Should the Borders Open?

In March, after the COVID pandemic drove me back to California, I put aside thoughts of returning to Argentina and Chile for the foreseeable future. It didn’t help, of course, that my passport expired in September and, amidst evidence that the US Government was slow-walking renewals, I couldn’t even find the document in question—making its renewal a moot point. Somehow, in the process of self-quarantining on my return, it had gone astray.

We thought we’d searched everywhere possible, with no luck whatsoever. But then, in the process of finding a Hawai’i guidebook for my daughter, who was flying there for a ten-day holiday, my wife stumbled upon the document in a basement bookshelf. I had no memory of putting it there, but I’m relieved that it’s still in my possession.

 

In theory, I could now apply for a renewal right now, but to what end? Historically speaking, a US passport has opened doors to the world, but the current administration’s mismanagement of the greatest public health crisis in a century has rapidly devalued our citizenship. Ideally, the current election will reverse the process but, even so, it’s not likely to happen overnight. We will need a major U-turn.

 

Desperately Premature?

In the meantime, how are things looking beyond the Equator? Just a few days ago, the government of Argentine President Alberto Fernández made the surprising decision to open its borders to neighboring countries—Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Chile—in the interest of reactivating its economy for the approaching summer. There will be no quarantine, but some limitations: there will be no overland entry points—only by air or river (in the case of Uruguay)—and and a negative COVID test in the country of origin will be obligatory.

Are the immigration lines at Buenos Aires's international airport likely to match this any time soon?

This leaves some questions unanswered, though. Uruguay, which has been the continent’s most successful country in controlling the COVID crisis, has announced that it will not reciprocate, keeping its borders closed to foreign tourists. It may be most concerned with its porous northern border—the Uruguayan city of Chuy and its Brazilian neighbor Chui, for instance, share a main avenue that marks the limit between the countries. Still, even if Uruguay allows its citizens to cross the river to Buenos Aires, it’s not likely to reciprocate toward Argentines heading the other direction.

Argentina may be counting on the passenger ferries from Uruguay, but will Uruguay reciprocate?

The statement issued by Argentina’s tourism minister, Matías Lammens, left some things unsaid. While citizens of neighboring countries are presumably clear to cross the border, what about resident non-citizens—say, a US citizen living permanently in Chile? What about legal tourists to bordering countries, such as Brazil, which still allows US citizens to enter by air? Can they cross into Argentina as well?

 

Who’ll Go, and How’ll They Get Around?

One question, of course, is whether anybody will want to go. After an early lockdown seemed successful, Argentina’s per capita COVID stats are a bit better than Chile’s but worse than Brazil’s in terms of total cases, though not quite so bad as Peru’s. Another question is the practicality of logistics in a country that now requires special permission for inter-provincial travel, with internal checkpoints at every provincial border.

Argentina's current COVID-19 statistics are not encouraging (https://ncov2019.live/data/southamerica)

In the course of writing a magazine article on coastal Patagonia, which I submitted last weekend, I heard from one operator that “transportation between cities is restricted, except for emergencies, flights are resuming but only for medical issues and special cases, not for tourists, and I think it will be difficult to open again before the end of the year. All our 2020 reservations were canceled, but there’s a ray of light toward the season’s end, in February or March, if the situation improves, but there’s lots of uncertainty at present.” Another eco-resort was unable to open on October 1st, its usual date—“We have all our hygiene and security protocols in place, but the outlook is uncertain and far from encouraging. Hopefully we’ll be able to open when summer starts, at least!”

 

It’s worth adding that Chile is also considering reopening its border to tourists. One eco-lodge operation in northern Patagonia just wrote me that “I think we’ll open in early December, right now we’re looking at the security protocols, we’ll also offering a half-price deal if a group wants to take over the whole lodge for a minimum of four days without additional services except for lodging and kitchen access.”

 

In Tentative Conclusion…

For my part, in search of normality, I’ll take it step by step. In that sense, I actually enjoyed having my teeth cleaned yesterday—my dentist’s reopening is, hopefully, an early indicator that things in California have begun to return to normal (Joe Biden’s victory should make it even more so!). Before we started, the hygienist required me to cleanse my mouth with a wash of iodine and mint (not hydrochloroquine!) and they refrained from polishing the teeth, as that could spread aerosols.

 

That said, this will be the first winter in recent memory that I will spend entirely in the Northern Hemisphere. Though I miss South America, I’m personally not confident enough to plan my return for another year or so.

