Bolivia and Chile

April 1 - Mendoza, Argentina

I'm currently in Mendoza, the center of Argentine wine country, on my way to somewhere. I'm not sure exactly where yet. My options are to drive about 1500 kilometers to Iguacu Falls, then back most of the way to Buenos Aires to ship home, or I might skip the falls entirely and just loop through Uruguay and take the ferry into Buenos Aires. I don't want to miss one of the highlights of South America, but I'm not sure if taking an extra week for it makes sense when I'm at the point where I'd really just like to get home. I don't think I'll be awed (or for that matter shocked) by the sight enough in my current jaded state. Now I'm trying to think of this trip not as my only chance to see tourist attraction x, but more as my first major tourist foray into South America. It takes a lot of the pressure off not to miss anything that everyone else thinks is the sole reason for coming down here.

I've also not been writing much because I've been obsessively watching the disaster unfold in the Middle East, something I'm trying to stop doing. This has been absorbing a huge amount of my mental bandwidth for months now, long before it became the only news story, and was getting to the point where lately my voyage was becoming riding breaks in between BBC World, Salon and nytimes.com marathons. I'm not completely successful at breaking away though. I long for the time when you'd get the news from home in three week old newspapers, or at least for the countries a few months back like Peru that didn't have cable everywhere.

I stayed in Ushuaia for a few days, giving myself a good rest from the marathon ride down from the Lake District of Chile. I'd already seen the main attraction in town - the prison - so I spent my time working on my bike. Ulf and Anke arrived in Ushuaia a few days after me, and we partied a bit to celebrate our arrival in the deep, deep south. They flew down from Puerto Montt to Punta Arenas and sent their motorcycles on the ferry to Puerto Natales, and raved about the view from the plane of Fitz Roy and Torres del Paine, two of the many natural attractions in the south. They'd met a couple, Doug and Mary, from Colorado who had already made it to the "End of the World" after starting in January. We all split town in an Enduro biker convoy as the daily rain started changing to snow. We crossed the mountains in the south of Tierra del Fuego cautiously, looking out for patches of ice that might have formed in the shady places on the road as the temperature danced around the freezing point.

As I think I've beaten to death in my past logs, riding a motorcycle gives you a very different experience than you get in an enclosed, 4 wheel vehicle, and the best (worst?) example of this is the wind. On the way back across the island of Tierra del Fuego, we got the usual antarctic blasts, which then intensified into "wow, this is almost dangerous", to "this is insane" and then went beyond that to something worthy of a Buster Keaton movie, during which when we were stopped at a police station we had problems keeping the parked bikes upright even when we sitting on them. I could tell when the wind was about to hit me in a burst by watching Anke's bike - it would look like the wind was about to sweep her wheels out from under her, and she would go from the center line to the shoulder in a second. Doug found out later that the wind had been over 100 kph, going up to 120 in gusts, which Doug said was hurricane force. We stopped in Rio Grande for the night - the next day promised 200 km of gravel and probably the same wind, and it was also around freezing which for seem reason makes you very tired at the end of the day even if you haven't gone very far.

I'd stayed at the same hostel on my way down and it was probably the friendliest place I've stayed at during my trip. One of the owners gave me a cup of coffee within a minute of my walking in the door. It was real coffee, not the Nescafe which is almost all you ever find in South America - despite the fact that we get our coffee here. (For some bizarre reason the closer you are to actual coffee production - i.e., Ecuador - the worse the coffee is. But this isn't just a South American phenomenon - look at the non-dairy creamer you get all over Wisconsin...) I ended up sitting in the kitchen near the wood burning stove for the next few hours and was given dinner and a beer by an Australian couple who were cooking for themselves and then the owner returned with wine, cheese and a special kind of chorizo and insisted I have some. I finally saw my room and unpacked at around 10pm, full, warm, slightly buzzed and content.

