What the hell.  I already did this and I don’t really feel like trying again.  On the upside for my kind readers, there won’t be anything extraneous because I won’t remember the unimportant.

For me, Buenos Aires was a place to eat.  The city is famous for it’s night life, I know, but with a few notable exceptions I don’t really see much of a difference from city to city that way.  The food though, I’m still recovering.  Steak for lunch every day, ice cream around four at an ice cream parlor that had a whole row on its menu dedicated to varieties of Dulce de Leche.  At night, a pizza, risotto, gnocchi.  Media Lunas (croissants) and cafe con leche in the morning and again after the ice cream but before dinner.

It was also a fairly familiar city.  This is not actually true, but it’s a wrong idea I’ll never drop, owing to a few circumstances.  First, I was in Recoleta most of the time.  Recoleta is the fanciest neighborhood I’ve ever spent time in, including any stray hours I passed in Manhattan.   I saw more Barbour jackets than I’ve ever seen in my life before.  Polished leather everywhere, honest-to-god polo equipment stores.  So you understand that it’s not familiar in being like places I’ve been, it’s familiar in that it takes places I’ve been and amplifies them.  So the anglophile tastes of the wealthy BA’sians (no one else would ever use that as the adjective form of Buenos Aires – they prefer porten(ny)os) remind me of the anglophile tastes of the prep school types.  That’s tenuous, I admit.  I was given the number of an Argentine who knew my cousin.  This was Max, and he not only had been to New Orleans several (three?) times, but he enjoyed past times similar to our own, this would be drinking-in-bars as opposed to the inexplicable but universally popular dancing-in-clubs.  He invited me to dinner at his friend’s apartment, a beautiful apartment so, hey, thanks Sebastian.  Sebastian and Max are old friends, of a type that corresponds well to my type, and they had a friend there who had been in the Marine corps.  Far away, but not very distant.

The neighborhoods, you ask?  I spent most of my time being fancy in Recoleta.  My one night out was in Palermo, at the Golf Club there, also pretty button-down.  I walked around the rest of the time,  including my little jaunt to La Boca.  That’s kind of a deal, they have a soccer stadium and brightly painted corrugated iron buildings.  The former I don’t care about, the latter pales in comparison to Valpo and, anyway, is obviously done on purpose now just because of the tourism fame.  The Lonely Planet has a map, and the map of La Boca and San Telmo contains the legend “area not safe for tourists” in two areas.  That is a first for me, even though I didn’t see it until after I had already walked down there alone.  It may have been dumb, which proves that I’m hopelessly clueless.  On the other hand, I felt a little uncomfortable, which suggests that I don’t lack all ability to judge my environment.  Either way, I can do without dodgy neighborhoods unless there is a good reason to be out (as there was in Valpo).  I suspect that the real attraction of La Boca is the roughness, which suggests any number of interesting theories about the nature and purpose of travel.  I’ll save them for another day.

The rest of the city I saw was fun for a pass through–San Telmo, Montevideo (?) Congreso.  All very interesting, as the neighborhoods do differ in terms of the businesses, types of food for sale, and all through the age of the buildings varies wildly.  Just a big old mixup.

I forgot about the trip to Alta Gracia.  After two days sightseeing in Cordoba, with three nights of living in a coke-and-beer-fueled dance party of a hostel, I decided a quiet day in the country was in order.  Luckily, the towns and small cities in the mountains near Cordoba have things to see, among other things the Jesuit estancias.

During the 16th century, the Jesuit missionaries built a network of estancias, or ranches, from Cordoba up to Paraguay– like the movie The Mission.  An obscure loyalty to the Jesuits and a more obvious curiosity about Baroque colonial buildings – rare enough in Argentina –  put me on a minibus to Alta Gracia, according to Lonely Planet one of the better examples in the immediate vicinity.  I found a hostel and a whole bunch of quiet.  The city itself, I’d say about 10,000 inhabitants, was dead still with real, honest-to-god siestas every day.

I rented a bike the morning I arrived, what was meant to be my only day, and sweated my ass up hill to the old town.  The old town opens below the Jesuit church, a rough stone building with a Baroque façade.  Abutting the church, the missionaries built their residence in the shape of an L with a stone wall that closes the fourth side of the courtyard.  The courtyard has an old well and orange trees.  Very nice, all unfinished stone work, thick wood beams, and heavy wrought iron (note:  the only present tense of the archaic participle “wrought” is “to make”).  I did not see the church on my day in Alta Gracia because at two p.m. I was already too late.