The Erosion of Lonely Planet

Guidebook writing has been my occupation for three decades, though the digital revolution has put pressure on the print sector for at least two-thirds of that time. In the context of the coronavirus crisis, it drew renewed attention last week when Lonely Planet, my first publisher, announced the closure of its Australian flagship in Melbourne and its London editorial office. It is also shutting down its namesake magazine. This will leave it with a reduced presence in the Nashville suburb of Franklin, Tennessee (!) and Dublin, where it’s presumably cheaper to operate. The Tennessee office replaced its former US headquarters in my hometown of Oakland, California.

The skeletal 1989 edition of LP's Argentina prominently featured the author's name.

I’ve always had misgivings about digital travel content, especially crowd-sourced sites like TripAdvisor. They are vulnerable to anonymous and pseudonymous comments—especially by competitors—but not everything about them is necessarily untrustworthy. I would never even consider a restaurant on the basis of a TripAdvisor recommendation, for example, but if somebody reports claims to have eaten there three days ago, I’ll have reasonable confidence that the business in question still exists (except, perhaps, in times of coronavirus).

While the proliferation of digital content is certainly a factor in the decline of print guidebooks, LP’s corporate culture has also devolved from what it once was. In the beginning, the company gave its authors an autonomy to explore and make decisions on the content of their titles. Developing regional expertise over the years, those authors held copyright to their work, and received generous royalties—enough, in some cases to result in six-figure annual incomes.

Arguably, LP’s decline coincided with the devaluation of the on-the-ground regional expertise that first made them credible. In this context, Paula Hardy’s quasi-obituary in the Guardian (linked above) is a blend of naiveté and misinformation, not to mention gaping lacunae. About the time she came on board, in 1999, LP was morphing from an author-friendly company to one that dispensed with experienced authors, eliminating their copyrights and royalty contracts.Some were told that (I’m paraphrasing here) “You’re getting a reputation as difficult to work with.”

After the company warned that it might start titles from scratch with new writers, longtime authors learned that continuing with LP would involve fixed-fee contracts for a third or less of their previous income, with no certainty of future employment. Several whom I know opted out—choosing to sell their copyrights to the company, which seemed to conclude that destinations and authors were fungible (in fairness, the copyright buyouts could be generous).

Nothing in Santiago de Chile remotely resembles the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, but an LP editor wanted it as a cover shot.

New editions and titles became the product of multiple writers, some with doubtful qualifications—if an author had collaborated on a guide to, say, Sweden, he or she could just as easily draw an assignment for Myanmar, academic preparation and language skills notwithstanding. Many incoming authors and editorial personnel were neophytes whose geographical ignorance was palpable—in one case that I know of, an editor chose a photograph of Spain’s Santiago de Compostela (population about 96,000) to represent the capital of Chile (population five million-plus).

My first LP guide (left) omitted our names from the cover, but the licensed Spanish-language version  acknowledged us.

In that context, it’s noteworthy that LP stopped putting authors’ names on the covers of their books in the late 1980s, as best I can figure. After signing my first LP contract in 1990, I never had my name on the cover with a single exception—when Barcelona’s Editorial Kairós licensed my Argentina, Uruguay & Paraguay title, it featured both my wife’s and mine (María Laura was also the translator).

I spent ten years with LP, producing titles on Argentina, Chile, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Baja California and The Rocky Mountain States, but was never so fortunate as to have a royalty contract. That said, the flat fees seemed reasonable at the time and, in one instance, LP provided me a supplement when Argentina dollarized its economy, which made it a very expensive destination for several years.

Meanwhile, Hardy’s assertion that LP is the only guidebook publisher to send authors into the field is laughable. I  can contradict that on the basis of my own experience, in part after returning, earlier than I had hoped, from fieldwork in Argentina and Chile to update my Patagonia title. Because of the public health crisis, I have no idea when (or even if) Imay be able to resume the work, but I still hope to do so. A friend, also an ex-LP author, recently informed me that a different publisher has commissioned him to update two of his titles, and I am confident that other publishers will do the same.

The Independent’s Simon Calder seems to share Hardy’s romanticism about the publisher’s struggles: “When this wretched crisis is over, we may begin a new era where travellers will be hungry for resources they can trust, in particular guides researched and written by professionals, which don’t require batteries or an internet connection, and which feed our sense of adventure.”

I too would like to think so, but LP seems unlikely to carry that torch forward. After two ownership changes since my time, it is wearing down; the current contraction is part of a process that began decades ago when it jettisoned its most credible and dedicated authors. In both the physical and the publishing world, erosion is a slow but inexorable process.

