02.26.2006

Junin De Los Andes

In northernmost Patagonia up against the border with Chile is a child's drawing of a volcano come to life - a triangular white peak covered in snow, with a kind of hump on its southern slope that makes it look like a hunchback. This is the Vulcán Lanín, a stratovolcano that sits on the horizon like a single pointy tooth. To the south of it stretches the Lanín National Park, in the heart of Argentina's lake district.

Apart from its scenery, which is what you would expect from a place called 'the lake district', the region is famous for its trout fishing (catch and release, a gastronomic lap dance) and a very strange kind of tree called the pehué, or araucaria, or monkey puzzle. The araucaria looks like a shoe tree made of giant pipe cleaners and is probably as unfriendly a plant as you can get without using thorns. Up close, the branches of the alcuara display a cylindrical arrangement of triangular artichoke-like leaves. These leaves are tough and spiky, so even brushing against one of the branches feels like running your hand across a saw blade. The trees are popular with Western gardeners (who came up with the monkey puzzle name), but are notorious for their ability to inflict severe injury if you happen to step on their fallen leaves barefoot, or get caught by a falling branch.

Araucaria come in male and female forms - the men are a regulation dark green, while the females cover up with pretty russet flowers that grow into large pine cones, with edible nuts. These nuts once formed a staple food for the local natives, the Mapuche, who worshipped the trees as divine beings and even paid them the ultimate staple-crop compliment of figuring out how to distill their seeds into booze. But the Mapuche fell on hard times in the late nineteenth century. After hundreds of years of resisting first Inca and then white colonization, they succumbed to an intense 'pacification' campaign (the towns in this area were founded specifically to exterminate them) and now constitute a small minority of the local population. This puts an awkward spin on the local history, but the survivors have been graciously allowed to continue gathering the pine nuts, and in an unusual experiment have been given a stake in administering the local national park (a big deal in statist Argentina).

One of the charms of the Lanín park is that it's really not easy to get to from anywhere. Buenos Aires is some 1500 kilometers to the northeast, and the nearest city of any size is in Chile, over the Andes. The main town on the Argentine side is Bariloche, which has made a name for itself as a fishing and ski resort and (borrowing an idea from the Swiss) a place to get fantastic chocolate. Junín de Los Andes is a small town about three hours north of Bariloche, and a gateway to the northern part of the national park, as well as Lanín volcano itself. Its main concession to the growing tourist trade has been adding a large painted trout to each of its wooden street signs.

Like every other town in Argentina, Junín is laid out on a grid and centered on a Plaza San Martín. The park in that plaza has an equally predictable (although still baffling) little statue of an older woman off in a corner, inscribed simply To Mother. In an orgy of extravagance, the main few blocks in the town center have been paved, although the road turns quickly to gravel at its edges, and from there peter out into pasture and brush. The border of the national park is a rickety forty minute van ride to the west.

Horses graze on the outskirts of town and there are telltale plops of manure in places in the streets, corresponding to the occasional clomp-clomp you hear during the afternoon siesta. The heat must get to the poor animals - in similar country in Provence it was too hot to try and keep horses or cattle, but the Argentines either have a system for keeping their livestock cool or are just too plain stubborn to compromise their supply of beef by yielding to the demands of climate. Chickens and dogs are the most numerous residents of Junín proper, barking and crowing in the morning to make sure the town wakes up, and then taking it easy through the hotter parts of the day. Dogs here sleep deeper than any dogs I have ever seen, flopped over on their sides in the shade with paws extended and neatly stacked. They are a uniform brown color from the dust.

An unexpected source of joy throughout our stay in the town was the Junín bus station, a little building surrounded by greenery, percolating with young students and backpackers. Whether by disposition or because of something special in the maté, everyone we encountered there was unusually friendly, even by the high standards of rural Argentina. A man with a cart outside hawked Super Panchos, the Argentine foot-long hot dog, the only bad meat product in the country. Across the street, at a sage distance from the cart, some strange birds were strolling and pecking at the grass: each was the size of a small turkey and has a elegant curved bill. I found out later these were black-beaked ibis.

