Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Argentina is a fabulous place for people from the northern hemisphere to enjoy a vacation from our cruel dark winter.  Here are some good reasons to visit Argentina:

• 15-17.5 hours per day of sunlight in December and January
  
• incredibly friendly people, enough of whom speak English that you can get around reasonably well without Spanish skills
  
• beautiful unspoiled scenery, one of the only parts of South America that still has some wilderness
  
• less rain and wind than Chile–Argentina is on the eastern side of the Andes and therefore in their “rain shadow”
  
• ridiculously low prices ever since the 2001 devaluation; hotels and restaurant meals are 1/3 to 1/2 the cost of comparable services in the U.S.
  
• families traveling with children will find the little ones welcomed everywhere

Days 1-3:  Buenos Aires.  Most of the domestic flights within Argentina leave from the downtown airport.  You, on the other hand, will be arriving at Ezeiza, a 45-minute trip from the center of town.  If you’ve already got your luggage and are in a taxi you might as well spend a few days exploring B.A.  rather than attempting to catch a flight somewhere else.  B.A. is a lifestyle city more than a tourist city so try to get some introductions to friends or relatives of friends.

Day 4-6:  Iguazu Falls.  A 1.5-hour flight to the NE brings you into subtropical jungle and the world’s most powerful waterfall.  The falls are best explored from the Argentine side.  If you are a U.S. citizen you need to get a visa in advance and fork over $140 to visit the Brazilian side, which really isn’t worth the trouble unless you’re desperate to take a scenic helicopter flight (banned in Argentine airspace).  If you’ve got the Brazilian visa it might be worth adding an extra day.  Once in Brazil you have the opportunity to proceed further across the Paraguayan border and visit a big hydroelectric project upstream, sadly one that inundated a waterfall of a similar size and beauty to Iguazu.

Day 7-14: fly from Iguazu to San Martin de los Andes, in northern Patagonia (might be a little tough to arrange, at least without an overnight in B.A.).   Try to find a rental car that you can drop off in Bariloche and/or take a “Seven Lakes route” tour bus at the end of your stay in San Martin.  Be aware that even in the middle of summer Patagonia can be a chilly 10-20 degrees C and windy.  At 41 degrees south the latitude here is comparable to Boston in the Northern Hemisphere.  However, there isn’t a big continental land mass to generate hot summer temps.  Patagonia is like a little finger poked into the cold Southern Ocean.

Day 15-17: Calafate.  Unless you’ve seen a lot of glaciars in Alaska or New Zealand, the sight of a thick glaciar calving icebergs into a lake should make Calafate worth the stop.  You have to stop here anyway if you’re flying from Bariloche to Ushuaia so you might as well get off the plane.

Day 18-20: Ushuaia.  At 54 degrees south this is the southernmost city it the world (comparable to Edmonton, Alberta or Manchester, England).  Go hiking in the Tierra del Fuego National Park.  Take the all-day Rumbo Sur cruise that visits the sea lions, penguins, and Harberton ranch.  Enjoy the snow-covered mountains behind the city.  Be prepared for cold temperatures, at least a bit of rain most days, and some wind.  A typical mid-summer temperature here is 12C.  Warning:  Ushuaia is a bit like Alaska in hospitality as well as scenery.  People move here because they don’t really like other people… then they get jobs in hotels and restaurants.  On average the welcome you receive in Ushuaia is better than in most parts of the U.S. but the quality of services and friendliness is lower than in the rest of Argentina.

Day 21:  You can get a direct flight from Ushuaia to Ezeiza (EZE).  Hang out at the airport Internet cafe and write to your friends about what a fun trip you had.  Then catch an overnight flight to NY (10+ hours) or Miami (8 hours).  The First Class seats on the American Airlines 777s to Miami fold completely flat for sleeping.

For the next trip….

• take the ferry to Colonia, Uruguay (tiny colonial town) or Montevideo, Uruguay (the capital)
  
• visit the northwestern provinces, which have more colonial and Indian influence
  
• tour the wine country of Mendoza and then head through a pass in the Andes to Santiago, Chile

Watched fireworks in 15 towns at the same time, from Flight Level 330 (approx 33,000′), over northern Argentina and western Paraguay (New Year’s Eve, American Airlines 908 from B.A. to Miami).

Stood at the top of the world’s most powerful waterfall, Iguazu, where the Parana, a river second only to the Amazon in volume, drops nearly 100 meters.

