The Rhythms of Argentina and Uruguay

 

As mentioned last week, Roland and I began our recent South American cruise in Buenos Aires, Argentina. And what does that make you think of? The tango, of course.

On our first full day in Buenos Aires, we went to lunch and a tango show at La Ventana. We have discovered that music and dance shows on excursions are usually geared toward tourists and vary greatly in quality. This show was quite good, however. The photo at the top and the following one show some of the dancers.

Besides the dancers, the tango show included a couple who could have been in a circus because of their skills with their hands, both on drums and with swinging ropes. That’s the next two photos.

The next day we were docked in Montevideo, Uruguay, where we visited the Museo del Carnaval. Uruguay outdoes New Orleans by celebrating Carnival for 40 days. Aside from the costumes and parades, there are Murga groups presenting musical stage shows that are mostly satire on the national and world-wide political situation. We saw a show at the museum, and it was pretty interesting.  Instead of politics, however, this show was designed to explain what Murga groups are and do. That’s the final three photos.

From there, our trip concentrated more on wildlife and geography, which I covered in earlier blog posts. The entire trip was entertaining and educational, but next week I’ll leave South America and turn to another subject.

The Look of Argentina and Chile

 

Our trip took us to four countries: Argentina, Uruguay, the Falkland Islands, and Chile. I covered the Falkland Islands last week and will make a stop at Uruguay next week. However, most of our time was spent in Argentina and Chile, and this post is limited to them.

The photo at the top of this post shows both countries. Chile is very long but very narrow. From the town of Fruitillar, Chile, which is about an hour from the Pacific coast, you can look across a lake and see several volcanos. The one on the left is in Chile and the one on the right is in Argentina.

We started our cruise in Buenos Aires, which is known for its colorful buildings, especially in La Boca, which was originally a poor Italian neighborhood. The only way the residents could get paint for their houses was to use the leftovers from the ships that arrived at the port. So they might have enough blue for part of the house and use yellow or red for the rest, or maybe they would need three colors to complete the exterior. La Boca is no longer a poor neighborhood (mostly tourist shops now), but the tradition has continued.

The following photos show one of the buildings in La Boca, with a figure representing Eva Perón in the center, and the iconic pink government building where Eva used to give speeches from the balcony.

The cruise ended at Valparaiso, Chile, which had its own peculiarities. It isn’t the only city on a hill with houses built over empty space, but the sight is still fascinating. The next photo shows residences hanging from the hill.

Valparaiso is a historic city and building owners can do whatever they want to the interior but aren’t allowed to demolish or change the outside of an old building. The following photo shows a creative developer’s solution—and he apparently got away with it.

It isn’t just the buildings that are interesting, though. The scenery along the cruise route was spectacular. The next three photos were taken from our ship. The first shows the scenery we sailed by, and the following two are of the Amalia Glacier at the end of a fiord.

I’ll finish this series next week by talking about some of the entertainment we took in along the way.

 

Lions and Whales and Penguins, Oh My

 

Like last week, the title of this week’s post is a little misleading. The lions were sea lions, and the whales were merely skeletons. There were apparently live whales where we cruised, but we never saw any. We did see three species of penguins, however.

The sea lion colony was part of an excursion from Puerto Madryn, Argentina. It was mating season and we couldn’t get very close, but they were still interesting. In my letter home I called them “cute,” but they are actually quite ugly. The next two photos show the colony and as much of a close-up as I could get of the baby sea lions with my zoom lens.

There were partial whale skeletons near the sea lion viewing area, but the most complete one we saw was outside an ecocenter where the excursion took us next. That’s the skeleton in the next photo.

