Last Tango in Buenos Aires

FOUR STARS - A review on Last Tango the book

Last tango is available in print at Amazon.com, on Kindle and at Smashwords for I-Pad, I-Phone, Kobo, Nook and PDF Download.

A 4-Star review was gratefully received although I would contest the reviewer when he says the 'book is not about tango'. While it isn't strictly all about tango, there are various scenes and a whole chapter dedicated to the milongas of Buenos Aires - A must-read insight for anyone interested or thinking of coming to dance.

Read the review here

LTBA Review

 

Last Tango in Buenos Aires not only offers hilarious insights into dating, love and sex with the Argentine man, it is a travelogue that apart from Buenos Aires, visits Patagonia, Iguazu, Salta, Tigre and the Gualeguaychu carnival.

Love and Las Vegas or Publishing your Book

So I'm in Las Vegas and I'm here for two weeks which is weird because most people only stay a couple of days and I'm the only person who hasn't spent so much as a quarter gambling. I'd really like to win some money but I can't bear the thought of losing. And anyway I have tons of work to do. I received the proof copy of the Last Tango in Buenos Aires book, read it and approved it and then spent all night re-formatting it for Kindle and then again for Smashwords - Self-publishing takes on a whole new meaning with E-books, but oh, the joy of not being at the mercy of ignorant vultures who have used authors as worker slaves for at least a century. Look at the mountains of rejection letters they have sent out to writers who are now extremely well-loved including JK Rowling.

I'm doing the shopping and the signature restaurants and the Cirque de Soleil shows but mostly working. Today I walked a couple of miles in 110 degrees because I was told there was a notary with a raised seal in a mall a mile and some down the highway. Huh? An English author publishing to Createspace on Amazon.com requires an ITIN from the IRS tax office otherwise 30% of royalties will be deducted at source. Because England has special status and 0% tax withholding this makes sense to acquire but oh dear, the hassle.

To get the ITIN number the steps are

1. Get your passport certified by a notary with a raised seal

2. Fill in form W7

3. Attach letter on letterhead from publishing company

4. Send in and wait 6 weeks for number

5. Send number with form W-8BEN to puvlisher

 After falling into the notary office behind the Walmart with a rare beef face from the heat - I was informed all notaries in Nevada operate with stamps - no seal. Call the Secretary of State. Maybe purple faced English authors fall into his office from desert heat because he had the number down pat. I had to wander around Walmart garnering suspicious looks for twenty minutes until my heatstroke calmed down.

I am managing to have some fun in Vegas. At the Golden Nugget pool a man at the next lounger said 'Ma'am where can I find you later?'  I told him Ma'am was my Mother, not me and not entirely seductive on his part.  I'm not really interested in that kind of fun - I'm enjoying working too much. In the past few weeks I've accomplished more that I managed in the six months previous. Because having a boyfriend is time consuming. Especially a boyfriend who requires full time attention.

I gave it to him because I was in love with him. Love is a very strange concept.  I believed him to be one of the three great loves of my life. Instead he turned out to be one of the three worst nightmares. Understandably I'm not eager to start again. Time is needed to dispel rancor and not spew bitterness. Trust needs to be in place to some extent.

How many women have talent or abilities that are subsumed for the sake of love? Camille Claudel is nowhere near as famous as Rodin. So many female artists gave up in order to be supportive. Maybe only Frida Kahlo managed both. I have found out in Las Vegas that creating something is at least as fulfilling as the ideal of the perfect relationship.

BOLIVIA - Not All That

What a tough trip it is! But I can't say I wasn't warned. My friends all said 'Why?' when I told them I was going to Bolivia. My partner refused to go saying the people are 'raro'. I put it down to Argentine xenophobia, similar to what we feel for Germans, Americans for Mexicans or the French feel for everybody - when it comes to nations, it's rarely a case of 'love thy neighbour'.

But I had wanted to go for so long, especially to the Salar de Uyuni deep into the south west, surely the last wild place in South America and I needed a border run before November.

Oh how wrong! The people are strange and very unattractive and stare at you as though you have just landed from Mars. On the chicken bus ride from Villazon to Tupiza, I was struck down with some agonizing stomach pain which brought me out in cold sweats and I thought may be appendicitis. I imagined all the chickens and the women in their tea cosy skirts and bowler hats staring at me as I ruptured and carrying on blindly with their knitting as though nothing had happened. I thought I was going to die on a hideous filthy bus at the end of the world.

And then another bus ride from Tupiza to Uyuni - an amazing landscape, a rickety bus swaying up the side of a mountain over 45oometres- but no photos - the windows were too filthy to see through let alone focus a zoom.

