Argentina

[Arab Nights (imported)]

As always, if you don’t like this post, blame Moi. He is the one who encouraged me to post about foreign travel.

I had the good luck last year to get to go to Argentina. The trip didn’t begin so well. We have a shuttle that gets us to the airport in our fair capital city reasonably. I like to arrive early for a sit down meal and read a paper before a long trip. I went back and forth with the shuttle reservation gal and she finally agreed to schedule me earlier than what she recommended. So I show at the kiosk. I am the only one there and 20 minutes later I see the Shuttle drive by. I called and she had actually put me down for the one she recommended. The wait was just long enough to not quite make sense to drive home and then come back. So as she told me, I got there in time to check in, go thru security and go to the gate, BUT only time for a quick sandwich to go before boarding. Then it was the long haul across the US to Atlanta. Normally Delta seems pretty good to me, but this trip was an exception. My arrival gate was on the far side of Atlanta from the international departure gate. Plus I was to check at the gate for seat assignment. They started boarding just as I got there, so no time for food. They began meal service once we settled into cruise altitude. When she got to me, I chose chicken. She said she had just given the last one and would be back with one for me. I cut them some slack because they were serving people, but eventually I realized she was not coming back. But by that time I really didn’t care that much. So I spent the usual miserable night in a coach seat with only an interesting Argentine young lady next to me who was a lawyer but giving that up for singing. It takes me a while, but eventually I can always get my body to accept the reality of coach travel and I settled into a distorted posture for the duration. I skipped the inflight breakfast because it is always timed just long enough before landing to cause discomfort waiting for the bathroom before the seat belt lights go on. Anyway, I was supposed to have lunch with the country manager after landing. But they had just got me on an earlier afternoon flight to Salta, so there was only time to go out to his car at the far end of the parking lot, go thru the permanent Buenos Aires traffic jam to the domestic airport, park at the far corner, haul my luggage to the counter and check in. The flight departed from the really far gate. By that time I had not eaten in 24 hours and was getting really cranky.

So I get to the departure gate and there are a bunch of relaxed people there talking among themselves and occasionally laughing. Pretty much everyone looked like their clothier was Goodwill. Of course there was only the cup of soda and biscuit on the flight. But as I took the taxi into town, I just had this feeling that I was home. For me, most places I am neutral about. Occasionally there is a place I either like or dislike from the start and I do not know why that is. I do know I liked Salta and just had an overwhelming sense of ‘I am here.’ After a good dinner in a restaurant where a few groups of people talking among themselves and occasionally laughing, I stepped out to walk around the square which was typical Latin America full of music and people and a few street dogs. I had brought a bit from the restaurant and gave it to one dog I kind of liked at first glance. That always puts me in a better mood.

The next day I started a several day trip with the company rep who drove. He is a really great guy and it gave me lots of time to talk about life in Argentina. Clothing is very expensive there because of government tariffs. That is why the people looked like Goodwill shoppers. The country is just coming off the populist policies of the outgoing lady president Kirchner who is a Peronist. The Peron populist line seemed to be that a leader can change something just by dictate. Gas prices too high, set the price lower. Natural gas prices too high, set the price lower. Inflation too high, simply ban people from saying or printing the real number. Amazingly enough, although Argentina has lots of natural gas potential, we drove by an electrical generating plant that wasn’t really functioning because you could not produce natural gas for what the government said that it was worth. Inevitably a low natural gas price led to electrical shortages. Argentina now has a new market oriented president. Inflation is something like 22%, but it is because all of the distortions are being wrung out of the economy. His party won in the last elections, so people seem to now vote in an un-populist way. They seem to be optimistic about the future. One of the interesting twists is caused by Trump and NAFTA. US agriculture has been a real winner with NAFTA. I believe it because I have read the big number of unit trains bringing US corn into Mexico City every day. I have worked a reasonable amount in rural Mexico where I have only seen family-sized corn plots and been told that they cannot raise corn at a price to compete with US corn. Mexico is hedging its bet about NAFTA being killed and looking to countries like Argentina to fill the gap. Argentina is really an agricultural powerhouse and can be more so, but …. Under Kirchner with Big Brother taking care of everyone there was no need for gritty things like some of the rail lines which fell into disrepair. You need rail to ship agriculture, so they are now trying to bring those back to fill any market openings resulting from changes in the international agriculture economy. Interestingly, I returned via Santiago (Chile) to Toronto (passed US customs there!) and back home. I had the chance to talk to two different Americans who are agricultural people and they both agreed that Argentina has lots of room to grow their agriculture if their politics allows it.

I gather the ideal there is to live in country, but be paid from outside in places like Caribbean islands or, more conveniently, Uruguay. Make a trip to collect your money in dollars and sneak them back in country. That way you can circumvent bureaucratic decisions on what a money is worth and play the market for what it really is worth. Then you bring in extra money as you need it for bigger purchases.

The populist line has really led to some interesting results. One guy has managed to buy a couple of rental homes thru his life. I asked him what mortgage rates he has paid. He said the lowest was 12% and the highest was 25%. He swears that you only want to have enough in Argentina to pay your regular needs with the rest outside the country to avoid the fiscal swings. “We are a very happy people, but we elect very bad governments,” he said.

I found the food reasonably good all thru the trip, although it seemed a bit pricey. I have been told by foreign technical people before that they cannot believe how cheap food is in the US. I noticed that eateries usually had groups talking among themselves and occasionally laughing. Everyone I dealt with from wait staff to cashiers to just general people were, without exception, incredibly nice. I was just two weeks ago talking to a Canadian professional. Argentina came into the conversation. He said that everyone he had talked to who had been in Argentina had experienced the same thing.

Part of our spin was thru wine country. Think of a setting like Palm Springs or Coachella with spectacular mountains as a backdrop to the vineyards. Argentina is still like the old West with real cowboys on real horses doing real work. One of the hotels we stayed in had a display of local artwork and it was straight out of old Arizona complete with saguaro-like cacti.

When you get into the high La Puna country (we are talking +10,000 feet altitude), it has a really stark beauty like Death Valley or desert Nevada without much around. We came upon two guys with horses up there and I thought it was my chance to get a picture of gauchos. It turned out to be two British guys who looked in their prime. They had been looking at a map and wondered if they could cross east from Mendoza on horseback and set out to do it. Leave it to the Brits.

I was really surprised by the really big numbers of cameloids (llams, vicunas, alpacas) I saw. While it is really a barren country, there are reliable springs with (sort of grassy meadows) which allow them to flourish. Apparently Argentina has banned hunting them and bitch about the low life Chile guys who use back roads to illegally hunt.

Chilenos are not the only foreigners they complain about. Bolivians are their equivalent of Mexicans and Central Americans in the US. Bolivians are generally pretty obvious. Argentina is full of European blood from Spanish and Italians to post-WW II Germans (ahem). Bolivians are obviously indigenous to look at and speak Spanish in a way that sounds very uneducated to Argentines. They do a lot of the hard labor that needs doing for not much money, and thus are necessary but are looked down on and often cheated out of money for their work and so on.

The one subject that brought a dark look to my contact’s face was the Falkland War with Britain back in the 80s. That is a subject like the Civil War in the old South. I quickly changed the subject.

Would I go back? In a heartbeat. The people are just so nice. Like Iowa X10. In fact, if you are quiet, you can faintly hear Argentina. It is the sound of groups of men and women talking and laughing among themselves.