Surrealistic Roadie

When I read Latin American literature, I usually do so in English—partly because my own Spanish, though fluent, is more academic than idiomatic, and partly because English is, presumably, the native language of most readers of this blog. I also want to provide an idea of the availability of Latin American literature—mostly Argentine and Chilean—to an English-speaking audience.

Trabucco's novel won the Man Booker International Prize.

Even that is a challenge with Alia Trabucco Zerán’s novel The Remainder which, for lack of a more inspired description, I’ll call a Chilean millennial version of Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism. Trabucco Zerán is part of the generation whose parents supported Salvador Allende’s “Chilean way to socialism” and suffered (or died) under the lengthy dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

Trabucco’s protagonists are three young Chileans, two women and a man, one of whose parents has recently died in German exile but expressed her desire to be interred in her South American homeland. When a mysterious ash storm halts flights into Santiago, the three have to cross the Andes into Argentina—in a loaner hearse—to fetch the mother’s casket at the airport in Mendoza.

Trabucco's characters don't see the same landscape I do when crossing the Andes to Argentina.

Having crossed this border many times—though never in a hearse—I found the stream-of-consciousness narration hard to follow, perhaps because I view the crossing from the viewpoint spectacular landscapes rather than as part of a surrealistic mission that gets even more so when the three amigos have trouble locating the body and, then, getting it released into their custody. The narrators take such liberties with geography that I found it difficult to follow, even as I could sympathize with their quest (I lived in Chile during part of the Pinochet dictatorship, and can still recall measures like Santiago’s 11 p.m. curfew, though I never personally felt any threat there).

Maybe I’ll have to reread this, at a more leisurely pace, to get as much out of it as Chilean millennials dealing with their parental hangover traumas would. On the other hand, I might prefer to see it as a black comedy, perhaps in the hands of nonagenarian film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky (the trailer above is from his cult classic El Topo). Whatever the result, I’d have to say “Don’t try this at home.”

Argentina Opens Its Skies

One deterrent to travel in Argentina—the world’s eighth-largest country—has been the deplorable state of its air services. Throughout my lifetime, the state-run Aerolíneas Argentinas—occasionally under private ownership—has dominated a Buenos Aires-centric system that, with unavoidable stopovers, sometimes made flights as time-consuming as bus trips. The arrival of Chile’s LAN (now LATAM) improved the scenario, but political obstacles kept it from challenging Aerolíneas’s dominance.

State-run Aerolíneas Argentina now dominates the country air services.

At one level, there’s a logic to this pattern, as roughly a third of the country’s population lives in and around the capital, but it also re-enforces the city’s primacy. Traditionally, even important cities with upwards of a million inhabitants, such as Rosario, Córdoba and Mendoza, can only make connections to other provincial destinations via Buenos Aires. It works against the tourist industry as well, when flights between popular visitor destinations such as Mendoza and Bariloche require lengthy detours via the capital.

Many domestic flights require changing planes at Aeroparque Jorge Newbery, the Buenos Aires city airport.

It’s about to change, though. Earlier this month, the administration of President Mauricio Macri approved 135 new routes by five new or expanded airlines, including the budget carrier AirBondi. Bondi will not begin operations until September, but Neuquén-based American Jet, Córdoba-based Alas del Sur, and the capital-based Andes Líneas Aéreas may begin immediately. Tucumán-based Avian, an affiliate of Colombia’s Avianca, should soon join them.

The idea, according to Macri, is to more than increase the number of flights and more than double the number of passengers by 2019. Given that distances are so great, that long-distance trains barely exist, and that bus services are time-consuming (although the quality is generally high), there’s potential for modernizing Argentina’s transportation system and the tourism sector in particular.

In a perfect world, AirBondi would live up its name by adopting the color scheme of this classic city bus.

Whenever Argentina announces great changes, it’s always advisable to retain a certain level of skepticism, but greater competition in the transportation sector should be a welcome development—even if part of that is a budget airline likely to charge for checked baggage and other “extras.” For what it’s worth, Bondi’s name derives not from the famous Australian beach, but rather from a lunfardo (slang) term for city buses in Buenos Aires.

Border Bother? The Last Time for a While, at Least

Once again, yesterday, I crossed the border from Chile into Argentina and, again, there were no glitches as I passed through Chilean immigration and customs at the Dorotea border post, a short distance from Puerto Natales. The Chilean side was brightly lighted, orderly and efficient, with short lines and quick service – certainly none of the hassle that I experienced in crossing over to Mendoza last month.