Ate dinner at 10:30 pm at an outdoor cafe and watched families arrive, with their young children, after I had sat down (very comfortable T-shirt temperatures in December evenings in Buenos Aires).

Walked to Chile from the Tierra del Fuego National Park, just west of Ushuaia.

Took a ferry boat across the Rio De La Plata, world’s widest river, to Colonia, Uruguay.

Observed Rockhopper and Gentoo penguins and the Southern Sea Lion from a luxury catamaran in the Beagle Channel.

Received a friendly welcome from all of the staff at a $7/night hotel in Bariloche (northern Patagonia).

Got two bent wheels repaired with a sledgehammer on Christmas Eve and put back on the comically tiny Hertz rental car for US$6 in Tolhuin, Tierra del Fuego.

Took a flying lesson in a Piper Archer in a region of the world where it isn’t legal to fly unless you speak Spanish or have an interpreter in the airplane (over mountain passes in Tierra del Fuego and low over a lighthouse and sea lion and penguin colonies).

Saw a Chevy Chevette 5-door hatchback, circa 1976, in excellent condition with a Bush/Cheney ‘04 bumper sticker on the back (Northwest Washington DC, near my cousin Donna’s house).

It was 10 years ago this month that I began to build my personal Web site, which eventually grew into photo.net and philip.greenspun.com.  In December 1993 hardly anyone cared about the Internet or World Wide Web.  Hal Abelson, one of our professors, thought the Web was interesting.  My friend Brian LaMacchia got motivated to set up an HTTP daemon on our Unix file server.  Our classmate Jonathan Rees built a CGI library so that we could write Web scripts in Scheme (a dialect of Lisp).  I began playing around in the hopes that I’d be able to write collaborative networked computer applications without having to build user interface code for every possible operating system.  Zak Kohane, a professor at Harvard Medical School and doctor at Children’s Hospital, taught me enough SQL that we could build a Web interface to the Children’s Oracle clinical care database.  Nearly everyone to whom we mentioned our little obsession said that we were wasting our time and that nothing especially interesting was going to come out of the Web protocols.

And now, after just 10 years, there are 30+ Internet cafes in Ushuaia, Argentina, the capital of Tierra del Fuego and the southernmost city in the world (54 degrees south latitude)…

Tudor Parfitt, an English academic, schlepped all over southern Africa trying to figure out whether or not the Lemba people were, as some of them claimed, in fact Jews.  He wrote up his travels, circa 1990, in Journey to the Vanished City.  This was no easy task due to the fact that the Lemba have been illiterate for many centuries (if not forever) and therefore all of their history had to be obtained in person-to-person interviews.  There are some parallels between the situation with the Lemba in Africa and the Indians and Mormons in the U.S.  According to the book, southern Africa was never inhabited by literate people and for the most part never inhabited by people who built any buildings more substantial than a grass hut.  When whites came to southern Africa they encountered tribes living in grass huts but also an extensive ruined stone city called “Great Zimbabwe”.  They didn’t want to believe that ancestors of the blacks whom they were oppressing had been capable of advanced civilization and therefore a popular explanation was that people from the Middle East had come down to southern Africa at some point, built Great Zimbabwe, and left.  The theory made some sense in that Arab slave traders had been operating up and down Africa’s east coast for many centuries and had colonized substantial parts of the Horn of Africa.

Where’s the parallel with the U.S.?  There are massive ceremonial centers built of earth in the Ohio River Valley and up and down the Mississippi (Cahokia, Illinois being the largest).  Europeans displacing American Indians did not want to believe that the people whom they were pushing aside had ever been capable of much.  Various theories were promulgated in the early 1800s as to who might have built these impressive structures.  The Book of Mormon is an explanation that posits immigrants from the Middle East (tribes of Israel in fact).

The book is interesting as a travel adventure and it is also interesting as a reflection of attitudes about the country of Zimbabwe circa 1990.  A black South African university professor is quoted:

“I don’t think the Africans are a vengeful people.  Look what happened in Zimbabwe.  The whites always said there would be a blood-bath if the blacks won the war, but not so. … If redemption and peace can come to Rhodesia after years of one of the bloodiest wars, it can come here.”

