Meditations on Patagonia

I haven't gotten the photos off Mom and Dad's cameras yet, so I can't post on our fishing the past few days. Instead, here are some preliminary tidbits on Patagonia, both observed and learned from our fishing guides:

*   With an Argentine accent, "y" sounds are pronounced like the "j" in Bujumbura, a sort of slurred, hybrid z-j sound. So, for example, the word "amarillo," normally pronounced ah-mah-ree-yoh, becomes ah-mah-ree-zjoh. Also of note: coger down here does not mean "to catch," like it does in Spain. It means "to f*ck." Fortunately I had been warned of this in advance, so I didn't go crowing all day about f*cking fish.

*   To greet someone, you go in for a one-armed hug, squeezing their left shoulder with your right hand, and do an air-kiss while touching your right cheek to their right cheek. This seems to apply even to greetings between men, whereas in Spain man-greetings were a handshake.

*   Argentina is surprisingly white, 86% white. Like in the US, Europeans came over a few hundred years ago and killed most of the Native people, either with guns or disease or both. Unlike in the US, many of the white people here are only 2nd or 3rd generation, because there was another huge wave of European immigrants after WWII. Mostly Spanish and Italians, but also Germans and everyone else. In some places there are pockets of Italians so dense that they speak a sort of Spantalian.

*   They're on a siesta schedule. Businesses close down at 1:00 for a few hours, then open back up in the late afternoon. Gotta love a country that builds a naptime into the day.

*   Mate, a bitterish, caffeinated tea made from yerba mate, is super popular. It's consumed in a cup made from a dried-out gourd, about the size of a coffee mug. You fill the gourd with dried, chopped yerba mate, pour in hot water, let it steep a bit, and then drink it through a metal straw with a filter on the bottom, called a bombilla. What's interesting to my American mind is that it's a very individual drink; you would never find it for sale at a restaurant or cafe, for example. Instead, everyone has their own personal gourd, supply of mate, bombilla, and thermos of hot water. Then there are vending machines all over town that dispense hot water, so people can refill their thermoses. One time we were at a gas station and next to the sign saying "air" for tires was a sign saying "hot water for mate."

El Bolsón

We stopped for one night in El Bolsón, on the way to the Parque Nacional de los Alerces. Never in my life have I seen so many hippies. Here are some in the town square, complete with dreads and the requisite dog.

Here a young woman gets her hair dreaded while listening to some guys in a drum circle. I’m not kidding.

Which reminds me:

How many hippies does it take to screw in a light bulb?
None. Hippies only screw in dirty sleeping bags.

Ziiiiiiiiiiiing! Haha, love that joke.

Speaking of hippies, now is as good a time as ever to mention that there is a bird down here whose call sounds exactly like the quick electric guitar plucks at the end of Grateful Dead’s “Eyes of the World.” A high yip! yip! sound. The Boy knows what I’m talking about.

El Malleo

In between fishing the Chimehuin and the Collon Cura, we waded a river called the Malleo. It was strikingly beautiful; the gusano hatch hadn’t happened yet, so the willow trees still had their leaves, and the brilliant green of the willows complimented the deep turquoise of the Malleo. The water was as warm as Canton Creek in August. Plus, we lucked out again with the sun, and temperatures were in the high 70’s.

 

  

  

 

Fishing the Malleo is more technical than fishing the Chimehuin. Somehow the fish are more discriminating, so you have to cast and mend just right. Fortunately, half the time I am an expert angler, so I caught several fishies.

On one occasion, I pulled a nice brown out of a riffle and Dad caught it on video. Tragically, I can't figure out how to upload said video, so check back later.

On another occasion, Pablo told me exactly how and where to cast, and I managed to execute, landing a fat rainbow:

 

 

Mom and Dad also caught some hogs:

 

 

Here’s all three of us after a great day on the river.

El Rio Chimehuin

Thursday morning (January 21st) we drove to the put-in for a two-day/one-night float. It was just a half-hour drive, but the landscape changed dramatically; we passed out of the green, pine-tree valley containing San Martín de los Andes, and into the dry, low-brush rain shadow containing el Rio Chimehuin. It reminded me of driving from Leavenworth to Wenatchee.

We have two fishing guides, whom Mom and Dad have fished with all five times they've been down here: Darío and Pablo. Both are super knowledgeable and conversational; we can ask them any question about Argentine history, culture, wildlife, you name it, and they gladly launch into a thorough and interesting answer. Darío and Pablo speak great English, but since we speak Spanish, with us they use Spanish mixed with the occasional English word.

Darío and Pablo.

I started the day in a boat with Dad and Darío, and caught a fair number of fish. The fish here fight much more than the fish in the Madison. They thrash and run and jump; I kept thinking by the fight that I'd hooked an 18- or 19-inch fish, but then I'd get them up to the boat and they'd be only 12 inches long. We think maybe because the water was colder that there was more dissolved oxygen, so the fish were stronger.

