Well, some more days have passed us all by, and I now find myself on the other side of the continent. They call Argentina and Chile together, The Southern Cone, and I am now on the Chilean side of said cone. It has been an exciting few days since the last entry. I flew back down to Buenos Aires to visit the Embassy of our fine country. They actually didn't piss me off there...and evidently they give you new passport pages for free!! Which is remarkable, and the second they told me I dropped to my knees and prayed thanks to the Baby Jesus. Some people looked at me funny, but others joined in, so I don't really know what to make of it. When you travel abroad for long enough, you are amazed when things work out right the first time and even more amazed when things are free. Or free without a catch of some sort. I guess the catch is that I am from America and that has it's own travelling price tag...can't complain too much though. Not gonna anyway. So I got that done and had a nice 'farewell to Buenos Aires' day where I went back to the eerie but totally stunning and strangely comforting Cemetario De Recoleta. I love the way the light lands on those carvings of angels and columns. There is a feeling of ghosts in there. You walk through and see so much accumulated testament to the dead and their legacies. It's quite a place.
I gotta put in a little piece about the Superbowl on sunday night, which I had the good fortune of finding on TV in Buenos Aires. Wow, what a game!! After the shitty season for the NFC, really the shittiest season of football in years if you ask me. No one was really that good (except the Pats)...and that made teams that would get killed in ordinary seasons seem better than they were. The only team that was really consistent and good was the Patriots and I hate the hell out of those bastards so I was really pretty glad to be far enough away that I didn't have to watch them destroy every other team. They almost had their perfect season, which I admit would have been fitting after the season that Brady had, and Moss too. But here is the fundamental feeling I have about this team. For me, they are the football equivalent of the New York Yankees. I love watching my teams win more than anything, but, I am almost equally as happy when I see the Patriots and Yankees lose in their respective games. I love it. When it came to the Superbowl, which is usually a waste of time anyway because the talent usually leans heavily one way or the other, I thought that the Giants were doomed. The didn't really have a good early season and they entered the playoffs as a wild card...their QB was, as of yet, unsuccessful in proving himself to be a consistent winning player...all things seemed against them accept their winning road record. I thought they would get destroyed in the first half, if not first quarter, and that would be that. So...you can imagine my utter glee when they held out long into the second half and ended up leading an incredible, stuff-that-legends-are-made-of, come back drive to win the game and send those bitch-ass Patriots scurrying for the lockers. I have to say that the Patriots were by far the better team, but the Giants deserve a lot of respect for pulling that off. I have much more respect for the players and coaching than I did before, and I tip my hat that I had until it got stolen, to them. Good work Giants, you're the man now.
So monday morning I took a flight to Mendoza, the famous Argentinian wine growing region in the eastern part of the country, to set my groundwork for the forthcoming harvest season, and also to pull a piece of travel strategy. Another great beny of being an American is this whole reciprocity thing. We charge everyone to visit America, so a lot of countries are now figuring, 'hey, why don't we give them a taste of that which they give.' So, getting into Chile costs 100$ US if you arrive in the airport. I want to make this point clear too. I was trying, for a long time, to figure out if the fee was applied to overland entry to the country and no one seemed to know. I now have done it, made the overland crossing at Libertadores, and you do not need to pay. If any travellers are looking at this, that is the answer to the question. If you fly in from outside the country, you pay, otherwise you don't have to. Ok, so anyway, I flew to Mendoza because it is close to the border with Chile and only seven hours by bus from Santiago. (Down here seven hours in a bus is about 15 minutes for normal people in America...it's nothing.) I like Mendoza a lot. It is a green town full of trees and parks and nice little cafes and restaurants. There is a lot of wine stuff happening and it is geared towards travellers which makes it easier in many ways, despite sacrificing a few 'real deal' cultural items. I was surprised to find however, despite the beauty of the place, that many of the locals are not really happy in their lives there. Evidentally, and this is only going by what locals were telling me, the life there is pay check to pay check, hand to mouth. Not in the American sense, but in the sense that decent people, working their supposedly decent jobs, have a hard time getting by at all, let alone ever getting ahead. I got the feeling that the constant presence of tourists didn't help their feelings of frustration...a constant reminder of luxuries and abilities towards the freedom of travel and those kind of options that they will most likely never have. There is a pretty serious drug abuse problem in Mendoza and you see it on the streets. This leads to a pretty serious crime problem. I got to be a part of that crime problem when some little punk ass bitches took off with my daypack. (I only lost a few things of monetary value, like my camera and some books, but I did lose my notebook with all my writing from the past four months and that sucks a large and hairy ass.) I was later told many stories from people at my hostel about how they, too, had been ripped off there in Mendoza. Moral of the story, don't carry your valuables in the streets and parks of Mendoza. It is a lesson I have known for a long time; in travelling, keep a close watch on your shit. But sometimes circumstances make that impossible, and with the right people watching, a little window is all they need.
