Argentina, Redeemed

Just when I was prepared to hate Argentina and everything it stands for, it turns around and becomes AWESOME. It's beautiful, there's tons to see, and the taxis actually have meters! It's such a relief to not have to engage in a battle of wits with the driver every time you have to take a cab somewhere. (I inevitably lose.) As great as it's been, though, we've been trying to get through it quite quickly because we're a bit tired of South America. I'm ready for some Kiwis. So the last 3 weeks have been a blur of activity - we've been to Iguazu Falls, Buenos Aires, and the delightfully palindromic Neuquen, home to the fossils of the world's largest dinosaurs (bigger than the T. rex!) and 100-million-year-old dinosaur footprints. As evolution nerds, there's no way we could pass that up.

(Note: if 3 cities in 3 weeks doesn't exactly sound like a "blur of activity," please remember that getting anywhere in Argentina usually requires a 20-hour overnight bus ride, effectively ensuring that every move takes us 2 days. Looking forward to New Zealand, which is 10 times smaller.)

There's not much to say about Iguazu Falls except that they were stunningly beautiful.



(Pictures couldn't possibly do them any justice, but to see our attempts, click here.)

Buenos Aires was a ridiculously fun city. Everything people do there, they do to the absolute extreme, with a lust for life that is contagious and exciting. It's beautiful, sophisticated, and vibrant in a way that I haven't experienced before. People routinely eat dinner at 10pm, get drinks at 12, and party til 7am. I'm not entirely sure how these people hold down jobs. Then there are the endless amazing restaurants, pubs, and free music shows, as well as beautiful architecture, tons of museums, and chic cafes. The people are gorgeous and almost too well-dressed. Add to that an almost obsessive penchant for drinking yerba mate out of little gourds and dancing tango at every possible opportunity, and it adds up to a place that sucks you in and doesn't easily let go.

We spent the first 4 days in a cute, upscale suburb called Palermo Viejo, not doing much except shopping, strolling around and EATING. Being a vegetarian here simply doesn't work (unless you're okay with getting scurvy), so we temporarily abandoned that plan and ended up switching to the other extreme, as you do. We ate steak almost every night we were in the city, and can I just say, HOLY FUCK, steak here is good. If there was ever a place to fall off the veggie wagon, this was the place to do it. I like to think that all of our steaks came from the same cow, so not much harm done, right...? =/



The next 4 days we were in San Telmo, just outside the city center. This neighborhood was a lot grungier. Dumpster diving takes on a whole new meaning here -- we saw several homeless guys with trash-filled sacks literally the size of cars, precariously balanced on carts. On every block, we had to dodge several piles of dog poop, as well as dripping air conditioners. Graffiti and trash decorated the streets instead of trees. The seedy underbelly of the city could definitely be felt here.



However, San Telmo is home to the San Telmo Sunday Market, one of my favorite parts of the whole city. The market is devoted to local artists' crafts, so everything was wonderfully creative, handmade, and cheap. The atmosphere was dizzyingly energetic - it felt like half the city was milling about here. Amidst all this, we stumbled upon an unbearably cute elderly couple dancing tango, surrounded by crowds of people. The man donned an old suit and a sideways hat, and shuffled around so smoothly that he could've probably done it in his sleep. SO ADORABLE. A few minutes later I came upon a drumming band, rocking out in the middle of the market so hard that it made my heart explode a bit. I gave them 10 pesos for exploding my heart and rocked out with them for 4 or 5 songs, reluctant to leave. LOVED being here. So much life.

The other experience I will never forget was seeing a tango show at a small restaurant downtown. We chose to go to a casual, cheap show because we didn't want to have to make reservations (I'm lazy), and I'm so glad we did. We turned out to be the only tourists there, so it was a brief glimpse into true Argentine culture. Everyone sang along with the classic Argentine songs the singer performed (perhaps almost too passionately at times), and in the end, many people got up to dance amidst the dinner tables. You see so many things when you travel that are simply for the benefit of tourists, an exaggerated caricature of their culture, that when you see something real like this, it's beautiful and very touching.

(We didn't take nearly enough photos of Buenos Aires, but to see a few more pictures, click here.)

Neuquen seemed like a tiny, quaint little city after Buenos Aires. We did a day-trip from there to Villa El Chocon to see a museum housing the bones of the gigantic dinosaur (literally, it's called Gigantosaurus carolinii) and some dinosaur footprints by the nearby lake. Due to a scheduling mishap, we ended up with about 8 hours in which to see the museum and the footprints, so for a while there, it seemed like it was going to be a day filled with lots of thumb-twiddling. We took as long as we possibly could in the museum, reading every sign, in Spanish and in English, and then drank coffee as slowly as we could to stretch the time before starting our walk to the lake.



