South American Diary #8: Shipmates

Julia Carlson

     Julia Carlson is the first person I've met who lives in Tasmania. So I wasn't about to let the opportunity go to waste when she joined me for breakfast after the ship docked at the port of Santiago. 
     Tasmania is an island off the southeastern tip of Australia, and the very definition of the far margin of civilization, in my view. I had to know: why go to all the effort of leaving her home in Dover—population 500—drive an hour and a half to Hobart, fly an hour to Sydney then 13 hours in the air to Santiago, three hours more hours to Ushuaia, then two weeks of sailing, all just to end up in another far corner for the planet?
     "I come from the end of the world that's paradise and go to the other end of the world that isn't," she said, carefully, as if she had practiced the line.
     Nobody goes on a cruise for the people. Well, maybe they do; I didn't take a poll. I certainly didn't sign on to the RCGS Resolute's expedition up the coast of Chile for that purpose. The focal point were the fjords, glaciers, moraines, waterfalls, forests, stone-strewn beaches, marine life, wildlife, birds. 
     Yet interacting with my fellow passengers, who tended to be a decade or two my senior and often from places I had never been, became a secondary highlight. Between all those deep dives into nature and science were breakfasts and lunches, coffee and cocktails, dinner and discussions at the rail, in the observatory, in the Zodiac boats rushing to and from shore. 
    I'll be honest. I really liked the people part. My life and job are so constructed that I mostly sit in an empty room, staring at a computer monitor, pounding a keyboard, twirling words into something fluffy and consumable, like cotton candy wanded around a paper cone. Occasionally I phone or visit someone, but that's an exception: one or two hours out of every eight. 
     I loved hearing how people speak. 
     "I'm spending my mum's inheritance," explained Julia, when I asked her about her career. "I looked after my kids, so I didn't have a profession. Just a mom."
     She was free to roam after her husband died two and a half years ago, but all was not loneliness.
    "I got a new man now," she said, with a note of pride.
     Some people became favorites, and I was comfortable plopping down next to them—the first people I spoke with: Keith, an oil industry professional and his wife Maggie, a budding writer; Dr. Lorne Greenspan, an MD turned medical administrator from Toronto, and his girlfriend Donna Cohen; Gregory and Karen, adventure vacation planners from California, Gillian and Colin, a bluff couple from Australia (you really couldn't go wrong with Australians. They love to travel and do it well); Len Miller, the sole Chicagoan, who grew up in Roger's Park; Alex, 10, the sole child on the ship, and his parents; Marion Kaplan, who took photographs in Africa for Life, Time and National Geographic in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and really deserves a post of her own. 
    Not that every encounter was pleasant.  The English, older ladies traveling alone, could be problematic. I sat down across from one I hadn't met and began conversation, which she stopped dead.
    "Are you Jewish?" she asked, vis a vis nothing. 
     I pressed my palms against the table and hunched my shoulders, half standing up, as if to leave, my attempt at a small joke that baffled her. I stayed, pushed past it, and was rewarded with a story how she went to Africa in the company of a man not her husband. 
     "It was an arrangement," she said.
     The most anodyne older person held some sizzling tidbit of the past: an adventure, disappointment, achievement. There were always kids to talk about, the fire axe behind the glass if conversation lagged. 
     Some were almost unapproachable. The German couples formed such tight bonds—think hydrogen atoms—and always sat at the tables for two. The Germans in general seemed a taciturn race: I sat with one solitary traveler, Yuri, and we ate pretty much in silence, my forays into conversation perishing in the Teutonic cold. 
      A few passengers seemed to give up the effort. 
     "How many times can you ask 'Where are you from?'" complained a scowling, fierce Englishwoman with cat's eye glasses, to her companion, as they took a seat beside me before a lecture.
     I briefly considered turning, smiling warmly, and replying, "I'm not saying a word to you." But I thought better of it, and zipped my lip. I carry around the urge to speak like a metal cylinder of compressed gas, a burden I sometimes contain, often don't, spinning the valve despite my best efforts. I have no doubt that if you questioned my shipmates, they'd say I was gabby to the point of logorrhea.  And that was with my hand white-knuckling the knob, trying to keep it shut. 
    "These fleeces make my skin crawl," she continued. "Everything that touches my skin has to be cotton, or silk."
      I fingered the green REI fleece that I wore continuously on the voyage. Again considered speaking, something along the line of, "I have three others at home identical to this, in various colors. I love them." Again, I said nothing, and avoided the woman until the last day of the voyage. 
     But those were in the minority. I had some conversations I'll remember for a long time. My father is not a bluff Irishman like Sean Smyth, of Dublin, who was there with his adult son David.  Sean and I had a wonderful, warm, close, confidential, uproarious dinner. It was so normal I didn't take notes.

