Uploaded a new cover for Last Tango as I thought the shoes deserved to be honoured on a typical Buenos Aires white marble staircase. I took the photo after a brazilian Independence day party when the shoes were thrown off and Super Sergio worked his magic - Any opinions?
Although I have moved out of Buenos Aires and am currently spending the summer in England and Wales, I am not done with South America and certainly not finished with the precipitous learning curve of dealing with 'love'. (Novel/screenplay of Argentine/expat love affairs currently in production). I simply could not cope with Buenos Aires for another instant. WHY? Are the people really more unpleasant there than they are anywhere else in the world? The answer quite quickly became yes.
Apart from the fact that for someone who loves mountains. Buenos Aires may possibly be the worst place in the world - humid, low, flat and not one speck of nature for hundreds of miles all around, it is also full of people who really couldn't give a damn.
Portenos are arrogant. Okay many Mediterranean races are termed arrogant but none seem quite so lacking of any reason for the characteristic as those native to Buenos Aires. The violent body checkers swarming the streets of downtown are the worst offenders. Portenos are phoney. I have heard expats from other nations say that at least in their own country they know when someone hates them. Here they pretend to be your best friend, promise the world and then bitch about you to everyone you know. All that kiss-kissing and fake politesse is simply a cover up for how misanthropic they really are - It goes with the jealousy.
Oh yes - Portenos are jealous. Schadenfreude is alive and well and growing like a weed in Buenos Aires. Portenos are greedy - In a world economic crisis when the first world countries are lowering prices to remain economically viable, Portenos are aggressively raising prices daily. My rent went up 20% and my expenses 100% - the landlady expected me to pay for the maintenance to the old building. When I gave notice - she tried, is trying, to sue me and 'reported me' to the British Embassy. These people want it all their own way. Take in the good times - take more in the bad times.
Argentina seems angry that so many expats are now living in their country, taking advantage of low prices. They seem to forget that without us living there, their economy would not have recovered so quickly - or maybe they really just want tourists - so much easier to steal from, no questions asked. Many people applying for residence permits are being refused now. They created the 'rentista' category and you only required 2400 pesos (about £450) per month of income earned from outside the country in order to qualify. Now people with tens of thousands in the bank are being refused because they aren't property owners 'earning' rent. Portenos are stupid - or maybe it's just irrational. Nothing they do makes any sense.
After having my most treasured possessions stolen by customs, having to pay fortunes for a residence permit that needs to be renewed every year, having to pay fortunes to bring a few more possessions into the country (which also needs to be renegotiated every year), having to wait more than a year for the privilege of an identity card (something sane people are strongly resisting in the UK) and having to find someone to guarantee your rent in order to be allowed to live in an apartment not valued in US dollars - Buenos Aires, a city that barely functions and has become as expensive as Europe, Simply was not worth it any more.
Argentina outside of Buenos Aires is a completely different place and the people are a totally different race. And they have beautiful mountains.
What do I miss most about Argentina? Patagonia and Glaciars, nada mas.
Being in England where cranky old toilets use 20 gallons of purified water to flush away a little pee and a plastic tomato planter ordered off the internet arrives packaged in enough boxes to protect a dresden figurine, we realise that some people aren't too bothered about waste.
And it won't be long before the tour buses and Americans jetting into EL Calafate for the day to 'do' Big Ice will have destroyed the beautiful purity of water.
We in England have a tendency to hop swiftly onto bandwagons, especially if they are driven by the likes of Posh Spice. So when the whole Eco-marketing ploy went into operation, I went into reverse. I had always, just naturally out of common-sense respect for the Earth, re-used and recyled. What is the point of paying good money for ECO-Goods while wasting thousands of gallons of treated water to flush a little pee-pee?
Something about Patagonia has got me on a bandwagon now. I did happen to see Al Gore's film 'An Inconvenient Truth' just before travelling and maybe his vivid depiction of retreating glaciares has contributed to my sense of injustice. The sight of Lago Nunez, the bird sanctuary in El Calafate, currently underwater from the melted glaciar was awakening.
