Vacation report: First day in Chilecito

We arrived at Chilecito on Saturday, August 30, mid-morning. The trip from Rosario lasts about 14 hours, not the least because it goes out of the straight path to reach Córdoba City and stops in two dozen little towns on the way. Although the punctuality was exceptional and the travel was fortunately uneventful, I'd like to vent my carefully preserved rancour at the General Urquiza bus company, which gave us no on-board dinner and no breakfast — a major crime if you ask me.

You get to Chilecito and the bus leaves you on the road by the new terminal station. It's not far from the city center but unless you're a backpacker you don't want to drag your stuff ten long blocks, so we took a taxi. We found our hostel quickly enough, left our bags there, went for breakfast, then back to the hostel for a bath, and then to the Cablerail Museum.

The Famatina range west of Chilecito is full of valuable mineral ores, so back in the early 20th century a German company built a system of aerial cables to transport rocks from the mine up in the mountains (at some 4,600 m ASL) to the processing facilities in Chilecito (at 1,100 m ASL). The rails and the supporting towers are still in place and, according to the guide, it might still work if the parts that have been stolen were replaced (and maybe oiled a bit). The Museum is Station No. 1 of the Cablerail, its terminus, and it harbours a heterogeneous collection of tools, blueprints in German, a payroll, parts of the mineral wagons, and rust.

We learned that the Famatina is being open for exploitation of its gold ore by the provincial governor, one of whose campaign promises was that he'd never allow exploitation of the Famatina. Gold extraction requires cyanide, and the snow on top of the Famatina is Chilecito's almost single source of water. Environmentalists don't know if the cyanide process is safe and they're up in arms against the government.

After the museum, we took a nap and then went out again, wandering, taking in the ochre-pink of walls, the blossoming lapachos, the stillness of siesta time. Carrying a thermos for mate, we went to see a white statue of a Christ on a hill and took pictures of ourselves beside a couple of tall cacti, exactly as tourist couples are supposed to do.

And those were the morning and the afternoon of the first day.

Vacations: Our days in Junín de los Andes

The trip from Neuquén to Junín de los Andes (which you saw in pictures in my last post) took about 6 hours. First we went west, into the arid central plain of the province, where pumpjacks stand solitary here and there, bobbing in slow motion. Then southwest, towards the Andes and the Lake District.

We arrived around 2 PM into a little bus terminal with a little wooden information booth beside the platforms. There we asked about La Casa de Aldo y Marita ("Aldo & Marita's House"), our chosen place of stay, and were promptly directed there. There was no need of a taxi, because Marita's is only 6 blocks away, one block from the river.

Junín de los Andes lies mostly between National Route 40 and the Chimehuin River, which forms its eastern border. To the west is the Lanín National Park; northwest you have Lake Huechulafquen and, north of it, the volcano that gives the park its name, Lanín, and the Mamuil Malal Pass to Chile.

The city itself is small, a town of about 10,000 residents with a few blocks of well-kept urban features and some commercial activity around a nice main square, plus quiet neighbourhoods of single-story houses and streets that gradually turn to gravel and dirt roads.

Our lodging was a residencial, that is, a kind of hostel that is fashioned out of someone's home. Residenciales tend to be more informal, cheaper, and obviously look more like houses than like hotels.

Aldo and Marita both run the place, but Marita is clearly the one in charge of the house and its temporary residents, while Aldo organizes fly fishing trips on the river and other aquatic entertainments for tourists, not necessarily the ones in the house. Marita also makes smoked trout and venison, which sell for steep prices in small amounts.

The place, as you'll see from the pictures, can only be described as "cozy" and "warm". You have all the things you can expect from a hostel (kitchen, sink, fridge, some supplies for common use, a common table), and one I hadn't seen before: an asador with parrilla, that is, a special brick oven and a grill to prepare and cook asado, inside the main room. On the other hand, Marita doesn't give you breakfast, but that's not that big a problem. The trouble with Marita's House is the wooden stairs and the upper floor in general. The whole house seems to bend and bow and it creaks loudly as you go upstairs to sleep, and once you're in your bed you can clearly hear everything in the common room. So you'd better be really tired when you go to sleep, or you won't be able to.

We stayed five nights, almost six days in Junín de los Andes, so this is only one of several posts, but I'll tell you from the start that I knew the best part of the trip was about to start as soon as I came into Marita's. People will tell you that Junín simply has too little of everything, but if you go there to rest, you'll find one of the most suitable spots for it; and if you're looking for simple adventure, you'll find it as well.

