Calafate's Ice Museum

In two decades of visiting El Calafate, I’ve always written that “the gateway to Parque Nacional Los Glaciares and its spectacular Moreno Glacier…has few points of interest in itself." Rather, it's been the town’s critical mass of services (and the lack of them in the park itself) that made it a destination for travelers from around the South American continent and the world. Even if the hotel building boom has slowed over the past couple years, the tourism economy has helped triple Calafate’s permanent from about 6,000 a decade to around 18,000 today.

Now, though, the town has that an attraction in its own right. New this month, though not yet officially inaugurated, the Glaciarum is a first-of-its-kind “Museo de Hielo Patagónico,” placing the Patagonian icesheets in natural and historical perspective, in state-of-the-art facilities on a hilltop west of town. Last Tuesday, I was fortunate enough to get a private tour in the company of Glaciarium director Luciano Bernacchi; on February 15th, the anniversary of the date when Patagonian explorer Francisco P. Moreno officially named Lago Argentino, he will host Argentine president Cristina Fernández for the official opening (It’s not often I get priority over high-profile politicians).

Within its walls (shaped to mimic the angular blocks of ice on a glacier’s tongue), the Glaciarium offers sophisticated exhibits on the formation of the Southern Patagonian icefields, their original coverage and present extent, and detailed descriptions on individual glaciers on both the Argentine and Chilean sides of the border. There are also accounts of discovery and research, with special emphasis on “Perito” Moreno - in fact, there’s even a robot of an elderly Moreno at his desk, writing his memoirs with an out-loud narration of his thoughts (Perito means “expert,” an honorific commonly attached to Moreno’s name). Note the photograph of US President Theodore Roosevelt, who toured northern Argentine Patagonia with Moreno, on the back wall.

Built with private funds, the museum’s didactic purpose is to promote public consciousness of climate change and environmental deterioration. The consulting glaciologist is Pedro Skvarca of the Instituto Antárctico Argentino; an early mountaineer in the region, he found his life’s calling in the preservation of the massive rivers of ice and the summits that surround them. In addition to the regular exhibits, there is an art space and a 120-seat theater that offers a 3-D tour of the glaciers themselves - certainly worthwhile for those who lack time to visit all of them. The informational panels, and the recorded narrations, are available in both Spanish and English.

On a hilltop several km west of town, the Glaciarium is open 9 a.m. - 9 p.m. daily except Monday, when it’s closed. Admission costs US$17.50 pp, US$12.50 for children age six to 12 - making it perhaps Argentina’s most single expensive museum. Still, in a country where government subsidies are a way of life, it’s refreshing to see private sources ponying up with confidence that the public will make it worth their while.

Besides its exhibits, the Glaciarium has a confitería for snacks and sandwiches, a souvenir shop, and, in the near future, it will add a subterranean ice bar. Given its distance from town, it also offers its own hourly shuttles to and from the site (US$6 pp r/t).

Tuesday Topics

Today entry includes items from Chile, Argentina and the Falkland Islands.

A White Xmas? In Summer?
In the course of my research, I rarely spend the year’s end holidays at home with family - unless somehow we get together with my wife’s relatives in Olavarría, in Buenos Aires province. In southern South America, of course, it’s summer, and you’re likelier to need air-conditioning than a shovel to clear the snow off the sidewalk (leaving aside, for the moment, that we live in coastal California where snow is always rare).

To be sure, if you seek out the heights of the Andes, you may have a white Xmas (when I lived at 4,400 meters above sea level in Parinacota (pictured above), Chile, summer was the rainy season and, at that altitude it could easily snow). Likewise, if you seek out high latitudes on the Southern Continental Icefield, you can virtually guarantee it. But I was nevertheless surprised last Saturday by a snowstorm in Parque Nacional Conguillío, in the relatively low-altitude, mid-latitude Andes east of Temuco. At 5 p.m., conditions threatened to become a whiteout, and I quickly headed down and south to the town of Melipeuco, where it was cold and damp but snow-free.

