Saturday Summary: Books, Boats & Wine

Today’s entry deals with a variety of topics including a controversy over the Buenos Aires book fair, the powerhouse Chilean wine industry, and the latest developments in the Navimag ferry saga.

Banning the Nobelist?
Buenos Aires’s annual Feria del Libro, due to take place next month, is the Spanish-speaking world’s largest book fair, and a wonderland for lovers of literature (the photo below is from the 2007 event). It’s not just for Spanish speakers - there are publisher representatives and literary figures from around the world. Invariably, there’s a high-profile keynote speaker from the literary world and, this year, it will be Peruvian Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa.

Unless, that is, Aníbal Fernández would have his way. Argentine President Cristina Fernández’s cabinet chief considers Vargas Llosa to be anti-Argentine and told the Cámara Argentina del Libro that he would not be the appropriate person to open the fair. According to Buenos Aires Herald columnist James Neilson, Aníbal Fernández (no relation to the president) has described Vargas Llosa as “a true example of the most reactionary rightwinger that has ever been seen.”

What has Vargas Llosa done to deserve such condemnation? According to the acerbic Neilson, the novelist committed the unpardonable sin of moving from a youthful leftist idealism (when he enthusiastically supported Fidel Castro) to a more conservative adulthood. In 1990, he even campaigned for the Peruvian presidency as a free-market “neoliberal,” a dirty word among Argentina’s Peronists (and some other sectors as well). Of course, compared to his victorious opponent Alberto Fujimori (currently imprisoned for human rights violations and corruption), Vargas Llosa looks pretty good today.

As Neilson points out, the novelist has consistently spoken out against dictatorship, censorship and xenophobia, but many of Argentina’s populists see him as an apologist for organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, which they blame for Argentina’s failure to achieve its potential. Foreign investment, presumably leading to economic exploitation, is their bogeyman.

This is not the first time Vargas Llosa has run into problems with the Argentines, but the most notorious previous instance took place under the sadistic military dictatorship of 1976-83, which banned his comic novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter for supposedly being anti-Argentine. According to the novelist, quoted in the Buenos Aires daily Clarín, "I have an absolutely marvelous decree signed by General Harguindeguy, who was then interior minister, explaining how I had offended the Argentine people..."

This time, at least, President Fernández has had the good sense to tell her cabinet chief to shut up and leave the Feria del Libro to the literati.

Chilean Economic Imperialism?
While on the subject on international foreign investment and acquisitions, it’s worth noting that Chile’s wine giant Concha y Toro has expanded its overseas operations by purchasing California’s Fetzer Vineyards, one of the United States’ ten largest producers. Does this mean Chilean domination of the international wine market or, perhaps, control over the US economy?

Navimag Update
According to Navimag product manager Adrien Champagnat, the damaged ferry Evangelistas is presently undergoing drydock repairs at Talcahuano, the port of Concepción. “At the moment,” he writes, “the return of the Evangelistas is predicted to be March 25, but it could be a little later.” That means that, for the rest of the high season, the smaller Puerto Edén will continue to operate on the route.

Meanwhile, he adds, the Navimag Cruceros experiment of shifting the Mare Australis cruise ship (pictured above) from the Fuegian Fjords to the Castro to Laguna San Rafael route - directly competing with the established Skorpios company - has been “a total success, but I don’t know yet whether we’ll have the Mare next season. I think so…but we’ll figure that out in March.”

Navimag Ferries, the Panamericana, & the Peronist Diet

One of Chilean Patagonia’s most notable attractions is the scenic Patagonian fjords trip from Puerto Montt to Puerto Natales with the Navimag ferry company who, recently, have renamed their car/passenger vessel M/N Magallanes as the M/N Evangelistas, after an earlier vessel on the route. More importantly, according to product manager Adrien Champagnat, Navimag has remodeled the Magallanes to include some more spacious (and expensive) accommodations with greater amenities, though this will remain “the poor man’s cruise” - with cozy but comfortable budget bunks for backpackers.

I’ve done the trip myself at least half a dozen times but, at the end of January, I will do it from south to north for the first time - I’ve always traveled from Puerto Montt to Natales before. Tentatively, I will be giving a couple digital slide presentations on Chilean and Argentine Patagonia on board.