As a City, El Calafate is obviously ruined. The old gravel road to the Glaciar now replaced with a superhighway. At least Men With Axes try to keep the glaciar pristine by insisting that you remove every shred of garbage and by totally forbidding smoking. But where were Men With Axes the day we went frente a frente with Mount Fitzroy and some idiot from New Jersey who could be heard yakking across the Moraine although he was just a tiny speck on the horizon, jumped into pristine Lago de Los Tres. (You are not allowed bathe in the waters and even when camping, have to take water from its source and wash 30 metres distant).
El Chalten is going the same way. Construction of hotels everywhere. Ruta 40 currently being paved to facilitate more tourist buses.
Not done with glaciares yet. After trekking Cerro Torre in El Chalten, I found an addiction to ice that I suspected I might have - it's always been a desire of mine to trek the Khumbu Icefall right after Everest Base Camp.
As with Cerro Torre, a steep ascent through the tree line, a steep descent and you're on the ice. Harnessed up and crampons on. Although Big Ice is only recommended for people up to the age of 45, unlike Cerro Torre, I would really term this a pussy hike. The eighteen Americans on the tour were trawling all over the place like ADD kids off meds and the four Men With Axes were constantly hacking staircases into the side of the ice pinnacle and hauling them up by the harness. They straddle every crack and crevasse and hand/haul you across, often with some atorrante comment to cheer you on as you pass.
It is however fantastic. Only poets have words to describe it and I don't think Lord Byron made it down here.
The air in Buenos Aires is like inhaling leek soup and where are the Men with Axes who can trip up and down a vertical glaciar pinnacle on two spikes smoother than a milonguero slips a new turista into his embrace.
I don't think I can live any more surrounded by men in plastic hairbands and bagged shorts who think shopping at Nike is exercise. Men should be outside reading ice caves for collapse not reading texts and downloading ringtones.
And when it comes to dealing with emotional unavailability and heartbreak - I recommend a week or two in Patagonia in the company of men with axes while stretching body to its upper limits. The Mountain God pictured above asked me why do women always complain about Atorrantes (hmmm, let's say bullshitters but divertido) yet those are the men they always chase after. He also said that the women they like are also a little atorrante - free, funny, full of life. Ladies we need to relax.
It was a relief to escape the constant tourist buses juggernauting around El Calafate and take a tourist bus up 'mythical' Ruta 40 to El Chalten. We had barely stepped down at Rancho Grande (no terminal in Chalten) when the wind kicked across the mountains and blew me and my pack off the pavement. Wind is a whipping theme in Patagonia - it makes the rain pummel horizontally and renders high tech waterproof gear redundant, every taped seam a meagre challenge.
It took a couple of hours to navigate the trekking agencies surfing the main street but it was worthwhile as prices differ dramatically. Although trekking the mountains requires only a good map - to get on top of the glaciar you need to go with mountain guides.
Casa de Guias was charging almost half the price of the other agencies to go out to Cerro Torre so we booked with them and staggered into the village at 7am the following morning, a little traumatized in the stomach area from the guiso de lentejas we had loaded up with at dinner the night before. I had images from the Inca Trail and from a Nile felucca, of once again dealing with dysentry behind a very small shrub as the Mountain Guide looked off into the hills pretending deafness.
A three hour hike under an almost full moon brought about amnesia as the mountain gradually drew back the curtains on her grandeur. How Gonzalo and Martin must have been amused at the turistas snapping away unaware of how much more impressive a sight was waiting just a short Tirolesa across the river, an hour across the moraine and a strenuous vertical ascent through the tree line and descent aside the glaciar before we put on crampones and stepped onto the ice.
It would be torturous prose to write about mountains and glaciares in Patagonia. Some things simply defeat language.
We hiked straight up and down ice pinnacles imagining we were on the ice field of Everest. There is a strange silence on the glaciar apart from when an avalanche comes down the mountain and the light changes constantly causing camera neuroses. I often left mine on auto-focus as it was impossible to tell. The white of the ice is often blue. The water on the glaciar is the clearest and most delicious gift on earth. It brings tears to my eyes remembering how the earth manages to maintain majesty in the face of wanton human destruction.
Just back from an exhilarating weekend -okay four days - in Gualeguaychu, Entre Rios province, four hours north of Buenos Aires but more like Cuba with its timewarp trucks and cobbled streets.
It really wasn't what I had been expecting.
Having been to Rio last year and Cafayate two weeks ago, I imagined that Guale would be something like Cafayate's neighbourhood corso but in the dromo. It turned out to be a lot more.
