Rio Pico

Weather conditions have not improved since the interlude two days ago, the wind is still blowing, daytime temperatures hovering around -5 C, roads are barely passable if at all - I better go back to the Patagonian summer, then.

We had the whole morning to spend in Gobernador Costa, and I decided to have a cup of coffee at the little restaurant at the front of the hosteria and write the few postcards I was going to send north. Johann, in the meantime, went for a walk through the little town. Our bus would leave sometime between eleven and twelve-thirty, depending on the source of information, and as we were right beside the bus terminal there was no big danger of missing it.

 I was the only customer at that time of day, except for a little mouse that appeared from behind my chair and scurried over to the window where it disappeared between some potted plants. I kept an eye out for his return, but he stayed hidden. I can’t say I objected.

Johann came back after about 45 minutes: the town was bigger than it looked at first sight, roads branching off to the town centre south of the long Avenida Julio A. Roca. He found a bank and even a tourist information, from which he brought back a nice little illustrated brochure extolling the beauty of town and area – in Spanish, of course. In fact, among all the people we spoke with in Gobernador Costa – and there were quite a few – not a single one spoke English. How nice to be at a ‘real’ place again, away from the hordes of tourists (to which we belonged as well, of course ...)!

The bus came in shortly before noon. Only a few passengers were waiting to get on, and not many got off. Among them were two gauchos in full regalia, this time not dressed in felt slippers and boinas but  leather boots and wide-brimmed felt hats, white shirts and black leather vests. Each of them carried a saddle and a huge trophy: obviously they were coming home from one of the Gaucho festivals that happen all over Patagonia in the summer.

Once again we were on our way. 85 km to Rio Pico – and we still didn’t know if anybody would be there to pick us up, or how to continue if there wasn’t. Once again it was hot and sunny, a slight breeze bringing some relief. The houses on the outskirts of Gobernador Costa were either brick or adobe, big and well kept ones right beside others on the verge of caving in. I noticed more flowers than at our first visit to Argentina, rose bushes now in full bloom. Was this simply because everything was not quite as new as last time so that I was able to experience it more intensely? Surely there must have been flowers then already.

The country started to look familiar soon after we left town. I even recognized a small flat lake where we had seen flamingos after we left Lago Vintter by car two years ago on our way back to Buenos Aires. This time there was almost no water left in the lake, and I don’t know what happened to the flamingos. Strange, actually: two years ago we were here a month later, and it was said to be a very dry year, and if it rained a lot last year – as we knew it did from Gretel and Nikita – I couldn’t quite understand how the lake could have contained water then and not now. People are worried about drought again, and winds are supposed to be really bad this season, too.

What I hadn’t noticed in 2009 was how much greener it gets the closer one comes to Rio Pico. The arid, pampa-like conditions gave way to more pasture land, with a few estancias along the road.

Rio Pico awaited us with its main street almost empty, more restaurants and shops than I would have expected in a small village of about 1000, a park with trees, a few benches and a swing set, and finally, at the round ‘plaza’, the bus terminal with white lace curtains. Several vehicles were parked along the road in front of it, awaiting passengers from the bus. Had one of them come for us? Our hopes dwindled with every one that opened its doors to release an obviously Argentinean person, none of them with white or blond hair. Hmmm. What would we do if nobody showed up, if our messages hadn’t been received?

First things first. We sat down on the grass in front of the bus terminal and took out bread, cheese and salami and had lunch. We would decide how to continue after. The lazy siesta atmosphere was taking hold of us, too, main street quiet in the early afternoon glare. A man walked by with a horse, small clouds of dust rising from their feet, and stopped at the little creek running between road and park to let it drink; once in a while a car drove by.

                                       Entering Rio Pico   

                            

How should we proceed, then? Our options were rather limited: no buses drive out to Lago Vintter, and we couldn’t reach Gretel and Nikita by phone. Well, the first thing we needed to do was to find out which road led out of town to Lago Vintter. We’d shoulder our backpacks and start walking, and hope that someone would take us along for at least part of the way. It was only about two, and days were long. Even in the worst case - if we had to walk the whole thirty-eight kilometres - we should be able to make it.

