Brett's Southern Crossing

I visited Uruguay twice, the first time was in February as a weekend trip between my first and second month of class (and well before I started traveling through Argentina and Chile).  This was the height of summer, and so myself and a few classmates went to Punta del Diablo to visit the beach.

Buquebus Ferry

A visit to Buenos Aires can easily include a visit to Uruguay, you just need to take a 1 hour ferry from downtown across the river.  There are very few departures to the capital city of Montevideo (which takes several hours), instead it’s common to take the 1-hour fast-ferry to Colonia del Sacramento and then connect on a 3-hour bus.  Most people are happy to do this, since Colonia is a nice place to visit.  Most people would probably use clichéd terms like picturesque, quaint, or sleepy.  Many people stop to enjoy a restaurant, or stay the night in a bed and breakfast and zoom around the town on cheap rented scooters (if the 10 minute walk from one end to the other sounds too taxing).  It’s a small town with an interesting historic quarter, which includes some original structures from the 1700s.  A couple of hours is probably all that’s really needed here though.

Historic Colonia

East of Montevideo is Punta del Este, the famous beach town that attracts South America’s rich and famous.  Steven, Nicki, Shelby and I decided to go farther east, almost to the border with Brazil to a beach town called Punta del Diablo.  This place was amazing, and exactly what what a small little beach down to be: a patchwork of cabanas, cabins, and houses; stretches of bright white sand with the ocean rolling in; a few outdoor bars with raeggetone bands playing at night; decaying fishing boats winched up onto the sand; dirt streets with stray dogs and dune buggies roaming around; and an isolated feel despite the crowds of vacationers.

Boats, buggies, sand, sun, beer....what more could you want?

When we visited it was the height of vacation season for Argentina and Uruguay, and this town of 500 fisherman that just recently scored its first ATM was packed with 15,000 visitors clutching their thermoses and maté gourds.  Still, it seemed like there was plenty of beach available and we took full advantage of the ocean and the sun, in the end getting terrible sunburns after falling asleep on the beach.

My next trip was very different.  I wanted to visit Montevideo before I left, so I returned in May.  By this time it was cold, rainy, and a bit miserable overall.  Montevideo is an oddly dead city on the weekends, but interesting to see.  I walked through the downtown area and then out to the Rambla, a path that skirts the coast and the various beaches of Montevideo out to the suburbs.  I managed to bring two cameras with dead batteries, so below I present my only photo of Montevideo:

The other main thing people tend to do in Uruguay is visit a cattle estancia (ranch), for some country life and good steak dinners.  Maybe I’ll have time on my next visit…

Iguazu Falls, dreary in the rain

Iguazu Falls is taller and wider than Niagara and is made up of almost 200 individual cascades in a lush green area tucked between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.  On the Argentine side, visiting the falls takes an entire day for hiking the various trails and taking boat tours to various locations.  It was a lot of fun, which was a bit surprising because it was raining all day and I spent almost 10 hours soaking wet!

The town of Puerto Iguazu is small but pleasant.  I think that Foz do Iguacu on the Brazilian side is larger, but I didn’t have a visa to visit so I didn’t go (although in reality, Argentina is the only one of the three countries that bothers stopping people at the border).

It’s definitely worth visiting, but consider flying – Buenos Aires is 18 hours on the bus.  I did actually get an amazing night of sleep on this journey by buying a suite-class lie-flat seat.

After 4 and a half months living in Buenos Aires I feel like I should have a lot to say about it.  In a way I guess I do, but I’m not sure how to summarize it into a blog post.  My time there was split in half, 2 months living in Las Cañitas and 2 and a half months living in Recoleta with a 2 month trip though Argentina and Chile in the middle.

My Apartment Building in Las Canitas

The first time I enrolled in Spanish classes at the Universidad de Belgrano, which had good teachers and materials but was about 50% more expensive than most schools and class sizes were a far too large at 15-18.  Classes were 5 days a week, 5 hours a day.  It worked well enough for learning basic spanish, but I think it’s a poor way to learn advanced spanish or get proficient in conversation.  The second time I studied with two private professors, meeting in cafes and restaurants, for a combined total of about 10 hours of instruction each week.  This really helped my speaking ability but I have to admit I could have studied a bit more between classes.  Still, by having a resonable number of class hours I was able to devote more time outside of class to practice, which really helps a lot.  Too much class is counterproductive in the end.