Sean Smyth

    A few days earlier I had sat in the bar with him while he made our acquaintance by showing off his tattoos, with the names of his children—David, April—and grandchildren, applied by himself when in his cups, using a needle.  
     He worked in some vague quasi-military role in Syria and assorted hotspots. 
    "My job took me away when he was growing up," Sean said. "I was never around for him. He left when he was 17 and went to Australia."
     Where David started a very successful travel business, and invited his father to go on this voyage.
    "I said, 'Why son are you bringing me?'" The answer was they had never spent time together, and now they would, to what seemed like wonderful effect.
     What about his wife, I asked, David's mother?
     "She wasn't asked to come," Sean said.
     The two men were very different.
    "He doesn't drink whereas I drink," said Sean, hefting a pint. "My son is like my dad."
     I hear you, brother. David was a bearded, taciturn man of 41, sporting a large earring, and I wanted to ask him how he viewed the whole thing, but literally never had the opportunity. Though judging from their body language, seeing them always together, exploring the magnificence of nature, I felt I had my answer. I meant to corner David but didn't, though in my defense, I was on vacation too, in theory.
      The central story I got is that everyone has a story, if you only ask, only listen, and be patient until they tell it. You sometimes have to push past their thorns and prickly armor. The fierce Englishwoman with the cat's eye glasses warmed up after a film by one of the ship's photographers, Jeff Topham, who projects a casual, smiling surfer dude demeanor but grew up in Liberia and recently returned to help the country reclaim its photographic legacy after years of ruinous civil war. 
    We paused in a hallway and the Englishwoman explained how she spent several years in Zambia with a lover, but realized, in her interactions with his family, she would never be accepted and reluctantly went home to England. 
     We struck up a conversation the next day, the last day of the voyage. She was apparently inspired by a talk I had given about telling your story. The subject got to first impressions, and I warmed enough to gingerly her to tell her about her rocky start, given her enmity to the clothes I was wearing, a tale that shocked and amused her.
     "I live alone and talk mostly to my cats," she said, by way of explanation and apology, which I accepted readily — many people, myself included, have a habit of talking first and then thinking about what we said long afterward, if then. I said we had never been properly introduced, and asked her her name. She didn't reply. I asked again, and she didn't reply, so I let it go. 
     Later that evening, she rushed up to me in the hall. For some reason, what I had been trying to find out before took a while to sink in.
     "Suzanne," she said. "My name is Suzanne."

 

South American Diary #7: Garibaldi Glacier

     Chile, Isabel Allende writes in her memoir, "My Invented Country," "is as far as you can go without falling off the planet." 
     Yet once there, at times it feels you've done just that, tumbling across the solar system to land in some remote corner of Saturn, navigating a lake of frozen nitrogen in the shadow of the great rings.
     Such as when contemplating the face of Garibaldi glacier, located, in the Alberto de Agostini National Park. Shortly after my soul-stirring encounter with Garibaldi Fjord, which I attempted to describe yesterday, the glacier that carved the waterway slid into sight.  
     As if that hadn't been wonder aplenty for one morning.       

     We piled into the Zodiac boats—stout black inflatable craft—for a closer look, skimming across the ice clotted fjord. This might be a good moment to say that I've been aboard the Resolute, an ice-reinforced passenger ship operated by One Ocean for the Royal Canadian Geographic Society, which has been inspecting glaciers along the southern coast of Chile. An RCGS fellow asked me to come along. I said yes.
      I probably shouldn't even bother doing the word thing in relation to glaciers. Just post a few photos and be done. But even the photos can be deceptive. The Garibaldi glacier is 250 feet thick, in places. The glacier face meeting the water had to be 200 feet tall. 
    And as much as I loved Chile, Allende writes something in her memoir that made me glad to not be from there. She said her grandfather always told her:

....just as Romans live among ruins and fountains without seeing them, we Chileans live in the most dazzling country on the planet without appreciating it.  We don't notice the quiet presence of the snowy mountains, the sleeping volcanoes, and the unending hills that wrap us in their monumental embrace; we are not amazed by the frothing fury of the Pacific bursting upon our coasts, nor the quiet lakes of the south and their musical waterfalls; we don't, like pilgrims, venerate the millinery nature of our native-growth forests, the moonscapes of the deserts of the north, the fecund Aruacan rivers,  or the blue glaciers where time is shattered into splinters. 

