Gardel Gets a Stamp; Chile Reprieves Bicycles

Yesterday, when I went to the post office to mail copies of Moon Handbooks Argentina and Moon Handbooks Buenos Aires to the winners of my recent contest, I also asked to purchase some stamps and was pleasantly surprised to find a commemorative sheet of “Latin Music Legends.” It included three US citizens (Tito Puente, Cuban-born Celia Cruz and the Texan Selena Quintanilla), but also two non-citizens: the flamboyant Brazilian samba singer Carmen Miranda and the suave Argentine tango master Carlos Gardel. San Diego artist Rafael López did the illustrations for the series.

Miranda, in fact, was a star in Hollywood, where she made more than a dozen films and became known for her outrageous fruit-covered hats - there’s even a Carmen Miranda Square at Hollywood Boulevard and Orange, across from the landmark Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Gardel’s stateside credentials, though, came more from his singing and his work in Spanish-language cinema in New York - while he went to Hollywood, his poor English-language skills prevented his crossing over in the way that Miranda managed. While he might have managed to improve, his 1936 death, at the age of 44 in a plane crash in Medellín, Colombia, ended any such hopes.

Gardel’s final post-mortem tour took him from Medellín to New York, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, where he now lies interred in the Cementerio de la Chacarita. Every day, hundreds of pilgrims pay tribute to him, leaving flowers at his crypt and even placing lighted cigarettes in the hand of his smiling statue. So devoted are the Gardelianos, his die-hard fans, that they cannot pass a day without listening to his recordings. While nobody believes that he’s still alive - unlike with Elvis, there are no Gardel sightings - everybody says “Gardel sings better every day.”

Whenever I’m traveling through the Southern Cone countries, Gardel is a presence on my iPod. I particularly look forward to “El Carretero,” an oxcart driver’s song that contains the couplet “salí de Montevideo, dirección a mi casa…” (“I left Montevideo, headed home…”). At home in California, for many years, we had our own Gardel, the name of our late Alaskan malamute. As we used to tell our Argentine friends and family, “Gardel barks better every day.”

Chilean Cycling Stays Legal
The preposterous project to limit bicycles to designated trails is dead. According to the online Santiago Times, the 12 UDI legislators who originally introduced the bill backed off in the face of vociferous opposition from cycling groups and others - not to mention the fact, as voiced by La Bicicleta Verde’s Mac Mitchell, that “The police don’t have the inclination or the time to enforce something like that.” In fact, if traffic safety is the issue, it would make more sense to tackle distracted drivers on cell phones than cyclists (unless, of course, those cyclists are also on cell phones).

South Atlantic Design: Posted from Stanley

As a young boy, one of the things that attracted me to geography, and travel, was postage stamps - I was an enthusiastic collector. I was never particularly systematic about collecting, but the illustrations of foreign landscapes, peoples and wildlife instilled a curiosity that survived into adulthood. One placed that intrigued me - though its stamps were so rare that I only saw them in catalogues - was the Falkland Islands, in the remote South Atlantic ocean.

Falkland postage stamps have long been at a premium, because authorities have always issued them in relatively small quantities, so they preserve their value. At one time, postage stamps comprised one of the Islands’ main sources of revenue, though that has long been eclipsed by more lucrative pursuits, particularly fishing.

Commemorative issues almost always deal with local history, landscapes, and wildlife - the stamp depicted above, for instance, illustrates the ruins of Port Egmont, the first British settlement on westerly Saunders Island, established in 1765. In fact, the only non-local figure consistently on Falklands stamps is Queen Elizabeth II, who always appears in silhouette and occasionally in her own commemorative set.

Whenever cruise ships steam into Stanley, in fact, one of the most popular attractions is the Stanley Post Office and its Philatelic Bureau, from whose website it will soon be possible to purchase stamps directly without visiting the Islands. At the same time, the Bureau continues to promote its stamps abroad, as it did in May’s London Festival of Stamps.

What’s really interesting about Falklands stamps, though, is that the government often contracts local rather than overseas artists to design its stamps. Despite a population of only a few thousand, the Islands can boast many talented painters and illustrators. James Peck (pictured above in his Stanley studio), for instance, has done a series on the history of sheep farming, while Tony Chater has contributed a series on scenic landforms of small offshore islands and one on albatrosses, among others. Ian Strange, a naturalist who has contributed to many issues, has recently joined forces with his daughter Georgina to portray the Islands’ seasonal landscapes. Together, all these locals have helped create a memorable philatelic heritage.