Browsing Tag

Explore

Blog

Seven Steps

seven-steps

It’s been said that this city is the Paris of South America.  It’s also been said that it is the “new” New York.  Both and neither are correct.   After nearly a month in Buenos Aires we gently uncovered a place with a depth, tradition, and pride that defy any comparison. 

Like all great romantic cities this place is best explored by walking its streets as aimlessly as possible.  It’s buildings are majestic, old, and wealthy; craftily hiding the torments of time.  So too, are the numbers of old ladies who take charge of this city during the day.  To start to understand what makes Buenos Aires herself, sit at any cafe at any time of day and watch the women. They’re a living version of Rene Magritte’s man in the bowler hat with his face hidden by the apple.  They all radiate with the same carefully bronzed skin.  Their quaffed hairstyles are dyed the same gold over silver. They’re purposefully poised.  However, instead of a polished red apple hiding their face, they’re all throwing the apples.  Under the St John knit sweaters and carefully stylish and sensible shoes they have sharp elbows on the bus.  Clenched fists fly in a rage at street bands who overstay and overplay their welcome too near the sanctified peace of an Argentinian Nona.  Shop in their store and they’ll grace you with a Parisian kiss on each cheek.  Attempt to hail a taxi at the same time, and one will, without mercy, upstream you faster than it can happen in New York. 

Walk deeper down her streets and you’ll find bars and cafe’s in the early evening filled with locals drinking coffee and eating a sickening amount of sweet pastries to fill the void between meat at lunch and more meat for dinner at ten or eleven PM.  Each night we drowned ourselves in what they called half sized cuts of steak. 

Afterwards we would set out in search of the night layer of Buenos Aires.  We visited bar after bar of the city’s supposed best and recommended nightlife.  We sat in gigantic Victorian chairs sipping whimsically named cocktails while a larger than life “Alice in Wonderland” worthy clock spun circles overhead.  We passed secret messages at dinner to find an escort into a too perfectly reenacted hideaway Prohibition bar.  We followed our noses through an overflowing flower shop to find a secret refrigerator door to an illusory underground mirrored tunnel.  On an acid high from the botanic biosphere above we drank from lab beakers of smoke, swirled vials of rose petals, and gaped at a giant octopus.  As wondrous as it was, we couldn’t help but feel the tinge of anticlimax.  Hadn’t we been to these bars before?  Didn’t we sneak though the same secret passage, and sip on an equally exotic elixir?  Maybe this is the new New York. 

With that realization, our flower headed high began to wear off; until one night when a friend said ‘come with me.”  We still used special keys, and spoke secret passwords to find our destination.  This time however the key was a subway card, and passwords, unintelligible local Castellano Spanish.  We found ourselves in a cross between a local community center and below ground gym.  It didn’t start until after midnight and didn’t end until after the long after dawn.  We sat at cheap tables surrounding a polished wood floor and drank fernet and cokes.  The lights dimmed ever lower.  An accordion sprang to life on stage, and then another, and then three more.  Then the strings, and finally the suede voice of the singer.   Gracefully and gradually they glided in pairs onto the dance floor; timeless old men in shimmering suits; young beautiful women in bedazzled dresses and sparkling shoes.  Those simple seven steps to the music was all it took and we were mesmerized.  They spun and twirled;  toes swept the floor and wound up around each others bodies.  Their hands barely touching each other.  Their eyes were closed and yet not one of the hundred people on the small dance floor bumped another.  They moved like every great Tango scene from every great movie, except better.  These were regular people.  They were the old ladies we walked past on the street, and the young couples we sat next to in the prohibition bar.  This is where we found the real Buenos Aires and fell in love.  Here, Argentina didn’t cry for us, we cried for Argentina. 

         
          

0 comment
Share:
past-the-precipice
Blog

Past the Precipice

The next several days trekked us through a wilderness that flipped though all four seasons in no particular order.  In the morning we’d have to cling to the side of a barren rock strewn mountain, the wind threatening to give us an extra shove over the edge.  By afternoon we’d be stomping through muddy green meadows, stripped down to shorts and t-shirts.  Every bend unveiled a new vista worthy of a full camera card of photos.  Every angle was packed full of something to see; a lake bluer than the last, a new mountain face covered in ice brighter than sunlight, or a beach covered in water polished rocks sprouted with ice crystals.  We walked through miles of burnt forrest, each tree a black and white headstone with sprigs of fresh green life growing from the ashes.  At the end of the forrest we came upon another lake.  On this lake a parade of icebergs drifted past us. 