En route, though, I saw snow-covered monkey puzzle trees of the sort that drew pioneer conservationist John Muir here from California in the early 20th century. Even more strikingly, the volcanic slag heaps (pictured below) on the lower slopes of Volcán Llaima (whose steaming summit was obscured by cloud) turned from black to white in minutes. Except for rangers and park administrator Norberto Arias, with whom I briefly spoke in his office at Laguna Conguillío, I was the only person in the park. It warmed on Sunday, though, and the prospect of a white Xmas is receding by the minute - though, as I’m continuing farther south, it could still happen.

Gaucho Gil Crosses the Border
My brief Conguillío excursion came at the end of long day’s drive that began near Curacautín, at the outstanding Bavarian-run guesthouse Andenrose, and proceeded to circle the park via Malalcahuello, Lonquimay, Liucura and Icalma. En route, I stopped to photograph this shrine to the Gaucho Antonio Gil, a Robin Hood figure and folk saint from Argentina’s Corrientes province whose cult has grown in the aftermath of that country’s economic meltdown of a decade ago.

This was the first time, though, I have ever seen a Gaucho Gil shrine in Chile - a country that’s been almost untouched by regional and global financial crises. To be sure, the highway itself links Chile to the Argentine province of Neuquén but, even then, it’s jarring to see the Chilean flag flying above Gil’s shrine.

The Falklands Tussac Grass
Jim McAdam, the editor of the Falkland Islands Journal with whom I have corresponded for many years but never met (we just missed each other a couple weeks ago, as I was in the departure lounge at Mount Pleasant as he arrived from Punta Arenas), recently explored Argentine Tierra del Fuego in search of Falklands tussac grass, Poa flabellata. Once abundant throughout the Islands, the grass is exceptional wildlife habitat, especially for small birds - watch for the lurking sea lions, though - but much reduced by unrestricted grazing since the introduction of sheep in the 19th century.

According to Jim, tussac ranges from South Georgia through the Falklands to eastern Tierra del Fuego (including Staten Island and the Wollastons), but “it is only thought to be present at one site on actual mainland Tierra del Fuego - the tip of the Mitre Peninsula near Cabo San Diego. We didn't make it, though, despite a three-day expedition on a quad bike.” He is interested in tussac’s DNA, to see if all came from the same original population.

Whale Meet Again

For most visitors, Patagonia is a summer destination, when long days allow extended sightseeing and outdoor activities such as hiking and river rafting. Even if the climate doesn’t always cooperate - the wind rarely relents in the blustery summers and some Andean locations can even see snowstorms then - there are usually breaks in the weather that make it possible to get out and do things.

In the Patagonian winter, that’s less so, but there are two major exceptions: wildlife-watching at Argentina’s Península Valdés (pictured above in a NASA image) and “off-season” skiing at resorts on both sides of the Andes, in Argentina and Chile. I’ll devote today’s column to the former but, for skiers, there’ll be something in the near future.

In reality, Península Valdés - which juts into the South Atlantic Ocean like the blade of a medieval battleaxe - is an all-year destination. In winter, though, it means whales, and the hamlet of Puerto Pirámides is the whale watch central for the southern rights (photo by Michaël Catanzariti) that cavort, and give birth, in the sheltered Golfo Nuevo. En route to Puerto Pirámides (pictured below), the new visitors center at the Istmo de Ameghino (the narrow neck that links the peninsula to the mainland) contains beautifully reconstructed right whale skeletons, along with displays on the rest of the peninsula’s wildlife. That includes elephant seals and penguins (both of which are primarily summer residents), southern sea lions (present all year), and orcas (which, at the peninsula’s Punta Norte, sometimes lurch ashore to snag unsuspecting sea lion pups, pictured immediately below).

Those who want to stay close to the whales should make reservations at Puerto Pirámides, which has limited (though very good) accommodations, well in advance. That’s even truer on the rest of the peninsula, where only Estancia Rincón Chico (where elephant seal expert Burney Le Boeuf of the University of California Santa Cruz has done field research), Hotel Punta Delgada, Estancia La Elvira and Estancia La Ernestina offer accommodations. There is a municipal campground at Puerto Pirámides (pictured below), but elsewhere on the peninsula camping is prohibited.