On the return trip the hostel was just about full, and ten of the guests and two of the owners congregated around a long wooden table lit by candles and warmed by a woodstove. One of the other guests was a photographer from France who jumped ship midway on a round the world sailing adventure and has spent the last eight months taking pictures of the gauchos (Argentine for cowboy) in Tierra del Fuego and southern Patagonia. As anyone who has traveled in Argentina knows, 90% of the food here is beef, 9% is potatoes, and the rest is pizza. He explained that the diet of the gauchos was one or two kilograms (between 4-5 lbs) of beef with some potatoes every day - and nothing else for months at a time. He said that the reason that the gauchos don't eventually congeal into something fit for display in Madame Toussaud's is they are constantly drinking yerba mate.

Yerba mate is not only the national drink of Argentina, it is also the national ritual, which involves group sharing of a gourd with a metal straw filled with superheated water poured over what tastes like grass sweetened with ashtray. You can observe this ritual everywhere - for example while you wait for an hour at the border control between Chile and Argentina in Tierra del Fuego, as the entire office shares a gourd. The next day we were able to observe exactly this, but eventually we got through the border at San Sebastian and were once again in Chile.

The wind had died down to merely dangerous and we headed through the wilderness towards the ferry. The inland of Tierra del Fuego on the Chilean side was grasslands with only occaisional hills, with random gravel tracks leading off our road into the middle of nothing - we stopped several times to guess where we were, and eventually found our way to the port where the ferry was. Upon arrival we found two other couples there on bikes - one couple from the U.S. that Doug and Mary knew, and another from Germany. All told we were 6 bikes, which made us a little more of a force to be reckoned with and a pain in the ass to pack onto the ferry. The little catch was that on the way over from the mainland a bus had broken down on the boat, and we couldn't load until it was off, which took an hour. They squeezed us all on in back behind the double tractor-trailers, pulled up the Normany-landing door, and we were off for our 15 minute ride to the mainland of South America. The bus had made us late - and this was bad because for 3 hours in the middle of the day the tide was too low to land on the other side.

We reached the other side, and the captain attempted to land, but couldn't get close enough to the shore. He turned around (the boat had landing doors which became vehicle ramps on both ends) and we were invited to ride off into 3 feet of surf if we wanted to - if I didn't have any gear on my bike I would have done it, because how often to you get to try an Evel Kneivel off a ramp over water? But we all realized that the sand and gravel were very soft, the water was deep and salty, and whoever gave it a shot would probably crash and then get salt water inside of their engine, a very bad thing. So we declined and the captain moved further down shore and found a place where people could get off, and we went up to the restaurant and had to wait for the tide to come back in.

So all of the bikers wound up hanging around for two hours in the restaurant - wherever we went, the fact that we were adventure touring bikers made us pretty much automatically a posse, regardless of nationalities, though most of the time the Germans talked together in German and I talked to Doug and Mary. I liked Doug - he was a pilot in his early 50's who'd been working in Colombia for Customs - i.e., for the DEA. We shared some basic attitudes towards life, and I respected the fact that he was able to ride from Colorado starting in January and hit Ushuaia two months later. While we were waiting for the ferry to land I was a little astounded on the ferry when we were talking about the war and he said -
"So, you're from New York, why don't you want to go kill those ragheads?"
I was a little shocked. No, I was dumbfounded. Two nights before when we'd had dinner he'd seemed anti-war. I wasn't sure if he was serious or not. "Well, I guess it's because some of those 'ragheads' are my neighbors, friends... my relatives." My uncle is Saudi. "Two guys I'm friends with in Queens have a Lebanese grocery, and they came to NYC after 15 years of war looking for a peaceful place for their families - and now they are living in NYC after September 11th. I look at it like the fanatic religious rednecks of their world and our world want to have a war - and I wish we could find a nice, peaceful place for them to kill each other without the rest of us being involved."

That more or less ended that discussion, and then when we were in the restaurant I found out more about his job in Colombia, which was a little more than simply being a pilot. We agreed that the FARC were definitely a group of people the world would be better off without, but at the end I felt like I was talking to one of those people who asks "before we resort to diplomacy, is there a military solution?" Nevertheless I still liked the guy and began to see the wisdom in the fact that Ulf rarely talked politics.