Another bird kept swooping around right above the terminal, keeping a close eye on the pancho stand, clearly unafraid of people. It looked like a cross between a small hawk and a pigeon, with the claws and leggings of the former and the head of the latter, about the size of a crow. Later on I would see enormous swarms of these birds assembling in Junín's central square, roosting in the evenings on all the large radio antennas and conifers, and even (when it got truly crowded), dejectedly landing in the alaucara, though that triggered a fussy half-minute or so of careful wing-balancing and adjustment. Although the town being absolutely full of these birds I have not been able to find a single mention of them since, either in online bird guides or in the massive collection of stuffed Argentine birds at the natural history museum in La Plata. I still don't know what they were.

We arrived ill-prepared, a dysfunctional party of five with no reservations on a weekend at the height of tourist and fishing season, but within half an hour we were in a spacious and inexpensive apartment, referred by a friendly taxi driver to the town's English teacher, Sonia. Sonia had a big house with an annex next to it for guests - a room with two regular beds and a bunk bed, children's sheets on all of them, and a large hand-drawn poster of Harry Potter in a robe with angel's wings. From then on, Junín could do us no wrong.

Sonia's yard was an oasis of green grass in a dusty, dusty town. She kept it fenced off to protect the two rabbits that live there, one white and one black, doted on by her three-year old daughter. At the hottest part of the day the rabbits would lie panting on bare patches of dust under a hedge, like the penguins at Puenta Tombo. We watched the rabbits and sat in the yard with Sonia, who poured us tereré, the lemony hot-weather version of maté. Children of all ages cycled through the yard and the house, which seemed to be the focal point of the whole neighborhood. Smaller kids would run in and out, conscientiously shutting the gate for the rabbits' sake; the teenagers would kiss us on the cheek and then go in to paint and do other chores.

Junín was full of these sweet-mannered teenagers, and a considerable number of the male variety seemed to spend their evenings milling around in front of Sonia's house, which may have had something to do with the presence of her beautiful teenaged daughter. One of the suitors would roar by on a dirt bike every half hour, his face hidden in a giant helmet. In the wee hours of Friday night, some others drove over in a car and did doughnuts in the dirt road outside, blasting Creedence Clearwater Revival. We walked in the house at two in the morning to find Sonia playing a weary game of Galaga at the computer while her three year old sat in front of a Disney movie, absorbing English, too stubborn to sleep.

The days here are hot enough to trigger the universal siesta, which lasts from three to four hours. This makes it feel like you're getting two days in one, and also makes it easier to eat a large steak dinner at midnight. By the time evening comes, the stores have opened again, it is pleasantly cool and a breeze is blowing in. The nights this close to the Andes are clear and cold, with an ink sky filled with unfamiliar southern constellations. We are hundreds of kilometers from the nearest bright spot on the map, and when the power fails briefly one night the sky show is breathtaking. The Milky Way is an irregular stripe, and to the right of it are two faint cotton balls, the Magellanic clouds The bigger one is about the size of a grapefruit held at arm's length. I'm surprised to see familiar old Orion up in the northern sky. The Southern Cross is bright but tiny compared to what I had imagined, tipped over on its side like a kite.

The siesta, on those days when I could stand to skip it, was the perfect time to go jump into the fast and cold stream that ran just a hundred meters or so past Sonia's house. This was the best way to get cool in the hot part of the day, and the little riverside park stayed almost deserted until people began to wake up at three o'clock. You could jump in upstream of a little pedestrian bridge and be propelled along at an exhilirating clip, with little children bobbing up around you, until the stream hit a shallow gravel patch some two hundred meters later and slowed down enough to let you and the kids claw your way out. A wire fence bisected the river further downstream, slicing up the weak and forgetful before they could be washed out into the Atlantic. When no one was looking, small tanned children would drop like apples from the rickety pedestrian bridge into the shallow water.

The drive up to the national park is rough and bumpy, with spectacular views every time the Pigpen-like cloud of dust surrounding our van clears for a moment. We trace the stream up to its source in a fat blue glacial lake almost at the foot of the volcano, which looms much larger from here. At the park entrance we discover that all the jolting has somehow jammed the van door shut, trapping us inside, to the great mirth of all the occupants. The driver shrugs and walks off somewhere, returning with a maté. One of the passengers tries to disassemble the lock from the inside while everybody else makes jokes. Other vans pull over in a show of solidarity, and soon their drivers are drinking maté with ours. Half an hour later, the door latch pops open, and we are free.

