Out of the Cave and into the Sunlight! An End to Argentina's Dollar Blue(s)

It’s over! On Wednesday evening, Argentina’s new finance minister Alfonso Prat-Gay announced the end of the the cepo cambiario (“currency clamp”) that, since 2011, had made it difficult for Argentines to purchase foreign currency for international travel. It also confused foreign visitors, and inadvertently created the so-called “blue dollar,” traded surreptitiously behind closed doors since 2011.

The measure is long overdue, and will benefit visitors even if the weaker peso does contribute to short-term inflation (this is still unclear, since the peso has actually gained slightly against the former blue dollar since the change). Two weeks ago, on December 4th, the last place I changed US dollars for Argentine pesos was the cueva (cave) pictured above in the lakes district resort of San Carlos de Bariloche, where I had to make an appointment by phone and then be admitted through the reinforced door, where an employee in a barred booth counted out my pesos.

The end of the clamp means that tourists will no longer have to seek out potentially shady money-changers in Buenos Aires or elsewhere, since they will now be able to withdraw money from ATMs without paying, in effect, a 30 percent penalty on every purchase (though they will have to pay charge on each ATM transaction; minimize this by withdrawing larger amounts). This should be a relief to everybody except the previous government of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, whose financial house of cards has collapsed.

There remains one other major task that should make everybody's daily transactions easier. The government of newly elected President Mauricio Macri should create larger banknotes, ideally of 200 and 500 pesos, that will not test the carrying capacity of ordinary wallets and even armored cars - the reams of 100-peso notes (worth about US$7 each) are still a logistical nightmare.

The Stars of Fireland

Recently, a young Chilean woman told me she moved to Tierra del Fuego because its clear nighttime skies offered spectacular views of the stars. It struck me, later, that there’s more than one way to interpret what she said.

Divided between Argentina and Chile, Tierra del Fuego is a large but thinly populated archipelago with an international reputation but only a handful of cities and towns. For most foreign visitors on a Patagonia vacation, the prime destination is Argentina’s Beagle Channel port of Ushuaia, the gateway to Antarctica, usually reached by air or cruise ship. For overland travelers, though, the tiny town of Tolhuin, where the land begins to rise midway between the industrial flatlands city of Río Grande and Ushuaia’s scenic sierras, the bakery known as Panadería La Unión has become an obligatory stopover.

In fact, all the buses that travel between Ushuaia and the Chilean city of Punta Arenas, on the South American mainland, stop here so that passengers can load up on medialunas (Argentina’s version of the French croissant) and other pastries, plus empanadas and chocolates for a 12-hour trip that involves a ferry crossing over the Strait of Magellan (there are no longer any flights between Ushuaia and Punta Arenas). So does almost every Argentine motorist en route to “the uttermost part of the earth” (to appropriate the title of pioneer Lucas Bridges’s memoir of his life on the island).

Many of them stop in hopes of glimpsing the Argentine and even foreign celebrities whose photographs cover the walls. Among them are the (now disgraced) President Carlos Menem (pictured above), the Dylanesque folk-rock singer León Greco (pictured below at left; his signature album “De Ushuaia a La Quiaca” spanned the length of the country) and even the US rock drummer Marky Ramone (pictured at bottom; the Ramones were enormously popular in Argentina). In a town that takes its name from an indigenous word meaning the “heart” of the island, there’s also a tribute to the late Buenos Aires surgeon René Favaloro, who pioneered coronary bypass surgery while working in the United States.

However quintessentially Argentine La Unión may be, it has one surprising shortcoming. In a country where almost every remote town offers fresh espresso on the spot, the “bakery to the stars” offers only a coin-operated vending machine to purchase coffee.

Patagonia without Tompkins?

Early last year, while driving Chile’s Carretera Austral, I photographed this bumper sticker – plastered onto the back side of a highway sign – denigrating environmental philanthropist Douglas Tompkins in hopes that he would get out of Patagonia, where he helped create new protected areas in Argentina as well. While small, strong opposition to Tompkins came from local and even national government officials, and even some paranoid nationalists who even imagined that he was a Zionist.

In a sense, Tompkins’s opponents got their wish – “Patagonia without Tompkins” – when the North Face founder died Tuesday after a kayaking accident on Lago General Carrera (pictured above), a short drive north of the Parque Patagonia created by his widow Kristine McDivitt Tompkins. Ironically, in a 2012 interview in which he defended his conservation activities in Chile and elsewhere, Tompkins made the comment that “This is where I am going to croak.”

I met Tompkins a few times, but never really got to sit down and talk with him, though I did have an extensive interview several years ago with Kris Tompkins about Parque Patagonia and their other properties. Given their legacy with Parque Pumalín and similar projects, there may never be the “Patagonia without Tompkins” that his detractors hoped for.

Meanwhile, in Related News

On Tuesday, before hearing of Tompkins’s death, I paid a brief visit to Argentina’s Parque Nacional Monte León, on the Atlantic Coast of Santa Cruz province. This was another Tompkins/McDivitt project, created by purchasing the Estancia Monte León sheep farm from its owner Silvia Braun (pictured below with her husband, Juan Kuriger).

Silvia belonged to the Braun-Menéndez wool-growing dynasty but, in my contacts with her, she was something of a free spirit. While donating the park to the Argentine government, the Tompkinses retained a small section that includes the former big house as what is now Hostería Monte León. There, Silvia was contented to tend her organic garden as a Tompkins employee, so long as it let her remain in a place she loved – living in the simple trailer pictured here.

Sadly, the same day that Doug Tompkins died, I learned from Silvia’s husband that she had also died several months ago. While I didn’t know her really well, I always looked forward to seeing her at Monte León, where “Patagonia without Silvia” will be as much an oxymoron as “Patagonia without Tompkins.”

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.