CHAPTER 47
It has been said that “all roads lead to Rome”, but that is not quite true. In South America at least, all roads lead to Buenos Aires. Look at a map of the continent and you will see a jumbled network of red lines marking the highways and lesser roads, like veins of blood extending to every corner of the body that is South America. At the periphery, these lines randomly branch and merge as geography dictates. But the further south you go, the highways become distinctly more organized, and just like veins, they converge on Buenos Aires, the heart and soul of the continent.
Though we generally try not to back track to places we have already been, we were not immune to the inexorable pull of Argentina’s vibrant capital. Thus, happily, we were once again back in Buenos Aires- our final port of call on this incredible voyage through Central and South America.
The last time we were here, we rented a certain furnished apartment on the recommendation of our friends the Ramblewriters. We had looked into a few hostels, but the apartment won out in every respect: it was cheaper, much bigger, cleaner, nicer, less smelly, safer, had a nice big bathroom and a small kitchen, and even a private patio- all in all a wonderful experience. Unfortunately, the old apartment was booked up for the two weeks we would be in BA this time around. I was afraid we would have to downgrade back to the hostel life, but surprisingly, a few minutes on the internet revealed that Buenos Aires has a huge selection of apartments for rent by the week or month, some furnished, some not, and all at incredibly reasonable rates. The morning we arrived into town, we stopped at a gas station to take advantage of the free wifi, and less than an hour later had an appointment to see a new apartment that afternoon. Now that I think about it, I bet most of the big cities we traveled through had a similar situation. We should have been doing this the whole trip- hostels are for suckers!
The building was in a little different neighborhood than our last one, and the parking wasn’t quite as abundant, so I dropped Kacey off, and circled the block to find a spot, while she went up stairs to meet the realtor. It took me awhile to find one, and by the time I made it to the apartment, Kacey was already signing the papers! It was so easy and convenient- way better than squeezing into a shared room at a dirty hostel. The place even came with a cell phone for our own use, we just had to buy the pre-paid minutes card.
Now that we had our home base set up, we were ready to get down to business. Our number one priority was to get the shipping of our truck straightened out. We needed to make a few trips to the shipping agent, get all of our papers in order, wash the outside of the truck, and completely clear out the inside. We chose to ship the truck home via RORO (roll on roll off) because it was substantially cheaper than shipping it back in a container. The down side to this decision was that the truck, and anything left inside of it, would be at the mercy of every sticky fingered deck hand and kleptomaniacle port worker from BA to Baltimore. We had heard that it was pretty much guaranteed that anything left in the vehicle, down to the change in the ashtray, would not be there when you went to pick up your car in the US. Thus, we spent the better part of a day cleaning out the truck, and trying to get everything to fit into our luggage. This was made a lot easier due to our gringo garage sale in Punta Arenas a few weeks earlier, but we still had an overwhelming amount of stuff that we wanted to get home safely.
Getting all of this sorted out was a little bit of a drawn out process, leaving us whole days of free time to take care of priority number two: seeing all the sights we had missed the first time we were in BA. First on the list was an extremely sad reminder of Argentina’s turbulent history. Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo gather in solidarity every week, and march around the, you guessed it, Plaza de Mayo, located in the heart of downtown, just yards from the entrance to the Casa Rosada ,which is the seat of the federal government, just like the White house in the US. They have been doing this, rain or shine, every Thursday, for the last 30 years.
The tragic story of the mothers and the reason for their weekly vigil, is unfortunately, an all too common component of the typical histories shared by most of the countries in South America. In the late 70’s, the popular government was overthrown by a military coup, and any and all dissidents to this new regime, mostly young liberal university students, were summarily rounded up to be imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. To add insult to injury, some thousands of babies born to the prisoners during captivity were stolen from their mother’s arms, and given as adopted children to wealthy, childless, aristocratic families. The fates of these unlucky souls, an estimated 30,000 prisoners and children, were never disclosed to the public, and even now, almost 30 years after the fall of the junta, the government still declines to provide any information to the grieving families. And thus, the mothers and grandmothers march arm and arm around the tall obelisk at the center of the Plaza de Mayo, with pictures of their missing children, and a banner proclaiming this gross injustice. What started out as merely an outcry for information and acknowledgment by the government for these wrongdoings, has slowly morphed into an internationally recognized and praised peaceful action group, with the stated mission of raising awareness of these crimes in Argentina, and also of similar crimes that have been perpetrated in other parts of the world. In a paltry attempt at placation, the government did offer compensation to the Madres of $50,000 per disappeared person, but the majority of the women vehemently declared “You can’t put a price on our children’s lives!”, refused the hand-out, and set to work even harder to accomplish their organization’s goals.