And then Uyuni - an ugly cement block town, cold and windy full of cynical people ripping off tourists. They lie! They will tell you anything, even if it could kill you (feeding wheat to a coeliac) they don't care. When our old jalopy of a landcruiser broke down in the desert and after five hours of exposure, we walked back to the 'salt hostel' we had stayed in the night before, the woman told us to get lost, she had to get back to her washing.

Uyuni is very touristed. At every stop, there are another thirty landcruisers containing six or seven squashed underfed foreigners. We called it 'The Uyuni Salt Flat Diet' - it's going to be this year's christmas bestseller, you are guaranteed to lose ten pounds in three days.

Pachamama Festival

Blessings to the Mother Earth. Today marks the start of Pachamama Festival, an Incan rite lasting the month of August, celebrating the gifts from the land and making sacrifice for a good harvest.

Pachamama is celebrated in pueblos all over the

North West where the indigenous rituals are still rigorously observed. Sahumerios are on sale all over Salta City – small packages of sulphur, herbs and incense burned to rid the home of negative spirits, purify and invite in love, money and abundance. By nightfall the city is covered with a smoke thick enough to stir memories of the burning of the soja in the campo last year. It’s a serious occasion though – the Jujuyena woman who explained the tradition to me had tears of emotion in her eyes.

The ritual begins with prayers and offerings but always ends raucously with folkloric music and dancing. There is an all-day celebration on Balcarce, that is mostly geared to tourists but is still fun, as is the one next Saturday on the Plaza. To really appreciate the profound spirituality of this sacred rite, an extended journey must be made (as is customary) into the Calchaqui Valley or to the tiny pueblo at Tolar Grande high in the Altiplano.

Groceries

Cafayate is cheap. It is not so third world that it needs to be this cheap. You can have a week’s fresh groceries for a tenner and all the wine you can neck down from the bodegas at the end of the road. Canned goods are more expensive as they have to be trucked in from afar.

Living in the middle of town there are supermarkets all around – what we would know as a seven elevens but without all the goods. A whole aisle of shelves can be stretched out with a few plastic washing up bowls and coloured plastic buckets. Cleaning is important here. Every day a thin film of sandy dust covers everything in the house. In the dry season of winter, it will be a thick film of red sand, turning the white porcelain of the bathroom suite into a dust bowl. Every day women are outside hosing down the pavement in front of their houses in an attempt to stop dust tracking into the house. It’s an ongoing battle against an enemy that slinks back in overnight or is whipped back in by a ten minute wind shower.

I go shopping at the market and choose between who has the nicest greenest vegetables that day. Everything is piled up unpackaged. The broccoli has been recently hacked low down from its stalk with all its blue leaves still attached. All my vegetables, fruit and salad is placed into one bag and a price totted up. I’m not going to quibble – it comes to less than a pound. I buy chicken in the same shop. The butcher smiles as I explain in Spanish that I want it boneless and skinless. Here they would eat the lot and give the rest to the dog. They wrap six eggs in a row inside two sheets of newspaper. I could buy chicken at the house two doors down. It would somehow seem like justice to eat the cock that wakes me up early every day – not the sort of cock one wants in the morning – but I can’t face eating something I know even if only aurally. So I avoid the place.

Missing Buenos Aires (or Not)

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.

Ice Water

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.

Waco in the Delta

There is a lot of fakery going on in Buenos Aires these days. Firstly the expats acting the nouveau-hippie lifestyle, cooking the potato diet on a camping stove and indulging in 'monogamy-free' days and then the Porteno hippies who have recently discovered dreadlocks and global warming (without allowing this to interfere with their ingrained love of plastic).

I especially love it when a man starts wafting on about how there are no stereotypes and we are all individuals - There's never too long to wait before some predicatable behaviour ensues. A case in point -  our trip to the Tigre Delta this Easter weekend to write an article on the 'Eco-Village'  in progress.

Despite the leaflets being vigorously distributed at the port regarding management of Dengue Fever, the 'Village' consisted of one rickety house on stilts surrounded by 50m of jungle and one terrifyingly turgid trough of water - a pit in the ground. The 'Eco-Warrior' was cooking at his stove when we arrived and put our supplies in his ancient fridge-freezer which must have been blowing out enough CFCs for a small Asian nation.

He stopped and informed us that he would take us to the almacen where we could buy supplies. He proceeded to order massive plastic containers of water, massive plastic containers of cooking oil and massive plastic containers of Bleach then looked at us with limpid eyes when the bill was presented. As one of us rummaged for money (obviously not me), he proceeded to order beers that were quickly added to the bill.

Soon his disciple, B., appeared and more beers were ordered while the Warrior regaled us with tales of his 10-year journey with his 'Village' and how it was soon going to become a sanctuary when the Global Economic Crisis finally hits Argentina later this year. 'You cannot imagine how many riots there will be in the streets'. He soon switched to more invigorating tales of his many Portena friends and how they spend each day at the office planning some teatime assignation before going home to their Husband; 'Taxi drivers, bus drivers, pizza delivery boys - One told me, "do you know the best orgasm I had in my life was with the portero in my sick aunt's building" '. 