    Exactly. I'm not sure what time being "shattered into splinters" means. But that's as good a description of how being there felt as anything I could conjure up, and I'm glad to come from somewhere else, so I could appreciate it. Though Allende is Chilean, and she noticed these wonders. So I'm sure she is not alone.      

South American Diary, #6: Pining for the fjords

     "I've got to send some emails," Michael said, pushing away from our first breakfast on the ship.
     "I think I'll go up top and look around," I said. The RCGS Resolute is a large vessel, with a special steel reinforced hull to travel through ice-laden waters. It was the fourth passenger ship to traverse the North Passage, with the help of a Canadian Navy ice breaker. Yet it has a formal dining room on the fourth floor. I worked my way forward, to the open deck above Deck 7.
      A fjord is a long, narrow waterway created by a glacier. Those words seem dry on the page. Honestly, prior to coming to Chile, the word "fjord" made me think of just one thing: the Monty Python Parrot Sketch. 
     "It's gotta be pining for the fjords..." 
     "'Pining for the fjords?!' What kind of talk is that?"
      But standing there, surprised, despite all the foreshadowing that should have tipped me off long before, to find myself in a fjord.... aboard a ship, atop a ship, watching the fjord flow toward me, past me, to the left and right, behind me. Fjord everywhere I looked.
     Dawn had just come, no sun, but a lightening blue-grey sky the color of stainless steel. The snapping wind ruffled my clothing. The mountains were deep green to black, reflecting in the water, slashed with silver ripples, dappled with chunks of ice. Words must inevitably fail me here, but I was overcome by the enwrapping view, the overwhelming 360 degree expanse of  mountains, rounded and jagged, snowcapped and bare, looming so close and far off. For a moment it seemed the ship was sailing directly into a mountain range; then, to the right, a passage emerged between two peaks.
      I felt so ... stupid. Here I am at home, working every day, in my little office with with the wide red pine floorboards I'm so fond of. Satisfied with that. When just a couple of airplane rides and a short sail away was this. 
      It was all too much. I turned my head, pressed the fingers of my left hand against my cheek and my palm tight against my mouth, sobbing.
    Regaining myself, I turned and bolted below decks, hammering on Michael's door as if the ship were sinking. He beckoned me in.
    "Screw the email!"  I said. "Follow me!" 
    I practically dragged him up four flights of stairs. 
    "Look at this!" I cried, gesturing all around, to the sky, the mountains, the water. "Look at this!!!" 
     And it was only the first morning of the first day. 
   

South American Diary #5: "The End of the World"—Ushuaia

The Arakura Ushuaia is the green building set up in the mountains on the far left.