This is how far we had got with our planning, our lunch not quite finished, when Johann suddenly said, “There she is!” “NO!” was my first reaction. But the short woman with reddish-blond hair waving excitedly from the open window of an old pale yellow Chevrolet camionetta  coming to a rattling halt across the street was Gretel, without a doubt. “So ein Zufall! (What a coincidence!)” she called to us over the roar of the engine.

It wasn’t a total coincidence, of course, but they had indeed not had any news of us until that morning when they went to town thinking we’d have to arrive sometime. Finally able to check her phone at one of the places in town with cell phone reception Gretel found my two messages. 

How good it was to see her again - and what a relief to know that we didn't have to walk all the way to Lago Vintter! 

Interlude: Musings from the Farm.

"Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?" John Keats wonders in his ode "To Autumn".

I, too, ask this question, but unlike Keats who goes on to say, "Think not of them, thou hast thy music too", I have a hard time hearing the song of this season. Or is it really the rustle of treetops bent and twisted by the wind, the hoarse calls of ravens and magpies trying to conduct a conversation while battling the elements? Maybe I simply have to adjust my thinking. 

Do I sound disillusioned?

I have to admit it is a little hard to keep up my spirits when one gets stuck about half a mile from home with a four-wheel drive pickup at seven in the morning - four days into spring!

It snowed steadily for the last two days, not those thick flakes that almost cover your eyes when you lift up your face, but very fine stuff, almost bordering on drizzle. It is difficult to take this snow seriously; much of it melts upon contact with the ground, and it doesn’t really make a whole lot of difference if the snow cover is sixty or sixty-two centimetres deep.

This deception lasts only so long as we stay in and around the house, however, sheltered by the bush in the east, thus unaware of the fierce south-east wind. We always know about west or northwest wind which has much easier access to the house and announces its presence with rattling windows and clattering chimney.

There are other ways of finding out about the wind, however. Watching the top of the tallest spruce tree bend low, the one I can see from my bed in the morning, towering above the surrounding poplars, is a good indication, and so is the phone ringing at a few minutes past seven. Nobody phones at that time of day – nobody but Doris, the bus driver, and it almost always means that roads are poor.

Twice in a row this happened this week. Maya is the only student on the bus on our two-mile stretch of road, and two days ago Doris asked Johann if he could take Maya one road over to the west so that she didn’t have to negotiate the blown-in area with the bus. At that point we could still get through with the pickup ...

The snowplough cleared one side of the road later that day, and yesterday morning the bus had no trouble. In the afternoon, however, it was a different story already: Doris had to drive all the way around the block (a detour of 10 km) to come in from the south.  

Our neighbours to the north, too, resigned themselves to that approach after pulling a stuck van out of a snowbank north of their house last night, not wanting to succumb to the same fate. She phoned to warn us about the poor road conditions, and plans were made for this morning to leave for town together at seven, when Johann was going to take Maya to an early Badminton practice. It would be safer to travel in tandem in case something went wrong. Also, a phone call to the county office hotline had given them reason to hope that the roads would be cleared by morning: two snowploughs were supposedly working in our area.

No such luck: they obviously hadn't got around to our road yet in the morning. Instead, the neighbour had cleared a path through the drifts with his little tractor and the snow blower, as they informed us shortly before seven; it should be fine. Johann and Maya left. Only about ten minutes later, however, I heard the front door: ‘Oh, we’re stuck,’ Maya mentioned, almost casually. The problem came a couple of hundred meters before the neighbour's place already: while the path to the north was clear there was a stretch of road before that which proved non- negotiable even for the pickup. No school for Maya, then.

Familiar procedure: plug in the tractor for an hour (or it doesn’t start), then drive down to where the bush on the east side ends and the open field begins, where the wind suddenly has access to the road, sculpting drifts higher than the wheel wells, hard enough for me to walk on. Access, too, to my face, assaulting it with a fine, hard mist of snow, not at all pleasant at a temperature of -7. Our brave old tractor, aided by the snow chains it has worn since the beginning of December, once again did its job.

Now, at the end of the day, the roads have been cleared. Very little snow has fallen since this morning, and we are hoping to have free passage now for a while.

But wait! Just now the mournful whistle of the train and the distant rumbling of its wheels, much louder than it should be, is interrupting my dream of a road free of snow drifts. Only when the wind is blowing from the east or southeast can we hear this so clearly. Here we go again ...


                  Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?

                                                  
                                                Indeed.

Gobernador Costa - now what?