We finally got our bikes off the boat, and we headed off - Doug and Mary were headed north, along with the other American couple, and I was headed west with Ulf, Anke and the other German couple, Eric and Hanke. We stopped along the road soon after the ferry to see two boats that had been wrecked on the shore of the Straights of Magellan - two metallic skeletons slowly dissolving in the salt spray. The town where they wrecked was also slowly dissolving, English style buildings gradually losing their windows and roofs. Both Chile and Argentina during their earlier history and especially during their dictatorships tried to populate the south in a manifest-destiny style, but much like Canada and the U.S., a lot of the wide open spaces are starting to lose population now.

We tried to make Puerto Natales, but the weather was against us - near freezing rain - and we'd lost most of our daylight waiting for the boat, so eventually we decided to head into Punta Arenas instead. The next day we saw the local cemetary - full of bizarre family shrines with photos of the deceased - and then tried to see some penguins at what, in-season, is one of the largest colonies in the world. Since it was now approaching winter in the south this meant a 100 km round trip through mud and a huge puddle/pond to see the remaining 50 or so penguins. My feet were soaked, and once again in near zero temperatures we ended up trying to beat sundown. We made Puerto Natales just as it was getting dark.

I'd been debating whether to hit Torres del Paine for about a week - I kept talking to other gringos who had been flooded out of the park the week before, or got two days of snow. Sitting in a restaurant in Natales in my soaking boots, freezing even inside a building, it was easy to decide my next move. The next day I said goodbye to Ulf and Anke again and got on the ferry from Puerto Natales to Puerto Montt. Puerto Montt was at 42 degrees south - about the same as NYC or Seattle - and the ferry would get me out of the winter in 3 days.

That night the war began. The nice thing about the ferry was we couldn't get any news for three days, which didn't stop the war from being the main topic of conversation. The weather was calm but foggy, so there weren't the masses of seasick people that I'd been warned about, but there also wasn't much to see. Most of us spent the trip reading, playing chess and cards, and drinking. I ended up meeting James again (he was one of the pair of bikers that I'd tried to catch up with in Quito several months before.) The last night the social activity organized by the crew was a semi-karoake act by some of the kitchen staff, a few rounds of bingo, and then dancing to your favorite Latin and 80's pop tunes. This got a little old, so I gave the DJ a techno cd, which he dutifully played for half a track and then killed the volume on at the first graceful opportunity. Some of the other gringo tourists (we were the vast majority of the passengers) went up to request it again, and he played one more track and then went back to Madonna. It was hilarious to watch the people on the dance floor try to do something with it, though.

I woke up the morning that we arrived about an hour after everyone else had gotten off the boat thanks to a massive hangover - I was a little embarrassed, and now sick. I spent three days in Puerto Montt getting over my cold and watching CNN, and finally couldn't stand watching the TV in my room anymore and decided to ride north the next day, well or not. I had an uneventful two day ride 600 km up the autopista to Santiago and went to SCS Habitat again.

There I ran into Rob, the guy from the NYC Burning Man community who I'd chanced upon in Patagonia. I'd arrived Friday night, and as it happened just hours later there was some kind of "Dance for Peace" happening in the eastern outskirts of Santiago that he knew about. We collected two other guys from England, and grabbed a cab with the vaguest of directions to go far past the last suburb and up a road 8.5 kilometers. It turned out to be way up in the mountains in a desert canyon, and the event had a rave feel to it but the anti-war angle was hard to find, especially with the corporate sponsorship. The event seemed to be supported by Smirnoff Ice - they had showed up with a truck of the stuff and were giving it away, presumably because most of the people at this event were the children of the rich and influential who lived in the Los Condes suburbs (I had been to Los Condes several times for the BMW dealership - it all made perfect sense that this event was here). Some guy was walking around with a big plastic Smirnoff Ice bottle dispenser on his back - we took to walking up behind him and just grabbing a few whenever he was talking to someone. Rob had helped me party in true Burning Man style, so I was stuggling to make conversation in Spanish after a few drinks, but we had a great time and partied until after full daylight.