In practical terms, this whole area and especially Junín de los Andes is suited for budget travelers and backpackers and all others who, like me, don't care for pre-packaged tours. You can find accomodation in dozens of places. Buses come and go, taking you to places where you can experience the majesty of nature firsthand, and back to "civilization", cheaply, safely and quickly. Fellow travelers will engage you in conversation and give you all the best tips and hints. You can choose to walk around, wet your feet in the crystal-clear lakes and quick rivers, climb the hills, or just lie down in the grass. Nature's realm has only recently been invaded by humanity here. True, there are signs and roads, and trash where there shouldn't be, and every now and then a car will come by along the silent road, but that's about it.

Most important for us big-city urban dwellers, who have been increasingly forced to paranoia and mistrust of our fellow citizens, is that this place is one where you can stop looking over your shoulder all the time. You can be sent into a tourist trap by an agency, and you can be scammed, but you can also stay away from that and explore by yourself.

On our first day in Junín de los Andes we just tried to get our bearings — finding out where the center, main square, cybercafés, supermarkets, etc. were. As the sun came down a bit, we hit the square and just lied there with our mate (and my camera). The next day promised to be exciting, our first trip into the real Lake District.

Vacations: Into Neuquén

Although in my last post I said "this was our last day in Malargüe", I should've said "our last whole day". We had to go from there to Neuquén, but what should be the most direct path was unavailable — National Route 40, which goes south across the desert, has been in the same sorry state since ever, and you can't use unless you have a special vehicle. So instead of going straight south into Neuquén Province and reach Chos Malal, you have to go north-northeast to San Rafael, and then east and back south along the border of Río Negro, get to Cipolletti, cross the river and then you're in Neuquén City. That's an almost semi-circular route that takes about eight hours for a trip that should take at most five.

So, in order to avoid paying for an extra night and/or arriving at ridiculous times, we stayed in Malargüe half of the next day, then took the 3-hour bus ride to San Rafael, rested a bit there (outside that creepy bus station!), had dinner, and then at about 11 PM boarded the bus to Neuquén. The trip was unenventful. I slept through the night, and woke up at dawn as we arrived in Cinco Saltos, less than an hour before our destination.

Neuquén's bus terminal station is almost brand-new, and it looks more like an airport, with lettered embark gates and all. Everything seems to be neatly organized, if only a little sterile.

Neuquén itself seems to be a fairly modern city. The downtown area (where I stayed at all times) is within the limits marked by National Route 22 and the river. There are a couple of wide avenues and a lot of trees lining the streets, but no large parks (that I know of). Constant irrigation of grass in public spaces through sprinklers is conspicuous; this is still, after all, semi-arid Patagonia, and only the fact that it's at the junction of two large rivers spares it from being a bone-dry plain.

Visitors looking for historical buildings and sites will also be rather disappointed; even to the untrained eye Neuquén shows a complete lack of old architectural styles. The city looks neat, like its bus station, and much unlike Rosario or Buenos Aires with their layers and layers of new and old dirt and cracks, with their half-visible cycles of destruction and reconstruction.

Neuquén was a small frontier town when the big cities of central Argentina were already metropolises. It was at the border of civilization, the equivalent of the American Far West, at the beginning of the 20th century, a couple of decades after the "Conquest of the Desert" (i.e. the government-sponsored genocide of the Patagonian natives and the subsequent occupation of their lands, in several waves), and continued to be a small city until oil was discovered in the area in the 1960s.

Well, we found our little hotel quite easily and checked in. It wasn't a pleasant experience. The owner of the hotel was a Polish immigrant who must have seen World War I with her own eyes, a bit hard of hearing to say the least, extremely methodical, rather reserved, and mindful of waste to the point of pasting newspaper articles and warning signs about water and energy conservation. She charged quite a lot for a rather basic service, though in her defence I must say all of Neuquén City is terribly expensive. No kitchen, no space for laundry, no breakfast, and no showers unless you paid an extra fee, and this was more expensive than the (infinitely better) hostel I found in San Martín de los Andes.

Neuquén City seems not to have understood its own touristic potential for budget travelers looking for a conveniently urban base for exploration. If it weren't for the outrageous prices, I would've stayed 4 or 5 days, and explored the whole Alto Valle area of Río Negro and the interior of Neuquén (such as the oil towns of Plaza Huincul/Cutral-Có and Zapala). As it was, we decided to cut it to only 2 nights.