Many if not most whale watchers stay in the city of Puerto Madryn, about an hour south of Pirámides, and take advantage of tours that spend the day on the peninsula; renting a car here is another option. Madryn’s seaside Ecocentro, which opened a few years ago, is an even better place to learn about the South Atlantic environment than the peninsula’s visitor center, and the city has far more abundant accommodations and a better choice of restaurants. It’s also only about an hour from the town of Gaiman, the picturesque Welsh-founded settlement that’s home to at least half a dozen teahouses such as Ty Nain (pictured below).

Punta Arenas, Antarctica, and the Humpback

In the city of Punta Arenas, on the east side of its central Plaza Muñoz Gamero, a white block building with a Parisian mansard has long housed the Instituto Antárctico Chileno - but not for much longer, apparently. According to Montevideo-based Mercopress, the regional government of Magallanes will soon build a US$30 million International Antarctic Center, to include the Instituto’s offices and laboratories, along with a museum chronicling Chile’s Antarctic presence.

That presence dates from 1916, when the Chilean cutter Yelcho, whose prow now overlooks the harbor of Puerto Williams, rescued British explorer Ernest Shackleton’s marooned crew from Elephant Island, in the South Shetlands. In an unheated vessel, in mid-winter, pilot Luis Pardo Villalón (pictured here in a commemorative postage stamp) survived collisions with icebergs to get there. The Yelcho’s return to Punta Arenas gets a cameo appearance in British director George Butler’s The Endurance, an extraordinary documentary of Shackleton’s expedition.

Today, Punta Arenas is one of Antarctica’s main gateways, though the Argentine port of Ushuaia is a day’s sailing closer to the Antarctic Peninsula and most cruise ships leave from there. At the same time, there are regular Aerovías DAP flights from Punta Arenas to the Chilean “settlement” of Villa las Estrellas on Isla Rey Jorge (King George Island) , where it’s possible to board a small cruise ship without suffering the ultimate seasickness experience of the infamous Drake Passage.

Chile built Las Estrellas, which includes a school, a hospital, a hotel, a bank and a post office, to support its Antarctic claims. While it has civilian residents, in reality it’s part of the Base Presidente Eduardo Frei Montalva, an air force base that would not exist without government support. Only 200 meters from Russia’s Bellingshausen Station, it sits in territory also claimed by Argentina and Great Britain (whose Antarctic claims differ slightly from those of Argentina and Chile). By the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, all such territorial claims are on hold, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t become significant at some point in the future.

Meanwhile, closer to the South American continent, the Global Environment Fund has declared its intention to build a new research center on Chile’s Isla Carlos III, the whale-watching center of the western Strait of Magellan. Chile has been one of the strongest voices for whale conservation within the International Whaling Commission.

Part of the Parque Marino Francisco Coloane, Chile’s first maritime national park, Carlos III lies just off the main feeding grounds of the southern humpback whale, and has been home to an eco-camp of geodesic domes for several years now. Other operators also take groups to the park, with accommodations aboard ship. It takes most of a day to reach Carlos III from Punta Arenas, followed by a full day on and around the island, and a morning’s sightseeing before returning to Punta on the third day.

Argentina's Six-Legged Invaders

There are countless unwanted Argentines in California, but they keep a far lower public profile than the barras bravas (soccer hooligans) expelled from South Africa during this month’s World Cup. Rather, they’re six-legged invaders who arrived surreptitiously in fruit shipments at the port of New Orleans about a century ago, and spread by rail around the country. Today, Argentine ants (photograph courtesy of Penarc) form mega-colonies that extend from the San Francisco Bay Area to San Diego. Coastal California’s mild climate, apparently, is particularly conducive to them, though they are also troublesome in Mediterranean Europe, Japan, and New Zealand.

According to the Smithsonian Institution’s Mark Moffett, the “Indiana Jones of Entomology,” Linepithema humile is an aggressive species that has displaced or even wiped out native ants to the point that California now has an “ant crisis.” Unlike the state’s native species, Argentine ants do not disperse seeds of indigenous plants, for instance, and are unpalatable to native lizards. They also cause crop damage by encouraging aphids.