Then of course the question was how the hell we were going to get out of this place - we were miles away from civilization. Rob had had this idea that we'd easily scam a ride off of someone leaving - but no one seemed to be in a hurry to leave, and we were way beyond being able to beg in Spanish anyway. So the four of us hitchhiked on the road that ran below the canyon, and within minutes we caught a ride with a pickup truck. The guys in the truck seemed to have the idea that they were going to have some fun with us to punish us for the having the temerity to ask for a ride - they took the switchbacks through the canyons at over 100 km an hour, running into the gravel on both sides as they took the curves, but for Rob and me it was like being on the bike but not having to worry about any driving, and all four of us were way beyond being scared. We were cheering every time they slammed around a curve and into the oncoming lane, and after a while the guys up front gave up and drove more or less normally.

I spent the next day recovering, and then Rob took off the following day. I once again had problems shaking free of Santiago and Scott-Land as Rob dubbed SCS Habitat (our hostel was owned by an American named Scott - he was a little odd). I'd planned on two days to work on my bike and file an extension for my taxes, but when I went to change my oil I found out that BMW Santiago had overtorqued the oil pan bolt, and I couldn't get it off and it was halfway stripped as well. So I took it in for them to remove it and give me a new one, but they didn't have the bolt in stock. Two days turned into four. People asked me if I wanted to go out and party, and I said no, not wanting to prolong my time in Santiago, which is a pleasant but dull place.

Finally I gunned it out of town and headed for the Andes. The Pacific Ocean and the west coast mountain chains that run from Alaska to Argentina had been the constant on this trip, and now I was leaving them behind for the last time - it left me feeling all choked up and nostalgic (or maybe that was just the altitude sickness kicking in one last time). I headed up to a pass that went over at 4000 meters, with the weather going from tropical to frigid in a matter of hours. I did the formalities and was in Mendoza just after dark.

Mendoza is beautiful and fairly laidback - like California with a heavy northern Italian and German influence. I could get used to this. The war hasn't stirred up as much overt anti-Americanism as I thought it would. People sometimes mention the war without much surface virtiol, except for one incident. When I was doing a took of a vineyard in Mendoza there was one worker there who heard that I was American, and then exclaimed something to me that I had to ask him to repeat, not being familar with the Spanish colliquialisms for terrorism - the tour guide looked at him with reproach. an Israeli in the group caught it and I asked what he said. "He said they're going to bomb New York." I turned to the guy and said "So what's new?" in Spanish and then added "asshole" in English, which thanks to the dominance of Hollywood movies world wide is now understood by 99% of the planet. The Israelis laughed - I think they could identify. The English guy that I'd been sitting next to on the bus said under his breath "Well at least they're not bringing up the bloody Falklands again."

The tour was otherwise great - Mendoza is the center of Argentine wine country, and the wines they make are pretty good (by my plebian standards) and extremely cheap - I came away with a bottle of the local specialty variety, Malbec, for $2.50, and I think it would have cost $15 at least in NYC. The vineyards were also really good about plying us with samples, and we hit two of them, so by the end the entire tour group was rather happy. We rounded off the evening with an asado (a huge amount of barbequed meat) in the hostel, and some live music in the hostel's bar, and I went to bed a few hours later happy to be back in Argentina.

April 11 - Montevideo, Uruguay

I've just arrived in Montevideo, Uruguay - I crossed the border yesterday from Argentina and spent a night in Fray Bentos. This is my last new country, and I hope to be in Buenos Aires in 2 days, and then head home in about a week.