(Dinosaur footprints are quite hard to photograph because they blend in so well. They were about 2 feet across, astonishingly big.)



As we walked, a dog suddenly appeared, sprinting towards us, happy as a clam and jumping all over us with uncontrollable glee. He was so immediately and unnervingly friendly, that at first we got a bit scared because we thought maybe he had rabies. We pushed him off of us and kept walking as fast as possible, hoping he wouldn't bite our faces off. But as we walked, it became obvious that he wasn't rabid, he was just an unnaturally social and happy dog. He ran in front of us, and then behind us, and then around us, and then into the surrounding fields and back, his energy and curiosity entirely inexhaustible. We couldn't figure out if he was stray or not - his coat was clean and his teeth looked healthy. We ended up naming him Dogosaurus.

Dogosaurus walked with us all the way to the lake, came with us to see the dinosaur footprints, hung out on the beach with us, and then walked back with us. As the day drew nearer to its end, we desperately hoped he would find his way home so we wouldn't have to abandon him as our bus drove away. But he didn't -- he waited for us for an hour outside of a restaurant, and then followed us back into town and waited at the bus stop with us. Just as we were preparing to say our tearful goodbyes and feel like monsters for abandoning the cutest dog of all time, Dogosaurus disappeared! I guess he knew that tearful goodbyes were coming and wanted to avoid the awkwardness. That's how I usually avoid those types of situations too.

So it turned out to be a marvelous day -- not boring for a single second of those 8 hours -- thanks to Dogosaurus, our little gift from the universe.



(More dinosaur pictures are here.)

Today we spent the day in Trelew and Gaiman, two small Welsh (?!) towns on the coast of Argentina. I think this is maybe the only area in the world where you can see signs both in Welsh and in Spanish. We had tea and all-you-can-eat pastries at a Welsh teahouse, which was, and I'm not overstating here, the BEST THING EVER. I don't understand how America has adopted so many traditions and foods from so many cultures, and yet this one has gone unnoticed. Bubble tea - yes. All-you-can-eat pastries and tea - no. What a sad world we live in.

A Welsh and Spanish Jehovah's Witness Church:



All-you-can-eat pastries and tea. LOVE.



(Trelew pictures here and Gaiman pictures here.)

Tomorrow we're seeing PENGUINS, and, if I haven't died of cuteness overload by that point, then after that we're going to see one of the world's only expanding glaciers outside of Antarctica. As it expands, the pressure in the ice builds to such extremes that icebergs the size of houses fall off its edges. Fuck yeah. I'm really glad we gave this place a chance.

The one thing that has continued to be a huge challenge is the way Argentines talk. When I took Spanish in school, I learned the Spanish they speak in northern South America. So until now, I was getting pretty cocky, thinking I was about halfway to being fluent. Then along comes Argentina and I'm back to feeling like a complete beginner. There are several changes that, when combined, makes it sound like they're not even speaking Spanish.

- "Y" sounds have changed to "zh" and "s" sounds have changed to "th."
- Their word order is usually all flipped around.
- They use entirely different words for many things, including the words for "you are," which is a pretty important phrase. It's as if someone took the phrase "you are" in English and changed it to "fleb gleb."
- They speak extremely fast, and slur their words together.

Putting all of these changes together, it's the equivalent of going to California and someone asking "Where are you from?" and then going to New York, where they instead slur to you: "From zhere fleb gleb pathing?" Perhaps you will understand when I say, with all due respect, that to me they sound like my friend Kelly after she just had her wisdom teeth pulled, which makes every interaction extremely difficult, albeit somewhat amusing, even after being here 3 weeks.

However, they have waterfalls, Buenos Aires, dinosaurs, Welsh tea houses, penguins, glaciers, and Tierra del Fuego, and that's not even a tiny fraction of what there is to see here. So I guess I don't mind it here too much. :)

Weeeeeeeee!

Wow, the last few days have been intense. Shit has been real up in here, as they say (or may not say anymore).

Right now Ross and I are in Iquitos, the largest city in the Amazonian jungle, only reachable by boat or plane. The humidity here is absolutely unbearable. It feels like you're trapped in a sauna that's been wrapped in llama wool, dragged through a forest fire, and then left sitting in a swamp. It's mildly uncomfortable. Fortunately we've decided that Iquitos will be the place where we splurge (because you have to have a good splurge every once in a while if you're going to survive a year of backpacking), so we got a hotel with air conditioning! Oh sweet, sweet air conditioning. Possibly the greatest invention known to man.