They also have a Che Guevera museum there, in one of Che’s childhood homes in the town, in the “English quarter” that the English railroad company built, along with a casino, on a hill above the estancia and the reservoir.  The house is tiny, smaller even than my childhood home, but pretty well filled.  Chavez and Fidel came there for some anniversary of Che’s death not that long ago.  Honestly, walking through there and reading his correspondence it was easy to see his appeal:  he comes across quite charismatic and passionately committed to a cause and quite indifferent to his own health, well-being and wealth.  The museum, however, was closed when I went there.

All I was able to do was ride my bike around the reservoir that, with the estancia, is the center of the original settlement.  It is a large pond, surrounded by trees, held back by a dam the Jesuits built when they built the church.  It powered the mill then, now it just supports a few ducks and gives the flocks of kids in town a place to hang out (not in the water, in the park around it).  Then I rode the bike out into the countryside.  After a half-hour uphill without seeing my turn, I headed back down.  On the way back down, which took only five minutes, I saw the turn.  When I got to the bottom, I turned around for another half-hour trip back up the hill.  This was my first time on a mountain bike, my first time riding on a dirt rode, and it just about killed me.

The next morning I walked a mile and half with my pack to the bus stop to go to another town.  The bus did not come or I missed it while I waited in the cold drizzle for an hour.  I kept time on my watch, which was really a square plastic alarm clock that I pulled out of my second-hand windbreaker’s pocket every few minutes like a homeless Mad Hatter.  So I walked back to the hostel.  It was on my second day that I went into the church and the museum and stuff.  That lasted me until about three in the afternoon.  I also fell in love with the women in my hostel and had dinner with them, which lasted until about nine o’clock.  A rather simple tale, really, even boring.  There isn’t even a point, really, except something to do with skewed perspective.  I believe that, objectively, this detour was shit.  I don’t know that I could even recommend it.  At the same time, I was happier walking to the bus station that night than I had been in several weeks.  I would recommend the California girls, if I could, but wouldn’t know how that works.

p.s.  I had sweet, sweet pizza both nights.  I brought the left-overs of the second pizza in a greasy box on my super-swank full cama (bed) overnight bus to B.A.

The City Museum of Beaux Artes in Cordoba was a mansion, the first floor of which was filled with art – half contemporary, half nineteenth century portraiture.  I believe that it was simply the private collection of one man, at least that’s what it looked like.

At this point I had developed a low opinion of Argentine musuemery.  In all fairness, I didn’t know that the Museum of Beaux Artes I saw in Cordoba was only the city museum, with a much larger and better one on the other side of town.  Nevertheless, that was my opinion.  Then I went to a new museum, one that had just opened.  The house had belonged to a noveaux riche type of the early XXth.  It was sparklingly, sleekly restored – and also very recently restored, after decades of negligence had ruined permanently the original décor of the upper stories, which somewhat reduces the credit the argentine gov’t gets for its preservation efforts.  But they made up for past negligence with the staffing.  Beautiful women, dressed in elegant sexy pantsuits hovered around the door, to take my bag, to give me an introduction to the house, to ask how I liked it, etc.  I was one of only three guests there, two less than staffers.  Incidentally, the works inside were the private collection and a contemporary collection, like the other museum.  This guy was richer, though, so his private collection was larger and better, and the contemporary collection was larger since the house had more room.  The lesson here:  having a lot of money means that you not only leave behind big house, striking art, but also, apparently, beautiful women.

Cordoba is a city that you visit for itself.  They have the Jesuit block, a UNESCO world heritage sight.  Blah blah blah.  It is the old Jesuit University in Argentina, and a city block of Baroque, colonial construction.  I enjoyed the buildings.  They were graceful and well-proportioned, but, like most old colonial construction, a rough copy of the European model.  In the balance, the Block’s architecture is the sort of thing that depends on its historical context to impress a viewer.  The history is very interesting, though, something to learn about.  What is the history?  They have it at en.wikipedia.org I would guess.