Meanwhile, in January, Navimag will retire the smaller M/N Puerto Edén, which used to ply this “inside passage” route and has been providing service from Puerto Montt to Puerto Chacabuco and Laguna San Rafael, in the Aisén region. This will leave Puerto Chacabuco (and the regional capital of Coyhaique, about an hour east) without ferry service for the first time in my memory, but Navimag’s sister company Navimag Cruceros will now sail to Laguna San Rafael from Puerto Montt, after least for this summer, on the Mare Australis, one of its small (100-passenger) cruise vessels (its twin sister, the Via Australis, appears in the photo below).

This puts Cruceros in more direct competition with Cruceros Skorpios, which has been doing this route for decades - as a ferry company, Navimag could never match the amenities on Skorpios, but Cruceros can match or surpass them. At the same time, that leaves the Naviera Austral passenger/car ferries from the city of Castro (on the Isla Grande de Chiloé) to Chaitén as the major connection to the Carretera Austral and Coyhaique; I can only presume that commercial truck traffic to Coyhaique will now go through Argentina, as certain sections of the Carretera Austral are difficult or impossible for 18-wheelers.

The Road South
On Wednesday, for the first time since the February earthquake, I drove south from Santiago for about 500 km. It was a holiday, so traffic was light but even so, the road damages that I could see were minimal and detours few - in some places traffic was reduced to a single lane in each direction while repairs proceeded on the other side. In fact, someone not paying close attention might even assume that this was just routine maintenance or replacement but, in a few places, the roadway undulated, the guardrails were twisted, and there were temporary supports beneath overpasses as more urgent work took place elsewhere.

I spent the night at El Rincón, a secluded German-run guesthouse roughly 120 km from the epicenter. Owned and run by Winfried and Elke Lohmar, it’s a rambling wooden structure, with extensive gardens, that bent but did not break despite the historic 8.8 magnitude of the event. They went without electricity for four days and the cell phone networks were saturated, but they had plenty of drinking water stored and were able to haul water from the nearby river to flush the toilets. The greatest problem was that their bookcases tumbled and their contents were scattered (the bookcases are now attached to the walls).

The Evita Diet?

Meanwhile, according to the online magazine Planeta Joy, there’s a new trend in Buenos Aires restaurants - over the past several months, three Peronist restaurants have risen up, so to speak, in the Argentine capital, and another in the Buenos Aires province capital of La Plata. In a country whose politics are so personalized, and which often looks to past glories rather than future goals, nostalgia for Juan and Evita Perón is unsurprising, but it’s ironic that the gourmet ghetto of Palermo could become the locus of a gastronomic theme park inaccessible to their “shirtless” followers. However unconsciously, though, Peronism thrives on irony.

Argentine and Chilean Coastlines Rate Highly

Annually, National Geographic Traveler magazine (for whom I write occasionally) produces an annual survey of “destinations rated” and, in the new November-December issue, this year’s list evaluates the “world’s great islands, beaches and coastlines.” In a print magazine, of course, there’s not room for much more than a list of all 99 places - Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula comes in first - but the online version goes into more detail.

I was pleased to read that two Southern Cone destinations - the Chilean fjords (No. 4, pictured above) and Argentina’s Península Valdés (No. 10) made the top ten of places “In excellent shape, relatively unspoiled, and likely to remain so.” Chile’s Viña del Mar (No. 56) made the mid-list as “a mixed bag of successes and worries, with the future at risk.”

In fact, there are two sets of Chilean fjords. One lies along the west coast, where Navimag passenger ferries between Puerto Montt and Puerto Natales make occasional incursions from the inland sea of the Aisén and Magallanes regions to the edge of the Southern Patagonian Icefield, and the Skorpios cruise line visits Parque Nacional Laguna San Rafael and offers a longer tour of the continental glaciers.

In this case, though the article doesn’t make it clear from the beginning, the fjords in question are those on the south side of the Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, visited only by the relatively small vessels of the Cruceros Australis line. Traditionally, their Mare Australis and Via Australis vessels (carrying about 120 passengers each) shuttle between the Chilean city of Punta Arenas and the Argentine port of Ushuaia; this season, they will be adding the Stella Australis, capable of carrying about 200 passengers with greater amenities, to the fleet.

This, of course, contrasts with huge cruise ships that carry thousands of passengers and are, fortunately, incapable of navigating the narrow glacial channels in question here. According to one of Traveler’s anonymous panelists, “Local officials are aware of the damage cruise-ship operators have done elsewhere and working to create a sustainable tourism strategy.” Cruceros, for its part, has created an elaborate statement of its own environmental goals.