Getting to Guale is 37 pesos semi-cama from Retiro. We had a refuerzo (extra bus laid on due to too many kids heading off for a drunken weekend) whose air-con promptly expired. Strange to sit on a bus with sweat pouring down your back. The return was however, the normal business class service, although the DVD players broke down.
Hotels all full and all over-priced. Campsites all very full. Next time I would stay at the Embajador at 210 a double (versus 160 a dump) or the Aguay on the river for its rooftop pool. It was very hot in Guayle. Friday afternoon was spent locating our press passes in the corsodromo. Mine was lost - Pedro denied receiving any of the many messages from my editor. There were only back seats on the terraces available for 15 pesos at the entrada window but the very lovely girl (Everyone in Guayle was very nice - painfully obvious when you are accustomed to Portenos) gave us the private address for the family that owns the concession to the VIP area.
We walked twenty blistering blocks while the sane people enjoyed their lengthy siesta to be met by a large notice on the door saying that entradas were available from 18.00 at the Corsodromo. Being foreigners we ignored the notice and knocked on the door and were knocked back.
Twenty more seething blocks. You get what I mean about the rooftop pool.
A plastic portacabin surrounded by fence was the VIP stand. It was 17.23. First in line - we let the sun pummel away at us. Had we been smarter, we could have acquired reservas for a table weeks before, but that was before the press pass fiasco and a desperate friend calling from the City.
T
Saturday after partying on the Costanera the night before, we were not up to much so walked along to the beach. A beachbum town concocted around a river is a bizarre sight to behold, especially when the bums are rammed so tightly onto the sand that they are all standing up. We took the other side of the river to observe and listen to the insidious sound of Factoria (V. popular reggaeton group).
After a lengthy conversation about the dearth of spots to meet decent men in Argentina and just as I was explaining to my friend that it happens organically when you don't expect it rather than in bars or online - two chicos, no tan chico, happened along on motos offering to kill the afternoon with cold beers.
The carneval began at 23.30 - a mini Rio with what appeared to be the same floats from Rio 2008 although Guayle may simply have borrowed some influence. Much more comfortable - they ram too many into concrete amphitheatre steps in Rio - way more civilized with champagne and cocktail service and some very pretty boys on display, Guayle goes full-out for four hours. Then its back to the Costanera where the allnight party revs up and after another four hours, there are some pretty sorry states to behold passed out along the river, along with the intense smell of piss and a dump-load of plastic bottles along the road. The sunrise was beautiful on the water though and the residents were out cleaning up, happy that their pockets were full for another year.
It was full on party week last week in Cafayate, Salta. Not only was there a corso along calle Rioja three nights running but there was the Serenata - a week long folk music festival - the most important in the North.
It isn't easy trying to maintain a relationship with someone from a different culture. I once told the BD that I didn't think he would properly understand me until he was able to visit England. It's something he's dying to do but unlikely in any forseeable future for a forty-year-old man who has never been out of Argentina. He used to give one of the reasons for loving me as 'because you are English' - I think it has something to do with our rock music- So many men here are obsessed with English bands.
And English women are so independent. There are no rules for us. The suffragettes of a hundred years ago paved our path with their movement and we continue to live as we want, how we want,where we want. For men whose culture has taught them that all women are desperate to get married, the thinking is hard to assimilate. So they freak themselves out by promising too much never imagining that we don't even need all those guarantees- We just need to be loved.
For all those men reading Mystery and the annihilation project, be officially advised by someone who knows - You don't need to pretend anything with a woman other than that you love her.
While I went to England to get the money for the project we had planned, the BD segued from undying amor to el desparecido overnight. Emotionally Unavailable, scared, push-me-pull-you, commitmentphobic, narcissistic, my friends say but the fact remains that my heart is trapped in Salta and I want it back. And what of our plans? Do I continue by myself being the independent English woman I am or do I make others? Ever since I travelled Peru in 04, I have wanted to live in the mountains under an Yves Klein sky. Buenos Aires is really wearing me down - the noise, the dirt, the non-functionality of it now coupled with the prices. All my life I've lived in big cities- London, New York, Buenos Aires - Now I'm aching for some clean air and the open road across the Puna.
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