Pie Fight

La Bella Vita

I wasn't expecting anything more than a self-indulgent and eventually unreadable memoir of life with the quaint natives, but La Bella Vita by Vida Adamoli turns out to be a pretty damn good case study of the effects of big time tourism on a small, once isolated town. The changes that sweep over her pseudonymous Neapolitan coast town of Torre Saracena are immense. They are happy for some - grinding poverty looks colourful to visitors, but the stunted physical stature of the older residents of the village is testament to how much it rules the poor's life. At the same time, they have community, and when that is lost, much good is. If I were ever teaching a class on tourism, this would be one of the easy reads I'd require.

Down with tourism!

Someone from Tourism Concern moans that tourism leads to increased poverty and that "many" southerners are against it. Better let them go back to idyllic lives they led before, then.

I'm reminded of some graffiti I saw in Spain once: "Tourist, you are the terrorist".

Did anything happen in Rio Gallegos?

It's been a while - cursed work...

From Calagete we took a lovely bus ride  across the pampas to Rio Gallegos,  actually heading just a touch south in order to get to a town where tourists hadn't filled every flight for the next week to come. Not far out of town, I thought I had achieved one of the key goals of my trip: perusing the guanaco. Alas, they was but the llama - hairy, cute, masticating and expectorating, but ever so domesticated. He is not my spirit animal. This is what I thought. Then I hit myself in the balls with a Travel Scrabble kit.

After a gorgeous ride across the pampa, we came into Rio Gallegos, which was mostly a dump, albeit a decent-sized one. Lovely room and the cheapest yet, and then out for some yumyum. Had a peek into something billed as The British Club, but avoided it for two good reasons. One, why would we travel halfway around the world to eat British food? Two, it was very formal, and the only people in there were a couple of Prescott-fat old Argentinians hunkered red-faced over their whiskies.

So an uneventful night and off ot the airport - which reminds me.

On our way from Ushuaia to Calafete, we got to the airport very early, and after checking in had loads of time to kill. Cards adn booze! Cards and booze! So we plopped down into the cafe, ordered a bottle of wine, and popped out the elvis cards to continue our cribbage tournament.

As we were playing, we noticed the line building up. No problem for us: it was full of oldsters who were surely on Aereolineas flights (we were on Wendy's fave: Lada). We'd just let the line go down and continue with our cards. No matter; we had tones of time anyway.

So while we were waiting, the line burst into an uproar. A team of rugby players had come into the lobby, and instead of sliding in behind the hiking boot-clad oldsters, the rugger boys slid straight into the front. Oh the hissing from the oldsters! One even shouted - over and over - 'Who do you think you are? Maradona?' I don't reckon any ARgentinian would have the cajones to claim that, but apparently you don't have to be the Gordo One to get to the front of the airposrt line; being a rugger bugger is enough. So to hoots of derision and much gnashing of dentures, the yoof to today moved to the front of the line and on through security.

Ah well, we thought once they'd passed, maybe we should queue up ourselves. So into the bag of the line we went, then ten or fifteen minutes of waiting, then through securtity, then - two security guards are rushing at us. 'Lada? Lada al Calafete?' Uh, si. 'Vamos! Vamos!' And before we knew it, we were being whisked to one side, out a door we hadn't seen, and were running across the concourse to get onto our plane, which, despite not being scheduled to take off for another half an hour or so, was revving up and raring to go. We ran halfway across the concourse under the giant umbrellas of the securty guards, who then pointed to our plane, stopped running, and abandoned us to our umbrella-less fate. Drunk and giggling in the rain, we made it to the plane, clambered up the steps, heard the door slam shut behind us, and fell into the only two seats left, in the very back of the plane. To our left, another tourist couple. Ahead of us, occupying the every other seat of the plane, the rugby team. After they'd boarded, the plane had just been waiting for us.

Escape from Calfete

We left it too late to get out of Calafete. Not sure what we were thinking (or weren't), but when we strolled blithely into the Lada office on the day we were planning to leave, we were we told that there were no seat available that day, there were no seats available for the rest of March. Blimey - it was only March 4th or so! (For those who don't know, ie everyone who's never been to Argentina, Lade is the Argentine military's airline, and they frequently sell seats for commercial purposes. We flew them from Ushuaia to Calafete (buying our tix only one day in advance, I might add, thus apparently making ourselves susceptible to overconfidence), and they are very (and inadvertently) retro '50s totalitarian chic, with a brilliantly Soviet-style waiting room in Ushuaia, and old gleaming planes on the runways. (In Ushuaia, it wasn't just the walls, with their unintentionally groovy old photos of Lade planes on the walls, that was Soviet-esque. There was also the need to come back on the day of the flight to confirm that we woudl be on it, the request that we pay exactly one peso each of our ticket cost in cash, and the full-length, belted, spy/dominatrix-type overcoat worn by the woman helping us.)