On the first day we decided to do some reconnaisance. We walked around town, I took pictures, we got some information from the tourism office, and we came to the conclusion that trying to move around without a car and without paying ridiculous sums of money to an agency was pointless. This was just not a touristic part of the province, period.

So in the afternoon we followed the tourism office's advice and visited the beach. Neuquén has three public beach resorts, all easily accessible on foot, about 2 km from Route 22. We chose one and settled on the sand. The day was rather hot, so we bathed in the river, and then came back to dry in the sun. By pure luck we caught a kayak regatta in progress (nice colourful pictures for moi).

By this time, incidentally, we'd gotten accustomed to using sunblock all the time we were outdoors. I'd taken the precaution of getting some protective tan before leaving Rosario, but still the Patagonian sun was terrible, and soon we were all quite red, sunblock notwithstanding. I'm naturally dark, so I didn't get burned, but I came back almost chocolate-brown and peeling in a couple of spots.

El Che and his monument

I was reading GoodAirs the other day and found the news about the monument to Ernesto Che Guevara. The monument is going to take up three tons of bronze, donated by thousands of people in the form of old keys and other objects, to sculptor Andrés Zerneri. I knew it had been decided to erect the monument here in Rosario, by a majority of votes of those who donated the bronze, but I didn't know when or where exactly.

So, digging a little bit, I found the plans for Che's 80th birthday celebrations at the Municipality of Rosario website. It turns out there'll be several days (June 12–15, 2008) with a schedule of various events, including the unveiling of the monument, which will be located within the recently finished Parque Yrigoyen, near the old Central Córdoba Station. It's not a prime visitor spot, being on the very edge of the macrocentric area, but it's along one of the major avenues of the city (27 de Febrero) and should be easily accessible.

I expect there'll be a lot of debate about the convenience of honouring el Che. Some consider him a terrorist and a murderer; others call him a brave freedom fighter; others disregard his ideology and his methods and somewhat shallowly admire his struggle for the cause he believed in; for most he's little more than an icon of rebellion. I have no position on this, feeling that this is a subject for reflection, not debate. Historical facts are clear enough for everybody to learn and decide.

The monument will settle a debt that the city has had with itself for decades — it will be a reminder of the life of one of its most notable children. There are monuments to, and streets and parks named after, much more sinister historical characters. Call me a heartless postmodernist on this, but I'd rather have a big statue of a controversial man that gets tourists here that not having anything. And if the whole celebration and the monument get more young disinformed people to go to the library and read history books, all the better.

Culture weekend

I always more-or-less supposed there were tons of culture-related events and culture thingies to do in Rosario at any given time, but then the propaganda machine of the Municipal Culture Secretariat is well-oiled and sometimes they do blow things out of proportion. However, this is not the case right now.

You'll remember the vernissage I attended last Tuesday — well, that exhibition was held in the very lobby of the seat of the Culture Secretariat, in Rosario Norte Station. (On a side note, I asked my artist friend how she'd managed to get that space. She said she had no idea; it was a deal with her university. And I was already fantasizing about a photo exhibition there...)

Then last Friday I went to see this display of old and new photos, drawings and blueprints of buildings by Lluís Domènech i Montaner. I had no idea who he was, but then I read that he was a pioneer of Catalan Art Nouveau (a.k.a. Modernisme) on par with Antoni Gaudí, so I went to the Parque España to check out the exhibition. Domènech designed buildings mostly in Barcelona, but I knew the style because other Catalan architects worked here in Argentina and particularly in Rosario (see my post with the picture of the Palacio Cabanellas).

Very impressive, enough for 45 minutes of admiration, and it only cost me one peso. I took as many pictures as I could, mostly not very good (pictures of pictures, under museum-type lighting, come out usually rather bad), but enough to document it. I don't know if it was allowed to take them, but nobody protested.

Then on Saturday I was scanning the cultural schedule again, and I found a Japan-themed event at the Museo Estévez, including a display of Japanese art pieces and ornaments, a short lecture on Japan's history, and kamishibai (paper theatre). I decided to check it out as well, but I made the mistake of taking a detour to enjoy the sunny view along the river (camera in hand, of course). It turned out that the view was extremely rewarding and I arrived at the museum when the lecture had already started, and after all the tickets for the kamishibai were reserved. It was all free of charge, but the space was limited, so I was told to come back for another show later. I couldn't do that, but I'm going to try it tonight if I can.