Profesor Gérman

Profesora Natalia

Until the end of my time there I hardly did anything touristy.  It was nice because it seems like I really lived like a local for the most part.  Buenos Aires has a lot going on and an incredible number of cafes, ice cream shops, and restaurants.  Everything is available for free delivery from your laundry to ice cream to anything you want from the local minimart.  There are plenty of downsides too – terrible air quality, dog poop all over the sidewalk, etc.

I didn’t learn quite as much Spanish as I hoped.  I can talk to anyone about just about anything, but I’m still a ways from being fluent.  I’m planning to keep working on it in Austin though.

It was an amazing experience and I’m glad I made time to do it!

My last couple weeks in Buenos Aires I finally got around to doing a bit of sightseeing.  You really only need to spend 3-4 days in the cities to see most of the tourist sights, although it’s the kind of place you could easily stay for ages just to enjoy walking the neighborhoods, eating in great restaurants, relaxing in cafes, and going to special events.

In no particular order, here are the touristy things I thought were worth seeing:

Recoleta Cemetery

Where the rich and famous show off by building elaborate mausoleums.  Many of Argentina’s famous politicians and wealthy families are buried here, and it’s still a functioning cemetery where the modern-day elite aspire to rub their deceased shoulders with the likes of Evita.  The cemetery is huge and has the feel of a city, with a network of streets weaving through hundreds of mausoleums.  Most are ornate and in good repair, but some are really degraded.  I’m not sure exactly how it works, but it seems you (or your family) somehow need to keep paying for maintenance.  Some tombs were damaged and in a really unfortunate state considering there were still coffins inside.  Also, in case you were considering it putting a skylight in your mausoleum is not something I would recommend.

La Boca

Possibly Buenos Aires’ most touristy place, this famous neighborhood is known for its brightly painted buildings, art museums, and its association with tango.  There’s one street several blocks long packed with tango-themed cafes and restaurants with performers who will dance together and then drag tourists on stage to give tango a try.  If you’re interested in tango, it’s possible to take classes in many places in the city.  Attending a milonga (community tango dance) is another good option – you can watch lots of people dancing with their partners, and professors often give performances and demonstrations.  There’s something really cool about seeing aging couples dancing together dressed to the 9s.  Considering the dramatic events of the last 40-50 years in Argentina, it’s like watching a bit of history.

Downtown

There is a solid cluster of photo-ops in downtown Buenos Aires, including Avenida 9 de Julio (a massive 18-lane avenue), the Obelisk, Casa Rosada (the Rose House, where the President lives.  Tours available in Spanish), Plaza de Mayo, Teatro Colon (one of the world’s great opera houses, newly restored) and the main plaza surrounded by opulent government buildings.

Puerto Madero

This port was constructed for many years, only to be deemed too small once it was finished.  The area was instead converted into an upscale place with fancy restaurants, cafes, ice cream shops, waterfront promenades, condos, and a museum on a retired naval ship.

San Telmo

A bit sketchy at night, but packed with great restaurants, bars, and clubs.  During the day on Sundays there’s a huge antiques fair in Plaza Defensa, and at night the plaza is filled with tables and chairs for an outdoor bar.  One of the city’s most popular neighborhoods.

Palermo

The definition of Palermo has crept over the years to become an area so large it now has to be subdivided into Palermo Viejo, Palermo SoHo, Palermo Hollywood, Palermo Chico, and a few others that I’m sure I’ve forgotten!  The neighborhoods are filled with cafes, restaurants, and boutique shops, but this is still primarily a residential area and is a great way to see what a typical nice Porteño neighborhood is like.  Don’t miss a night in the outdoor bars near Plaza Serrano followed by dinner at any of the nearby parillas (Argentine grill restaurants).  Order a parillada to share among the table; they’ll deliver a massive grill filled with coals and heaped with chorizo (sausage), morcilla (black sausage), vacio (steak), costillas (ribs, usually beef), and perhaps some exotic bits like the intestines or even tripe.  It’s a great value, delicious, and about as Argentina as food gets!

Cafes and Bookshops

Buenos Aires has lots of cafes and bookshops that stand out.  El Ateneo Grand Splendid is an amazing bookshop set in a restored old theater.  Las Violetas is an ornate old-school cafe with waiters in white bow ties.  They serve absolutely massive hamburgers, and if you go with a group you can order a picada platter crammed with a variety of sandwiches.  They also have a bakery with dozens of different types of cakes and candies.  Las Violetas isn’t near much of anything else on the tourist circuit, but you can go there on the A-line subway, which is an interesting experience itself.  The A-line was the first metro in Latin America and many of the trains still running on this line are rickety antiques with wood-paneled interiors and manually operated doors.  Classica y Moderna is another neat bookshop that is a good example of a typical city bookstore.  It’s got a nice cafe up front and tall racks of books crammed in the rear.  Cafe Tortoni is classic cafe downtown, known best for its history of having famous Argentina writers, artists, and politicians among its clientele.  For Example, Luis Borges, Carlos Gardel, and Alfonsina Storni.