I regained my ability to eat in Cordoba for my second day there, but decided to leave.  Besides, I had already seen most of the important buildings, museums, etc. in my two days.  The city itself, like everywhere else I visited save La Serena and Valparaiso, was haphazardly preserved and so just walking around alone didn’t appeal to me.  Probably most importantly, I was in the mood to be calm for a few days, and the hostel was a wreck.  That’s an important point.  Without good company, the city reduces itself fairly quickly to the list of attractions in a guidebook.  There aren’t many cities in the world that can entertain you out of a Lonely Planet for more than two or three days if you are, like me, a committed walker.  It just happened that the hostel in Cordoba didn’t fit.

I write this from the U.S. because for the second two weeks of my trip laziness set in, and I stayed in hostels where the computer was crowded or at the front desk.

I have nothing important to say about Mendoza.  I was sick and I could not find a place to stay after the first night because the city’s hostels were overrun by Evangelical Chileans in Argentina for a “Fiestas Patrias” weekend retreat.  Because I was sick and could not eat, the wine and steak legendarily awaiting me had to await me a little longer.  I also missed the wine-yard touring, whitewater rafting, mountain biking, horseback riding, trekking, etc.  That left the city itself.  It was pleasant – all the streets laid out in a grid, with frequent squares.  Though the city is famous for it’s mountains activities, it’s completely flat, as the foothills rise quickly and abruptly behind it; and, though it is a dessert, or “semi-arid sub-Andean” city, water runs in narrow canals alongside every street, between the street and the sidewalk, and sycamores and poplars (or “Alamos,” so now you know what the mission in San Antonio was named for) shade everywhere.  Anyway, it’s an out-door sport and wine tour city, and I did neither.  I was very glad, however, to find cafes again after their rarity and low quality in Chile.  Even though I wasn’t eating, I still had coffee.  I find it interesting that the Chileans are just now developing a coffee industry.  The Argentines have cafes everywhere with all the major coffee drinks, and by all accounts have had them since the turn of the century.  But it’s not as if the Chileans had another major drink to substitute – it’s the Argentines with their cult of Englishness and the accompanying tea drinking; it’s the Argentines with the maté.  The only beverage in Chile that appeared to have a historical institution besides wine was beer.  I was glad to have coffee again, and not Nescafé.  In all fairness to the Chileans, they had better mass-market beer than the Argentines (I mean Kuntzman’s not Cristal).

On the bus to Mendoza, Argentina, I sat next to an apparently upper middle class Chilean woman.  Have you ever met a person who obviously has gone through their whole life being treated as if they were completely normal, but yourself wondered if they were not actually retarded?  This woman wore nice clothes, had a very fancy camera, but without the props I might have pegged her for a subnormal.  Maybe I bring out the maternal in people, but she decided to explain the significance of everything we saw up to the pass through the Andes.  On the upside, I had a unique (for me) glimpse into the concerns of the Chilean bourgeosie.  First, she wanted to know what I thought about the country, about how advanced it was.  We can´t call that neurotic, America is the gold standard so of course my opinion on those things is significant to one who doesn´t meet many gringos.  European appearance was very important to her.  She explained to me that her children had blue eyes, like mine.  She unnecessarily explained to me that the Peruvians and Bolivians are ¨negro,¨ and that the people I saw at the Plaza de Armas were all immigrants.

She was a plump little woman, with died hair, a dark gold.  She wore gold earings and a turquoise shirt under a black leather jacket.  She fondled her expensive digital camera with inordinate satisfaction, the pursed-lip greediness of a child.  She pointed out her earings and her rings, explained to me that she always went out in jewelry.  But she nodded her head knowingly and conspiratorially, and said that she couldn´t wear her good jewelry out in Santiago or Mendoza, and I knew that she loved her good jewelry all the more for it.

This is only a fluke of chronology:  this woman was merely my last, and worst, impression of Chile, not the strongest by any means.

Now that I´ve left the country and had time to reflect, I want to make a few points.  First, there are a startling number of stray dogs in Chile, but, with some exceptions, and worse in Valparaiso, the dogs appear reasonably well fed and, though dirty, not diseased.  Also, they were very handsome dogs, large dogs that looked like German shepherd mixes or Husky mixes.

Second, as for the hostel in La Serena, I called the people ¨wonderful.¨ horseshit.  I was in a very good mood that day, it was warm, maybe I ate a big breakfast.  They were entertaining and friendly, but not worth four days in La Serena.