     When I learned the flight from Buenos Aires to Ushuaia is three and a half hours long, I was taken aback. That's the distance from Chicago to Los Angeles.
     Americans, what is to be done with us? We assume everywhere that isn't the United States must be small. But 2,600 miles is quite the distance within a country not my own, due south yet, from the Paris of South America to a town that calls itself 'The End of the World."
     Ushuaia, despite being the southernmost city on earth was, almost needless to say, bigger than I expected. A city not unlike Boulder, Colorado, set in the foothills of a mountain range, though the southern slope of the Martial Mountains—an offshoot of the continent spanning Andes—struck me as several derivations larger than the Rockies.
      "Ushuaia makes Boulder seem like Kansas," I said.
     This is where Ernest Shackleton and his crew set sail for the Antarctic, and to this day polar expeditions gather to push toward South Georgia, a thriving industry still, judging from  the signs for polar adventures and stores offering snowboards and fleece.
      The organizers of our expedition to the glaciers of Chile, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, had put its adventurers up in the Arakura Ushuaia, an improbable luxury hotel tucked high in the mountains, framed by a snow-capped peak. The place is huge, with the vibe of a hotel in Finland, all bleached wood and raw stone and odd energy-saving touches—you tuck your room key in a slot to turn the room lights on, and they flick off when you leave, thus saving the planet. There was also a series of expansive outdoor thermal pools, where I set up operations, as well as a lap pool, where I happily swam off the confinement of travel.
      The hotel prides itself in its classical music series, and we excused ourselves from dinner early and went over to listen to the Camarata Bariloche, a well-known Argentinian string ensemble--a dozen violinists, a few cellists and a bass. It felt so disorienting, to travel all this way only to sit listening to Bach, like traveling to Mars and finding your childhood home.
     The next day we wandered the town—mostly closed on a Sunday morning, but a caretaker was already at the Municipal Cemetery, ready for visitors, and we strolled around. It was quite run down, with markers toppled and crumbling, and humble to begin with, a modest contrast to the luxurious granite tombs and marble angels at Recoleta Cemetery. Though, it hardly needs to be pointed out that the occupants here are just as dead, at a fraction of the cost.  Caskets could spied through glass doors, and tableaus of the lives of the departed are set out—photographs and coffee mugs and poignant notes from children crying out to their parents. Some caskets are covered with lace, given covers like beds, which I suppose they are. We spent a long time there, walking up and down the aisles, gazing in near silence at these tributes to lives that had unfolded in this out-of-the-way place. Memento mori.
    There was some kind of charity race going on, with young people in running clothes with numbers pinned to their shirts. The military had set up a tent to show off their various specialities, diving equipment and machine guns and such, a friendly public service that only subtly conveyed: We aren't drowning your kids in the River de la Plata anymore. 
      Michael and I wandered over to an old airfield, where a mothballed DC3 sat slowly moldering in the high winds ruffling across the Beagle Channel. Chile sat there, in plain sight, across the water, as if telling us: get on with it already.
     You don't often see an old bird like the DC3, and I slowly walked around the plane, inspecting it from all angles. When I looked up, Michael was gone, vanished over a fence and into a nearby field, where he had found transportation of an even more ancient lineage. I considered following him, but paused at the fence and held back, letting the two have their moment of communion uninterrupted.

South American Diary #4: "The life is only once"—Tango

     Somehow, just seeing the red door, I knew.
     I don't know how I knew. But I knew.
     We had arrived at the right place.
     And the funny thing is: I hadn't even planned on seeking the tango.
     Oh, I knew the Latin American dance was there, in clubs all over Buenos Aires, where it began at the end of the 19th century in taverns and brothels, moved to Paris, then returned to find upper class popularity just before World War I.
      But tango today, in my mind, was associated with single friends bravely filling their evenings with dance lessons and older married couples performing a pantomime of romance in their declining years.
     In other words, I thought I knew. 
     But I didn't know. At all.
     Luckily Michael, the friend I'm traveling with, raised the possibility: we should go see some tango. I, nothing if not accommodating, flipped open my laptop and began to search. Some places were too hip, or offered "shows"—Las Vegas-like tango reviews—geared toward tourists. Pass.
      Then there was El Beso. I liked the name, "The Kiss." I jotted down the address: Riobamba 416 in the Villa Crespo neighborhood. Maybe we would go.
      It was about 3 p.m.. After the triumph of the walking tour and a restorative coffee and snacks, we figured, why not slide by? The cratering Argentinian peso means we could take a cab anywhere in the city for about three dollars. Go, see, if it wasn't anything, just shrug and come back.
     I saw the sign. I saw that door. I ceremoniously shook my Michael's hand, then pulled open the door. We went up the staircase.
       The music hit us first. A sinuous rhythm from above. Then the single square room, neither large nor small. Bright chandeliers, yet somehow a little dim. I paid the entrance fee: $4. Patrons sat in two rows of chairs bordering the dance floor, studded with small tables. The average age was 65 to 70.  The music was recorded.
     Everyone seemed to know each other. As in high school, the boys sat with the boys, the girls with the girls. Some couples sat together, including an older woman with a slickly handsome man in a sport coat, 25 years her junior.

Daniel Nacucchio and Christina Valeria Sosa.