And More

Of course there’s plenty of other options too.  A futbol match, going to the horse races at the hipodromo, taking a train to the river delta in Tigre, going to a milonga (tango dance), etc.  And remember that a typical weekend night out is dinner from 11pm-1am, drinks for a few hours, then a club til dawn!

Video Screen in Parque San Martin

One of the cool parts of staying in Buenos Aires for so long was the chance to spend an entire World Cup in a cities with a team in strong contention to win.  I had been looking forward to it for months, and though Argentina didn’t go all the way it was still pretty nice.

Most of the Argentina world cup matches I watched in a local restobar near my apartment, and I watched USA matches and quite a few other matches in my favorite cafe in Las Cañitas.  The Argentines seemed excited if not truly pumped for the matches I saw, although I really only watched the group matches in the restobar.  So there wasn’t too much on the line.

I went to Uruguay for a weekend partway through the cup, and got two see Uruguay defeat South Korea to make it to the final 8.  The last time they had advanced so far was 1970, and I have to say they were really worked up for their knockout round match.  I watched the match in a small restaurant in a little town called Colonia de Sacramento and after they won tons of Uruguayans were zooming up and down the streets on motorcycles towing huge flags and setting off fireworks.  The news was live for hours showing crowds celebrating in the streets of Montevideo.  The next day I went to Montevideo to see Argentina defeat Mexico, and was interested to see that the Uruguayans were not supporting their neighbors!

The last match I saw was Argentina vs Germany.  All the matches had been screened on massive video boards downtown in San Martin Park.  By this time I was out of my apartment and living in a hostel, so I went with 4 English girls in my hostel to see the match.  Unfortunately Argentina was pretty much dominated by Germany so it was more of a funeral than the party I was hoping for.

After seeing Argentina dominated we were able to look very serious with this guard at the Presidential Mansion

All in all it was great to see matches in two countries who were really into the cup.  I know that in a lot of cases schools and businesses closed, and an Argentine friend told me her office had brought in TVs and popcorn makers for the staff to enjoy.  I learned a lot about the game and know quite a bit about the players now as well.

Argentina, along with several other South American countries, are celebrating their 200th anniversaries this year.  As Napoleon caused chaos in Europe, most of South America took advantage of the situation to declare independence from Spain, or at least begin the process.  In Buenos Aires there was a week of celebrations culminating in a huge parade down Avenida 9 de Julio.  In Argentina’s case, while July 9th is independence day they celebrate the nation’s birthday a little earlier in May, since the first local government was formed in May of 1810 (independence wasn’t declared until 1816).

In true Argentine fashion, the parade started well after dark at 9pm.  The floats were really well done and covered all of the major events of Argentine history including the indigenous peoples, wars of independence, political upheaval, military dictatorship, Malvinas/Falkland Islands war, the Madres y Abuelos de Plaza de Mayo, Peronism, the industrial revolution, democracy, and more.  I took a video, which was difficult since with 3 million people attending the parade it was kind of a mosh pit just to stay in my spot!

A great photo album of the festivities can be found here.

Mendoza has just about everything going for it:  Easy to get to from both Buenos Aires and Santiago, a great place to ski, surrounded by mountains (most famously Aconcogua, the higher mountain in the Americas), a really pleasant and easygoing town full of cafes and restaurants, and maybe most famously a large part of Argentina’s wine country.

I hope I can return someday, because my few days there barely scratched the surface.  It was too early for ski season, and I was just about mountained-out by this time.  So I spent 2 days enjoying the cafes and parks in the city, and a day doing the typical tourist activity of drunkenly riding bikes between wineries.

Gulp!

What made this stop great was my hostel, Hostel Lao.  It was named Best Hostel in Latin America last year, and I can see why.  It’s in a great spot, the staff are really helpful, and it has bathrooms as nice as a downtown condo.  It’s also got a nice little courtyard with hammocks and chairs.  But the best part was that they set up a great bike tour for me and a few other people in our hostel.  Most people go with a big bike company in the Maipu area, which is crowded with tourists and the wineries have high fees for entrance.  Hostel Lao set us up with a small family company called Baccus, and they in turn set up appointments at 3 wineries in a different suburb of Mendoza.  It seemed to me that we were the only ones visiting these wineries all day, and it was a nice way to do it since we didn’t feel rushed and the staff seemed happy to give some personal attention.  The last winery was an organic winery owned by a small family, and we spent at least an hour talking with the owner and vintner.  This was especially nice since she could describe all the ins and outs of adding a bit of a certain grape for color and other technical details of the process.  Her wine is mostly exported to the USA, so I feel a bit like I’ve got my own private bodega in Argentina I can shop from when I get home.