Meanwhile, on the Atlantic coast of Chubut province, Argentina’s Península Valdés draws praise for facilities “that are set up in a way to minimize their impact on the local environment.” The anonymous commentators, though, differ in their assessments: One dissents that “Development is relatively unregulated” and, from personal experience, I would say that the growth of the gateway town of Puerto Pirámides (pictured above) is cause for some concern.

Península Valdés, like most of Argentina’s Atlantic coast, is a desert, with no surface streams and an annual rainfall of only 246 mm (less than ten inches). Over two decades and at least half a dozen visits to the reserve, I have seen Puerto Pirámides expand from a oversized fish camp to a substantial village, with many more hotels and restaurants, that depends on groundwater for its existence. Some of those hotels, such as the Hostería Ecológica del Nómade, are designed to limit their environmental impact, but the town’s growth is nevertheless a serious concern.

That happened a long time ago in Viña del Mar (pictured above), Chile’s traditional seaside resort, whose proximity to the capital city of Santiago ensures an invasion of tourists not just in summer but year-round on weekends. According to Traveler, “overbuilding has damaged the ecology of its beaches, and peak season crowds and traffic are poorly handled.” For my part, I prefer the neighboring city of Valparaíso, with its quirky geography and colorful hills neighborhoods.

One other coastal destination caught my attention in this month’s Traveler, but it’s not part of the ratings game. A photo gallery on animal migrations includes a nesting colony of black-browed albatrosses - to my mind, one of the world’s most beautiful birds - in the Falkland Islands. I’ve been to several albatross colonies there, most notably on Saunders Island (pictured above), but I don’t recognize the one in the Traveler photograph; from the topography, my guess is that it’s remote, hard-to-reach Steeple Jason Island.

We Are About to Land in...Puerto Natales

Earlier this year, two Chilean airlines began flights into Puerto Natales, the gateway to Torres del Paine National Park. These first limited landings may be just the beginning: according to an item in Mercopress, the regional government of Magallanes wants to make it a destination airport for tourist travel into southern Chilean Patagonia. This would mean an expansion to make the now modest airfield suitable for more frequent landings, including nighttime operations. Chile's flagship airline LAN would in all likelihood have the most services, even if Sky Airline and Air Comet continue.

In the recent past, the need to transport passengers overland from the Punta Arenas airport to Puerto Natales (three hours), and then to the park (another two hours), hasn't seemed to deter visitors - in the calendar year 2007, Paine received more than 125,000 visitors. Authorities, though, may be looking to the example of Argentina's nearby El Calafate, whose airport has largely superseded the coastal city of Río Gallegos and contributed to a boom in hotel construction, restaurants, travel agencies, and other tourist-oriented services.

While its population is considerably larger than that of El Calafate, Puerto Natales is a backpacker's Mecca that's only recently started to acquire a critical mass of boutique hotels such as Indigo Patagonia (whose rooftop spa, with views to Last Hope Sound, is pictured to the right), Hotel Altiplánico del Sur, and Hotel Remota (pictured below, on the northern outskirts of town). More are likely to follow, as they have in El Calafate; even if not everyone is enthusiastic about the prospect, it's probably better than building more accommodations in the park.

More flights into Puerto Natales would also simplify connections for trips such as the Skorpios cruises among the nearby Patagonian fjords, and the Navimag ferries to Puerto Montt. In all likelihood, Natales would be a stopover en route to or from Punta Arenas, with flights continuing to Puerto Montt and Santiago.

Comet (and Sky) over Natales

For many years, the travel and tourism sector in Puerto Natales has complained over the lack of direct air services from Santiago; until now, visitors to Torres del Paine and other nearby attractions had to fly to Punta Arenas, which is three hours away by bus or car. Recently, however, Sky Airline began flights from Santiago, and Air Comet is due to begin them next Saturday, January 12. Natales's airport runway is too short for the bigger jets, which may be one reason why the flagship airine LAN has no apparent plans to land here, but the new services will add flexibility to Patagonian travel plans.

Sky's flights from Santiago stop in Punta Arenas before continuing to Natales, three times per week. From Natales, the flights continue nonstop to Santiago. Air Comet will be flying Saturday and Sunday, but the routing is not yet posted on their website. Both services should also link up with Navimag ferries and Skorpios cruises to the nearby glacial fjords such as Pío XI (pictured above), and are likely to be seasonal.

Air Comet is considering flights to Easter Island, which would be LAN's first commercial competition to the World Heritage Site, known from its iconic moai (statues). It will have to avoid conflict with LAN's schedules, however, on the five-hour flight from Santiago.