It was a sobering sight to see all the old ladies with white scarves wrapped around their heads slowly circling the plaza. After they went around a few times, they gathered by a microphone and gave some speeches, one lady recounting the story of her loss. All I could think about was how much tenacity and strength each of these women must have to continually show up here every week, and face this terrible heartache again and again. After the oration, they slowly disbanded and filtered out of the plaza.
Since we were already there, we made the short walk over to the Casa Rosada (the Pink House), so called because of its bold pink façade. The story goes that this huge building, which houses the executive branch of the government, was originally white, but the paint being used at that time degraded quickly in the humid coastal environment. So, in the 1860’s, some innovative architect decided to add cow’s blood to the recipe- which would supposedly increase the paint’s durability, but with the unfortunate side effect of turning the mixture into, in my opinion, an embarrassingly girly shade of pink- it’s not exactly a color that imbues a sense of administrative power or authority, is it? Whatever the reason, the tradition stuck, and the absurdly pink edifice has become one of Buenos Aires’ most emblematic buildings.
The next thing that we wanted to see was a little more light hearted in nature than Las Madres. We took one of the crowded city buses headed south from downtown, and got off in a poor working class barrio called La Boca. We came here for two reasons: the neighborhood is home to one of the most popular football teams in Argentina, La Boca Juniors- and we wanted to try and get tickets to see a match that evening; and second, the neighborhood is also the birthplace of a little dance people like to call the Tango. Have you heard of it? Well, of course, everyone has. And just like everyone else, I had no idea that it came from Argentina, let alone this small seedy corner of the country’s capital.
We ended up being thwarted in our football ticket aspirations by an unfortunate combination of our innate tendency to procrastinate, and the unyielding will of a pair of extortionist ticket scalpers. But we fared much better on our mission to discover the Tango.
Now, I am not known for my love of dancing, neither personally partaking in the activity, nor even less so, watching it, but I have to say that when we jumped off the bus directly into a crowd on the streets of La Boca, I was surprised- I might even go so far as to say impressed- by the intertwined bodies of a dancing couple, marching off measured steps in unison across the cobblestones to the staccato beat emanating from an old record player on the sidewalk. Wearing a tight fitting, sequenced evening gown, the woman’s body melted into her partner’s muscular arms, their combined mass acting as a single organic being as it twisted and turned in front of the crowd, almost like an ostentatious pair of Siamese twins. With an all too cliché rose in her mouth, the dance ended with the woman precariously held in an almost painfully exaggerated, back-curling pose, one leg high in the air, to the rapturous applause of the surrounding mob of tourists.
La Boca is one of those places that, for all the forces of poverty and neglect acting against it, is somehow able to maintain its unique identity, setting it distinctly apart from the surrounding neighborhoods which are rundown and crime ridden. The place is poor, to be sure, but the influx of tourism is visibly helping. The houses and buildings are all painted bright primary colors, yellows and reds cover every wall, with a green door here, and a blue bench there, it is like walking through a town built with child’s Legos- the haphazard construction and placement of the buildings lending itself to this description. The exaggerated color scheme is just an outward expression of the town’s character, which has always been independent, in spirit and in reality. Starting way back in 1907, the residents got a little carried away by the momentum of their free-willed nature, declared independence from Argentina, and formed the short lived Republica de la Boca. The secession of the barrio from the country was quickly quelled, but now, this ingrained quality of independence still shows itself in the color of the houses, the tango dancers in the streets, and the unlikely domination of the national and international soccer leagues by the Juniors.
We walked around for awhile, took some photos, had a cold beer at a sidewalk café, and saw some police shaking down a couple of very suspicious looking fellows. We realized there were actually quite a number of suspicious looking fellows starting to come out into the streets as it got later, and I couldn’t help but feel that more than a few of them were eyeing my camera bag with interest. We decided to take our guidebook’s advice and leave La Boca before it got dark. Our next adventure was to a place decidedly less seedy, but just as unique, El Tigre.