'There are four more beers to be paid for. B. go pay for the beers'. Off trotted the disciple to pay his tab and on the walk back to the 'Village' she grabbed me. 'He's trying to figure out which one of you he's going to sleep with', she muttered as though he was about to get out his machete for more than the foliage surrounding the village. 'He sleeps with every single woman that comes here.' The Eco-Retreat as Love Shack then. B. was looking quite wild-eyed and desperate to escape after a month in the jungle.

'He tells me he quite likes it that I'm fat as it means he can have me all to himself'. Was she quite proud of this?  She was refusing to indulge him any more as he told her right after sleeping with her the first time that he had a woman in the city he was madly in love with. However, there is only one bed in the Love Shack. 'Every night in bed, he tells me; 'No tenes ninguno idea cuanto te quiero'.

Later that night he decided which one of us was to be graced with his election for a Rapidito. Personally I don't care to sully myself with the village tart but I cannot speak for others. Beware the atorrante.

 

Eco-Patagonia

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.

 

Human beings have lost not only their sense but their sensuality. Not only was I frustrated last night at Vaca Profana, listening, or attempting to listen to a band play over the top of two women yakking but in El Calafate it seemed wrong that American Lawyers jet in for one day to tick the Glaciar off their 'Been There, Done It'  list whilst yakking full blast about where they were off to next.

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.

 

I came across a note in my journal from travelling to Puerto Madryn in 2007 - 'What a disastrous testament to human existence Patagonia is. Rumbling across the esteppe with a vista of thousands of plastic bags trapped in the gorse, blown there by the wind and held captive forever'. At least El Calafate and El Chalten have banned plastic bags from shops now. What about the mega-pervasive mineral water bottles? Post Carneval at Guayleguaychu, the streets were a nuevo mountain of plastic. We don't need them. But then again we don't need most of the things we thing we can't live without.

   

 

Patagonia - Big, Big Ice

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.

 

Taking the bus from El Chalten to El Calafate along Ruta 40 in the most pefect weather of the week was extreme frustration. The weather is Patagonia is so irrational, but this is what being a mountain lover is - learning patience for the elements. As one traveller pointed out - 'It hardly seems fair that we have suffered and punished our bodies only to have the most fantastic view from the bus.'

 

It was a view from the Gods. No I didn't snap it. I refuse to snap through bus windows - It means I doubt a return some day.

 

El Calafate was conquered after a bus malfunction. This town exists solely for tourism and man does it show. The road though town choked with tour buses. The sidewalks rammed with souvenir tat and excursion booking agencies. If you aren't one of the viejos taking a bus/boat tour, the choice is simple. Hielo y Aventura has a slamdunk monopoly all over the Perito Moreno Glaciar and getting on top of it is only possible through them. In fact there are no options to do anything in El Calafate unless you do it through an agency - One day even breathing will require a middle man.

 

There is 'Mini-Trekking' around 460 pesos or 'Big Ice' at 520. Along the lines of 'If you aren't living on the edge, you're taking up too much space', we went for more Big Ice. Desperate to get hands on axes again.

 

I don't like to begin my day at 7am sitting on a bus driving around hotels picking up 18 other tourists but once dropped on the terraces in front of Glacier Perito Moreno before the hoardes of viejos arrived, my mood improved. The Glaciar is one of the few things in life that is still truly gob-smacking.

It's fifteen minutes there, then 'Back on the Bus' to the port for a ten-minute boat ride across a branch of Lago Argentino and onto the edge of the Glaciar where you first meet Men With Axes. Are mountain Guides the new Air Hostesses - you  have to be cute to qualify? And are they paid extra to flirt so uncontrollably?

 

As we began our ascent across the Moraine, my heart was pounding and I was having trouble breathing and it had absolutely nothing to do with the climb.

 

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.

 

Watching the Mountain Guides forge ahead to check for fissures made me wish one would open up and swallow these eighteen others - Certain of whom had flown into El Calafate for one day to 'do' Big Ice - and leave me alone with the creaking glaciar, the shifting light patterns and the most beautiful man in the world.

 

'Giddy'. my Companera del Crimenes called me. Indeed we both were. Stimulated by the earth's natural gifts and the immense range of emotion they are capable of gouging out of you.

 

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this mass tourism across the World's great places. It seems that although the Glaciar is huge and forever, we are systematically destroying her.

Fortunately on the return boat, the Men With Axes brng you back to earth with a couple of shots of whisky on the rocks. The purest rocks you will ever see.