minutes before we did. 

Alejandra sat with us after our (third) bag lunch. She said (paraphrasing), “I am the daughter of the military dictatorship. It had certain advantages. I to this day don’t have a taste for anything sweet. As a child we had no sugar. I learned how to live without, not a bad lesson for anyone to learn.”

This afternoon we went horseback riding around the estancia for an hour. Judy (horse allergies) and one other stayed home. The horses were mostly well behaved although one of our number took a tumble when her not-so-faithful steed started galloping to catch up with the group ahead. She wasn’t hurt although she said she’d probably feel it in the morning. Otherwise it was an enjoyable adventure. 

Before dinner, Luis gave us a carefully prepared history lesson, starting from the misery of the 1960s and 1970s, the Allende Marxist government, the military coup (ending the longest-lasting democracy second only to the U.S.), the Pinochet dictatorship, and the reestablishment of successive democratic administrations, successively socialist and conservative to the present time. My bottom line, which Luis seemed to agree with, is that today Chile is in a much better place than it was pre-Allende. The suffering that got Chile to its present condition was immense and there could have been much better ways to reach today but, nonetheless, the suffering endured by Chileans, including Luis and his family, is perhaps partially rewarded by today’s Chile.

Tomorrow we hit the bus for what will probably be a nine hour ride to Calafate, Argentina. Adios, Chile!

Move over Canadian Rockies, Swiss Alps and even good pls Mount Katahdin. Torres del Paine and its Paine Massif will give you a strong run for your money. I’ll let the pictures show you what I mean and you can decide. You’ll have to agree they’re pretty impressive. 

Torres del Paine is a 935 square mile park that includes not only the mountain peaks but also the Chilean ice field and the numerous glaciers that emanate from it. A glacier is a sheet of ice that is in motion. Snow and ice build up in the ice field; the resulting pressure and gravity force the ice down the side of a mountain. Voila: a glacier. 

The mountains we observed here exhibit three distinct layers: a dark, black base made of metamorphic rocks from the earths crust; a light gray layer that is pure granite and a darker gray layer that is sedimentary rock; part of some ancient sea bed. The collision of the Pacific plate and the Continental plate thrust this combination up from beneath the earth’s surface to where we see it today.

That all happened about 12 million years ago, a blink of your eye in the scope of earth’s four billion year history. The ice ages sculpted the mountains a bit but compared to the older Andies and Rockies and much older Appalachian ranges the Paines are still pretty fresh. 

Most of the park is covered with the steppe we saw yesterday on our way to Puerto Natales but with more hills. We took two walks, one this morning and one after a bag lunch. Each hike had three options: stay in the bus, a short hike or a long hike. In the morning Sharon and I did the long 2 hour/4 mile hike and Judy did the short hike of 30 minutes plus lots of picture taking time. All three of us did the long 45 minute version in the afternoon. 

Both hikes offered spectacular views. The main feature of the morning hike was the wind: 40 to 50 MPH. That’s enough to make walking difficult and dangerous. Several times we had to stop, turn our backs to the wind and crouch down to avoid losing our footing. We could see mist being blown up into the air on the lake below us. Sure enough, we’d be hit with a blast a few a minute or so later. 

The afternoon hike took us through the pumas’ dining room. We saw many guanacos grazing in groups (female) or solo (males). We also found several piles of guanaco bones. Pumas attack guanacos and eat them for dinner. We saw numerous guanacos as we walked but no pumas, just the bones that proved the cycle of life was in full swing. 

Our lodging for tonight is Estancia Mirador del Paine. Estancia means ranch in Spanish and this is indeed a 30,000 acre cattle and sheep ranch that has been expanded to include 20 guest rooms and breakfast and dinner service. As the name implies the estancia has perfect views of the Paine massif. 

Most of Patagonia including the land of this estancia was until the 1960s owned by first one and then a handful of individuals. President Kennedy convened a meeting of all South American presidents who pledge to implement land reform: breaking up the large landholdings and redistributing plots of land to the poor – thereby hoping to thwart the advance of communism in the region. Salvador Allende, the world’s first democratically elected president, accelerated land redistribution in Chile. Pinochet and the military junta reversed some of Allende’s redistribution. Today anyone can own land but the economics of sheep ranching in Patagonia is that a lot of land is needed to be viable. 

So tomorrow is more hiking and a horseback ride in the afternoon.