     "Maybe a son taking his mom on the town," I suggested. But there was another, nearly identical serpentine man, also in a suit coat, who was just sort of there, sitting, scanning, poised, as if waiting. Could it be...?
     The dancers slid and spun, embraced and turned. Hands splayed across shoulders, rested securely across waists. It seemed half the dancers had their eyes closed, yet everyone kept the proper distance, all functioning like some room-sized human clockwork, every part doing the proper motion in steady syncopation.
     An hour went by. I drank a Coke. There was a tango demonstration.  Daniel Nacucchio and Christina Valeria Sosa. They moved slow and fast, stopped then began again, in perfect unison, both rising on their toes, then sliding a leg back. Nacucchio had a look of calm concentration, Sosa smiled brightly. The room applauded.
     We  didn't want to leave, and indeed, there was a sense that time had stopped, here, and if we only remained then the years would melt away outside while here the tango would go on forever. 
     But eventually decided we had to go, and slowly worked our way out of the room, edging past the dancers, reluctant and elated. Somehow I felt I had glimpsed a path into the future. A navigable route up the painful mountainside. This is how one grows old: with dignity, companionship, music, and dancing. It can be done. These people are doing it.
     There was a restaurant nearby, La Esperanza de los Ascurra, and we repaired there to eat dinner and savor our triumph. A friendly bartender,  Maria Soto, a young Venezuelan who fled to the relative stability of Argentina, served our drinks and made conversation. I told her we had just been to El Beso to see the tango.
     "But did you dance?" she asked.
     No, I explained, it was our first time, and we didn't know the proper custom for asking someone to dance, did not want to give offense and, besides, we didn't know how.
     "You have to try it," she insisted. "The life is only once."


   

South American Diary #3: The Walking Tour

Ministry of Exterior Relations

     If New York City and Paris had a baby, it would look like Buenos Aires.
     I'm not speaking of the entire city—just like New York and Paris, Buenos Aires has its share of slums and favelas, which I did not visit in the two days I was there.
      But much of the fashionable areas, with five-story apartment blocks topped with copper domes, obviously mimic fashionable Parisian streets.
      The first day we exhausted my plan—visit Recoleta Cemetery then grab a steak at Don Julio, which arrived on a searing hot plate, thick and salty and delectable, along with roasted pumpkin. I could have turned around and gone home at that point and felt the trip had been worthwhile.
     But the next morning Michael had an idea. We took a cab to the opera house, Teatro Colon. I didn't ask why, just went along assuming we were heading blindly into the city, which would be my inclination. It turned out we were hooking up with a walking tour, FreeWalks Buenos Aires.
      Like a lot of guys, I have this little narrative loop playing in my head when I travel where I'm James Bond traversing the city in my virtual Aston Martin Vanquish. There is no place in that mindset for tours, for joining the sheep baaing after brightly t-shirted guides.
      But Michael, whose life at times actually approaches the Bondian, has no such qualms. We were briefed by an undernourished young lady named Dominique, who told us about Luciano Pavarotti complaining that the acoustics in the opera house were too perfect—his flaws were being projected too readily.
    Interesting if true, as they say in my business. A thought that came to me a few times more during the tour—perhaps another reason I avoid them: their standards of veracity dip below that of professional journalism, which might betray an excessive fastidiousness on my part, like rating carnivals based on their cleanliness.
     Dominique said the tour would take three hours, and we could pay her what we liked at the end. I knew we'd never last the three hours and would drop out at some point along the way, but was willing to give it a try, since we were here.
      Our first stop, to my surprise, the Templo Libertad, where the group admired a mosaic hands formed in the gesture of benediction, which I had lain on my sons' heads at their bar mitzvahs. As I considered whether to volunteer the story of how Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock in Star Trek, was Jewish, and based the Vulcan "Live Long and Prosper" hand sign on the Jewish gesture of blessing, Dominique explained that Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock in Star Trek, was Jewish, and based the Vulcan "Life Long and Prosper" hand sign on the Jewish gesture of blessing.

9 de Julio Avenue is wide enough to be easily seen from the air.