That night I hung out with a cool kid from Pittsburgh and a dude from Perth, Australia. (I didn't ask him if he knew Heath Ledger.) We shot the shit and I tried to hit the hay early because my bus the next morning left at 6, but I couldn't sleep due to the heat, and the noise down below in the street. I woke up after a few hours and caught the bus that took us up and across the Andes. I have said it before, and odds are good that I will say it again in some other part of these mountains, but goddamnit, they were not messin' around when they made the Andes!!! They come upon you from a distance and you think that they will be pretty but that is all and then...Bah-BLAM!!! They nail you and you sit there drooling and giggling to yourself about their size and splendor. I had been dozing off when I awoke to this ridge of snow capped stone reigning high over glaciers and great, sharp and rocky mountains. The air was as clear as can be and the water that cascaded down from those glaciers had that grey-blue glimmer that I live for. I was the only non-Chilean on that bus so I was interested to see what would happen at the border crossing. We got there in the late morning and the people there were all really friendly and helpful. I was happy that even though I had my hundred greenbacks all ready to use, I didn't have to.
We got to the terminal in Santiago and I had to wait a few hours for my transfer down to Curicó in the wine country. Since I didn't have my small backpack anymore, I was carrying my shit in a ghetto plastic bag, actually it was two of them, only a dumbass doesn't double bag it when travelling internationally!!! Me and my bags and books and bottle of water wandered around the station for a bit. I had finished Snow Falling On Ceders the day before, and so I was reading George Orwell's Animal Farm there in the station. I like the book a lot...for it's metaphor and also for the fact that it is small enough to fit in your pants pocket on the off chance that someone steals your backpack!! Ha ha ha! (Ok, no more getting robbed jokes.) So I got on the bus to head south at about 5 in the afternoon and I was ready to crash out for a siesta when a young Chilean kid struck up a conversation which turned out to be just what I needed. Man that little guy was hilarious. He first showed me a song that his band had recorded playing live at some house party and it was rad!! Not good, per se, but the energy that these little dudes had was awesome and it totally took me back to the hay day of my own rockin' and rollin'. (That's not to say that I ever gave it up, mind you, but things change their form over time as we all know...) This guy was a sixteen year old bass player with spiked hair and torn jeans. It was just like back in the day. Then he gives me one of his earphones and we rock out to Guns and Roses and Lynyrd Skynyrd and Led Zeppelin and Velvet Revolver and lots of other rockin' 80's music all the way to Curicó!! Sweet Child and Paradise City and Freebird and Gallows Pole...it was hilarious! Air instruments and all. I don't think most Chilean buses see that kind of air instrument display. Those people should feel lucky. Really.