With Lade failing us (perhaps them month's flights were all full of rugby teams, as ours had been), we sought out boring old Aereolineas Argentinas. Imagine our surprise to be told that nope, there weren't any planes that day. Nor the next. Not even the next? Crikey, that would have left us stuck in Calafete for two days longer, just wanting to get out. With our delicate constitutions, it would have been analogous to those poor bastards who spend their entire lives in Bolton or Asheboro, North Carolina.

That's when whip-smart Wendy had yet another brainwave. Are there flights from Rio Gallegos, she asked? Yes, plenty, the woman said. So off to Rio Gallegos we went.

(If the process I just described sounds simple, that's because I'm a habitual liar. The way it actually worked is this: First, trudging dejectedly down the hill from the Lade office to that of Aereolineas, we asked the woman if there were any flights to Buenos Aires that day. When she said no, we left for a cup of coffee and a meeting of minds to decide what to do. Just after I ordered our coffees at the place next door, Wendy sent me back in to ask - all this in my feeble Spanish, mind you - if there were any flights for the next day. Somehow that hadn't occurred to us while in the office. I went in, asked, and was told no. Hmm, I thought. Then I left. I'm a man of action, you see.

Back at the coffee house, I had a sip of my cafe con leche. Are there flights the day after tomorrow, Wendy asked. Hmm, I thought. I don't know, I said. Why don't you go ask, she said. Because I'd feel like a prat going back in there, I said. Well I'm not going to do it, she said. I've already pestered the poor woman twice, I said. That means you have a relationship with her, Wendy said, a bond. She'll think it's wierd of you don't turn up and suddently I do. I couldn't argue with that logic, so I had another sip of coffee. Well, you better get going, Wendy said. Hmm, I thought. Then I left. Man of action, don'tcha know.

Back in the Aereolinas office, the poor woman laughed as I walked in. I rolled my eyes and shrugged my shoulderes in a gesture that was supposed to imply "girlfriends, isn't it crazy what they make you do", but more likely came across as "I'm the type of guy who dribbles when he gets excited about something - and I"m about to get excited about flying on Aerolineas Argentinas."

Are there flights the day after tomorrow, I asked. She rolled her eyes, but in a way that only her colleagues, me and everyone  in the watiing  room could see. NOt from here, she said. Hemm, I thought. Okay, I said. Then I left. MOA.

What about Rio Gallegos, Wendy asked, as I had a sip of my cold coffee. Don't know, I said. Didn't ask. You should, she said. Why me, I asked. We've covered that, she said. Right you are.

This time, I tried to pre-empt the AA woman by rolling my own eyes before she could roll hers. See, I was implying, I recognise the absurdity of this situation and I tool find it amusing and worthy of future anecdotes. Which I suspect she understood as, "While standing outside having a nice drool session, I came to the brilliant conclusion that, for the rest of your working life, I will come in here every three minutes and ask you a stupid question in crap Spanish."

Are there flights from Rio Gallegos to Buenos Aires the day after tommorow, I asked. Yes, she said, smiling. Then, since I didn't think to ask it, she added, "And tomorrow as well." Thank you, I said to her, for what I thought would be the last time. No, thank you, she said. As I was leaving, I'm fairly certain her colleagues didn't burst out laughing until the door was at least two-thirds shut.

I'd like to continue this story, but frankly, I just can't bear it. My beer needs re-filling  and I have to pee. (How much more embarrassing would it be to pee in my pants while relating this story?) Suffice it to say that I had to make only two  more trips into the now home-like offices of AA. The first, at Wendy's insistence, was  to ask if there were plenty of tickets available for the Rio Gallegos to Buenos Aires flights. Yes, she said. So we can wait until tomorrow, and buy them in there? Yes, she said. Which I agreed that we would do.

The second visit, of course, was a few minutes later, when we came in to buy tickets for the Rio Gallegos to Buenos Aires flight.)

Not that I stuck to that, of course.

El Calafete

After walking on Perito Moreno, Wendy went off the idea of going up to day hike around the Fitz Roy Massif area. The glacier had been so phenomenal, and we'd had several days of overwhelming nature, and... it just felt like, after the glacier, anything else along the same lines (ie super incredible nature) was going to pale in comparison. It would almost seem redundant.