Third, and finally, I came down very hard on Santiago.  I enjoyed my stay there.  I only didn´t want to come out too strong in favor of the first place I visited in case subsequent places were better.  In this case, that was the right choice.  Valparaiso, with no cultural sights of interest to speak of beside the Neruda house, La Sebatiana, was much more intriguing.

I have been in La Serena for three days now, I have a fourth today.  The town cannot justify an entire day, much less four, but these things happen.  It a grid of single story colonial buidlings on clean streets, set on a ledge, apparently a glacial terrace, about a kilometer (a completely arbitrary estimation, just beacuse I wanted to write “about a kilometer”, it took about twenty minutes, maybe a litle more)from the Pacific coast.  You can see the entire old town in three hours, a walk to the beach adds another, but you can only watch the waves, blue, roll in on the sand, brown.  Or watch a few Chilean girls on vacation run around.

I did that my first morning, without much pleasure.  I had  arrived by overnight bus, and as I wandered around that first day, I was incapable of even the simplest decisions.  I thought maybe being with the same two guys for three days had ruined my capacity for independent thought.  I cound´t even eat, the decision was too much.  I went to be at four, and woke up around nine, shivering, with a fever.  So, day one I wasted, but with good reason.

The second day I felt well again, and decided to make this trip to La Serena, the only example of independent thought so far on my itinerary, a success.  I overslept, so the tours I found all left on Sunday, the third day.  I put down a deposit, and returned to the hostel to recuperate fully, not chance the cold coastal damp.  So, the second day I wasted, but with good reason.

The third day I went on a tour of the Elqui valley.  We didn´t do much, in terms of physical activity.  The views from the bus were the most impressive part of the trip.  On foot we saw a few small farming towns obviously calibrated now towards tourist interest.  We saw the one room schoolhouse where grew up the Nobel prize winning Chilean poet—not Pablo, the other one I´d never heard of.  We saw the Cochineal bugs on a cactus.  Very exciting stuff.  We stopped at the dam on the Rio Elqui, and I always like walking across a dam, the Chilean woman who thought I was handsome took some surreptitious pictures of me, as I found out later.  I should come out well with the mountains and the lake behind me.

As I said, the valley itself is the most interest part.  The river and the valley both narrow and the mountains grow drier and drier.  At the top of the valley, the river is a foot wide, a turbid, whitish green color like a buttermint.  The mountains are bare rock, where at the wide mouth of the valley they had bushes, then cactus, now nothing.  The sky is empty and hard blue, the sun is roasting.  (The skies here are supposed to be the clearest in the world, as winds from the mountains push all cloud cover out to the coast.  For that reason there are bunch of observatories in the valley.)  Still, the flat bottom, only a hundred meters wide, is green with vines and Eucalyptus trees.  And leaving, the floor widens, the river grows, and trees start to creep up the mountainsides where Cacti thicken.  At the mouth of the valley, low wet clouds from the Pacific cover the hilltops.  Look at that.  What a nice day, right?  Yeah.  But thanks to the close proximity of the bus, and the fact that all the other groups came in pairs, and the fact that I am too polite by half, I backed into a date that night.  I didn´t really want to go, I don´t want to go out with a nice Chilean woman my own age one time.  But it is almost obligatory when you have the opportunity, despite my not trying.  So I did.  She invited me to stay with her in Santiago.  Not in a manner that I consider in the least disgraceful.  On the contrary, she was very sweet, sensible, sober (though not literally).  Interesting.  But certainly not a wasted day.

Well, today the Fabulosos Cadillacs have a concert in the neighboring town of Coquimbo, and I want to go.  I have nothing to do here in La Serena, the national park with the penguins is four hours away by bus.  So, the fourth day I will waste, but with good reason.  And since I´m here in chile today, the 15^th, and independence day is the 18^th, I suppose I should just kick around until then, in Santiago.  The people here at the hostel in La Serena are wonderful, but I am getting to know them far too well.

