Parque Pumalín - Saved by the Volcano

The 2008 eruption of Volcán Chaitén, about which I have written several blog entries, now turns out to have had positive as well as negative consequences. For years, environmental philanthropist Doug Tompkins has been arguing that building a road through undeveloped parts of Tompkins’s Parque Pumalín, with attendant clear-cutting to allow for power lines from proposed hydroelectric dams in northern Chilean Patagonia, would be an environmental disaster. Now, it seems, the Chilean government concurs with Tompkins that a coastal route is preferable to an inland route through the heart of Tompkins’s properties (click on the map to see more detail).

That’s because Chilean authorities have decided that the new route, which will now involve two ferries, cannot pass as close to the volcano as it does now. As the town of Chaitén relocates to the northwest of its current site, it too will be beyond the volcano’s reach. Their reasoning may not be the same as Tompkins’s - the power lines are not likely to disappear from the proposal - but Pumalín should remain relatively untouched. On the other hand, the government’s move eliminates one of the objections to building the massive hydroelectric projects on the Río Baker and the Río Pascua, with all that energy to be shifted to power-hungry metropolitan Santiago. In all likelihood, this is not the end of the story of native forest conservation in northern Chilean Patagonia, but it's nevertheless a positive development.

Buenos Aires: Post-Election Fireworks?

From my doorstep in Oakland, it took a little more than 20 hours to arrive at Buenos Aires’s Aeropuerto Internacional Ministro Pistarini (pictured here, popularly known as Ezeiza), with changes of planes at Los Angeles and Lima, and another two hours to get through immigration, customs, and a shuttle to my doorstep in Palermo. It’s my first return visit since the new edition of Moon Handbooks Buenos Aires came out in October, and I’m already starting to update, though I’ll do the bulk of the work early next year.

Meanwhile, Buenos Aires looks great in the warm winter sun - though the sun set around 6 p.m., the mild evening required only a light jacket. At the same time, though, there’s an apparent obsession with the H1N1 flu virus that has caused the Universidad de Buenos Aires to suspend classes and many government offices and schools to close up early for winter holidays, which would normally begin in a week or two. At both Lima and Ezeiza, many airport workers and passengers were wearing disposable surgical masks - according to a friend here, their price has shot up from 35 centavos to five pesos in recent days.

According to today’s Buenos Aires Herald, “Argentina has veered from one extreme of not allowing a swine flu epidemic to stand in the way of elections to total alarmism.” In reality, adds the Herald, we don’t know the truth between these extremes, and the result has been “thinning numbers in shopping malls, restaurants, entertainments and even workplaces.”

That doesn’t mean their won’t be anything happening, though, as two independence days take place this week - that of the United States on July 4 (today, with many events for the US expat community), and that of Argentina on July 9 (Thursday). Oddly, as I returned from dinner and headed to bed around 2 a.m. this morning, I briefly stepped out onto the balcony to the sound and sight of fireworks in the nearby Parque Tres de Febrero. An odd occurrence, even for a 24-hour city like Buenos Aires.

Summer in California, Winter in Buenos Aires

In general, the Southern Cone is a northern winter/southern summer destination because the seasons are reversed - with notable exceptions, as some people enjoy the endless winter at ski resorts such as Argentina's Las Leñas and Chile's Portillo, and the northern deserts of both countries are ideal for travel at this time of the year. The appeal of Buenos Aires, though, is independent of the seasons, and that's where I'm heading tomorrow for a couple weeks as I begin to update the most recent edition of Moon Handbooks Buenos Aires. While I'm reluctant to give up two weeks of summer, especially as the Santa Rosa plums in my Oakland garden are ripening, check this space for the latest travel news from the Argentine capital, pictured here in the form of the Plaza del Congreso. Feel free to send along any questions.

Governor Sanford Flunks Geography of Argentina

As almost everyone has heard over the past couple days, South Carolina’s Republican Governor Mark Sanford went AWOL several days last week, ostensibly hiking the Appalachian Trail, before being met at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport by an inquiring reporter from the Columbia daily The State. In reality, Sanford had just returned from a "spontaneous" trip to “exotic” Argentina where, he said, he drove the scenic coastline alone.

Several observers have pointed out, some with great hilarity, that the governor would first have had to drive several hours through hundreds of miles of pasturelands, on short mid-winter days, before reaching the scenic coast of southern Buenos Aires province. If not, his best alternative was the capital's Avenida Costanera (pictured here), which runs past the domestic airport Aeroparque on the muddy River Plate estuary, before dead-ending a few miles north.