All praise Wendy. For while this feeling was bouncing round in my head unidentified - and even if I had understood what I was feeling I wouldn't have had the balls to say "Fitz Roy Massif? Not interested" - Wendy suggested we bog off up north and do a surprise detour into the Mendoza region for wine tours, sunshine and the Andes. It turned out to be a brilliant idea, and not just because it added a whole new pillar to the trip: the rains that had afflicted us on our way to the glacier (they let up the second we got on it, and started back up soon as soon as we got back to the shelter afterwards) had according to a guy we talked to two days later, joined the trekkers in setting up camp round the Masif. So we would have seen beautiful sights, but we would have been waterlogged (despite the steely protection of my overtrousers) - and it would have seemed a bit underwhelming.

Our decision to leave after walking on Moreno left us with a day to kill in El Calafete, and almost left us with more. Calafete is a surprsingly sophisticated tourist town, by the way, with features (such as burning ditital photos onto CD) not even available in Ushuaia, which has a population of more than 40k. Amazingly, even our lazy asses are in the vanguard of Perito Moreno tourism, as Calafete - and the launching pad to the Perito Moreno glacier - didn't exist even as late as 25 years ago. It's not even on the map in Bruce Chatwin's fab In Patagonia, a point Wendy says is largely related to the fact that it didn't fit into the narrative. But I think that, narrative or no, had there been an infrastructure there, Chatwin wouldn't have been able to resist at least bunging it on the map, and probably even mentioning it in the text, as the glacier really is a wonder. I'd have liked to have read his attempt at describing it.

Chatwin or no, it's an almost brand-new town, sprung up when the government and/or business recognised that the glacier could be a powerful lure. As one guy (our groovy, Dom-ish man at Las Cabinitas, I believe) told Wendy, pretty much no one we saw except the children and teenagers had been born in Calafete; the place just hadn't existed before then, so none of the older, working age people actually came from there. It's an astonishingly beautiful area, and our change of plans regarding leaving it has left me with two of my biggest regrets: that I didn't get a good picture of the big lake, and that I didn't get one of a Lade aircraft at the outragesously situated airport, with the flats extending out to the lake behind the runway, and that military Lade plane (full of Argentinian rugger buggers, by the way - we thought we were in a remake of Alive) sitting in the foregroud. Alas - if only Wendy could do etchings.

Glacier Perito Moreno

I think Wendy I both agree that the most amazing and memorable experience was walking ("mini-trekking" - ha! how mini can you get?!) on the Perito Moreno glacier. As our dear guide Bernard explained to us, though it's known as one of the world's few expanding glaciers, that's not strictly true. More accurately, it's a half truth.

The thing is, the glacier is expanding, but at the same time, it's losing hunks and bits of itself - and unlike most glaciers, it's expansion is rapid enough to keep pace with its loss. If I understood dear Bernard correctly, this is in large part due to the fact that it's not a "cold" glacier, in the sense that it's not in a particularly cold part of the world. Calafete is, after all, on pretty much the same latitude as Paris, just on the flip side of the globe. (The glaciers of Antartica, on the other hand, owe much of their bulk to their cold climate, I think.)

What keeps Perito Moreno expanding is the constant flow of ocean-sodden wind up the Western side of the Andes, resulting in heavy and pretty much constant snowfall at the source of the glacier.

What I don't understand, though, is how the glacier actually moves. I know that the surface moves faster than the internal bits - there's less friction. YOu can see this quite clearly by looking at the pole that a glacialogist has inserted into the glacer: it was dead straight when he put it in, but over time (18 years, I think) it has developed a noticable tilt towards the glacier's front end. 

So I don't know what makes the glacier's bulk move forward, but something certainly does. Can Wendy tell me? here's hoping.

As for the glacier itself, it's absolutely stunning - even more for its otherworldliness than for  the mazing shades of blue the ice gives off. That blue is a function of mass, Bernard said: any small bit of the glacier would be clear - it's just ice, after all - but when enough of it is compacted together, it refracts light, just like water.

Why doesn't the surface look blue when we are up close to it? That has to do with erosion, but I don't understand exactly how. The surface is always being eroded, so will always look clear or white. Why?

One interesting phenomenon is how holes develop in the glacier - vertical caves of shaft-to-corkscrew-like erosion down into the ice, exposing beautiful varieties of blue. What happens is this: when even a small amount of dark dirt finds itself in a pile on the glacier, its darkness attracts and concentrates sunlight, causing that spot to heat up. As it heats up, it melts. The hole grows a bit deeper. And then deeper. And I guess this goes on until the sun can no longer find that bit of dirt to heat up.