      Which increased my confidence in her veracity. We crossed the 9 de Julio Avenue— named for July 9, 1816, Argentine Independence Day— the widest avenue in the world, more than 110 yards across, or longer than a block in New York City. Crossing at top speed took more than a minute.
     Pausing before the former palace of the Anchirena family, now the Ministry of Exterior Relations, Dominique leapt from the standard tourist fluff to history with a bit more substance to it. 
     In the first half of the 19th century, she said, up to 25 percent of the population of Buenos Aires were black slaves—their labors built the fortunes of what was, at one point, the third richest country in the world. An understatement, turns out—some sources say up to a third.
    "If you are wondering what happened to people of color," she said, explaining how after Argentina abolished slavery—officially in 1813, in practice in 1853—it systematically eliminated its black population, either by selling them to slave-owning neighbors, or putting the slaves in the front lines during military campaigns. Today Argentina is the whitest nation in South America, with 97 percent of the population having European roots. 
     "There's a truth we don't speak much of," she said.
      Dominique was a very quotable guide. Stopping at an equestrian statue of Jose de san Martin, the liberator of Argentina, she asked, "Who is our biggest hero? Not Messi. Not Maradona. Not the Pope—San Martin." (Sigh, Lionel Messi and Diego Maradona are wildly popular soccer players. I try not to leave you guys in the dark). 

Basilica of the Holy Sacrament

     We toured a gorgeous church, The Basilica of the Holy Sacrament after Dominique shared an improbable legend about the nearby art deco Kavanagh Building being constructed to deliberately block the view of the church from the home of its patroness, Mercedes Castellanos de Anchorena, as "a revenge" for the high-born woman blocking Kavanagh's romance with her son, even though Anchorena died in 1920, before the church was even completed, and the Kavanagh Building wasn't designed for another dozen years.     
     As Hemingway wrote, "Pretty to think so."
     The shift into the fantastic continued at the memorial to the 1982 Falklands War, which they call the Malvinas War here. General Leopoldo Galtieri and the junta running Argentina, trying to distract Argentinians from economic turmoil and brutal political repression—30,000 people disappeared, many of them dropped from helicopters in "flights of death" or tossed into the River de la Plata—tried to push the British out of the Falklands Islands, where they had squatted since 1841. 
     That part, alas, is all too true.
     The British, ripe for a bit of distraction themselves, responded with the full brunt of their military might.

Kavanagh Building

     "This ridiculous war, often called 'The Most Ridiculous War,'" said Dominique, who then, speaking of ridiculous, suggested that Margaret Thatcher herself accompanied the British armada to South America and personally directed the sinking of the Argentina cruiser General Belgrano, considered a great atrocity because it supposedly was torpedoed while cruising out of a British-established exclusion zone. Whatever direction it was steaming, 323 Argentinian sailors died, nearly half their forces killed in the war.
     I raised my hand, suppressed saying, "That can't be true," and instead observed, "So you're saying that Margaret Thatcher was on the scene, giving orders?"
     "Margaret Thatcher was there," Dominique insisted (spoiler alert: she wasn't). 
     While I still trusted her nuanced and passionate account of the Dirty War at home and the insanity of the battle with a superpower over this collection of rocks off the coast, her leap into fantasy was unfortunate nevertheless. It only takes a little spit to spoil the soup.
      Though it did give insight into how myths develop—the Iron Lady is even more vile if she can be transported to the scene of the supposed slaughter of innocent Argentine sailors, giving the fatal command herself with a wave of her bejeweled claw.
     Not that I held this flight of fantasy against our guide. Her father, Dominique said, was a young conscript in the war, and I appreciated the heat she brought to the subject.
     "We lost 649 men in that war," she said. "It was about stupidity. It was about politics."
     Most wars are. The tour ended, conveniently, next to the La Biala cafe, where we all posed for a group shot—which Michael and I realized was done, not for our benefit, or hers, but to help her bosses gauge the tour's gate, 50 percent of which is supposed to be turned over to FreeWalks.  The going rate seemed to be $10 a head, and we gratefully ponied up. The full three hours had held our interest, even offering moments of fascination, with the detours into fabrication easily forgiven.  It was time to sit down, enjoy another coffee and to plot our next goal: The Tango.

