Ushuaia

It was with much relief that I slid into my seat at the window of the exit row for the flight to Ushuaia, because at every stage of the process I was expecting something to go wrong. Especially given my place on a flight which was supposed to be full. But everything was painless.

After writing the post yesterday I went out for another walk around the city. Again I felt there wasn’t enough time for a proper itinerary and contented myself with random wandering, but that was very satisfactory. A short while in I heard a distant booming and I followed it for several blocks, the sound getting louder with each turn, until I came on the source: a small group of people with two very large drums and some other instruments out practicing in a park. The drums were audible from a remarkable distance. Later on I came across a little bookshop that had a shelf of English books, a discovery not that much more unusual than tripping across a stack of gold bars on the footpath. As English books are so hard to come by here they are very expensive when you do find them, but to celebrate the serendipity I added a book of short stories form Marquez to the mobile library, called ‘No One Writes to the Colonel.’ I love the title. Oddly enough there was not one but two editions of the book on Shackleton that I read earlier on the trip, but nothing else on the Antarctic region unfortunately.

Once the steakhouse opened (it is called La Plata, by the way, on the street called Chile) I wandered over, bringing the Easter Island book for company, and I had the steak that was medium rare this time, and I have been thinking about it since on and off.

Humour me for a moment, gentle reader, and imagine that you have grown up playing the game of golf, but in your universe there are no professional golfers. There are no Majors and no USPGA and no Ryder Cup and no 1980s Greg Norman heartbreak. It’s just you and the other amateurs working on your handicaps. Some of you have low handicaps and some of you have higher, and the same few people tend to win most of the competitions, and all is well and pleasant.

Now introduce into this odd little world Tiger Woods. It’s still fundamentally the same thing – he drives from the tee-boxes and approaches from the fairway and putts on the greens. But he is playing the game at such a high level compared to anyone else you have ever seen that really it’s not comparable at all. It’s like comparing a Bullet Train to a 1840s steam-engine, or a BMW M3 to a bicycle, or my acoustic version of Black Hole Sun to Chris Cornell’s. That feeling of disconnection between all that had come before and what was happening now was the impression I had of the steak. It was perfectly cooked, medium rare to a nose, distinct from medium or rare. It was lightly seared on the outside. With it were three sauces, though that’s not quite the correct word for them – one of mixed peppers, one based on broccoli and one with a mixed vegetable and garlic base, and they each harmonised with the meat in a different way, like the perfect additional note in a piece of music. So overall, I would certainly say the experience was unique to this point in my existence, and probably localised to this part of the world, and probably one of the top ten things that any carnivorous food-lover should do in their lives. Steak in Argentina is not like steak anywhere else.

I ate alone, which Benjamin Franklin described as being like eating in a tomb, and then as I was having a coffee afterwards (given that I was in no particular hurry anywhere else) a guy sat down beside me with a magazine which I recognised to be one of the Nordic languages (I’m not sure they can go three words without an ‘og’) and which turned out to be Norweigan. Given that I had been steered to the ‘medallion de lomo’ by the American guy the previous night I thought I would return the favour, and we ended up chatting. His name was Uwe, and he was retired from the Norweigan Navy and now worked with the merchant navy. He could get long periods of time off, and is on one of those right now. He’s also going to the Antarctic, though in a more luxurious style than myself by the sounds of things. We ended up talking for most of the evening, and I joined him at his table, and we shared a half-bottle of wine. I very much enjoyed the conversation. At some point the Irish couple from the previous evening happened to take the table beside us, and so the four of us talked for a while.

Time slipped by unnoticed, and when I got back to the hostel it was close to 1am. The taxi was coming a little after 2am. So I packed and had a nightcap from the hostel fridge (seven pesos for a beer there, USD2) and in the end, bar an afternoon snooze, I never slept in the bed I paid for. D’oh.

I was at the airport about three and there was nothing going on. Everything was closed, including the check-in desks. I waited until they opened and then found that security to get to the gates was closed and would not open for another hour and a half. So I walked around, and I noticed that a lot of people were asleep on the ground. Some of them had bedrolls and other items that made it look as though they had planned to sleep at the airport. As I was tired, and as there was nothing else to do, I found myself an out of the way spot and joined them. I lay down on the floor, slipped the strap of my bag around my neck and lay my head back against it, put the Indiana Jones hat over my face, and snoozed comfortably and well.

I woke a bit before my alarm an stiffly got up and checked in, slept most of the flight, and was picked up by the nice people from the hostel at the airport. The hostel is a family-run place in a nice house in a nice area, so it’s like staying with a well-to-do aunt this time. My room is large and spotless.

Ushuaia is similar in layout to Valparaiso in that there is a large bay and a curve of flat land around it, and then the hills build up from not very far inland, culminating in mountains. But in every other detail they are opposites – Ushuaia is clean and orderly and prosperous, and reminds me of a European ski resort, especially with the mountains in the background. There is one long central main street on which there are banks and restaurants and shops, so there’s a pleasant mixture of tourists and locals. The waterfront displays the various boats and ships that are moored there, from small sailing boats at one end to giant cargo ships at the other.  As of last night I know that a boat is a small boat, a yacht is a large boat, and a ship is a very large boat, without any formal delineation of where one category starts and the next begins. Thanks Uwe.

I spent a few hours in the evening planning what to do once back in Buenos Aires, looking at places myself and Mick might go when he gets here, and realising that Argentina is enormous. It is, as the guidebook says, almost as big as India. This produces a certain logistical interest when interesting things are in opposite corners of the country, as is the case with the glaciers and the waterfalls. But we’ll get there, literally and metaphorically. I went for dinner in a place recommended by the hostel people which looked nice – lots of tasteful Argentinian kitsch on the walls – but the food was disappointing. If you engineered an unholy union between pita bread and normal bread, and then used that to make a burger, and added a standard sandwich-cut of ham and did not serve it with chips, that’s what I had.

When I got back to the hostel the family were sitting around watching the beginning of Inception, and I stood and watched a moment of it, and then they waved me to a seat and I ended up watching the whole thing with them. It really is excellent. I still suspect the entire thing is a non-reality as per Total Recall, if for no other reason than the ending is too fairytale for Nolan to believe in.

It’s late now and I am tired from my disrupted sleep pattern, so I will get to play with some dreams of my own soon. Goodnight.