The Herbs of Hilo?

Just recently, I spent several days in Hawai’i—my first ever visit to the 50th state—and spent most of my time on the Big Island, in and around the city of Hilo. As always, I was on the lookout for links to  my main region of interest, the Southern Cone of South America, and that turned out to be an herb—not the notorious Maui Wowie, but rather products made from yerba mate, the tea-like infusion that’s a daily presence in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and parts of Brazil and Chile.

Yerba mate products on the shelves at Abundant Life Natural Foods, in Hilo

When I shop at Berkeley Bowl, my go-to supermarket for a diversity of products from around the country and the world, I’m not surprised to see a display of yerba mate products, but I did not expect to see any such thing in Hilo, with only 50,000 inhabitants (though it’s Hawai’i’s second largest city after Honolulu). Nevertheless, there was an ample display of yerba items at the Abundant Life Natural Foods grocery on Avenue Kamehameha, in the historic business district, though I can’t recall seeing any packaged yerba for preparing mate in the traditional gourd.

A yerba mate plantation in Misions Province, Argentina

Only when I returned to the mainland did it occur to me that the local climate and conditions—hot and humid—resemble those of northeastern Argentina’s Misiones province, the source of most yerba that finds its way to markets here. In fact, Hawai’i’s native Ilex anomala is a close relative of South America’s Ilex paraguariensis, though the “Hawaiian holly” seems to be rarely cultivated.

To the best of my knowledge, the only place to find yerba mate on Hawai'i's Big Island

Yerba mate, however, can and does grow on the west side of the Big Island, at the Adaptations Inc Farm, not far from the resort town of Kailua-Kona. As it happens, though I never realized it, we had passed nearby when we spent last Thursday driving around the Big Island. Yesterday, when I inquired at the Adaptations Facebook page, they responded that “We have one pet tree for personal consumption.” Thus, I don’t expect to see Hawaiians walking around town sipping on their gourds any time soon.

A symbolic gourd and bombilla (straw) outside the mate museum in the Buenos Aires suburb of Tigre

SSAD (Seasonal Sports Affective Disorder)

For more than a quarter century now, I’ve been writing and updating guidebooks on southernmost South America for several different publishers. In general, most of my work takes place from autumn (the austral spring) to the northern spring (austral autumn), so I’ve often joked that I leave California after the World Series and return in time for Opening Day. It’s not such a joke, though, that as the days shorten and the baseball draws to an end, seasonal affective disorder becomes an overlapping issue (with “sports affective disorder,” as baseball is the only spectator sport I find worthwhile).

Fortunately the longer days, filled with work, help me get through the winter - unlike the late Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby who famously said that "People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring."

Generally, I consider South America a sports desert, but there was a South American link to the end of the baseball season, though it didn’t turn quite as I had hoped. Last year, reserve outfielder Paulo Orlando became the first Brazilian ever to play on a World Series, as his Kansas City Royals defeated the New York Mets in five games (for non-baseball fans, I’ll state here that the first team to win four games out of a maximum seven becomes the champion). This year, reserve catcher Yan Gomes could have become the second player to do so, but his Cleveland Indians lost Game Seven in extra innings to the Chicago Cubs (Gomes began the season as Cleveland’s starting catcher, but a separated shoulder forced him onto the disabled list for an extended time).

Anyway, that’s enough baseball for a while, as I fly south to Santiago de Chile this coming Wednesday. I’ve seen baseball fields in Santiago, in northernmost Chile’s Atacama Desert (pictured at top), in the subtropical heights of Argentina’s Salta province (pictured above), in Buenos Aires (where I’ve played recreational baseball and softball), and even in steamy Paraguay (pictured below). I recently learned that there is baseball in Chile’s southerly university city of Concepción and also in the more southerly agricultural city of Los Ángeles (37° 28’ S latitude), whose team nickname is not the Dodgers but rather the Pumas.

It had never occurred to me to try to locate the world’s southernmost baseball diamond, but I’m guessing it might be in Christchurch, New Zealand (latitude 43° 33’ S). I’ll be asking, this time, as I drive south from Santiago, in hopes of finding one nearer the South Pole, on either the Chilean or Argentine side.

Before then, though, I’ll be flying farther south to Punta Arenas and then to the Falkland Islands, where I have seen locals with cricket bats. There, in the capital of Stanley, I once played catch with crewmen from a Japanese fishing vessel who were stunned that somebody in the Islands could throw them a curveball. I don’t expect that to happen again, but the memory will serve until I return home in February, when the days get longer and spring training starts. Pitchers and catchers report on February 13th.