Argentine national parks seem to offer only two kinds of hikes: a sedate thirty-minute stroll along a wide footpath, or a multi-day trek through gorgeous and difficult terrain, the kind where they make sre you brought crampons. The day hike so popular in the United States seems to be nonexistent. It is possible to hike to the base of Lanín volcano and back in one day, but you're only allowed to try if you arrive by eight in the morning. To go further up requires ice equipment, sweaters, determination and a guide. You spend one night at the 2,700 meter refuge (with "good views of the surrounding countryside"), and go up to the summit and then all the way down the next day. The last section of the volcano is a long 45 degree climb. They say it is dormant.

We opt instead to eat a steak and take a boat tour of the large blue lake. Again the sheer friendliness of the guides is shocking; these people after all have to spend every day of the season ferrying sunburned tourists around the same limited circuit. The trip leader runs around the boat pointing things out to everyone, stopping only to serve NutraSweet espresso and miniature chocolates to the passengers from a tray. At the tip of the lake we slow down near a nonplussed angler fishing where a stream enters the lake. Our trip leader grows even more excited, and throws a small aluminum bucket into the water, with a rope attached. The water in this stream is supposed to make you ten years younger. It gets passed out in tiny Dixie cups and everyone trundles down the stairs to drink it, while the angler looks at the fifty foot boat with murder in his eyes.

Taking photographs on this cruise feels like going hunting in a zoo. You can lift your camera and point it at random in any direction, and you get a National Geographic cover. All the glacial lakes at the foot of the volcano are vivid blue, with coarse black sand surrounding them. In some places there are bare, lunar lava fields; in others the forest grows right down into the water. The forest has a pestilential look since the cane that forms its underbrush has flowered - something that happens only every few decades - and now lies dead on the ground, with only a few new shoots visible.

When the boat docks again I change into swim trunks and try taking a dip in the glacial lake. Much of what I am swimming in was recently snow, so there is an abrupt transition between the thin top layer heated by the black sand and Patagonian sun, and the icy bottom layer that lies in wait just below your ankles. The sand on the banks is so steep and coarse-grained it shifts like quicksand, so that as soon as you step out into the water your feet slide down in a series of slow-motion avalanches. We gringos are the only ones swimming; even the panting dogs won't go into the water. The black beach is as hot as a griddle and burns your feet badly if you have been foolish enough to leave your shoes inshore.

Back at the bus station again, a shaggy man with a microphone headset on approaches us and begins peppering us with questions. "Where are you from? What made you decide to visit Patagonia? How did you hear of Junín?" He's doing a radio show, mercifully not live, and I answer his questions with the effortless ease that is my hallmark in Argentina:

"We are from Nuevo Djork. Observe volcano. Volcano is pretty and we like it. We like water, like the heat. We like the heat and also we like the river. It is not hot in Nuevo Djork. In Nuevo Djork it is cold. Patagonia is very pretty. Penguins are here, beef is here, and also there is wine."

Inside the bus station a woman sells us a ticket to Neuquén, and onwards to Buenos Aires. She's the first person in Argentina to speak to me slowly, and the transaction unfolds in a beautiful dream of comprehension. The bus will be coche cama, a fully reclining seat. Steak will be served. The bus will arrive in Buenos Aires fourteen hours after departure. Outside the bus station, taxi drivers are standing outside, smoking. When a cab gets a fare, the other drivers push their cars forward one slot without turning on the engine, then get back out to stand in the shade. The pancho man is back with his hot-dog stand.

I see two guys drinking maté from a hollowed-out horse's hoof in another bus company's ticket window. I ask them whether I can take a picture, and they pose it gingerly for me.

"We didn't kill it", one of them explains.

Late one night in her house, Sonya catches us being stereotypical Americans, by which I mean we're drinking whisky on ice late at night at her kitchen table. Reciprocally we catch her being a typical Argentine, which means she is giving her three-year-old a bath at one in the morning. Sonia has a request for us: Do we know of anyone who would like to do a langage exchange with her in Junín? She's looking for either a teenager who wants to study abroad (you would get an infinitely nicer Argentine teenager in return), or an adult who would come to teach English. Personally I can't think of a better place to spend a school year. I'd be happy to put any interested reader directly in touch with her to figure out the nuts and bolts of it.