Past the heat and humidity, Iquitos is a difficult place to describe. It's the kind of place where, instead of driving cars, mom, pop, and 3 kids pile onto a motorcycle, sans helmets. Instead of squirrels hopping around the main plaza, there are giant rats. The marketplace offers sloths (as pets), larvae (as food), Valium, and Chicha next to the usual array of splayed chickens and fish (Chicha is a beer that is traditionally made by grounding corn, moistening it in the maker's mouth, and then forming balls to lay out to dry. In short, we've been calling it "spit beer," but despite that it's actually quite good). During meals, we've been approached by children begging for food, a boy selling quartz, and one drunk, overly enthusiastic waitress who insisted on hugging each of us on our way out (I didn't mind this at all - maybe we've been enjoying too much chicha). The people are beautiful and friendly, and the juice is so good it's like a smack in the face. It feels wild and unkempt, but also laid back and fun - completely removed from urban mores. Pictures would probably be a lot more successful at conveying a sense of what it's like, so I'll wait until we have those up instead of writing any more.

We've booked a guided tour into the jungle for 4 days. Tomorrow we take a motorboat down the Amazon river for 3 hours to our ENTIRELY SCREENED lodge. Ross's brother, Sean, just did a similar tour of the jungle last week, and was attacked by ants. ATTACKED BY ANTS. As in, one moment he was walking along being all British, the next moment there were ants down his shirt and in his hair, biting the shit out of him for committing the grave sin of brushing against their tree branch. He also reported that there is such a thing known as "sweat bees," which prefer to attack the nose and eyes. I'm slightly terrified of this aspect of the jungle. I completely flipped out when we had to sleep in a hostel that had a cockroach in it. Hopefully it will be like aversion therapy and I'll come back completely unaware that bugs even exist. After this is over I will laugh in the face of cockroaches! Ha ha! Or, alternatively, I will actually go insane and spend the rest of my life rocking back and forth, mumbling incoherently about screens. (We got nets to wear on our heads just to be sure this doesn't happen.)

However, according to Sean, the trip is totally worth the onslaught of bugs. Every day we will go bird watching at dawn. Then the afternoon will be filled with hikes to various regions to see monkeys, butterflies and hopefully bears or something. Those live in the jungle, right? According to Mowgli? We will also go fishing for piranha, and at night, do hikes to look for nocturnal animals like tarantulas and caimans. I'm excited - it sounds at once exhilarating and a bit nightmarish. I'm sure the reality will be something else entirely.

Today I had to go shopping for a long-sleeved shirt, because apparently those are somewhat handy in the jungle. It would've been good to have thought of that before actually being IN a city in the jungle. The fashion here, understandably, is to wear as little as possible. Store after store, people looked at me like I was nuts when I asked for shirts with long sleeves. When they did have one, all they had was one size, "standard," which may be standard if you're a petite, beautiful Peruvian jungle woman but was comically undersized on me. I felt like a big, pasty Godzilla, lumbering around their stores with pit stains bigger than some of their small children, scaring away all but the bravest of salesgirls. Fortunately everyone came out unscathed (except for my ego), and I managed to acquire 2 long-sleeved shirts. Huzzah!

Anyway, if we're not back by Friday, send help!

More pictures of Iquitos:

Drugs, soup and witches

During breakfast, at the vegetarian restaurant across the street from our hostel (!) in Chiclayo, Ross noticed that there were bags of "coca" for sale behind the counter. We were surprised at first, but then remembered the guidebook mentioning that coca leaves are a legal and, in fact, important part of the culture in South America. (Which may explain the way people drive down here.) Natives chew the leaves or brew them into a tea to alleviate headaches, altitude sickness, hunger, fatigue, stomach pains, Kinda-Bored-Itis, and Not-Having-Enough-Fun-at-this-Party Syndrome. When we expressed interest in buying a bag, the waitress spent about 10 minutes offering advice and chatting with us about it. She spoke at great length about how she went to Cajamarca, had a headache because of the altitude, had a cup of coca tea, and BOOM! No headache. Had a stomach pain... Hey presto! Gone. (Incidentally, not a single person in Ecuador ever gave us advice or chatted with us. People here have been about 300 times friendlier than in Ecuador. They actually smile! And make jokes! And don't make me feel like I've raped their babies! Always a plus.)

To my parents and others who may worry: Unprocessed coca is about 100 times less potent than cocaine. It has roughly the same effect as a cup of coffee. So no worries, we probably won't turn up dead in a dumpster several days from now with an equally dead hooker and a donkey. (Although, somewhat relatedly, yesterday does mark the first day that I actually saw a man riding a donkey. Amazing!)

So we bought a bag of ground coca and took it back to our room to make a tea. Of course, because we have no way to boil water in our hotel room, we just mixed the coca with some bottled water and stirred it as vigorously as possible (which was not very vigorously). The result was a dark green, grainy, cold brew of disgustingness. We downed it anyway, just to see what it would be like, and eventually felt... absolutely nothing. Hmmmm. Not impressed.