The last week has been pretty uneventful. I've been crossing Argentina from west to east, through the pampas. The pampas look a lot like the American Midwest, and are about as interesting, but the people are very friendly, and extremely surprised to see someone traveling by motorcycle through their towns, especially someone who isn't Argentine or Brazilian. Three days ago I was in Colon, a small town about 200 km from Buenos Aires, and orderd dinner at a restaurant where the only people there worked there or were friends - they were all watching a football (soccer) game between an Argentine team and a team from Uruguay - theirs lost 4-0, which in football is a humiliation... They seemed to bounce back quickly, though.

The town on the whole is very nice - a mixture of the best parts of a small Illinois town with one in Italy - but about a quarter of the shops are closed, reflecting the economic depression that has hit Argentina in the last few years. You can also see this in Mendoza, where hordes of people beg and hawk things in the outdoor cafes at a level I'd only seen in Cuzco or Arequipa in Peru. The desperation is in some ways worse, because while Peru is improving the situation in Argentina has with a few breaks generally been getting steadily worse for decades. The people are well educated and act European but are falling behind Chile and soon will be headed below Brazil, if current trends continue. Things are still very safe, and I never worried about crime, but there is definitely an atmosphere of pessimism about the future.

The biggest thing that happened in the last few days was yesterday I had a run-in with the Argentine police. I was cruising through the state of Entre Rios - the delta between the Uruguay and Paraguay rivers - an area that strongly resembles where New Jersey meets Delaware. I crossed a large suspension bridge with a speed limit of 90 km/hr. I would never have speeded in Chile - the Carabineri there are make New York State Troopers look jolly and easygoing - but the rest of the highway was 120 km an hour, and I've been taking my cues from the Argentines, who regularly blow past me when I'm doing 120 or 130. Speeding is a national sport here - everyone seems to think that they are a racecar driver. What I failed to notice was one of the cars slowed down suddenly, as I passed it.

On the far side of the bridge was a policeman, waving people over. He didn't have a radar gun but he waved me to the side anyway, and once he'd stopped me and looked at my plates he changed his mind from getting me on speeding to getting me for not having Argentine insurance, which was actually very lucky for me, since I was clearly guilty of speeding. He asked me to follow him inside the small cinderblock station on the side of the road, and I ended up at a desk talking to his supervisor.
"I've crossed the border between Chile and Argentina 4 times, and no one ever mentioned this. I also talked to the Caribineri in Chile (which is also in Mercosur) and they never mentioned it." I've been technically uninsured since I left Belize - I bought insurance in Mexico and Belize because it's obligatory at the border. My American policy only covers the U.S. and Canada, and anyway I let it lapse in February because it was useless. In Peru or Ecuador if you get in an accident as the foreigner you're pretty much screwed regardless of who's fault it is, and they hold you at the scene until a cash settlement is negotiated. Anyway, on a motorcycle you probably have bigger problems like your smashed femur to worry about - so I've just been concentrating on not getting hit.

"This insurance is only for the Mercosur countries," she told me.
"Tiera del Fuego and Bariloche are part of Argentina... yes? I am sure that the border police as well as the other police that stopped me in Ushuaia would have mentioned this." Our papers were in fact looked at intensively twice in Tiera del Fuego by the transit police.
She explained to me that it is not required that the border check for insurance or mention it to tourists. Perhaps the other police were being derelict in their duties. Which is where I started getting suspicious. Then she said that I had two options - either pay it there, or at the bank. And I knew what she was going to say next. "The fine at the bank is 380 pesos (over US$100) but you can pay 80 pesos here."
Pay a mordida in Argentina? Fuck you lady, I thought. I'd been suckered by this exact line in Costa Rica - another country where the cops are supposed to be fairly clean. She'd caught me on the wrong day. Earlier in my trip I would have cared more about getting where I was going, and I knew less about how all of this worked. However I was careful not to let any of this show on my face, and adopted the penitent and cooperative but insistent gringo demeanor. "Well, it was an honest mistake on my part. Perhaps I can buy the insurance in the next town."
No, I would have to pay the infraction.
I explained that I was crossing over in Uruguay that afternoon, and I would be happy to pay it at the bank when I returned to BA in a week.
"You will not be able to cross the border without paying the fine."
"Where is the closest bank to pay the fine? I'll pay it today and cross over to Uruguay tomorrow."
"Buenos Aires." BsAs was more than 200 km south of here, and I was only 60 km from the border to the north. The more heavy handed she got, the more pissed off I was, and the more certain I was that I was going to walk away from this one. If I didn't and I had to go all the way back to Buenos Aires she had a pretty good idea by this time that I was going to rat her out to my embassy and anyone else who would listen in their police, causing her no end of grief. And the way that I knew I had her was she quoted me over US$100 for the ticket, and when I got back to BsAs it would turn out that she was lying. I didn't threaten her with this - I didn't need to. Argentina does not have the storied history of police corruption that much of Latin America has - I've heard that things like this have only started becoming widespread since the economy collapsed two years ago. So it isn't really an accepted part of the culture yet.
"Fine. Give me the ticket. I'll go back to Buenos Aires."