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02.15.2006

Two Dinosaurs

On my way back from Buenos Aires from the Argentine lake district (snug up against the Chilean border), I stopped in the provincial capital of Neuquén. Neuquén is one of those unloved but essential cities, like Inverness or Anchorage, that constitutes the only population center in a large expanse of nothingness and so consist entirely of big box stores, dealerships, billboards and administrative offices. Neuquén is also a transport hub at the gateway to Patagonia and the Argentine Lake District, with a massive new bus terminal to connect the several regions together.

And Neuquén is also the place where Argentines extract prehistoric fauna from the ground, whether in liquid or fossil form. The region supplies most of the country's oil, and all of its record-breaking giant dinosaurs.

I had come to see the paleontological museums in two little towns, Plaza Huincul and Villa El Chocón. Both are about an hour's bus ride away from Neuquén, in hot desert country that looks a lot like Nevada. Plaza Huincul is home to the largest herbivorous dinosaur ever found: the hundred-tonne Argentinosaurus Huinculensi; El Chocón boasts the largest carnivore, Giganotosaurus Carolinii, which resembles the Tyrannosaurus Rex in the same way that the Ford Expedition resembles a Jeep. Both sets of fossils were found here in the nineties, and there is widespread agreement that there are many interesting surprises still hiding here in the ground. Argentine law stipulates that even the most impressive and scientifically important fossil cannot cross provincial boundaries, let alone leave the country. So to see the original bones you have to go to Neuquén.

Back when I was a kid, the dinosaur situation was pretty simple. Dinosaurs were dumb, lubmering lizards and the largest dinosaur of all was the brontosaurus, a cold-blooded giant that held its head up in an elegant curve and spent its life partially submerged in swamps in order to support its vast bulk. The only thing a brontosaurus had to fear was the occasional attack from the Tyrannosaurus Rex, king of the meat-eaters, who would stagger out of the forest roaring and waving his short, stubby arms. Stegasauruses grazed placidly on drier terrain, pterodactyls darkened the skies, and the oceans were filled with plesiosaurs.

As fascination with living girls replaced my fascination with fossil reptiles, I lost track of dinosaur developments except for a vague sense that things were getting a little complicated. First came a series of dinosaur finds that were larger than the brontosaurus; then came the disconcerting news that there had never been a brontosaurus in the first place, just a misfiled apatosaurus, whatever that was. Meanwhile, in the meat eating camp, the T-Rex found its reputation so beset by scurrilous rumors that it was a carrion-eater that it lacked the energy to fend off a rival for "largest meat-eater", the allosaurus.

After that, everything went to hell. The paleontological revisionism reached Orwellian proporitons. Instead of being cold-blooded swamp lumberers, it was suddenly announced that dinosaurs were warm-blooded - dinosaurs had always been warm-blooded! - and that they were intelligent and complex creatures capable of great bursts of speed. The giant plant eaters lost the graceful high curve of their neck and assumed the unexciting shape of a suspension bridge; the carnivores went in posture from a fearsome, chin-up, Tokyo-stomping swagger to something resembling a running chicken. Some scientists even tried to deck the dinosaurs out in feathers, or at the very least brightly colored skin. And then everyone got distracted by the strange things coming out of the ground in Patagonia.

The bus to Plaza Huincul is a comfortable ride with sandwiches and cups of soda provided free - most of the passengers are on the far longer journey to the Andes. I jumped out at a desolate roundabout at the entrance to the town. On one side of the road stood a giant wire-frame dinosaur, on the other side was a green cement pillar with a wire cutout of Santa Claus and his reindeer on top, and small plastic dinosaurs at the base. It was two in the afternoon and the sun was ferocious. The only things moving were cars and trucks that creeped in like swimming dots from the far distance and rushed through the roundabout without even slowing down. There were some refinery towers a kilometer or so away, and a strange empty campground which looked like it might offer a touch of shade stood near the road. A road sign told me I was 1256 kilometers from Buenos Aires, and I believed it.

Everything was closed and deserted, whether for siesta or more permanently. I finally got directions from a refinery worker shoveling macadam in the heat and walked along the baking main road, past the intriguing Club Anfitrion and Wiskeria Kalifornia, until I found the place immediately across from the museum where the bus had dropped off all the other passengers who knew better than to get off at the roundabout.

The museum in Plaza Huincul is charming and almost deserted. One advantage of trekking out into the middle of nowhere to see dinosaurs is that almost no one comes with you. Something about the bright room, the plastic chair, and the quiet library atmosphere of the place reminded me of my third grade classroom in southern California, back when California had good third grade classrooms. I stood for a bit before a woman appeared and walked over to collect my two peso entry fee. She asked me where I was from, wrote it down, and then pointed me to the two ends of the room. One side had giant lettering that read "Museo Historico", the other side read "Museo Paleontologico".

"This one is the history of city, and the other is dinosaurs?" I asked in fluent Spanish.

"You are very intelligent," she said, and disappeared back into the museum.

Out of some kind of misplaced feeling of pity, I forced myself to visit the historical section first. Like every other historical collection I've seen in Argentina, it consisted of a strange assortment of documents and machinery whose sole criterion of inclusion seemed to be age. The centerpieces of the collection included the first computer in Neuquén (a handsome Wang workstation), several antique bottles of napthol, a vial of jet-A kerosene, a set of old dentures, an adding machine, and a framed black and white photo of the dedication ceremony for a local bust of Eva Perón.

Plaza Huincul is an oil town. Like every other oil town, it has a dreary and brief history, with before and after photos of an empty dusty wasteland turning to a dusty wasteland full of oil derricks and shacks. The text accompanying the old photos hinted darkly that the canonical story of Patagonian oil being discovered by accident, in the course of drilling for water, might just have been a smokescreen for a government that didn't want its oil industry dominated by the norteamericanos. Whether true or not, the ploy seems to have worked - the region produces most of Argentina's oil, for Argentine companies. Then again, no one here would be likely to complain if someone drilled and found water.

I stood in the history room as long as I could bear it, and then went to see the biggest dinosaur in the world.

I had just started reading the plaque next to a wall-mounted plesiosaur by the entrance to the exhibit when a paleontologist detached himself from a group of friends sitting in an large open doorway and walked over to give me a guided tour. He wore a kind of mullet previously unknown to science, something that looked like it had once been a mohawk but had been allowed to grow in for a year or so.

"Yargle blah zhorl dinosaurio ghromple patagonico," he began.

"Sorry, I understand very little Spanish"

But of course this kind of admission has yet to faze anyone in Argentina, which is one of the most pleasant (if intimidating) parts of my sojourn here. After hearing you say you can't speak Spanish, people here will smile and continue talking to you in an amused but relaxed tone, without slowing down, as if you've just shared a good joke. Incomprehension seems to really break the ice.

In the case of the paleontologist, this was the best possible outcome; I was able to understand almost everything he said to me over the next half hour, to my great surprise. With the topic clearly defined, listening to him was like watching the Spanish-dubbed Discovery Channel, with its many helpful dates and latinate words, and anything I missed my brain helpfully filled in with extravagant inventions of its own. This made the local dinosaur history really leap to life.

The first thing my guide told me, of course, was "look to your right", and there stood the mighty Argentinasaurus. Or rather, there stood a small portion of the mighty Argentinasaurus. Getting a full view of the skeleton requires a fair amount of backing up, since the few parts of the enormous barn-sized enclosure holding the Argentinasaurus that are not filled with neck or ribcage are needed to contain the endless series of bones that forms the animal's tail. To the best of anyone's knowledge, this is the biggest land animal ever to have lived, and the Giganatosaurus posed next to it in an agressive posture (a shout-out to the fellow paleontologists in Villa El Chocón) looks like a poodle attacking a bus.

Almost all of the Argentinasaurus is extrapolated from the few vertebrae and hip fragments that were found here and are shown in a big wall case. The paleontologist explained (I think) that the body plans of these large sauropods are so well understood it's possible to do this kind of guesswork with good accuracy. The size estimate for the Argentinasaurus - around 100,000 kg - is generally accepted. An adolescent dinosaur at the height of his growth spurt gained 100kg of body mass a day.