In their home range in the Río Paraná lowlands, Argentine ants co-exist with other ant species, but in California they don't always co-exist among themselves - in reality, there are competing colonies at war with each other. They distinguish themselves by scent and, along the borders between competing colonies, their mortality rates can be astronomical.

Those mortality rates, though, do not keep them from being a garden and household nuisance - according to Moffett, the average back yard garden in San Diego may be home to more than a million of these tiny creatures. During the rainy season, especially, they stream through cracks in the foundations or gaps in windows, to the point that it’s impossible to leave a dirty dish in the kitchen sink without attracting hordes of them.

Moffett concludes his new book, Adventures Among Ants, with a chapter about the Argentine ant. He also spoke about the book, and Argentine ants, in a recent interview on the PBS radio program Fresh Air, with Terry Gross.

Pulp Friction: Argentina, Uruguay and The Hague

Just two days before Earth Day, the International Court of Justice in The Hague settled, presumably, a longstanding dispute between Argentina and Uruguay over a pulp plant on the Río Uruguay, the border between the two countries. The Finnish company Botnia built the US$1.1 billion plant in the Uruguayan city of Fray Bentos, across the San Martín bridge from the Argentine city of Gualeguaychú, in Entre Ríos province. Fray Bentos was once the site of the Liebig Extract of Meat Company, which produced canned corned beef that was widely distributed in Europe, and the bouillon cubes known as Oxo; its site is now a museum.

Best known as the home of Argentina’s Carnaval del País (National Carnival), Gualeguaychú has acquired an undesirable notoriety over the past several years as a handful of protestors have, in effect, controlled the border by blocking the bridge over the river. The Court’s Solomonic ruling allowed both sides to claim victory: it agreed with Argentina that Uruguay violated a 1975 treaty by not consulting with Argentina over the plant, but also agreed with Uruguay that there was no evidence that it was causing any pollution whatsoever. Uruguay will not need to move the plant - the most expensive project in Uruguayan history - or pay any sort of compensation to Argentina. It will, however, need to consult with Argentina on any further developments on the fluvial border between the two countries.

The ruling, though, does not touch on the controversial issue of the border blockade, which for four years has virtually eliminated traffic and commerce through what, historically, has been the busiest border crossing between the two countries. In effect, the administration of former President Néstor Kirchner and the current government of his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, have abdicated control of the border - normally administered by Argentine customs and immigration. Technically, it’s still controlled by customs and immigration, but picketers have blocked the approaches and threatened anyone who wants to travel to Uruguay. Buses from Buenos Aires now have to use more northerly crossings at Colón (100 km north) or Concordia (a further 100 km), adding time and expense to any trip to Montevideo.

The issue, according to an editorial in yesterday's Buenos Aires Herald, is that “Ultimately no court in the world can tell an administration how to deal with the chronic domestic matter of protesters who block roads to voice demands. It is the President who after The Hague must now address the same question pending since 2006: should authorities allow an international bridge to be blocked forever?” According to an article in the Buenos Aires daily Clarín, meanwhile, the intransigent protestors do not appear ready to abandon their blockade, having refused an offer from the governor of Entre Ríos to even discuss the topic.

Meanwhile, Argentine Foreign Minister Jorge Taiana has called on the protestors to respect the Court’s ruling, and Fernández de Kirchner is due to meet with newly elected Uruguayan President José Mujica next Wednesday, a conclave at which the topic will undoubtedly come up. It’s still anybody’s guess, though, whether Uruguayans will be able to attend the 2011 Carnaval in Gualeguaychú.

Viagra Cures Jet Lag - in Argentine Hamsters, at Least

When I wrote Tuesday's blog entry on jet lag, I was unaware that, in 2007, Argentine biologist Diego Golombek (pictured here), of the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, had received an Ig Nobel Prize in Aviation for his discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.

