Latinalicious: The South America Diaries (10 page)

No sooner had we checked into the somewhat deceivingly named Antarctica Hostel in Ushuaia, than Autumn and I learned of the kidnapping of two girls, one Australian and one Brit, abducted as they floated in a canoe in the Cuyabeno Nature Reserve the other day. This happened at the Colombian border with Ecuador, exactly where I stayed with the amorous Mowgli not so long ago.

Thankfully the girls were freed not long afterwards, but it’s horrifying to think of how much worse it could have been for them, or how they must have felt out there as captives in the sweaty jungle. It happened, too, as the FARC, Colombia’s armed communist guerrilla group, entered a peace process with the government following almost fifty years of war. I guess it goes to show that you can never be too careful when you’re travelling in these countries, no matter how safe you think you’ll be.

Thanks to things like Facebook and Foursquare, it’s very rare that people don’t know where we are when we’re moving around the world these days, but it’s mad to think that these silly habits of ‘checking in’ or tagging fellow travellers in photos might turn out to be actual lifelines … not that there’s an Internet connection in the Amazon.

Anyway, back to Ushuaia. For all intents and purposes, this town is expensive. It’s the gateway to Antarctica and isn’t a place you’re expected to want to linger, and thanks to everything having to be transported long distances to get here — usually by container ship — even in the supermarkets, prices for food and drinks are extortionate. It reminds me a bit of the Galápagos, as far as stretching the budget is concerned. Our hostel is costing us almost $20 a night for a dorm bed, too, as opposed to the usual $10.

I suppose we can’t really complain, though, seeing as we spent a small fortune on getting here in style!

Sadly, Autumn has decided that instead of travelling back up north through Argentina and on into Bolivia with me, she is going to take the seven last remaining koala bears back to Buenos Aires and then into Uruguay. There, she’ll head for the beach at the glamorous Punta del Este, which is home to Uruguay’s elite sun-seekers. I guess I can understand that after all this cold she wants some sun and sand, and to stay in one place for a while. And we
have
been a little extravagant in our glam-packing so far.

I’ve decided I’ll be flying via Buenos Aires up to Córdoba, where I plan to visit the sacred hill of Uritorco and look for aliens in nearby Capilla del Monte. Ever since Jose mentioned it, I’ve been intrigued. It’ll be weird, travelling alone again after all this time, but Autumn and I have had some incredible experiences together since we first sang along to Madonna and Antonio Banderas in the fancy Home hotel back in Palermo. Just the other day, having sailed through the Murray Channel and Nassau Bay, we reached the rocky promontory of Cape Horn National Park at dawn’s light on our final cruising day. Discovered in 1616 and declared a World Biosphere Reserve in 2005, for years Cape Horn was an important navigation route for sailing ships between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. It was at the nearby Wulaia Bay that Charles Darwin, during his voyage on the HMS
Beagle
, landed in 1833.

The cold was a living thing in Cape Horn, pressing down on us and slowing our progress as we struggled to walk in our fluorescent lifejackets. Standing on a grassy verge behind the Albatross statue — a monument constructed at the highest point for the countless sailors who’ve lost their lives in the area — maintaining any body heat was futile. But with our arms wrapped around our own chests, Autumn and I grinned at each other, and then at the thrashing waves — the only things separating us from Antarctica. And then we jumped up and down on the spot to stop our toes falling off.

We met a family who live out here in the remote and bleak beyond — a place so windswept that the trees grow at an angle and where the ghosts of almost 800 nearby shipwrecks are free to roam the land. Their ten-year-old son ran around us with his dog, seemingly glad of the company.

Apparently there’s huge competition for the privilege of living here on Cape Horn and the chosen family gets tax-free benefits, as well as the chance to operate the lighthouse. It would take a special kind of person to be able to handle it, though. I could barely feel my face, hands or feet by the time I got back onto the boat. I even refused my regular whisky, for fear that the glass might fall from my fingers and shatter.

As a result of spending far too much time on the ship’s decks trying to take photos, I now have another stinking cold. The silence of Ushuaia’s creepy penitentiary-turned-museum was rudely broken by the sound of my nose-blowing as we walked around it yesterday, attempting to make sense of the iffy translations and baffling over the bad spelling.