South American Diary #2: City of the Dead—Recoleta Cemetery

Recoleta Cemetery

     Americans can be startlingly ignorant about the world beyond their borders, and I am no exception. Before preparing to visit South America, I had exactly one association with Argentina: Nazis. It was in Buenos Aires that the Israelis nabbed Adolf Eichmann in 1960 and spirited him to Jerusalem for trial.
     Not exactly a roadmap for vacation fun
     Since I had a few days there before heading south to Patagonia, I decided it would be wise to figure out something to do in the city. Every website and guide book I consulted listed the Recoleta Cemetery as the No. 1, essential thing to do in Buenos Aires and, as fate would have it, my hotel, the elegant and refined Loi Suites Recoleta, was practically next door.  
      Lonely Planet calls the cemetery "perhaps BA's top attraction" and every other source I consulted agreed in a chorus of unanimity.
    So I hatched a plan: go to the cemetery.  At the same time worrying, slightly: what does it say about a city if its most alluring attraction is a graveyard? Only one way to find out.
    After a bracing coffee at an outdoor cafe, La Biela, we strolled to Recoleta Cemetery. Here I first saw the value of traveling with another person. I was ready to plunge into the cemetery, blind, using a long-established investigative process I call wandering-around-looking-at-stuff.
     But my former boss and current friend—a rare if not unheard of combination—Michael Cooke, immediately entered negotiations with one of the guides hanging around the entrance to the cemetery. A price was established—$20 US for the two of us for an hour. 
      I was glad we did. Our guide spent well over an hour conducting us through this 14 acres labyrinth city of the dead, laid out like city blocks, marble and granite, black and white, some massive, others narrow, some tombs meticulously kept up by their families, others crumbling into ruin, while overhead crosses, domes, urns, plinths, and a platoon of angels, seraphs, Virgins Mary, mournful women and mustachioed men kept blind vigil.
    Our guide took enormous care explaining the lineage of the more noteworthy tombs.
      "This is the main avenue," said our guide, pausing before a tomb whose doorway was surrounded by nearly two dozen bronze plaques and wreaths. "And then there is the General Pacheco, he of our independent wars. This is the big plaque that included his portrait and all the battles where he participated as an officer, including the Cross of the Andes Mountains and the 10 most important battles in the war for the independence of Chile.  The family of diplomatics and militaries: Pacheco was the other great grandfather of the President Aylwin. The father of his father was he of our independence, the General Loi. The father of his mother was General Pacheco. He of our independence, the father of his mother."   
       That might seem like heavy lifting, and I didn't follow it closely for 90 minutes, but gazed around, floating through Recoleta on a gentle sea of highly-accented verbiage. Yet somehow that felt perfect, and what sense I gleaned showed the importance of family ties in Argentinian society, so different from the U.S., where many people have trouble grasping the relationship between John Adams and John Quincy Adams. 
     We went to the tomb of Luis Firpo—who knocked Jack Dempsey out of the ring in 1923, a moment captured by painter George Bellows.
     "The wild bull of the Pampas," I said, admiringly, showing off my knowledge of the first Spanish-speaking heavyweight contender. (Dempsey got back in the ring and won). 
      The Duarte family tomb where Eva Peron's body, after years of odd international post-mortem wanderings finally found its rest, is tucked down a nondescript avenue. I was never particularly enamored with Evita, so stood politely by while her entire history was narrated, taking a few dutiful photographs. Though we soon realized how lucky we had been, that no one was there when we approached. Passing it by later, the entire row was jammed with a tourist group. 
    A number of tombs belonged to newspaper publishers, including a complicated statuary group that shows the inky benefactor slipping his coffin and ascending to heaven, a physical and moral impossibility.   There were a surprising number of Irish names—about 4 percent of Argentinians have Irish roots; but I think I'll save that story for St. Patrick's Day.    
    Our guide explained that Catholics can be cremated since 1969 (close: since 1963. One should always take the information provided by tour guides with a grain of salt, as we should see tomorrow). In fact-checking Catholic burial rituals, I noticed the church "earnestly recommends that the pious custom of burial be retained; but it does not forbid cremation" although it demands that the faithful inter ashes in a "sacred place" and not keep them in an urn at home or scatter them across a ballpark. 
      "So much death amidst life," Michael said, of the cemetery in the heart of one of Buenos Aires' most fashionable neighborhoods.  
     "So much life amidst death," I countered, gesturing to the people wandering all around.