Curicó is a medium sized town that I liked as soon as I got here. It has a hometown sort of feel. You can smell the countryside, the woodsmoke, the grain, the chlorophyll at work. I am staying in a really nice little residencial near the centro. There is a picturesque plaza in the center of town called Plaza de Armas. Lined by huge old palm trees and dotted with fountains and statues. Chile has a distinctly different feel from Argentina. Theoretically Chile has a much stronger economy, but I don't really know about that kind of thing other than what I read and what people tell me. It feels a little more organized and controlled. You can feel the military presence left over from the Pinochet years when you walk down the streets. It was that way in Punta Arenas also. The people are pretty open and aside from the fact that the accent is new and different to my ear, I have been getting along well with people. (They don't seem to feel obligated to pronounce d's and often s's too.) There is bad blood between the Argentines and the Chileans and I have found through conversation that the young people don't really know why. They say it has just been that way. I think most of the root of this started in previous generations. A lot of it had to do with the support the Chileans gave to the British during the war for the Falklands/Malvinas that I mentioned in the entry about Antarctica. History, no doubt, holds the answers to these cultural questions, but I have also found that each country that I have visited down here is very proud and quick to jump to the offensive against a neighboring country member over any sort of cultural reference, small or big. There is the feeling of sibling rivalry, but there also seems to be something a little deeper and darker at play, and at this stage, I must confess that I don't know anywhere near enough to make a definitive statement on the matter. Maybe later. Until then, I'll continue to enjoy and ponder the spats I encounter.
Today I went to visit a couple wineries here on the Ruta De Vino near Curicó. There is not much of an established infrastructure here in terms of wine tourism. A lot of places you go to visit, you can take a tour where a company will pick you up and drive you around to the various vineyards to taste. This is always a nice option, because as you drink wine at more and more vineyards, it gets increasingly difficult to figure things out for yourself. One detail that these kinds of tours always take care of for you is getting you back home!! And that is always a pretty important detail. Here there are no such tours, you're on yer own. Also, I do not look like a 'wine guy' in my current external manifestation of appearance. I have a decent amount of strawberry-blond chin hair, one pair of dusty looking work boots, no manner of ironing the two button-down shirts that I have rolled up in my pack, and a more and more authentic looking "Irish afro". So when I walk into wine tasting rooms or wineries themselves, Chilean people do doubletakes. Then, the fact that I can understand them trips them out and I have to explain my whole, chef-winefan-backpacker-bohemian-language-trip that I keep finding myself on, and they nod and smile and eventually are down with it. So this morning, I found my way to the chaotic local bus station and took a bus south, in the direction of Talca. They let me out on the edge of the freeway and I walked in the dried, brown and wind-blown grass down the off-ramp and across a couple chainlink fences to the beautiful property of San Pedro Winery. I was the only person there when I arrived and so I got the VIP treatment and tour. It was cool. They had some nice sauvignon blanc and then a really nice Carmenere. We went to the barrel rooms, which were European in style, and they even had bats flying around! We went through the big room where all the pressing happens and checked out all the different parcels of grapes. I ended up leaving with a decent, late morning buzz and as I crossed those fences to get back onto the freeway, I missed the cushy winebus tours I used to take in Australia and South Africa. I caught another bus, in a similar manner, to a different winery that had interested me for a while; Miguel Torres Chile. Torres, in Spain, produces some bottles of wine that me and my Hearts playing drinking buddies used to really enjoy...and how could I not go check this place out, being so close. They also have a Russian River property in California, but they are originally based in Penedés, in Catalunya. I had a good time at the place, talking for quite a while with the tasting room chabon, and tasting some really great wines. The three that I liked the most were a '97 and a 2000 cab, both incredibly well aged and super smoothe, but still maintaining a life and energy that one looks for in aged wine. The last was a blend that I could really dig, from the year 2003. A tempranillo, carmenere, monastrel, cabernet sauvignon. Yummy stuff. After all that, I had to once again traverse the freeway...(frogger on the freeway is not really that funny...) and find a ride back to Curicó. In the blazing late summer sun I hitched a ride with a couple families in a run down white van and rolled into town, just in time for an ice cream cone and a nap. ¿Life is good no? So that is the news for now...I am outta time for today. Hope this entry finds you well! Chau...
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