[Oh yes… the Lemba.  If you don’t want to read the book it turns out that DNA studies carried out in the late 1990s indicate that they have some Middle Eastern blood.  Their oral history points to an origin in present-day Yemen.  There were Jews in Yemen until they were pushed out by Arab riots in 1948 (they took refuge in Israel, some of them men with two wives, thus becoming some of Israel’s only legal polygamists).  Of course there were Arabs in Yemen.  The handful of Lemba traditions that are Middle Eastern could be either Muslim or Jewish.  So the question remains open…]

Just finished a Dover Press book entitled Jewish Travellers in the Middle Ages, 19 Firsthand Accounts.  Good for putting the discomforts of present-day travel into perspective…

Mushullam Ben R. Menahem in 1481:

“And even if you escape all these dangers [bandits on the road, Muslims who like to kill Jews, etc.] yourself it often happens to people that the horses on which they ride die, or they are nearly dead when they reach Jerusalem, because of the brackish water they drink, and the great heat and the dust which comes into their mouths, and the sand in which they go up to the knees in great pain and also because of the want of food and the long journey…”

Once you got to Jerusalem there wasn’t all that much to see compared to what greets modern-day travelers.  Obadiah Da Bertinoro 1487:

“Jerusalem is for the most part desolate and in ruins.  I need not repeat that it is not surrounded by walls.  Its inhabitants, I am told, number about 4,000 families.  As for Jews, about seventy families of the poorest class have remained; there is scarcely a family that is not in want of the commonest necessaries; one who has bread for a year is called rich.”

Just getting to the vicinity of present-day Israel was a long process.  Obadiah continues…

“… every year Jews come in the Venetian galleys and even in the pilgrim ships, for there is really no safer and shorter way than by these ships.  … The Galleys perform the journey from Venice here in forty days at the most.”

Worth a trip to the library but not a book with which you’d want to clutter your house in the long run.

Just finished Derek Lundy’s Godforsaken Sea, a book about the 1996-97 Vendee Globe, a solo non-stop sailboat race from France down the west coast of Africa, around Antarctica, and back to France via the east coast of South America.  In the best case you’re by yourself for 100-150 days amongst some of the world’s roughest waters and highest winds.  In about half the cases you don’t make it back at all, leaving your capsized boat to sink while you bob about in a liferaft waiting for the Australian military to pick you up.  Gerry Roufs, a Canadian sailor in the ‘96-97 race, vanished without activating his EPIRB, leaving behind a young wife and daughter.

Even if you get seasick just looking at a boat, as I do, and have never understood the attraction of “racing” along at 1/5th the speed of George H.W. Bush’s fancy powerboat, the book is interesting.  Sleep turns out to be a huge challenge for the competitors.  A properly captained boat maintains a continuous watch for (a) big waves, (b) other boats, (c) other bad stuff.  Sadly this isn’t possible with only one person on board so the next best thing is to sleep in short stretches.  It turns out the optimum rest in the minimum time for humans is achieved with 6-7 hours of sleep per day broken up into at least two periods.  Most people get their best sleep between 3 and 6 a.m. and then between 3 and 5:30 pm.  Sleeping for one long stretch every night is wasteful and may be a purely cultural phenomenon.  Note that some of the world’s most productive individuals, e.g., Winston Churchill, were known to supplement a short night’s sleep with an afternoon nap.  People in Buenos Aires must be doing this as well.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery, in Wind, Sand and Stars (a must-read, by the way), said that “the machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.”  As the sailing machines get more sophisticated and the world a bit smaller you’d expect sailboat races to become safer.  Boats are in constant satellite beacon, email, fax, and satphone contact with race officials and support teams back home.  If things go really badly the sailor can always activate an EPIRB and out come the Australians to pick them up.  Humans, however, apparently are able to factor in all of this new gadgets and use them to shave time off the records rather than increasing their safety.  A sailor with an EPIRB and a radar will go farther south, which shortens the distance around Antarctica but also greatly increases the probability of collision with an iceberg (maybe detected by the radar in advance) or some flat chunks of ice.  Sailors accustomed to the Australians’ heroic efforts have come to grief when they ran into trouble in Chilean waters, the Chilean Navy and Air Force being disinclined to take risks or even to initiate searches.  Lundy notes “Because the technology was there, because they could stay in contact with the world and call on its search-and-rescue resources when they needed them, the sailors did theings they might not have done if they hadn’t had the technology on board.  The reckless swings deep into the higher latitudes of the fifties, sailing fast through the drift ice, cutting the mileage to the Horn–these were all recent Southern Ocean tactics, adopted in the various BOC and Vendee Globe races.”