Salta feels a lot like Buenos Aires, which is probably why I liked it a lot.  There wasn’t much to see or do, but I could have been happy for a week just walking around and relaxing in cafes.

A colorful church near the city center

The most interesting thing I did here was visit the Museum of High Altitude Archaeology.  It’s signature attraction are the mummified remains of 3 children sacrificed by the Incas on a nearby mountain.  The Incas didn’t intentionally mummify them like the Egyptians, instead it was a natural occurrence based on the environmental conditions of the mountain.  The Incas worshipped the mountains and the highest altitude peaks, so the children were sacrificed at a high altitude with low barometric pressure, no humidity, and other conditions that prevented any bacteria from decomposing the bodies.

The children were a 15-year-old girl, a 7-year-old girl, and an 8-year-old boy.  After the arduous journey to the top of the mountain they were fed a meal that included enough alcohol and sedatives to knock them out, then left to die of exposure.  Gruesome, but what I found interesting was that these were the children of the highest ranking families in the empire – No leaving the tough stuff to the serfs.  They were also buried with lots of toys and trinkets made of gold.

The three children are now kept in special low pressure chambers with treated air and minimal light.  They rotate each of them through the display every so often.  When I went, the child on display was the boy.  This was probably for the best, as the boy’s head is curled down towards his chest making his face not visible.  The 15-year-old girl is more or less in perfect condition and the 7-year-old girl is in good condition as well but was struck in the head by lightening so she’s a bit charred.  In the end the boy is probably the least disturbing to actually view.

Definitely one of the most interesting museums I’ve been to.  The displays were all in Spanish, but the staff can provide a packet of written translations to bring along with you.

My last stop in my stay in San Pedro de Atacama was to visit the world’s largest copper mine, the Chuquicamata mine in northern Chile.  The mine is located just outside of Calama, about 1 hour away from San Pedro.

I began to get somewhat obsessed with visiting this mine.  It appealed to me initially for two reasons.  First, I had seen the mine on a show on the Discovery Channel called “The 10 largest holes in the world.” It featured pit caves, mines, canyons, etc and this mine was one of the largest.  Second, during my two months at Universidad de Belgrano we watched The Motorcycle Diaries twice to practice reading Spanish (the subtitles).  During the movie, Che Guevara meets a Chilean couple who have lost their land to the Anaconda Mining Company, a US company which owned the mine at that time.  He watches them try to find day labor in the mine and nearly ends up in a fight with the foreman choosing day laborers.  It was one of the first experiences that caused him to adopt his communist political philosophy.  Well, that mine was Chuquicamata so I thought it would be nice to connect my trip through Chile back to my spanish courses.

My first try to visit the mine, while on my way to San Pedro from La Serena, failed when my bus arrived to town quite late and it was too late to make it to the tour.  I thought that it just wasn’t meant to be.  Then, I discovered my planned departure to Salta on a Thursday wasn’t possible because there are no busses to Argentina on Thursdays.  With an extra day in hand, I decided to make another attempt.

The tour starts with a look at Chuquicamata town, which was a company built town for mine workers that was used until just a year and a half ago.  The company provided everything from housing to schools to a hospital to a movie theater.  Now, all the employees have moved to Calama because as the mine increased in size the company town became too close to comply with environmental regulations.  They’ve also buried most of the town under waste rock, which is dumped as close to the mine as possible due to the high amount of fuel the large mining trucks use.

From there, we got a look at the equipment used to pick up and transport the rock.  Only 0.86% of the rock is copper, and the mine produces over 1500 tons of 99.9% pure copper each day.  If you do the math, this means they have to process over 175,000 tons of rock each day.  First they blast a section of earth with explosives each afternoon to break it up into pieces.  Next, a large shovel scoops rock and loads it into the back of massive dump trucks, which then carry it up to the top of the mine so the copper can be extracted and purified.  Finally, the pure copper sheets are hauled to the port at Mejillones by rail directly from the mine.