The whale skeleton was the only worthwhile part of the visit to the ecocenter. The main “attraction” of that part of the excursion was a very confusing lecture about the evolution of the penguin. The woman’s theses was that penguins had lost their ability to fly when adapting to environmental conditions that put them in the oceans where they had to fish for a living. She claimed the adaptation was necessary because it is anatomically impossible for any animal to both fly and hunt underwater. Of course there are birds that dive underwater to catch fish, but she said that wasn’t the same since they locate their prey from the sky or the surface and dive only long enough to pluck them out of the water, while penguins hunt underwater and stay submerged much longer than other birds. The lecturer was also adamant that in the 60 million years (I think she said) that penguins have existed on the earth, they were never able to fly. So I had trouble following her reasoning.

Although the lecture on penguins was boring, the penguins themselves were very interesting when we saw live ones in the Falkland Islands. They are very social birds that they live with their families in larger groups, although we were told that they don’t usually mingle with other types of penguins. That’s why we were lucky to see three species, including two King penguins among a group of Gentoo penguins. Here is a brief primer.

King penguins are the largest ones seen outside of Antarctica where the Emperor penguins live. King penguins have orange behind the head and yellow breasts, which is how you can pick them out of the following photo—one standing and one lying down.

Most of the penguins we saw were Gentoo penguins, which are the next largest and have orange bills and feet. Those are Gentoo penguins in the photo at the top of this post.

The other species we saw was the Magellanic penguins. I think of them as black and white, although apparently they have a small amount of pink around the eyes. Here are two photos of Magellanic penguins. The first shows the conditions we watched the various penguin species in during our morning excursion, with a cold wind and snow. The other was taken on our afternoon excursion. He looks like a loner, but that’s only when he’s out getting food for his family.

It was cold, windy, and snowing in the Falkland Islands even though it’s summer there, but it was my favorite day because I loved watching the penguins.

I enjoyed all of the wildlife we saw on our cruise, but next week I’ll tell you about some of the gorgeous landscapes.

Journey to the End of the Earth

 

Roland and I just returned from a South American cruise around the Horn. The title of this post is misleading, however, since the end of the earth would be the South Pole, or maybe there is no such thing as an end when dealing with a globe. We didn’t get near the South Pole, anyway, since we didn’t go to Antarctica.

We did, however, go literally around the Horn, which is how most people refer to Isla Hornos. As you can see from the photo of the ship tracker at the head of this post, the captain circled it with our ship. The next two photos show the mountain at the southern tip of the island, which is on the Drake Passage where the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans meet, and a close-up (through my camera’s zoom lens) of the lighthouse. The people in the photo are from a different Viking ship on a more challenging cruise than the one we were on. 

As an aside, Isla Hornos is billed as the southernmost tip of South America, but apparently the Diego Ramierez Islands are farther south.

After going around the Horn, we docked at Ushuaia, Argentina, which bills itself as the southernmost city in the world. Again, there might be some controversy here, as the smaller Puerto Williams is farther south. However, Ushuaia has a population of approximately 180,000 while Puerto Williams’ population is less than 3,000, so it’s questionable whether Puerto Williams even qualifies as a city.

Ushuaia was originally established as an Argentinian naval base but, because of its isolated location, soon became the site for a maximum-security prison. The prison was closed in the 1940s and is now a museum. These photos show the prison and the city with the Beagle Channel in the background. The Beagle Channel was named after the ship Charles Darwin sailed on, but it has nothing to do with him. The name resulted from the Beagle’s first excursion, and Darwin didn’t join until the second.

Finishing up on the southernmost cities, we stopped at Punta Arenas, Chile, which claims the distinction of being the southernmost city on the South American mainland. (Ushuaia and Puerto Williams are both on islands.) Punta Arenas lies on the of the Straits of Magellan, and there is a large statue to the explorer in the main square. That statue is pretty traditional, however, and there are others that are more interesting. The one pictured here is the monument to the Schooner Ancud, which took possession of the Straits of Magellan for Chile in 1843. Many of the figures on it are taken from myth, which is most obvious with the mermaids on each side in the front. The other photo shows Punta Arenas from the balcony of our cabin.

So much for the southernmosts. Next week I’ll cover some of the wildlife we saw along the way.