Further up the lake as the icebergs grew larger, so too did the new sound of improvised wooden flute music undulating along in its own unfamiliar rhythm.  This took hold of us.  We were the needles slowly rippling across the surface of a vinyl record; our trail, the groove guiding us through its peaks and valleys; our sound whistling in the distance.  On the most narrow and steep section of trail we passed our flute player sitting on a barely balanced boulder on the cliff’s edge surrounded in the hazy shimmer of the music.  Once past, we never turned around to see if he really was there. 

A hilltop later, we gaped at our first view of the mammoth frozen mass that had born the bergs.  We sat on a rocky bluff that evening and watched the lights go out over the blue ice.  In the distance we could hear the crack of breaking wood bats and the bone rattling boom of thunder as the ice cast off new wedges to make their way down the floating parade. 

At night we would take refuge with other pilgrims equally over stimulated by the scenery and events of their respective days journey.  Groups would gather to warm their blistered and sore stocking feet around wood burning ovens and share the day’s stories.  Hunks of glacier ice rattled around in our cocktail glasses.  As the last of the ice melted away, two by two, we pad off to our dorms.  Tomorrow, we wake and walk to something new. 

For all the magnificence and sensory overload of this place by day, it was night that was the most overwhelming.  A few hours before dawn we stood in heavy silence beneath an endless sheet of sparkling space.  Each second, hundreds of tiny new bright pin pricks light up above us.  They drip down frozen star dust. It lands in spires on the polished beach rocks we’ll walk over tomorrow.  Some of the lights break loose and streak past us; others dilate and grow more intense; while some flash and then disappear.  We watch as this continues, waiting for the sky to rip open and catch fire.  Eventually the tips of the Torres behind us begin to flicker and glow red.  Far away, a wood flute plays.                         

lima
Blog

Lima

Most airports blast visitors with a heavy cocktail of jetful fumes and burnt rubber on their first step outside the overly air cooled terminals; but not Lima.  Our first step outside swallows us in a soft warm evening air rich with all the aromas of the ocean.  It tastes like sugar and intoxicates us like a third pisco sour.   

That evening, as we drive along the coastline with the windows down, Lima’s perfume persists relentlessly like a Glade wall plug-in done the right way by Mother Nature.  Ocean waves un-peel on the rock beaches in an orchestral timpani.  All the other noises of the city are sucked away with each woosh of a wave as it washes back into the ocean. 

By day Lima sparkles.  The sidewalks were polished the night before by the same lonely man who we see buffing the floors of airport terminals and malls.  The buildings are painted in gleaming white, clean cool grey; and the grass is freshly combed an evenly unrolled in the greenest green.  Under and overpasses were crusted in glittering mosaic art instead of graffiti.  Things only get better with the food.  Ceviches were so fresh we could only get them in the afternoon while the fish was still wet from the ocean.  Pisco sours come with a scoop of white frothy cloud.  It was all perfect, until we asked for an ice cold bottle of water to wash it all down because there was no water; anywhere. 

Peru was experiencing such massive flooding that water supply had become contaminated from overflowing rivers.  Mudslides had created a national disaster in the mountains surrounding the city and to the north.  Any bottled or potable water was being ported out of the city by the truckload, accompanied by military troops for disaster relief.  In Lima itself, toilets didn’t flush, and showers and sinks didn’t run.  For the brief minutes they did, it usually ran brown.  Our hotel supplied ten gallon bins of pool water each day with which we would brush and scrub as best we could.  Leftovers were used to refill and flush toilet tanks.  When absolutely necessary, we snuck our “showers” in the pool late at night.  By day three, many restaurants had shuttered their doors.  Where our walking tour gathered, so did a donation tent and an assembly line of volunteers loading up trucks to go north.  This city of ten million was rocked and rattled. 

As we left Lima for the mountains of Cusco we were left humbled by reminder that no amount of glitter, polish, and green grass can stop mother nature.   We are always at the whim of our planet despite our best efforts to believe the opposite.