She left the room and conferred with someone, and came back with a somewhat defeated and pissed off look, and told me to go. I said thanks, gathered my documents, and yessed her to death as she told me to go slower in the future. After all of the bullshit in Mexico and Central America with the police it was a sweet moment. I did keep it slower after that, though.

An hour later I reached the "International Bridge" and crossed over to Uruguay - the only holdup being that the Aduana (customs) officials for Uruguay didn't have the form for non-Mercosur nationals - people from Argentina and Brazil breezed past me while they looked for it. Apparently the Mercosur countries now have a common passport, much like the European Union. Once that was done, I headed for the first town over the border, a place called Fray Bentos. It looked like an Argentine pampas town to some extent, but was more run down. I'd assume it's much like the U.S. and Canada - when Argentina or Brazil sneeze, Uruguay catches a cold. Tiny Uruguay was created as a buffer state between between Argentina and Brazil back in 1828, when both countries wanted the territory - a seemingly extremely rational way of resolving the problem. It feels to a large extent like an Argentine colony.

I headed out for Montevideo, the capital this morning. I got threatening storm clouds and winds worthy of Patagonia, which the locals told me were not normal, and couldn't wait to get off the bike and get my gear into a hotel room. As I saw Montevideo on the horizon I remembered what travel in Latin America outside of Chile and Argentina has typically been like, and as I drove through the town I realized that two months of western living had made me a little soft. The city looks Argentine - there's a pretty strong German and general European influence - but the depressed look of some Argentine towns is far worse here. Buildings in downtown look like they've been vacant for a long time, and there's a lot of graffitti. This is also the first time I arrived in a big capital city without a guidebook or a map, and it was interesting. I figured Lonely Planet has screwed me so many times I would do fine without it, and actually, I did. I came in along the waterfront, with huge breakers whipped up by blasts of wind smashing over the sea wall onto the highway - I timed it right and narrowly avoided getting soaked. I headed for the big buildings, and drove around for about an hour, but the urban core was so dense that it was hard to drive slowly to look around, or stop anywhere. Finally I decided to get out of the centro, and randomly drove out for a bit and found a restaurant. After lunch I asked the waiter where the nicer part of town was with the hotels, and within 20 minutes I'd found one.

The place actually is not as bad as it first looked, but the clerk at my hotel recommended seeing the old part of town - but not after dark. I'll probably do that for a little bit tomorrow, and then head out to the town of Colonia de Sacramento, which apparently is where most of the actual historical stuff is. It's also across the bay from Buenos Aires, which means that this will probably be my last ride on the trip of more than 20 km. The trip is winding down, and I'm looking forward to getting the bike on a plane or a boat, then enjoying Buenos Aires with only a backpack. I'll probably write one more entry from Buenos Aires, but the end is in sight - and happily after today's marathon of writing I've more or less caught up with my journal before it's time to go home. Home. Bed. One bed for more than two nights. Speaking English and not feeling funny about it. Seems like a dream.

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