According to a summary of Golombek's research in a transcript of a Scientific American podcast, the hamsters suffered from grogginess and disorientation after Golombek and his assistants "booked them on the red eye from Buenos Aires to Bucharest - or the laboratory equivalent of turning on the lights six hours early." When that happened, "it took a while to figure out when to start running in their exercise wheels, which they usually do after dark. What the researchers found is that hamsters that were given Viagra the night before the time change recovered faster than hamsters that do it without the drug. Whether similar treatment would provide relief to weary world travelers is an experiment that's probably been inadvertently done, but not reported." Perhaps Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina has some experience with this.

In receiving his prize at the annual awards event in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Golombek stated that he “would like to thank my colleagues and my students for performing wonderful research that made us laugh and then think, and also for going to the drugstore to get the Viagra for all of us.”

Overpopulation of What? The Horses of Easter Island

In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, UCLA geographer Jared Diamond uses Rapa Nui (Easter Island) as an example of environmental disaster brought on, at least in part, by overpopulation. In a 2006 interview with Geographical Magazine, Diamond describes the abandoned quarry of moai (the island's iconic statues) at Rano Raraku (pictured here) as suggesting that "You get the sense that you've walked into a factory, and at 11.59 a.m. the whistle blew, everyone dropped their tools, went for lunch and never came back." This he attributes to environmental degradation on an island of only 171 square km (66 sq miles) ,with a population of 15,000 that denuded once dense forests. Diamond makes a strong case for his thesis, though it's arguable that the island's dysfunctional politics - a priestly class that demanded the construction of the moai and their platforms, and used timber to move them into place - keeps this from being an issue of population alone.

Today the island has only about 4,000 residents, whose livelihood depends on tourism and subsidies from the Chilean government, and it still has environmental problems. In the 2007 calendar year, according to statistics provided me by the Chilean tourism agency Sernatur, more than 50,000 visitors landed at the local airport - more 12 times the island's population. In this context, Chilean and local authorities have begun to monitor visits to archaeological sites such as Rano Raraku ever more closely, but one thing remains out of control: this subtropical oceanic island has, according to numbers I heard, as many as 10,000 horses - more than two per resident - further denuding the island's already impoverished flora.

Whether or not those figures are accurate, the accompanying photograph, also taken at Rano Raraku, suggests how destructive the horses have been. They are also devouring the reeds in Rano Raraku's crater lake and, as they gallop through the moai "nursery," are likely to do far more damage to the statues in situ than any well-monitored tourists are.

Uncertain Priorities, Unclear on the Concept

Argentina is famous for musicians and singers (such as Carlos Gardel), political icons (Eva Perón), and soccer players (Diego Maradona) . The tango that Gardel popularized, Evita's oddly romanticized image, and Maradona's athletic greatness define Argentina to the world (though in the United States, where soccer is a niche sport, Maradona is at most a minor figure; basketballer Manuel Ginóbili is better known there) . Their images are everywhere, and their graves are pilgrimage sites (except of course for the erratic Maradona, whose continued presence on the planet is almost as inexplicable as that of Keith Richards).

Meanwhile, individuals such Bernardo Houssay, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1947, seem to have been virtually forgotten by Argentines and foreigners alike. At the medical school of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, a small museum bears Houssay's name, and last week I went to see if, as I had been assured a couple years earlier, it had undergone a reorganization. Only by banging on the door of a hard-to-find office was I able to speak with an apologetic curator who told me that, in the country's premier medical school, Houssay's legacy remains disorganized and essentially inaccessible to the public--even to the thousands of students who roam its halls.

Meanwhile, in a country which has made a spectacular economic recovery since 2002, the medical school's dingy hallways suggest that education is not one of the current administration's priorities. The building's facade may honor figures such as Hippocrates, Paracelsus, and Pasteur, but the students don't seem to aspire to Houssay's achievements, even if the shabby infrastructure may not be their fault.

According to one survey, three out of ten Argentine cardiologists smoke and the halls of the med school, whose institutional autonomy means that the city's anti-smoking ordinances do not apply here, are a free-fire zone for tobacco junkies. A significant percentage of the students, it seems, are ignoring overwhelming medical evidence, and the failure to honor figures such as Houssay is symptomatic of both cultural and political shortcomings.