Argentina
and Chile 2003-2004: A Twenty Years' Retrospective
Introduction
I first visited
South America twenty years ago. Although at the time I mostly
stayed with Silvio's family--now scattered over separate homes--and
involved myself in their internecine struggles, that other visit
coloured my way of thinking about the continent, rather like dark
clouds suggest but don't guarantee a downpour.
The most significant
moments from my first trip to Argentina and Chile were fleeting
and largely overwritten by my attempt to grapple with a culture
that could be very isolating. I laughed with Silvio at rude tourists
we met on our trip across the Andes to Chile, grimaced with him
through the awkward confrontation with his cousin, marvelled at
the way in which people in the coastal city of Mar de Plata dealt
with organ trade child abductions in the past and the mark that
had left on the culture, and ran with him when his rabid cousin
pursued us for over four hundred kilometres.
Necessarily,
more negative impressions from that first trip fed a reluctance
to return, whether in print or in person, and it was with some
difficulty that Silvio persuaded me to come back to South America
fifteen years later and travel in his RV. The trip promised to
offer more than a hard chair at a noisy confusing table, and although
Silvio and I had shared road trips before, he had organized the
venture to take into account our changing circumstance.
We had driven
to western Canada a few times in my old car, but that way of traveling
suited me more than him. Camping in a tent does not represent
privation for me, and cooking over a fire is a relatively familiar
procedure. Silvio likes the clamour of crowds and meeting different
people, and endures discomfort with little grace. His RV project
promised to satisfy both of our requirements, and he was more
than a little excited to show me what he had accomplished.
That first
trip to Argentina and Chile still hovered behind his request however,
both a warning and a threat, and it was some time before I agreed
to return. Silvio urged me to visit ever since my first trip twenty
years earlier, and I had put him off, but he had spent both time
and money ensuring that we could travel for thousands of kilometres
in a way that he would be comfortable--and thus happy--and I would
be assured of a method of traveling that at least in part suited
both my temperament and inclinations. Eventually I gave in, and
Silvio and I went to Chile, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.
I have related those stories in my trip journals, and in the meanwhile,
while traveling by RV, Silvio became interested in stories of
my adventures in the Cook Islands when I was younger. Most people
care little about the travels of others, but other travellers
are curious, and Silvio asked enough questions that I became aware
that I remembered more than I thought about that most seminal
of trips now almost forty years ago.
Although the
other earlier trip to Argentina had largely receded into memory,
such ruminations--as well as the books I wrote about my later
trips to South America--evoked that earlier adventure. I recalled
how little effort Argentineans make to include someone with faltering
Spanish, and the idiosyncrasies of the culture--as well as my
attempt to interpret them--became once again part of my way of
thinking about the country. Although I hadn't recorded my almost
three-month 2003 trip to Argentina and Chile, it still existed
in the stories I told about the people we encountered and the
events we witnessed.
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