If you remember, in an earlier post I declared Buenos Aires as the Paris of South America. Well, if BA is Paris, then El Tigre is Venice. At the point where the Parana and Uruguay rivers converge to form the Rio Plata, there is a large delta- a huge area of damp jungles and marshy wetlands, crisscrossed by dozens of streams and channels, to form a maze of intertwined islands. The most suitable of these islands have become the weekend retreats for the well-to-do from Buenos Aires, with huge mansions surrounded by resilient landscaping capable of fending off the ever encroaching jungle. The remaining water front has been developed as well, though in a less ostentatious, more inviting manner. Nearly every house has its own dock stretching prominently out into the water, some even with a red and white candy-cane striped pole, just like their Venetian cousins. Long, cigar shaped, river taxis ferry residents and tourists alike down the winding waterways, their polished wood and brass reminiscent of the classic style seen in the canals of Europe, but their haste and recklessness purely South American. The wake thrown up by these careening taxis causes trouble for the other main users of the waterways: equally classic looking row boats- long, slender, wooden craft that you could imagine coming right out of an Oxford vs. Cambridge crew race on the Thames, in the 1920’s.
Seeing all the boats plying the water stirred up my own nautical inclinations, and I soon convinced Kacey and our friend Amy, who had accompanied us on this little marine expedition, that the best way to see El Tigre would be to rent our own boat and try our hands at navigating the winding channels while avoiding the maniacal taxis. They were game, but we all agreed that something with a little more freeboard than the racing shells might be appropriate for us landlubbers. A few minutes later we were happily dipping our paddles into the murky side waters of the Rio Plata from the relative stability of a large, plastic, three-person canoe. It didn’t take long to realize we were no match for the traffic on the main canal, so we contented ourselves with a lazy float through the back channels. Even then we ended up shipping a good 2” of muddy water from the reckless wake of a passing speedboat, and as captain, I could tell that our pleasant canoe trip was about to turn mutinous if I didn’t get my two shipmates out of this dirty, sinking boat soon. I was relieved when a riverside restaurant came into view, and all hands made a hasty exit to trade in our oars for cold beers.
The day had finally come. Our paperwork was complete at the shipping agent. The truck was clean inside and out. And the RORO ship was sitting in the harbor ready to sail. We drove the hour north to the port of Zárate, jumped through a few bureaucratic hoops at the immigration and aduana offices, and before we knew it, were handing over the keys of the Golden Gringo to Javier the port worker, who climbed in, and drove off with little ceremony.
I couldn’t believe it. We were done. We were done with our South American road trip. Just like that the thing that had defined our lives for a year, was over. It was a surreal feeling, sitting on the curb waiting for the taxi to come pick us up. A convoluted battle of emotions washing over one another like a churning tide pool. Pride, yes. Sadness, yes. Joy, satisfaction, anxiety, calmness- yes, yes, yes. In the end, the lasting feeling was one of bittersweet accomplishment. In a mere 48 hours we would be back in the States, back with our friends and family, speaking English, eating good food, drinking good beer, and telling stories and antidotes of our journey like it had all happened in some distant past, some other life when we were travelers. But our trip was more than that. More than just the feat of driving to South America. We had proven to ourselves that we could do whatever we set our minds to. We had proven that we wouldn’t settle for a mediocre, run of the mill existence. This trip might be done, and who knew what the next adventure would be, but sitting there, on a dusty sidewalk, in a podunk port town, waiting for a taxi… it didn’t matter. We both knew that there would be a next adventure, and that our whole lives would be an adventure. This was just the end of the first chapter in our life of Saturdays.
Well, the taxi finally came, dropped us off at the bus station, and we were soon bouncing down the highway towards BA for our last night in the country. Our friends joined us for a final-final at our favorite restaurant, Las Cabras, and the next morning we picked up our bags from their apartment and took a car to the airport. Kacey winked at the guy behind the counter at the luggage check-in, and he waived our extra bag fee. I spent our last few pesos on two overpriced, but very cold, airport beers, and we held hands as we walked down the gangway to the plane.
It would take another month and a half for our truck to show up in Baltimore. Other than the slight delay in arrival of the ship, the only thing that went wrong was that a negligent port worker left the keys in the ignition in the “on” position, so the battery was nice and dead when I went to crank her on. A new battery and we were on the road once again. We made a slight detour south to DC to pick up a few cases of 2 Buck Chuck- our new favorite wine that we had discovered on the first leg of our trip- to serve at our quickly approaching wedding (though for some reason on the East Coast it costs $3, instead of $2), and then headed straight west. We pulled into the driveway of Kacey’s mom’s house in Denver on July 23rd, at 8:00pm, completing the circle of our road trip through the Americas. The odometer had just rolled over to show 28,006.1 miles.