This human attitude is familiar.  For example, a friend is using my minivan right now back in Boston.  Someone in a big SUV ran into her little Honda Civic on the highway and then ran away.  The SUV driver was going 20 mph faster than all the other cars on a snowy miserable Boston night.  He probably felt safe with 4WD, antilock brakes, air bags, and seat belts, not to mention 5000 lbs. of extra bulk, and did things that someone in a simpler smaller car would not have done.  Insurance statistics show that antilock brakes haven’t lived up to originally high expectations for preventing accidents and saving lives.  People apparently factor the extra protection into their calculations and use it to push right back up to their previous limit for risk.  Reference:  “Condoms and seat belts: the parallels and the lessons”, Richens J, Imrie J, Copas A, Lancet. 2000 Jan 29;355(9201):400-3.

In Redefining Airmanship, a book for flying nerds, the author cites a U.S. Navy study that found that total flying experience did not reduce accident rates.  Pilots who had more than 500 hours in the same type of airplane were safer in that airplane than pilots who were new to a type of plane.  But otherwise the pilots with tremendous experience weren’t any safer than young punks.  The very experienced pilots were indeed more skilled but they used their skill to take more risks and tackle more ambitious projects, pushing right up to the point where the statistical risk they took was the same as when they’d started to fly.

Back on the theme of the Southern Ocean, it has been summarized in fewer words:

Below 40 degrees south there is no law;
below 50 degrees south there is no God.

– Old sailor’s saying

I’ll be there on Tuesday (Ushuaia, Argentina, 54 49 South latitude).

In the Israel Essay, under “Why do Muslims hate the United States?”, the following paragraphs seem relevant to this Argentina trip:

As with the preceding question we should step back and ask the more general question “Why does everyone hate the United States?” Everyone hates the U.S. because everything that goes wrong in the world today is the fault of the U.S. Our military consists of 1.5 million highly trained people and tens of thousands of machines capable of getting them very quickly to where they are needed. Yet though we claim to be interested in justice and human welfare we generally don’t bother to act to protect non-citizens. For example, impending genocide in Rwanda elicited the following quote from then-President Bill Clinton: “… I mention it only because there are a sizable number of Americans there and it is a very tense situation. And I just want to assure the families of those who are there that we are doing everything we possibly can to be on top of the situation to take all the appropriate steps to try to assure the safety of our citizens there.” In other words “We could use all of our airpower and troops to stop the Hutus from killing the Tutsis but instead we’re going to airlift American citizens out and then move on to the next issue.” An estimated 1 million people died.

Nobody is going to blame the Rwandan genocide on Ireland. They’ve only got 17,000 troops and a limited number of ships and cargo planes. Nobody is going to blame Denmark, with its 35,000 troops. But the U.S. military is strong enough to intervene anywhere in the world. People can blame, with some justification, anything that makes them unhappy on the U.S.

Ask Joe Foreigner what upsets him most about the U.S. Top on the list is the fact that the U.S. is too interventionist, swaggering cowboy-like with military power into complex international situations. Complaint #2, however, is that the U.S. failed to intervene in a particular situation that is near and dear to Joe’s heart. They hate us because we are too interventionist… except when we’re not inventionist enough. They also hate the U.S. because they’re so weak and their government essentially serves at our government’s pleasure. Consider how annoying it is to be an American voter, knowing that because you don’t have $50 million you don’t have any political power. Imagine how much more annoyed you’d be if you were a citizen of one of the European nations. Not only are your politicians corrupted by the local rich but if your society wants to do something that is contrary to a sufficiently important U.S. desire, the U.S. military might invade and turn your country into a possession, ruled by a colonial viceroy.

Joe Third World Foreigner has even more reason to hate the U.S. than Joe European Foreigner. Most Third World governments have no plausible claim to legitimacy. They have power because they seized power and because the U.S. has chosen not to overthrow them. If Joe Third World Foreigner hates his rulers, who are presumably skimming whatever they can take out of his pocket, it is only natural for Joe to hate the U.S. for enabling his rulers to remain in power.

In just a few days here I’ve encountered several Argentines who aren’t fans of the U.S. government.  For starters, these folks are angry because they blame their suffering under the military dictatorship on the U.S., which trained some of their officers.  I asked if they really thought it was possible for the U.S. government to control what happened half a world away.  Indeed they did.  What about Castro? I asked.  The U.S. has been trying to get rid of him for 40 years and hasn’t managed to do it.  True, an Argentine responded, but the U.S. has succeeded in making Cuba ridiculously poor.  Cuba, of course, is free to trade with and accepts tourism from the entire European Union.  So it doesn’t seem plausible to expect a U.S. trade embargo to cripple an ambitious hard-working people.  And most of the rest of the Caribbean is extremely poor as well, despite not suffering from any animosity from the U.S. government.