They showed us an old shovel which can scoop about 20 tons in each shovelful.  It takes 12 people to operate the shovels, and they’re the size of a building.  In the modern process they use even larger shovels can scoop 50-100 tons per shovelful.  The mining trucks carry about 3 shovelfuls of rock at a time, weighing up to 300 tons.  The mine has 100 trucks and 9 shovels and operates 24×7.  Each mining truck costs $4 million USD and lasts 10 years.  The tires cost $40,000 USD and last for a year.  I think each truck had 6 tires.  The gas tank holds 4000 liters of diesel!  The truck itself operates the wheels with electric power generated by the diesel engine.  The trucks are about the size of a small two-story house and need just one driver.

The last stop on the tour is a lookout built on the top of the mine.  It’s really amazing to see a pit 5km long, 3km wide, and 1km deep.  Each day as they blast out more earth the length of the mine increases while they keep the same width and depth.  Standing on the ridge it’s almost like being in an airplane…you can see tiny mining trucks driving along the many switchbacks in the distance.  The opposite wall of the mine is so far away they look like ants crawling along.

The only disappointment of the tour is that we weren’t able to see any of the processing of the rock into copper.  I suppose it’s no surprise, the process involves crushing the rock, water and chemical baths, high heat, etc.  Too dangerous for tourists to be wandering around.

All in all, it was definitely worth a day to see!  And it will be even easier for people in the future, we were told that our tour was the last one that needed to arrange transportation to Chuqicamata.  In the future they’ll be picking people up at the company’s headquarters in Calama.  The tour is free every day at 2pm and our guide was bilingual so anyone passing through northern Chile might want to see if they can stop in Calama for a visit.

San Pedro de Atacama is mostly a tourist town, but it has kind of an old-west charm that makes it a nice place to stay.  Located in the midst of the driest desert in the world, the Atacama,  there are a surprising number of great tours and day trips available.

To start, one of the largest geyser fields in the world is nearby and a popular day trip is a sunrise visit to see the geysers.  They only erupt as the temperature changes from cold to warm in the morning, so a 4:30am departure is essential to get there while it’s still dark.  The desert is absolutely frigid at night, and it seems that hardly anyone is quite prepared for below-freezing temperatures.  While we spent an hour watching the geysers (here, more steam than the huge amount of water you’d see in a place like Yellowstone), while our driver cooked breakfast:  Once the geysers stopped erupting we were led to one of the pools, where bags of eggs and chocolate milk had been left.  Since the water was at the boiling point the eggs were hard-boiled and the chocolate milk was steaming hot.  By now I was frozen to the bone and this might have been the most satisfying breakfast of my life!

By now we’d been up what seemed like half the day and it was only 9AM.  The tour continued with visits to some traditional desert villages, where llamas are ranched.  The villages have between 20-100 residents.  Although we were told that in reality people primarily live in nearby cities and leave only a few people at the village at any one time to tend the animals.  The change is due to mandatory education laws for children, which are strictly enforced.  There isn’t a lot to see in the villages, but they were selling marinated llama-kebabs which were very tasty.

Even though the tour takes a while we were back by noon, so I decided to see the sunrise and sunset in the same day with a visit to the Valley of the Moon.  A driver took a group of us into the desert to a bunch of different viewing points to see both the desert landscape as well as the ring of volcanoes that surrounds the area.  The culmination is the sunset, which causes the soil in the area to glow red.  And since it was the full moon, we got a nice view of that set against the reds of the sunset.

The next day I went with a group to see some of the lagoons and salt lakes nearby.  It was a lot of driving and not a lot of seeing, but the landscape is interesting and there are a lot of pink flamingoes and other birds in the lagoons.

San Pedro has a few other possibilities.  I wanted to do some stargazing, since I’d failed to find a clear night in La Serena.  It turns out the largest tourist observatory in the world is in San Pedro…an outfit called SPACE which is actually a French astronomer with a collection of the best telescopes for stargazing that he trucks out into the desert.  The setting is perfect, with almost no light pollution, a cool desert night that prevents any thermal currents in the atmosphere from disrupting the view, and it’s a place where there are almost never clouds.  I was thwarted again though, SPACE closes for 4-5 days around the full moon because the moon’s light prevents them from seeing some of the more interesting things like galaxies and the “milky” part of the milky-way.  I don’t know anything about astronomy, but I’d like to come back someday to do one of these star tours and also see some of the big observatories.  Right outside of San Pedro they’re building the largest in the world – a huge array of radio telescopes as a collaboration between a bunch of governments around the world.

San Pedro also offers sand boarding and trips to the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, so it’s really a great place to fit in to any trip in Chile.