Beisebol no Brasil? Brazilians Play Ball!

For more than two decades, I’ve been covering the Southern Cone countries of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and the Falkland Islands for various guidebook publishers. Because the seasons are reversed from my Northern California home, I’ve arguably experienced an endless summer – as a rule of thumb, I leave the Northern Hemisphere when the World Series ends and return in time for opening day. In South America, though, I’ve generally missed the presence of baseball, my favorite participant and spectator sport.

It hasn’t been a total loss. I’ve played both softball and baseball in Buenos Aires (where there’s a pretty good recreational league that includes teams of Cubans, Japanese and Koreans, as well as Argentines). In the Falklands, I surprised some Japanese fishermen by joining them in a game and catch and throwing curveballs – something they expected even less than somebody who could catch the ball. In Paraguay, I watched a sandlot pickup game (pictured above) in which most of the players were ethnically Japanese.

Venezuela, of course is South America’s baseball powerhouse, contributing many players to the major leagues though the economic crisis there has brought hard times to the game. Colombia is a distant second, but there’s an up-and-coming entrant – as of just a few days ago, Brazil can boast its first player ever in the World Series, reserve outfielder Paulo Orlando of the Kansas City Royals. At the age of 29 Orlando, who started playing with Japanese-Brazilians in his home town of São Paulo, is a late bloomer who played more than a thousand minor league games before finally reaching the majors this year. Seen above hitting a game-winning home run in July, he played in 86 games and showed speed and some power, with 14 doubles, six triples and seven homers.

Orlando hasn’t played much in this Series against the New York Mets, though, and he’s not even the highest profile Brazilian in the game. Catcher Yan Gomes, of the Cleveland Indians, plays the game’s most demanding position and, though he spent considerable time on the disabled list this year, the 27-year-old is just entering his prime (Gomes also spent much of his youth in Florida). São Paulo native Andre Rienzo, a righthanded pitcher for the Miami Marlins, has had limited success so far but is also only 27.

According to Gomes, baseball “is such a growing sport (in Brazil) right now, it’s amazing.” Whether Brazilian baseball will ever really take off in a country that’s obsessed with futebol (soccer) is open to question, but these three major leaguers demonstrate that the athletic talent is there to play this complex and difficult sport.

Can Soccer & the Pope Cause Border Issues?

Because of deadlines on another commitment, I’ve been neglecting this blog a bit, but it’s also because most recent off-season news from the Southern Cone has been topics that don’t much rouse my interest, most notably soccer and religion. Though to some people the two apparently overlap, to me they’re the cultural equivalent of Ambien.

First, chronologically, is the fact that Chile hosted the 2015 Copa América soccer tournament and defeated Argentina in the championship game a few days in a so-called “penalty shootout” (roughly equivalent to deciding a basketball game by shooting free throws). It still mystifies me that soccer players are incapable of continuing in overtime until somebody actually scores – at the very least, this would determine which team had the best-conditioned athletes.

Chileans were ecstatic, Argentines rather less so – especially the 7,000 who were caught on the Chilean side of the Andes when snow blocked their return to Argentina (the photograph above, taken from the Chilean side in summer, shows the snow-covered summit of Cerro Aconcagua in the distance). Some of those Argentines, apparently, responded to the border closure by staging rowdy protests and even robbing chickens and empanadas from a restaurant in the city of Los Andes.

I’ve managed to avoid soccer games since playing briefly as a schoolchild but, decades ago, I actually attended a Mass with a Chilean friend who has since become an atheist. It was a once-in-a-lifetime cultural experience I’d prefer not to repeat, though I do occasionally enter churches – and once, even a mosque – in the course of researching and photographing my own guidebooks. While I can acknowledge their historical significance, that’s the limit of my interest.

Admittedly, that’s not true for everyone – as will be apparent in Paraguay this weekend. Since adopting the alias “Pope Francis,” the artist formerly known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio has still not returned to his native Argentina, but a million Argentines may overrun border crossings this weekend as the Pope is due to make an appearance in the capital city of Asunción.

If so, they’d better do so soon. According to the Buenos Aires daily Clarín, Argentine customs agents will go on strike tomorrow. Whether those who manage to cross the border will be able to return could be another question entirely, and we can only hope they won’t emulate the soccer fans who were stuck in Chile.