I have left Santiago, on the road to Valparaiso, which I have since left for a smaller beach town in the Chico Norte called La Serena.  The road from Santiago runs almost due West to the Pacific.  The valley floor runs flat to the Coastal mountains that you can see on a clear day in Santiago.  The road passes through a tunnel.  When I rode through the tunnel, I left a gray, drizzly sky and came out the other end under an empty blue sky.  The coastal mountains are small.  The valleys on the way are flat bottomed except in the center of the range, but the hills are steep and pointed on top rather than softly rounded.   The grass is very green in winter, covered in scrub or with trees that appear in three kinds:  dark needled and thick trunked pines, palm trees, and tall, slender trees that have limp, dusty leaves, bark that hangs in strips and brances that turn upward with the trunk.  I believe these last are Eucalyptus.  The foothills of the Coastal range run in rows all the way to the coast.  Valparaiso built on the western slope of the last hill.  The flat bottom along the Bay of Valparaiso has the port and the tall, colonial boulevard buildings of the port merchants, banks and military offices.  From the Plazas set along the Avenidas of Indipendence and O´Higgins, cobble stone streets wind up the the “cerros,” the folds in the hillside that form the neighborhoods of Valpo.  Between the streets on the cerros narrow alleys cut between buildings and steep staircases lead up the hill faces that turn the roads.

The buildings on the Cerros are, as a result of the geography, all out of order.  The appear above and below, spaced on the green hillside where even cantilevering in impossible.  The buildings are mixed colonial, victorian, with some art deco and a very rough moderism thrown in.  Some look very German with heavy, carved wood detail.  Many are clad in corrugated iron, iron that dents and rusts and generally gives the town a hastily built air.  The buildings are all painted bright colors, even the newer poured concrete ones higher up the hills so, in the daytime, the city is a jumble of colored blocks.  The city is bright, but also crumbling and cracked and needs a wash—but that is a part of the appeal.

Unfortuanentaly, the city is plagued with petty crime.  Fortuanately for me, I was staying at a hostel run by a very conscientious and knowledgable German.  He gave me a map, with a route sketched out through the neighborhood where I was staying, on the swanky hill.  He marked out the neighborhoods I should avoid at night. I was ready for dodgy neighborhoods, I had only the necessities in my bag:  sweatshirt, guidebook, notebook, film.  Nevertheless, I am a cautious traveler, so I followed the route he mapped out, camera at my neck, day bag on my back.

Within the hour, about three in the afternoon, I was robbed in the alley by the hostel.  Three kids got my camera and my bag.  I spent the rest of the day replacing the items I had lost.  For my old Walmart sweatshirt, I bought a jacket at a second hand store, replete with stains on the front and a rip in the back.  For my toy camera, an even cheaper plastic camera.  I had not been hurt, though we had scuffled and they had punched and kicked me.  I left with only scrapes on my elbows and a stiff knee, and a lingering anger that I had not been able to hurt the little bastards more.  I was a little jumpy, but walking around in public for a while calmed me down.

The next day I was truly ready to explore.  I had a cheap camera, no backpack to attract attention, and the jacket of a homeless man.  Also, I had two companions.  No more rookie mistakes.  Then, around three o´clock, under a sun so bright I was squinting, an arm grabbed around my neck, flashing.  It released me and I fell, to see two kids, one with a knife.  Demanded my camera–they must have seen me take a picture with it and assumed it was digital because all gringos are rich–but before I could even stand up, Joe had turned on them and they stepped back.  Joe and the kid with the knife stared at each other for a second, until Chris whistled and they ran.  I had a knife held to my throat.  Now I was truly on edge.  So were my companions Chris and Joe, even if Chris still thought it was funny to grab me by the shoulder from behind on our way back to the hostel from the attempted robbery.  We decided that we needed a drink to calm down and celebrate.  “U.S.A. 1, Chile 0,” said Chris.  “Well, for me it´s actually U.S.A. 1, Chile 1.  But at least I´m batting 500 now.”  So we sat down in what turned out to be the oldest bar in Valpo and drank.  A lot.  On my first day, when I had my bag stolen, replacing the sweatshirt with a jacket cost me six thousand pesos and the camera cost me three.  On my second day, when I didn´t lose anything at all, celebrating the victory cost me twelve thousand on our way to a 35,000 peso bar tab.  So I went over budget in Valpo, but more because of our succesful prevention of robery than because of robbery itself.

Despite the nonsense, though, it is a wonderful town.  The rest of the inhabitants were at least polite, and often friendly.  They eat good seafood and drink beer.  And they live perched on steep hillsides that lean over the Plazas day and night toward the Pacific, which is their greatest attribute of all.