On the Argentine side, things were not quite so efficient, to say the least. The Argentine border post (pictured below) is larger but dingy and, though there were two immigration officials at a tiny window, the line – such as it was – never seemed to move. When I finally reached the front, I reminded the young woman there that the receipt for my so-called “reciprocity fee” was in my previous passport, which I also provided her, but that appears to continue to confuse Argentine immigration everywhere except for the international airport at Ezeiza, where I originally paid it.

Perhaps that’s because it’s no longer possible to pay on the spot as I did in March of 2010, eight months before that passport expired. The fee is valid for ten years from the time of payment, but at present it’s only possible to pay online, and arriving Australian, Canadian and US visitors must show a printout of their payment.

I might guess that this young woman is a newer employee who might never have seen a receipt like mine (pictured above), but that didn’t explain the half-hour or more that it took for her to examine every page in my passports – including two trips for apparent back-room consultations and a request to wait alongside the window while she attended another customer – but I eventually got the stamp that admitted me to Argentina. This should be the last time until I fly from California to Buenos Aires in mid-April.

After that, and refilling the tank at the coal town of Río Turbio - where gasoline is cheaper than in southernmost Chile - I made my way to El Calafate, where the weather has turned summery. Meanwhile, I’ve written an op-ed on why Argentina’s government should eliminate the “reciprocity fee” – urgently and unilaterally – that’s due to published in the Buenos Aires Herald. Whenever that happens, I’ll post links here, and on my Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Border Encounters with Officialdom, Part 2: The Happy Ending

Wednesday, when I crossed the Chilean border and took the ferry across Lago Hua Hum to Puerto Fuy, I felt a little uneasy about what might follow. As I wrote some days ago, official Chilean intransigence – from one unpleasant customs official – had complicated my entry into Argentina but, after consulting with my Santiago customs agent, I felt returning to Chile and re-crossing into Argentina was my best option.

The ferry sailed west from Puerto Pirehueico (pictured at top) an hour late, at 4:30 p.m., because an Argentine tour operator had failed to arrive on time. It was a beautiful afternoon, though, as the ferry advanced among the dense verdant forests of the Andean slopes. It was my first time on this route – when life gives you lemons, make lemonade – but on arrival in Puerto Fuy I left immediately for the town of Panguipulli, which had more diverse accommodations than the resort hotels near the ferry port. Panguipulli was also closer to Ruta 5, the Panamerican Highway that would help take me back to Argentina via the Paso Cardenal Samoré.

Thursday morning, approaching the Chilean border complex, I climbed along the winding international highway with little evidence of the volcanic ash that covered much of the area after the Cordón Caulle eruption of 2011. That’s because the prevailing westerlies carried most of the ash into Argentina, where piles of ash line both sides of the road, and there are numerous dead trees.

This is the second busiest border crossing between the two countries and, as I took my place in a relatively short immigration line, I felt a little anxious. That part went routinely, but then I had to face Chilean customs to learn whether, like their counterpart to the north, they would restrict my ability to take my own car out of the country.

My first step was a misstep. I lacked the initial paperwork for the vehicle because I had overlooked the nearby computer terminal that produces it – which the customs officer politely pointed out – so I had to fetch that before they could deal with it. Fortunately, it was a fairly simply procedure that involved entering the license plate and the number of my Rol Único Tributario (RUT, the Chilean tax ID) that lets me renew the car’s license every March.

Returning to the line, I was pleased to see the gentleman who attended me treat everything as absolutely routine – in only a few minutes, I was cleared to proceed to the Argentine side of the border. His cordiality and efficiency could not have contrasted more with the hostility that I experienced at the more northerly crossing.

There was a small glitch, though. After I left Chilean customs and drove a few km to the east, something was nagging at me, and I stopped to take a closer look at the paperwork. It was then I realized that the computer printout had displayed my nationality as Chilean, with no mention of my US passport. Consequently, I drove back to the border complex and mentioned it to the official, who was unconcerned. He merely noted, in ink on the printout, that I left the country on my US passport (for what it’s worth, my RUT differs from the one granted to Chilean citizens – mine is technically commercial rather than personal).

For my part, I was concerned that the Argentines might see it differently, but things went equally smoothly on the Argentine side and I continued to Villa La Angostura, where I found a comfortable B&B and has a pleasant dinner.

In the process, though, I had also learned that things might have gone better in Mendoza. When I inquired here about Hernán Lausen, the Samoré customs superintendent who had been so helpful to me last year, I was told that he was now at the Mendoza border crossing. Had I known that, things might have gone much more smoothly in the first place.