The lecture was fine enough — a brief surview of the relations between Japan and the West, showing how the myth of an enclosed, self-sufficient, almost xenophobic "millenary" culture is just a myth, as many of the things we associate distinctly with Japan were imported or adapted from the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch, the British or the Americans. The lecturer wandered into another kind of myth herself a couple of times, unnecessarily, for example speaking of the "unconfirmed" etymology of arigato from Portuguese obrigado, which has long been known to be absolutely bogus, and also relating a supposed graphical similarity between the Japanese kanji for "snow" and "blood" and samurai's concepts of purity and death. Maybe she meant "white" and "blood", which have somewhat similar characters, but then why not "white" and "red"?

Walking to and from the museum, I also noticed a lot of tourists. And I mean a lot. The riverside parks and the Flag Memorial were packed, and adding to the usual locals with mate and thermos and kids and dogs you couldn't stop noticing a large number of people with curious looks, camera in hand, taking pictures of themselves in front of absolutely unremarkable spots, or map in hand wandering the streets.

I found a young couple from some place in Greater Buenos Aires who actually asked me, not how they could get to a certain place, but where they could go, because they were not sure which direction to take. The girl seemed not to know that Rosario had a river, or that it was a large city, and somehow they'd both been able to walk down Córdoba St. without asking for (or finding by themselves) the 70-meter-tall Flag Memorial at the end of it. I also found a couple from Bánfield (Buenos Aires) who asked me to take a picture of them, and commented that Rosario's very nice but has almost no touristic infrastructure. I took another picture of a middle-aged couple from Córdoba. And on my way back I had to explain to two elderly ladies (one of them with a city map she was holding upside down) how to get back to the Bus Terminal.

The weekend is just half over, so there's still much to do...

Tourism in Santa Fe

I'm a fan of travel and tourism, as you may already have noticed. I'm convinced that travelling broadens the mind and (under the proper conditions) helps you relax, rethink your life strategies, plan ahead. I'm pleasantly surprised to notice how Rosario is slowly receiving an increasing trickle of tourists, who will, I assume, take the good news back to their homes, whether in Argentina or abroad (it seems to be mostly Argentina and mostly Buenos Aires, though there have been no formal surveys of that, and I've walked past groups of people speaking English and German more than once in the last few weeks).

I was also surprised, negatively and continuously, that Santa Fe as a province didn't bother to try and attract tourism. That was until now. The government, in coordination with private companies, has launched Turismo Cerca, an initiative that is (in this first stage) intended to promote tourism in the province. It's only in Buenos Aires, because it's conveniently close, accessible, and of course, because one third of the country's population lives in the metropolitan area. With hundreds of kilometers of river coast, plus eco-agricultural and historical tourism options just waiting to be exploited, it's a shame that this hasn't been done before, but better late than never.

I must say that I myself am guilty of not advertising my province by word or by example. I've stayed in places 1000 km away from here and I haven't visited the tens of small towns not 100 km around Rosario that have interesting things to show. Considering my availability of money and time, I feel like I'm wasting my time sitting here while I could be zigzagging around the province with a backpack... I think I'll be checking that touristic portal of the province more often.

Going to Posadas

I'm getting my things in order because I'm going on winter vacations. It'll be only a few days, but not a long weekend escapade. I'm leaving this Sunday afternoon, to arrive Monday morning (Independence Day, incidentally) in Posadas, Misiones.

Posadas is a city of a quarter million people with no famous tourist attractions. The area, however, is full of ruins of 17th and 18th century Jesuit missions (think The Mission, though the movie's setting was actually elsewhere). It's about 1,000 km north of Rosario, upstream on the opposite shores of the Paraná, and logically much warmer at this time of the year. Now that a polar cold front (another one) is headed for us, I think my timing has been perfect... only the weather forecast for Posadas says either "cloudy" or "showers" for every day next week. I'd have some nice rain rather than just an overcast gray sky. It's better for pictures, too (except it's a bother to handle an umbrella without hands while you hold the camera still).

I'm told Posadas is very nice, even though it has no big monuments or the sophistication of bigger cities. I'm staying there at least three days, possibly more, but I also want to check out Encarnación, which is across the river, in Paraguay. Rumour has it you can smuggle anything at a very good price, from MP3 players to plasma TVs, from Paraguay. We'll see...