 

  

 

Lunch was an outrageous three-course spread. Kiwis, cheese, and pancetta speared on toothpicks, followed by a delicious quiche, followed by dessert. And served with a bottle of Malbec, of course.

 

 

After lunch, since it was like 80 degrees and since Mom, Dad, and I had just split a bottle of wine, we took a little siesta.

 

 

In the afternoon I fished with Mom until I mailed it in and just stared at the beautiful landscape. It's amazing how similar the river and surrounding landscape are to the Madison River in Montana. Dryish plains dotted with plants, steppes that have eroded over the millennia. I don’t know why, but I had harbored the irrational belief that South America would look totally different, as if continents in the southern hemisphere weren’t formed by the same volcanic or glacial processes as continents in the northern hemisphere.

When we arrived at camp at 7:30ish, it was still plenty light out. Darío and Pablo have two guys who help them out at camp, Yiyo and Quique. Yiyo and Quique had set up the most elaborate, luxurious camp I have ever seen. There were five tents -- ours were enormous and already made up with cots(!), sleeping bags, and pillows(!); a soap and water dispenser; a portable outhouse; a grill with half a lamb on it, slowly cooking over the coals; and a dining tent. As Darío put it: "five-star camping."

Yiyo, Quique, Darío, and Pablo at camp.

Best of all, this is what greeted us in the dining tent:

And here was dinner: empanadas, cordero a la parilla, and chorizo. I think that night I consumed more meat than I have in the last three and a half years combined. (I don’t eat American meat. That shit is gross!)

Two gin and tonics (each) and three bottles of Malbec (shared) later, the seven of us were well into a lively dinner conversation in the dining tent. It was entirely in Spanish, and I understood all but a few vocabulary words, which I could guess at in context. I even made a well received joke: We were talking about wild boar for some reason, when Dad all of a sudden asked Pablo to tell us the story of how he met his wife, Carla. And I was like, "Espera. Como llegamos a Carla desde un boar?" ("Wait. How did we get to Carla from a boar?") And everyone laughed while Pablo vociferously assured us that Carla is attractive. (She is.)

When I woke up, Yiyo and Quique already had a new fire going, and when I came out of the tent Yiyo offered me some mate from the communal mate gourd. I accepted because I'd always wanted to try mate, plus it was early and I knew mate had caffeine in it. It tasted slightly bitter, but in a good way; I liked it. What surprised me was that the straw is made of metal, and transferred the heat from the hot water to my lips, so I could only take quick little sips. I wonder why they never changed to a less conductive straw. Here I am, drinking mate and looking super attractive and awake:

That morning I fished in a boat with Pablo. He told me about gauchos (old-school Argentine cowboys), jodedas (pranks), and we swapped Simpsons quotes; The Simpsons is really popular down here. In between conversations, I jack-pulled fish all morning long, mostly rainbows. At one point I caught two fish at the same time, man.

 

 

When we stopped for another three-course lunch, Dad and I went swimming, then we tossed the disc around a little.

 

 

In the afternoon I fished a bit more but then mailed it in again to stare at the stunning surroundings. Massive, regal, faintly red, Sphinx-like basalt cliffs jut out of the steep, brush-covered hills. On some of these cliffs reside Andean condors. We could see them soaring on thermals, and on the drive back we stopped at a lookout and busted out the binoculars. It was a sight to behold; the condors glide so effortlessly.

 

  

 

We've arrived!

We're here! Yesterday Mom, Dad, and I arrived in San Martín de los Andes. We flew into Bariloche, and when I woke up as we were landing, my first thought was that it looked like Eastern Washington -- that high, sagebrush desert after the pine trees run out, like between Wenatchee and The Gorge. Then, as we drove the 2 1/2 hours to San Martín de los Andes, the landscape changed from vast, Montana-like valleys, to forests-meet-lake like when you're passing Lake Crescent on the 101 on the way to the Hoh Rainforest, to the 138 along the Umpqua River, to that jungle episode of Planet Earth, the one with the monkeys and the figs. The camino we took was called Camino Siete Lagos, and sure enough, we passed seven lakes that look like they were carved out by glaciers. Trees ran straight down to the edge of the water, and the lake-edges were surprisingly free of cabins.

San Martín de los Andes looks like a Swiss village. Very green, perched at the edge of a lake, with those plaster-and-wood façades, like the Elizabethan Theater. The view from my window looks kind of like Ashland:



It is warm and sunny here, but windy. I had forgotten what it was like to feel the sun on my skin, and to have the sun set at 9:00pm. We're at about 41 degrees South right now, so we get a good amount of daylight.

Tomorrow we leave for a three-day fishing trip.

By the way, I fit an enormous amount of stuff in my backpack, which weighs 43 pounds. All I can say is that compression sacks are the greatest thing ever invented. Check out the before and after shots: