There are few things more annoying to me whilst on the road than a bad dinner, especially one where you feel you’ve overpaid for. It always seems like a good idea at the time, trundling along the cold street, with the evening wind picking up, churning up dust and debris from the ground and whipping it past your face. Pulling your jacket higher, in a vain attempt to keep out the cold, you see it.
Just round the corner, with an audible buzzing of the neon sign, like a miniature hive of bees.
A warm orange glow emanating from within, a promise of warmth and sustenance.
The clues were there from the beginning, the many empty tables and the bored looking waiters, the menu board outside, proclaiming the offerings in a multitude of languages, surely a tempting sight for many a gringo.
But the warmth! Oh! The warmth!
Like the proverbial moth to a flame, we drifted nearer, taking a peek inside. A voice sounds out from the side, we had not even noticed him, with an alpaca poncho, he was standing on the street, hustling for customers.
“Trout! Straight from the lake to your plate!”, he offered, in Spanish.
“Come in!”
The wind picked up just that bit more, an icy whip lashing at us.
He opened the door a little, and a brief cloud of warmth drifted out.
We took another look down the street, the glow of a few other restaurants further down the street looked ever further away, with a sea of black and cold separating us, we turned to him, and nodded.
And that was pretty much it.
I left my job as an advertising Creative Director in August 2012 to travel Africa and South America for a year with my wife, documenting these beautiful places with my Fuji X-Pro1. View the rest of my RTW adventures on Handcarry Only and follow me on my journey by subscribing/following/bookmarking.
The majestic Cerro Fitz Roy, with the turquoise glacial Laguna de los tres in front
At the very first mirador (viewpoint) of the hike
A fine shroud of dust hung in the air in front of me, drifting slowing to one side and catching the late morning sun in its ethereal cloud. The trees on either side of the path were absolutely still, with nary a hint of breeze in the air, which was still cool from the night. Trudging ahead on the path, not quite certain if we were headed in the right direction, I stopped to admire the view and tranquility. Surely this had to be the right path, it did fork about half an hour ago but the other path seemed so unlikely, it did not look like it had had much traffic recently, with some of the undergrowth starting to creep towards the centre of the dirt track.
We had to be on the right track.
With 2 hours of walking behind us, and another 2 more before we reached our goal of Laguna de los tres, at the foot of Cerro Fitz Roy. Apart from a couple of hikers heaving massive backpacks headed the other way, we had not encountered anyone else on the hike so far. They must have been returning from an overnight stay at a refugio somewhere ahead. The coolness of the air betrayed the heat that would come later on, in any case, I was not complaining, according to the park rangers, we were fantastically lucky with the weather, it could just as easily have been raining or Cerro Fitz Roy could have been blanketed with cloud, as the name Chaltén, or ‘smoking mountain’ implied. But for the moment, the skies were all clear and Fitz Roy beckoned.
We forged on.
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The lulling effect of the late afternoon sun claims yet another victim
Public busses in Buenos Aires, Colectivos, are a cheap and efficient way to navigate the vast city
I got thinking one afternoon, hanging on a greasy pole in a colectivo hurtling from stop to stop barely 2 blocks apart, the late afternoon sun sending everyone, or those with the luxury of a seat anyway, nodding away in motion induced slumber, how nice it would be to have peanut butter for breakfast. Not the boring smooth creamy kind mind you, but the ‘Extra Crocante’ variety. Peanut butter, or Crema de Maní, is a rare beast in Buenos Aires, finding a jar is not unlike finding an Argentinian who likes his steak medium rare, or ‘jugoso’, which is to say, whilst not impossible, certainly very uncommon indeed. Which leads me to another thought … on why a nation of people who pride themselves on having the best beef in the world then insist on cooking the life out of it, we had on various occasions ordered our beef in the local parilla to be ‘jugoso’ or juicy, and it had turned out in various levels of doneness, mostly ranging from medium well to completely well done … but I digress, today, peanut butter occupies my mind. We had a reported sighting at Barrio Chino by someone at our Spanish school in Palermo. I made a mental note of trying to hunt it down the next day… speaking of Barrio Chino, it might be worth trying to get hold of some char siew as well, I wondered how char siew would go down with Argentinians, they certainly weren’t opposed to barbequed meat, so I figured Cantonese barbequed pork could actually have a chance of existing in Buenos Aires, even if no Porteños bought it, there was still a sizeable Chinese population that could possibly justify its sale …
I’m afraid that no thoughts more weighty or substantial found their way around my head that particular afternoon, filled only with frothy musings and fluffy reverie … which kind of leads me to wonder why I haven’t really seen any marshmallows on sale at the supermercado either …
I left my job as an advertising Creative Director in August 2012 to travel Africa and South America for a year with my wife, documenting these beautiful places with my Fuji X-Pro1. View the rest of my RTW adventures on Handcarry Only and follow me on my journey by subscribing/following/bookmarking.
Arriving in the rain to Buenos Aires, “La Paris de Sudamérica”
I was more than a little excited to be arriving in Buenos Aires, a city with a reputation that precedes it. Bestowed with names like “La París de Sudamérica”, or “La Reina del Plata” (Silver Queen), I pictured a city of elegance and Old World charm. Buenos Aires, or ‘Fair Winds’ in Spanish, was to be our rest stop on our travels. We would be spending a couple of months here studying Spanish and just trying to live like a local. It was good to have a place to call ‘home’, even if it was for a while. It can get tiring living out of a backpack and being constantly on the road.
As luck would have it, we were greeted by torrential rain when our bus pulled in to the city limits, added to that, a toxic chemical explosion in the docks near Retiro, where the bus terminus was, closed the station down amidst a poisoning scare. It later turned out to be harmless but it didn’t stop us from getting dumped on the side of a busy avenue in the rain. So marked our first hour in The City.
I left my job as an advertising Creative Director in August 2012 to travel Africa and South America for a year with my wife, documenting these beautiful places with my Fuji X-Pro1. View the rest of my RTW adventures on Handcarry Only and follow me on my journey by subscribing/following/bookmarking.
The Brazilian side of the falls offers a panoramic view, albeit from a little further away than I would have liked
The view from across the border in Argentina
We trudged along in the 35 degree (or 95 Farenheit for my readers in the New World) heat, sweating buckets and fending off mozzies hovering around our heads. The liberal coating of insect repellent on my arms and neck seemingly doing little to deter the flying pests from having their meal at my expense. The roar from behind the trees was unmistakable and quite familiar, considering we had just visited Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe just a month prior. We pushed ahead just a little further and a vista of utmost grandeur opened up before us. Split into 275 discrete falls, Iguazu (or Iguaçu in Brazil) is unsurprisingly named as one of the 7 wonders of the natural world. Stretching for over 2.7km (1.7 miles), its hard to imagine the amount of water crashing over the edge every second, throwing up a huge mist and forming rainbows all around. It was a spectacular sight, even the thronging hordes of shutter-happy tourists jostling for picture taking positions did little to take away the wonderment of the scene.
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