The days are considerably longer than at the time of my last blog entry, and we are getting close to the spring equinox – such a nice word, isn’t it? Night and day of equal length, darkness and light in balance.

Yesterday I saw the first flock of starlings; they seem to go by date rather than the weather, because rarely there is as much snow left around the middle of March as this year. What will they eat? How will they survive? And yet they must be confident they will, and their presence is as certain a promise of spring as the drumming of the woodpeckers staking their territory and the suddenly changed song of the chickadee. No longer is there only the idle chatter around the feeder, but from the surrounding trees also sounds the melody that, according to German folklore, encourages farmers to “sharpen their plough shares”: two short high Ds followed by a longer B: “Spitz die Schar’, spitz die Schar’!”  

It will be a while, however, until we can pay heed to that call, as there are still two feet of snow on the ground, and only occasionally does the temperature reach the freezing mark. It is not unreasonable, then, to let my thoughts wander back to South America. There are still a few loose threads to tie up, after all.

                                             

A few weeks ago I told of our long bus ride along the ruta 40, on our way to visit Johann's relatives  Gretel and Nikita at remote Lago Vintter. While they spend the winter months in Buenos Aires with its much gentler climate, they live in Patagonia during the summers, renting out cabañas, cabins, mostly to sport fishers. We had visited them two years ago and had loved both them and the location, and now that we were so “close” we decided to spend a few days there again. They knew of our plans, and we had given them a rough idea when we would be there, but the exact date and time would depend on the bus schedule, which we had not managed to find out via the internet.

As soon as we had bought our tickets in El Calafate, a couple of days before we embarked on the 23-hour bus ride, I wrote Gretel an email to let her know when we would arrive in Gobernador Costa, about 120 km from Lago Vintter. There, she had written earlier, they could possibly pick us up, although it would be nice if we could make it to the little village of Rio Pico, still 40 km by gravel road from Lago Vintter.  She had also mentioned that it would probably better to phone them than to email as they were more likely to check messages on the phone.

What we hadn't quite understood before we got there was that they don’t have any phone or email access at Lago Vintter now but have to drive all the way to Rio Pico to check for messages, and if Nikita is the one going to town email messages don’t get checked at all. 

Not seeing any reply in my mailbox the day after I wrote I decided to try phoning. The internet place I used offered Skype, and ear phones hung on a hook beside most of the twenty or so computers, so I tried my luck – in vain: the number I was trying to dial was “not valid”. Hmmm. Well, we had one more day before we had to leave, and surely there would be an answer: they knew we were going to arrive sometime in the next few days. But no email came, and yet another attempt at phoning resulted in what seemed like a wrong connection: a female voice – not Gretel’s –spewed several sentences in Spanish at me, and I – by now able to find out about bus schedules and order a meal if the person I was dealing with was right before me and patient - didn’t understand a word. I assumed I had the wrong number, and we had no further means of reaching them. Oh well. We’d manage somehow – we were seasoned travellers by now, weren’t we?

Thus we started the journey I described a few weeks back. The bus, filled with tourists from all over the world, made its slow but steady progress northward.  The landscape didn’t change a whole lot after our breakfast in the middle of nowhere: quite flat, with sparse vegetation mostly in variations of beige, silver, and pale green, interspersed with neat mounds blooming in at least three shades of yellow, which, upon closer inspection, probably all would have proved to be generously equipped with thorns, spikes, or bristles. Some of the hassocks of grass looked like porcupines, long dark spikes with light grey tips.

                                           

Once more the bus stopped, in the dusty little town of Rio Mayo at the bottom of a steep hill, the sheep shearing capital of Argentina, as we found out from the Lonely Planet.  It looked totally deserted, probably because it was Sunday – but we would never find out: we were not coming back.  Between Perito Moreno (the town, not the glacier) and Rio Mayo we rumbled over a particularly rough stretch of road, but soon after Rio Mayo we finally reached pavement, and at least for a while travelled relatively smoothly.

The mountains had come into view again, and slowly we got closer. Closer, too, came our final destination. Would anybody be there to pick us up? I didn’t really let myself think beyond that, however. We would deal with it when the time came.