In spite of this, it’s an interesting place to learn a bit about the history of the prison, as well as everything you’ve ever wanted to know about Shackleton, or the navigation by others of the South Pacific and South Atlantic. We wouldn’t have got to discover all this if we’d gone dog-sledding as originally planned. Much to our disappointment, we arrived in Ushuaia just
one
day after the end of dog sledding season.

‘It’s the wrong time of year for that now,’ said the guy, predictably, at the reception desk when we checked into the Antarctica Hostel. Interestingly, we’re also too
early
for beaver season. It’s a weird kind of animal-free limbo here at the moment but, at the right time of year, you can go on a tour at night to watch the beavers build their dams. I find this interesting because I can’t help but imagine a smartly dressed family of beavers travelling into the city in turn, just to watch a construction team build a house.

At another museum, the Museo Maritimo y del Presidio, we also learned a lot about the Yamana people, the natives of Tierra del Fuego, who didn’t actually wear clothes until the Europeans reached them. To fight the cold, they smothered themselves in sea lion blubber. That’s something to remember if you’re thinking you’ve got nothing to wear, isn’t it? They also lit fires in their little canoes and huddled around them, and it was these fires, eventually spotted by European explorers as they passed by in their ships, that gave the place its name — Land of Fire.

Someone told us we’d be able to eat beaver in Ushuaia (oh, stop it), but we haven’t been able find it anywhere so far. Someone told me it tastes like a fishy kind of chicken, which is intriguing. I like to think I’d try it if I came across it, but you never know. I thought the same thing about tarantulas in Cambodia last year, but when faced with their spindly barbecued legs, I screamed the market down, caused a nearby baby to cry and ran back to the tour bus, quivering.

On our first night out on dry land, Autumn and I went for a decidedly non-beavery dinner with a guy called Chris from the hostel, who spent the majority of the evening bringing the conversation around to the girlfriend he’d just broken up with.

‘This is nice wine, isn’t it?’ I’d say.

‘Yes it is, my girlfriend used to love this wine,’ he’d reply.

‘I can’t wait to get to the beach in Uruguay,’ Autumn would enthuse.

‘My girlfriend knows someone in Uruguay,’ he’d say, morosely.

‘What’s the square root of 9,904,567?’ I’d ask.

‘My girlfriend was the better one at maths,’ he’d tell us.

Or words to that effect.

Eventually Chris went home in a melancholy funk of his own creation and Autumn and I hooked up with two Argentinean guys who entertained us with bad dance moves in a local bar and took great delight in posing for photos wearing Marshmallow and Tyre Man. They were way more fun. I especially liked the handsome Pedro when he told me between kisses to my fingers, ‘You have a beautiful sound in your mouth when you speak,’ although, having literally travelled to the end of the world and looked in vague hope for an eligible man, I still have a feeling I’ll be travelling onwards unattached.

At least I don’t have to worry about carrying those koala bears anymore, I suppose.

8/10

I clambered down from yet another top bunk this morning in the Mate Hostel, Córdoba, to find one of the Brazilians who’d been partying hard the night before in the common room was fast asleep in the bunk below. Because he’d kept me awake way past my bedtime, I thought his hostel karma was about due, so I applied a firm, quick foot to his backside, which was half poking out of his duvet like a waning moon. Then I smiled faux-apologetically when his eyes flashed open.

Much to my surprise, Alberto sprung out of bed with the urgency of someone who was late to catch a plane and announced that he was so glad I’d woken him up because: ‘We have to get to Oktoberfest!’

Seeing as though my only other plan for the day was to wander round the Che Guevara museum in Alta Garcia feeling sorry for myself while making spontaneous, irregular hacking sounds (my cold has now turned into a brutal chest cough), I thought that, actually, checking out an Argentinean Oktoberfest and drinking some soothing beer might be a better option. Besides, it was way too rainy to go condor-spotting in the national park, which is what a lot of people come to Córdoba to do … as well as paragliding.

And so it was that I, Alberto and his friend Vini, who’d last night had to be scraped off the common room floor after he’d fallen asleep on it mid-party, set off for the bus terminal to buy our tickets to a place called Villa General Belgrano. A return journey cost us about 70 pesos each and after our two-hour bus ride, during which I learned a lot about Brazil from Alberto while Vini fell asleep again and drooled on the window curtain, we disembarked … into a cartoon.

The small town of Villa General Belgrano is surrounded by splendiferous green hills and the houses are much like those in Pucón, all constructed of wooden panelling, only more European looking. Apparently hardly anyone visits Villa General Belgrano outside of its annual Oktoberfest because there’s really not much else going on, but I for one can definitely see myself living permanently in a town that looks as though it should be popping out of a cinema screen in animated 3D graphics. Driving in, I truly felt as though Papa Smurf might just spring out from behind a giant flower and point the way to the Mushroom Ball.

In Villa General Belgrano, humongous signposts on either side of the road look as though they’ve been carved straight out of giant, gnarly Disney trees. The wood-panelled pub and restaurant walls appear to bend as though they might disentangle themselves from their respective floors and ceilings and make off with the trees once more. Arrows swirl with a tease before they point in the right direction and all words are in written in a font and colour so cheerful you can practically hear a children’s TV presenter squealing them with enthusiasm as you read. For example, the word
lavanderia
, instead of just meaning laundry as it does everywhere else, means, ‘Fabulous clothing party in fun world! Yay! Let’s all go NOW!’ in Villa General Belgrano.

It’s just all so delightfully joyful. Even my cough forgot to bother me for a while as I took in the sights with amusement.

The town plays host to an annual beer party during the first two weeks of October because it actually models itself on Germany. This is because, after the Battle of the River Plate in 1939 (I hadn’t heard of it either, don’t worry), a German ship was sunk and 130 of the surviving sailors settled in the village, bringing with them the compulsory pastry, beer and chocolate recipes, probably. Honestly, it’s so far removed from every other place you would ever see in Argentina that you really do feel as though you’ve been swept away from the country of steaks and tango and placed in the German countryside.

The only hint that Alberto, a barely conscious Vini and I were still in Argentina as we took the five-minute walk from the bus station towards the main street was the sound and smell of those alluring
choripans
served sizzling in bread rolls — with sauerkraut. Locals and tourists in teutonically kitsch felt hats and shops featuring grinning oversized gnomes on their doorsteps further assured me I was day-tripping in a cartoon mad land.

Phil Collins was playing in all the
todo artesanal
(craft) stores as I snapped photos of the fairytale atmosphere and bought some German inspired
alfajores
– those yummy chocolate covered biscuits I discovered in Buenos Aires. Both Vini and Alberto bought barrel-esque souvenir beer mugs with ‘Oktoberfest 2012, Villa General Belgrano’ written in Gothic script across them. Vini dropped his shortly afterwards when he tripped on a pile of discarded beer bottles underneath a lamppost and chipped the handle. But he said that it merely added to the charm and went about filling it with yet more
‘Mak Bier — Brautradition seit 1959’.

Seeing as though my cough was still lingering on the sidelines, I decided I probably shouldn’t enjoy more than one beer, but the one I tried was decent enough and Vini and Alberto seemed to enjoy all of theirs. In fact, after we ate more sausages, sipped some hot wine from a steaming street-side barrel and danced to a live German band in the main square with our arms crossed and the mud splattering all over our jeans, the Brazilians decided they liked it so much in German World that they were going to stay. I’m not sure they quite got the message that the bus I was catching back to Córdoba really
was
the last one, and that they really
would
have to find somewhere else to stay without any of their belongings, but I was too tired to worry. I left them jumping up and down with their giant mugs like inebriated leprechauns and headed back to the bus station alone, eating an
alfajore
and taking a few more photos of gnomes along the way for good measure.

If you’re from Europe and you’re travelling through Córdoba and have had your fill of national parks, you really have to go to Villa General Belgrano and stay the night, if you can, especially if you’re feeling homesick. Grab yourself a strudel and Skype your mum and, trust me, it’ll be like you never left.

Oh, and if you happen to spot some dark-haired boys mooning the passersby through a window from a bunk bed, you’ll know Alberto and Vini never left, either.

10/10