In fact, in just a couple hours, Governor Sanford could have reached the scenic shoreline of Bahía Somborombón, an area of dunes and wetlands that’s ideal for bird-watching, about 180 km (110 miles) southeast of Buenos Aires via the city of La Plata. The governor, though, was after a different species of bird - one María Belén Chapur of Buenos Aires, with whom he had been carrying on an affair that had caused his wife to throw him out of the house.

Though I’ve never met her, it turns out that Ms. Chapur is a neighbor of mine - her apartment, near the city zoo on República de la India street in the Botánico sector of Palermo, is only two short blocks from my own on República Árabe Siria (click on the map to see detail). Though her given names suggest she’s a Catholic, Ms. Chapur’s surname is Iranian, which might alarm the governor’s Bible Belt constituents that he’s not only sinned, but consorted with an enemy from the “Axis of Evil.”

As the governor’s political career seemingly ends, he might well be singing the blues or, as columnist Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post suggested, a tango. Robinson, who was once the Post’s correspondent in Buenos Aires, remarked that “Tango lyrics are, essentially, blues lyrics in Spanish: somebody did somebody wrong. And that’s what happened.”

Buenos Aires: Small Change Becomes Election Issue

In a post early last year, I noted the shortages of coins in Argentina, and Buenos Aires in particular, which had made it difficult to pay for small items such as photocopies and bus fares. So acute has this shortage become that, in Argentina’s approaching mid-term congressional elections, it's become a political issue. President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s government recently decided to tackle the controversy by creating the Sistema Único de Boleto Electrónico (SUBE, Single System Electronic Ticket), a rechargeable public transit card usable on both the Subte (underground) and city buses.

In the elections, which will take place this coming Sunday, many observers expect the government to lose control of the lower house and suffer a reduced Senate majority, but they hope to cut their losses. One of their tactics is the hastily introduced transport measure - SUBE cards began to be distributed last Friday - that has become common in other countries. For several years now, Santiago de Chile’s Transantiago system, which includes the Metro (underground) and city buses, has had a similar system, but Buenos Aires has lagged far behind.

Whether this will be the electoral help the government hopes for is another question. In fact, the Subte, a few city-wide and suburban bus lines, and a couple suburban rail lines have had similar cards for a while; though this one unifies those systems, it’s still useless on most of the buses. Not only that, but distribution of the SUBE cards has been so slow that only 50,000 will be available before election day. Worse yet, according to the Buenos Aires daily Clarín, the cards - which are supposed to be distributed free of charge - are apparently being sold in the street.

Stanleywood: Cinema Capital of the South Atlantic

Last week my wife and I watched director Tristán Bauer’s 2005 film Iluminados por El Fuego (released as "Blessed by Fire" in English), which deals with the plight of Argentina’s 1982 Falkland Islands War veterans - more of whom have committed suicide than actually died in combat with the British. The story concerns a journalist, played by Gastón Pauls, who is called to the hospital 20 years later when a fellow conscript’s overdose leaves him in a coma for most of the film.

Pauls, who played a Buenos Aires con artist in the highly acclaimed Nine Queens, is far more subdued here. The overdose incident sparks his character’s flashbacks on his war experience, when sadistic officers staked their starving troops to the ground, in freezing rain, for minor disciplinary violations. The conscripts were, many remarked, treated better by the British military to whom they surrendered. That makes it a little surprising when, toward the end, there are conspicuously cheap patriotic slogans that seem out of context in such an outspokenly anti-war film - even though most Argentines would agree that the islands should be theirs, for most of them it’s a pretty low priority.

Much of the film was apparently shot in the vicinity of the Patagonian town of Puerto San Julián, where the landscape resembles parts of the Falklands, but the final scenes were shot in the Islands, as Pauls’s character makes a symbolic pilgrimage to the places where he and his comrades suffered so much. Given the islands’ small population, we thought it likely we’d see someone we knew from Stanley, where we lived for a year-plus in 1986-7 (pictured here as it was then). And sure enough, Pauls’s driver/tour guide in the film is Tony Smith, whose Discovery Falklands is one of the islands’ big travel and tourism successes.

Tony, who is not a professional actor, handles his brief scene with Pauls extremely well, offering insights from the Islander viewpoint that rarely make the Argentine press. It was, he recently wrote me, “an interesting thing to do but...not so easy...because of the timing of everyone else involved and the patience you need to do such a thing.” That I can sympathize with, having once been recruited to portray Roman Polanski’s London producer, at 3 a.m. in Buenos Aires one morning, for a film on the life of Argentine movie diva Isabel Sarli.