Rosario in the news

I peruse several local and national newspapers almost every day to get my news..., which of course would be useless to look for on TV (too much time lost waiting for pseudo-news to finish). The main local news source is La Capital, a venerable paper founded in 1867 that is Argentina's oldest of those still published. La Capital is objective enough not to pass op-ed for news, and its online version is fairly good. There's also El Ciudadano, but it's a "popular" paper so its quality is atrocious, and its website looks like something you could've designed using HTML 1.0. Then there's Rosario3.com, an online newspaper property of the same media group that owns Canal 3, Radio 2 (the main AM station in Rosario) and several major FM stations. Rosario3 is a recent addition and, though amateurish at times, it does cover certain items that the other neglect. Finally, there's Rosario/12, a short supplement to the Buenos Aires-based Página/12 written by a local staff.


I also read the "national" papers La Nación and Página/12 to get an ideologically broad coverage. I use scare quotes because Buenos Aires-based papers are invariably biased towards Buenos Aires coverage. They're distributed throughout the country but, quite logically, most of their public is concentrated in one hypertrophic metropolitan area that thinks of the country as one Important Place plus a vast, undiferentiated hinterland that provides the capital with food and football players. Página/12 does often take a look at important issues of "the interior", especially those related to social and political conflicts, which it attacks with undisguised ideological zeal; La Nación deals with national and local issues using the same pseudo-objective uptight treatment it employs with Buenos Aires news. I generally don't read Clarín, mainly because it's usually 75% sports non-news, though its supplements and journalist blogs are sometimes very interesting.

Rosario appears in Buenos Aires news almost only when something horrible or bizarre happens. Since we don't usually have floods or strange animal attacks or resonant small-town displays of misery, it's not often (there was these guys eating a cat in a villa miseria once in the 1990s... hence the epithet comegatos applied to rosarinos). However, reading Página/12's tourism supplement last Sunday, I was positively surprised by an article about Rosario.

The article speaks of Rosario as a passing weekend destination, which may be OK for people who only want to follow pre-set paths, but doesn't do justice to the city. Granted, most visitors wouldn't be caught dead outside certain areas (I myself would rather not) but the visitor may leave with the impression that Rosario is a medium-sized block of old houses plus a strip of river beaches and a few parks. The article does mention the amazing changes Rosario has had since the disastrous riots of 1989, where people looted supermarkets and stores, and the crisis of 2001–2002. Rosario was at one time the country's "capital of unemployment", and became at parts as dirty, desolate and unsafe as the poor parts of Greater Buenos Aires.

This same city, however, emerged from the last crisis with fewer permanent wounds and recovered fast. It earned a recognition for its advances in governance and development, leading to a better quality of life, by the UN Development Programme, and a recent study (which I covered) also placed it at the top of the quality of life ranking of Argentine metropolitan areas.

Página/12 humorously notes that Rosario views itself as "an independent city-state", so "if we take this seriously... a trip to Rosario is like going abroad". It and speaks of a "new Rosario" which has opened up public access to its river, something that Buenos Aires lost long ago, and notes that long-term urban planning has been at work. Despite two economic crises (with a full decade of neoliberal adjustment in the meantime), the local administrations have shared a common vision of Rosario and struggled to make it real. They've failed in many respects, or they've been forced to downsize certain promises, but an urban strategy exists.

The municipality is drafting the plan for the period 2007–2017 (I read about this in Rosario/12, by the way). It includes a project to build a multi-modal public transport node at the Cruce Alberdi, the place where the northeast of the city meets the border of the peripheric downtown area, now occupied by the Patio Parada, a railway node administered by the Nuevo Central Argentino. The project would have a small bus terminus, a stop of the BA–Rosario–Córdoba "bullet train" (which, by the way, nobody's heard of again), and (oh such delight!) a tramway station. The area will form an axis of communication within the city, with access to the airport and links with the metropolitan area.

At the same time, the municipality is presenting its urbanistic plans for this year. This will outline a number of large-scale changes to key areas of the city, design certain areas for residential use, preserve historical corridors with architectural homogeneity, prevent the disruption caused by tall towers popping out in certain areas (as is happening in Buenos Aires), and other more complicated goals. Such foresight is often marred by the harsh realities of negligence, corruption, bureaucratic delays and sheer lack of personnel... but anything is better than nothing.