Our main plan for today was to go explore La Mercada de los Brujos, or The Witches' Market. Because the next thing you want to do after trying coca for the first time is go haggle with some witches. (Un)fortunately, we had a hard time finding it because the guidebook's only 'guide' was that it was 'next to' the city's sprawling central market. And indeed, there is no other way to describe it except sprawling. Walking into this market was like what I'd imagine walking into the center of Delhi would be like. Local vendors had booths filled to the brim with every imagineable item, from bras and children's clothes, to pineapples and fish, to a metallurgy booth. The smells were, at times, overwhelming. People called out "Hola gringa! Gringa!!" trying to get my attention. Naturally. That is how I'd call a potential customer too. We even walked through a section of.... and here words fail me. Raw meat? Dead animals with flies buzzing all around them? Chickens cut open sideways so you could see all their organs? And that is when I had chicken blood squirted on my skirt as we walked. Mmm, yummy.

The "witch" part of the market was nowhere to be found (until we found it). Here people (or were they?) were selling herbs, candles, sacred shells, and shouting "Coca!" at us whenever we walked past. Now that is a better way to get a customer than "Gringa!!!!" (South Americans have a terrible affinity for shouting everything. On every corner there are people shouting what items they're selling. At the bus station there's guys shouting to advertise bus destinations. It's like, when I want strawberries I will come inquire about them. Likewise, shouting "QUITO QUITO QUITO QUITO QUITO QUITO QUITO QUITO" will not make me buy a bus ticket to Quito, it will just make me hate you a little bit more with each passing minute.)

Either way, we decided to buy some coca leaves to chew, since the ground coca that we'd made "tea" with earlier was such a disappointment that we were still curious. We read online that to chew coca leaves, you have to mix them with an alkaloid called "llipta" (pronounced YIP-tah) to release the coca more readily. When we asked for some, the lady selling it just poured some out into a bottle cap and handed it for us to try. Uh, no thanks. I'll take your word that it's good stuff.

The witches are my favorite people in South America so far.

One of the other herbs we decided to buy from the witches was San Pedro, a ground cactus that gives you mild hallucinations for about an hour. Hey, when in Rome, right? The man invited us into the secret back section of his booth to show us the product. We haggled him down to about $5, because if you pay any more than that for your hallucinogenic cactus then you're a sucker.

Armed with all our new goodies, we finally made it out of the market and went back home to try the loot. We watched several YouTube videos of people mixing coca leaves with llipta and chewing the mixture, just to make sure we weren't about to kill ourselves trying to do this. (God, I love the internet.) Finally we gathered the nerve to try it ourselves. The coca leaves had a nice, leafy taste to them, but mixed with the llipta, the whole thing tasted bitter and unpleasant. You chew the mixture a few times and then keep it in a ball in your cheek like a squirrel. After a few minutes, my cheek and throat started to go a bit numb. Ross felt nothing. After 20 minutes, Ross still felt nothing, and I felt nothing more than a mild deja-vu of being at the dentist. I have a suspicion the whole coca thing is a vast South American conspiracy on the gringos. Now I'm worried that the San Pedro we bought is going to turn out to be just ground basil. Damn Peruvians.

To finally switch gears from talking about drugs: for dinner we went to a restaurant where I was served cream of cream soup. I had asked for cream of asparagus, but I think they forgot to put in the asparagus. We decided to spice it up by adding some black pepper to it, since, hey, it doesn't get much worse than just cream for dinner. We added a normal amount of pepper, only to find that the soup tasted exactly as before. So then I added more. And more. We added what I conservatively estimate to be about 3 tablespoons of pepper and gingerly did a taste test, with absolutely no discernible difference. How is this possible? Is this soup another South American conspiracy on the white people? Does it actually have super-powers of creaminess? Is the pepper actually fake pepper, placed there to watch us squirm? (Travelling in places where we're the only white people for miles has started to make us quite paranoid. It seems like everyone is ripping us off or deliberately messing with our heads. Stop it, South Americans.)

Eventually the soup went from white to a dull grey color, but I still tasted nothing but cream. So the next logical thing was to chip off pieces of fried plantain (their version of potato chips) and make a little happy face in the soup. Sadly, the waitress did not appreciate our art and walked away with a scowl. We left money on the table and fled.

Dissatisfied with my dinner of 4 sips of soup, we decided to buy some fruit on the way back home. I was delighted to see that, among the apples, bananas, and oranges, there were also 2 fruits for sale that were new to me. Trying foreign fruit is one of my favorite things to do. It's so exciting having no idea what a food is going to look like when you open it, not knowing what texture it will have (usually it's fucking weird) or what it will smell or taste like. It's like a gustatorial adventure. I have never been disappointed doing this and tonight was no exception. Ross was just as excited, if not more so, because we were finally going to be getting to use the sporks that we bought specifically for this trip.

Overall a highly satisfying day in Peru, especially once I washed the chicken blood off my skirt.