It was after five o’clock already when we passed two big metal arches framing a sign claiming that we had reached Gobernador Costa.  The town seemed to stretch for a long time along a single road, and I was already getting a bit worried that the driver might have forgotten that we wanted to get off here. Finally he stopped, across from a YPF gas station with a long line of cars waiting for service. As foreseen we were the only passengers who wanted to visit this charming place that was described – again in the Lonely Planet – as ‘a place where children are just as likely to snap pictures of you, the tourists, as you of them’, in other words a place not usually frequented by foreign visitors to Argentina. Well, we could see why ...

Our searching eyes didn’t alight on any known vehicle or person, although there was a busy coming and going at the gas station. Given the distances and state of the roads this didn’t necessarily mean that we had to give up on the idea of being picked up. Maybe there was an email message now to give us further instructions. I asked a passer-by where I could find an internet place; he told me there was none. With my limited ability to make myself understood and the equally limited ability to understand everything I was pretty sure that I simply hadn’t computed this information correctly. A town of that size – and no internet! Every little place we had passed through had had internet so far. But an attempt at communication with the cashier of the gas station led to the same conclusion: no, there was no internet here, only phones, a couple of booths at the rear of the little restaurant belonging to the gas station. Well, I might have to try that route again, but we weren't quite ready for that yet.  

The bus stop where we had been dropped off didn’t look like the ‘bus terminal’. Indeed, the cashier at the gas station informed us, the terminal was three and a half blocks down main street. Maybe that's where they were waiting for us! We shouldered our backpacks and followed the sidewalk to the terminal, again, however, we were out of luck. The terminal itself was closed, but we found an open door at the rear which led to a saloon-like room with a blaring TV. An elderly couple was glued to the screen. With an effort the woman tore herself loose just long enough to tell us that there would be no bus to Rio Pico until the next morning. Of course not - what were we thinking? A bus connection to a village of maybe 500 on a Sunday evening?! What time tomorrow, we wanted to know. About eleven, she thought, turning back to her show. Not that this information surprised us. We probably could count ourselves lucky that there even was a bus the next day.

Which options were open to us now? The worst of this was that we had no idea if Gretel and Nikita had a) got our message, and - if they had – b) they were planning to pick us up at Gobernador Costa that night. There was no way to find that out.

Right beside the bus terminal we found a small hotel. If we were going to stay in town overnight we would need a place to stay – but so far we weren’t sure of anything.  We found an older woman in an apron at the reception who was very eager to give us a room for the night, but so far we didn't even know if we were going to spend the night in Gobernador Costa. Good to know, at least, that we would have a roof over our heads.

Back to the gas station, then, to try the phone again. This time I decided to leave a message after the gush of Spanish words -what would be the worst that could happen? A very puzzled Argentinean scratching his head over a message left on his phone in German. If it was indeed Gretel's phone, however, she would at least know that we had arrived in Gobernador Costa, would wait for a while at the gas station, and would spend the night at the hotel beside the bus terminal if they were looking for us. Also, I gave her the estimated time of departure for the morning.

Satisfied that I had done all I could under the circumstances I rejoined Johann in front of the gas station. Now it was my turn to keep watch over the backpacks, while he went off to buy a large bottle of beer. I spent the time watching the customers at the gas station: a few men - mostly older - with boinas, the traditional Basque hats, wearing not their high leather boots but felt slippers: so much for the Romantic idea of the gaucho. He, too, a man to whom his comfort is more important than his pride, a man who could let his guard down and just be "normal" at this place unblemished by misguided tourists? 

We drank our 1 l of "Iguana" beer sitting on a low brick wall, keeping an eye on incoming traffic, and when we still hadn't spotted Gretel or Nikita after almost two hours we made our way back to the hosteria we had found earlier.

The room was neat and clean, and the landlady insisted on taking us to the bathroom, where she turned on the cold and hot water tap - to show us that there was water, we assumed. Oh, good! We were really looking forward to a shower: after the bus ride I was itching all over, with or without reason I wasn't sure, but this had been the only bus so far that looked grubby. It was also the only bus we had been on that had only tourists on board ...

Johann, who showered first, cautioned me: the jet from the hot water faucet wasn't very forceful. Well, okay - but did it have to stop altogether by the time I was ready to rinse the shampoo from my hair? Still, it was nice to feel clean again, and my anxiety concerning the next leg of the journey had abated somewhat after we had found a place to sleep and done all we could to inform our relatives of our plans. Things would develop the way they would, and we'd get to Lago Vintter - somehow ...