I thought there might be a gentle rivalry between Plaza Huincul and El Chocón, but the two museums are in fact on excellent terms. My guide asked me to send my best regards to his colleagues down south, and in an echo of the Giganotosaurus at Plaza Huincul, El Chocón turned out to have a replica Argentinasaurus femur in tribute to its northern neighbor.

El Chocón has more of a sense of flair than Plaza Huincul, but it is unclear why. The town lies on the edge of a big artificial reservoir, and there are rows and rows of East German-like concrete huts leading down towards the water, painted in white and a rusty red that bleeds down the walls when it rains. The town is full of people on vacation; it seems these somewhat dismal huts get rented out to campers.

It's impossible to miss the dinosaur museum. Big white dinosaur footprints lead towards it from the main road, and the whole town has embraced the dinosaur theme like Trelew has embraced its penguins. The museum itself is small and fun - they are so proud of the Giganotosaurus that they display it not once but three times: as a set of bones in the red earth, as a reconstructed skeleton, and as an incongruously mounted green roaring head on one of the walls. The walking dinosaur is posed like he is about to crush a red dune buggy, which a sign explains is the custom vehicle that was used to find the dinosaur's bones by its charismatic discoverer. On the wall is an arrangement of press clippings, including a lively photo of the buggy itself with a giant bone tied down on its roof, Fred Flinstone style.

In the back of the El Chocón museum is a beautifully prepared and completely ignored exhibit on the local dam, including painstaking cutaways of its innards and the many pressure and movement sensors that are used to monitor its structural integrity. Like the historical section of the Plaza Huincul museum, this exhibit seems fated to a life of complete obscurity. Outside in the hallways are more fossils, various people who seem to be working paleontologists, and to my utter delight, a box full of fossilized dinosaur bones and teeth put out for the museum guests to handle.

The only disappointment in the whole trip is finding that the nearby dinosaur footprints - the real ones, captured in rock - have lately been submerged by the dam reservoir. Before the footprints were identified for what they were, people here used to use them as fire pits for their weekly asado. And if the occasion were ever to present itself, I doubt the people in this meat-loving country would hesitate to barbecue an entire dinosaur. The Giganotosaurus may be extinct, but its views on what constitutes a healthy diet are alive and well in this part of Patagonia.

I left Neuquén exhilirated, but also a little envious. Like video games, the dinosaurs just get better every year. Already we've come a long way from the sluggards of my youth, and I'm sure that the next generation of kids will be coloring in pictures of a three-hundred tonne cousin of the Argentinasaurus, and perhaps even playing with some new, improved version of the T-Rex that breathes fire. But at least the odds are high the cool new stuff will turn up right here. Come see it!

Get your fix of dinosaur pics at idlewords.com/images/Dinos/

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02.07.2006

Penguins At Punta Tombo

The flight from Buenos Aires to Trelew takes only a little over an hour, but you feel like you've arrived on another planet. Instead of an endless urban landscape that transitions into an even more endless coastal lawn, you find yourself in the middle of an arid plain that looks like a cross between northern Scotland and Nevada. The plane lands in a stiff crosswind and pulls up to the only building visible in any direction, a tiny airport terminal with an incongrous Welsh welcome lion on the front. After spitting you out onto the gale-swept tarmac, the plane scoots over to a little filling station and then immediately flies off to somewhere more populous and less gusty, leaving you on your own in an absurd excess of open space. Welcome to Patagonia.

Chubut is an Arkansas-shaped province of Argentina that is a little bit smaller and less populous than the state of Wyoming. The province is a horizontal slice through Patagonia - the region starts far to the north in Rio Negro, and extends all the way down to the southern tip of the continent.

Trelew and the associated group of towns around it (Gaiman, Rawson, Dolavon, Trevelin) lie up in the northeast corner of Chubut. They owe their strange names to the Welsh settlers who showed up here about the time of the American Civil War, looking for a place where they could be away from Englishmen while still enjoying the kind of windy, miserable winters they had grown used to back in the homeland. The Argentine government of the time is partly to blame for the rough start the settlers had in Patagonia. In their haste to stress the many charms the province offered (sun-kissed summers, virgin land, distance from England) they skipped over certain inconveniences (barren waterless desert) that made the first few years in Argentina a real trial for the Welsh.

However, after a few miserable initial winters, the settlers managed to build an excellent irrigation system and actually begin growing some food. The colony may not have thrived, but it survived, and as late as the 1970's the Welsh influence on this part of Argentina persisted, with old-timers still speaking the language and keeping their distinct traditions alive. In 2006, all that seems to remain of the settler culture is an annual song contest, the beautiful canals, a well-developed tourist effort aimed at drawing people into the local teahouses and an extravagant number of Jones Streets.

Trelew is a pleasant town of about 80,000, with the obligatory Plaza San Martín and an mysterious profusion of ice cream parlors. It serves mostly as a transport hub for the local beaches and marine wildlife reserves, and is not shy about advertising its penguin connection - the birds are on display in every storefront, in photographic, cartoon, plush and schematic form. And penguins were what we had come to Trelew to see. The nearby colony at Punto Tombo is the largest on the South American continent, with over half a million Magellanic penguins coming ashore each year to relax, eat fish, and breed.

Anyone who found the family-values propaganda of March of the Penguins a little oppressive will feel an immediate affinity for the far more laid-back Magellanic penguin. Instead of trekking through seventy miles of Antarctic ice to rear eggs that it balances on its feet, this admirable bird simply swims ashore in the warm spring months, digs a hole under a Patagonian bush, and lies sleeping on its belly in the sun until its chicks hatch. The Magellanic penguin is about the size of a bowling pin, and has an elegant black stripe around its neck that looks like a necklace. Punta Tombo is about the nearest it ever comes to Antarctica. Winters are spent swimming and eating fish somewhere off the shores of Brazil.

Punta Tombo is a little penninsula jutting out of the Patagonian coast, and to the undoubted benefit of the penguins, it is not easy to get to. Like most roads in Patagonia, the one leading from Trelew is unpaved gravel. Even though the road is well maintained, with enormous graders riding through several times a day to comb it, the gravel still has a tendency to pool up in large swells between wheel tracks and make a horrible clattering and scraping sound against the belly of your car, which it attempts to spin. Passing oncoming cars (or buses, or tailgaters who illegaly overtake you) are even more nerve-wracking, since you never know what kind of large rock might come sailing through your windwhield.

For most of the drive down, the view consists of gravel road and nearly level, featureless scrubland. Once in a while an animal will pop out into the road - on our drive we crossed an armadillo, a number of rheas (flightless ostrich impersonators) and the better part of a herd of guanaco, an upscale wild version of the llama. From time to time you see a sprinkling of grazing sheep, looking sullen and tasty out in the windy expanses.

At Punto Tomba the road turns left and slaloms its way to the shore, visible as a striking blue stripe of turquoise water in the distance, and more and more guanaco appear on the hilltops. Right before reaching the water, the road stops at a ranger station, where you can get stop and buy postcards, get a cold drink, or of course fortify yourself with a steak before entering the reserve proper.

Just past the ranger's semaphore you see your first penguin, squinting up at you from under a bush, where he has dug himself a little trench and is lying lazily on his belly. The brief drive to the shore reveals more and more penguins under their bushes, with the occasional amused guanaco standing among them, until there was not a single piece of uninhabited scrub without a bird under it. Along the beach itself are long queues of penguins waddling hither and yon, Childhood's End-style, on their mysterious business.

Penguins up close are much less adorable than penguins from afar. The birds are greasy, covered in dust, and have a strong ammoniac smell, just like you'd expect from anyone who's been sleeping for months under a bush. The grunginess helps offset the irresistible preciouness and self-importance of the way the penguins walk, in their formalwear, holding their wings slightly away from their bodies for balance. The birds are fearless but not totally indifferent to the crowds of human visitors that pass through. Occasionally a bird will grow interested in a pants seam or a shoelace and tug ferociously at it with his beak, whipping his head back and forth like a dog worrying a chew toy, and even waddle menacingly after the hapless person wearing the offending item, punctuating his efforts to remove it with an angry repetitive slapping of the flipper.

Most of the time, however, the penguins ignore the human visitors completely, and shuttle around from sea to burrow and back, feeding their kids and relaxing on their bellies in the shade. The living at Punta Tombo is not always as easy as it looks; the waters are rather impoverished and about half the young penguins die each year of starvation. But by this point in the season, the young penguins are almost grown and the hardest part of their youth is behind them. The only heartbreaking thing you're likely to see now is the occasional spastic fit of wing-flapping from a fledgeling, the young bird still not quite able to believe that it has been born unable to fly.