To an American this image of the U.S. government as omnipotent, right down to the smallest details of how other countries are administered seems odd.  We live admidst evidence of our government’s impotence to achieve its goals.  After 40 years of the War on Poverty the streets are filled with homeless.  After 20 years of Reagan’s stepped-up War on Drugs it is as easy to party as ever.  The FAA tried to build itself a new air traffic control computer system and the project went $billions over budget and more than a decade beyond its original deadline.  How could a government this incompetent in its own country prevent a determined group of foreigners from educating themselves, working hard, building industries, and exporting their goods to Asia and the European Union?

Today is the first day of the trip away from Buenos Aires, the megacity of Argentina.  I’ve arrived at Iguazu Falls (staying at the massive Sheraton right in the park).  It is the closest thing in South America to Niagara but less straightforward and more complex.  The lush scenery of the surrounding subtropical jungle and warm mud-colored water is also quite different.  Puerto Iguazu is a backwater town of 28,000 people, steaming in the heat and humidity of the southern summer.  But really when you think about it every place in Argentina outside of B.A. is a backwater.  The negative consequences of having one huge city dominate a country are obvious:  congestion, traffic, pollution, high real estate prices.  But perhaps there are positive consequences.

In Argentina people move to B.A., if they aren´t already there, when it is time for university.  After graduation, they stay in B.A. to work at high-level jobs.  If you make friends in college, chances are that they’ll be living within an easy Metro or taxi ride for the rest of your life.  Unlike Americans, Argentines don’t sag in the evenings, exhausted from their jobs.  Perhaps there is some napping at 6 or 7 but your friends might call you up at 9 pm and a big group will meet for dinner at 10.

Compare to the U.S.  Friends gather in, say, the Boston area for college.  They disperse for graduate school, each taking the most advantageous offer regardless of location from universities that might be anywhere in the 50 states.  After graduate or professional school, people who might have become friends disperse again, each one taking the best-sounding job offer regardless of location.  We achieve a lot in our careers and make reasonably good use of our vast territory but wouldn’t it be nicer if our friends weren’t strewn out across a 3000-mile wide continent?

My two Argentine friends in Boston generated a collection of invitations in Buenos Aires that could keep me occupied here in this massive city for two weeks.  One invitation was to attend services at a Reform-ish temple on Friday night.  The service itself was highly unusual from an American Jewish perspective.  Almost the entire time was taken up with lively singing by experts within the community and the congregation as a whole.  Everyone seemed to know each other.  Security was very tight.  I almost didn’t make it into the temple because my escort was unknown to the guard.  Fortunately she had her national ID card with a last name of “Cohen” to present.  Why the paranoia?

At first glance you’d think that Argentina’s Jews would be happy and complacent.  There has never been any violence directed at the Jewish community here from their mostly Italian- and Spanish-descended fellow citizens.  They escaped Europe’s war against her Jewish citizens.  You’d think that being on the other side of the globe from the Middle East would preserve Argentina’s Jews from the Muslim war against the Jews.  The 1993 bombing of the Jewish community center here in Buenos Aires, however, left a deep scar.  85 people were killed and 230 wounded in a car bombing that was never completely resolved.  Supposedly the money came from Iran and support from the local Iranian embassy but the actual killers were never identified.

It’s a tough situation when you’re already at the End of the Earth.  There is literally nowhere to run.

A friend criticized me for being unsympathetic regarding a concern of hers that I thought was irrational.  She believed that a friend ought to care simply because another human being is apprehensive, even if that apprehension is not justified.  During this exchange it occurred to me that there is actually no reason for the layperson to be sympathetic or empathetic in any modern situation.

Three hundred years ago everyone had to know how to make soap.  Today we can run down to the store and buy Ivory or Palmolive.

Three hundred years ago friends needed to empathize with one another.  Today anyone who wishes to get sympathy for his or her troubles can simply buy it from one of the hundreds of thousands of trained professionals in the therapy industry.

Friendship isn’t obsolete of course.  Psychotherapists aren’t very entertaining so we might still rely on friends for amusement.  But why bother pretending to care about another person’s troubles when there are so many psychotherapists out there who actually do care, truly, deeply, professionally?