A few weeks from now, all these birds, young and old, will emerge from their burrows and and head back out to sea, travelling prodigious distances to bring misery into the lives of the South Atlantic anchovy and other itinerant morsels of the deep. But for now, the birds are happy to stay put, and it's the tourists who must do the travelling - shockingly few tourists, given that it's high season in Patagonia. The busloads of visitors from the Northern Hemisphere you mentally brace yourself for in a place like this are nowhere in sight. Nearly everyone we come across seems to be an Argentine on summer vacation. We're the only ones on hand to ruin the experience for everyone else.

It's possible to drive further along south from Punto Tomba, if you are stubborn enough and know where to buy gas. The road continues all the way down to Tierra del Fuego. When you're sliding your finger along a map at home, the trip can even looks tempting. But in practice, even 99 kilometers of bone-rattling and wind gusts is enough, and it's all you can do to crawl back north to Trelew, gingerly trying to keep the car from sustaining visible damage ($5600 deductible) and marveling at the insane people who try to trek the length of Patagonia by bicycle. Still, the frightful road adds to the adventure. There's something about the otherworldliness of the bird colony and the hassle of reaching it that satisfies a deep Puritan urge for difficult pleasures. The remote penninsula here really does feel like the edge of the world.

More photos at idlewords.com/images/Trelew/penguins.htm

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02.06.2006

Heist!

There was a spectacular bank heist here the day after I moved to Buenos Aires. What I know about it has all come through the thick veil of my rudimentary Spanish, so I'm sure details and entire facts have been embellished to suit my sense of fun, but even in general outline it's a crime straight out of the movies.

On the afternoon of (Friday!) January 13, four gunmen walked into the Banco Rio in Acassuso (part of greater Buenos Aires) and took the staff and customers hostage. There was a tense six hour long siege by the police, expertly handled by the robbers - they let each hostage call home, so that family members showed up at the scene; the calculation was that the police would be more reluctant to storm the building immediately if hostages' relatives were watching. They made sure to release three hostages right away as a gesture of goodwill, but of course the three released included the security guard and police officer already in the building. While one of the robbers stayed on the phone, negotiating with police, the remaining ones got busy cracking open safe deposit boxes. Towards four in the afternoon, the police delivered six pizzas and some bottles of soda, the fruit of all those hours of negotiation, which the robbers passed along to the hostages. And then they went silent.

After about an hour of no contact and no news, an elite police bank-storming squad stormed the bank, only to find a group of bewildered hostages sitting scared in the smoke. There was no trace of the gunmen.

Initially the police suspected that the perpetrators had mixed in with the hostages, and questioned the hostages rather roughly as a result. "The robbers treated us better than the police!", someone complained to the press later. But after intense questioning, two things became clear to the Argentine boys in blue: all of the hostages' stories checked out, and there was also a rather large tunnel leading out of the bank basement.

The tunnel led to an extensive storm sewer system that underlay all of Buenos Aires. Geologists working with the police estimated it must have taken fifteen days or so to dig the tunnel, and that it had been dug within the last three months. The entrance point in the bank was easily disguisable by making a proper arrangement of furniture, one of many reasons the authorities suspected an inside job.

The robbers had unburdened the bank of 600,000 pesos ($200,000 US) and 145 of the largest safe deposit boxes, which officially were not supposed to contain more than fifty thousand dollars each, but unofficially were probably full of things that their owners did not particularly want declared to the Argentine fiscal authorities. The cash and the boxes were floated out either onto the River Plate or to a nearby superhighway in inflatable rubber motorboats - the tunnels were marked with special paint visible only with night-vision goggles - and the eight or so perpetators then departed to take their well-deserved retirement in Brazil or the Carribean. The guns they used turned out to be props. Apart from some rough handling of hostages by police, no one was hurt.

I read about this heist on my second day in the city, sitting in a beautiful jewel of a pastry shop, eating the medialunas (croissants) that they regrettably glaze with sugar here in an attack of confectionary insecurity. Below the newspaper with the heist story was a glossy magazine with a ten-page photo spread on a derelict Diego Maradona attending somebody's wedding. And I knew I'd come to the right country.

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