Patagonia 11: The Punta del Este, Uruguay Puzzle

What’s the difference between seeing and noticing? Does one go to the machinery of logic, the other to the place where imagination churns? Maybe our senses send signals both ways at once? Do we escape into details to avoid over-heating our cerebral processors? Or maybe we both notice AND see details to collect as many as possible for logic and imaginations to process later?

I like to troll scenes with a camera so that the heavy lifting of collecting analytical fodder can fill up memory cards with facts while allowing me distill out whatever truth they contain at leisure. Yeah, that’s it… that’s why I postpone conclusions until I can swim around in snapshot images like Scrooge McDuck in his money crammed pool. 

Donald Trump Jr announces the Urugua Tower

Punta Del Este's a playground for South America's (and Europe's) successful. This summer-time city's golf-course-like-feellng boasts lawns better manicured than the work of a Parisian nail studio. As a Yank, I noticed a beach-front two-story photo of Donald Trump Jr. boasting the erection of a Trump Tower filling with luxury apartments. In this Spanish-speaking place it was hard to miss that the building’s advertising was in English.

A tour-taxi drove us through acres of the sort of mansions that line the roads of Palm Beach, Greenwich, CT. and Beverly Hills. The city's often compared to Cannes. Perhaps tacky’s been outlawed by Punta del Este where homes sit upon multi-acre hillsides of green, most with spectacular water-views. 

The air’s scented with gold.

Casa Pueblo; The house, gallery, museum, boutique hotel, and 

castle of artist Carlos Paez Vilaro (1923-2014) in Punta Ballena,
near Punta del Este, Uruguay.

Has this city of 9,200 (swelling to  perhaps 30,000 in summer) overcome or simply banned poverty? After hours of touring, we spotted NO low-income housing. Mercedes seem driven by the middle classes while the coolest youth drive Lambos as parents are chauffeured  about in Bentleys and Rolls. Until those streets, I'd never seen Bugattis in the wild.

So? Here's what puzzled me since our visit to the city. Why are struggling Latinos streaming north to the U.S. when La Dolce Vida glimmers in Punta del Este (along with Chilé and Argentina)? Es desconcertante, eh? Thoughts anyone?

Patagonia 9: Buenos Aires • Vanishing Point

Freudian fun decorates a Recoleta tomb 'erected'
before the psychologist's ideas roiled across the West. 

Thousands wander daily through Recoleta cemetery here in the epicenter of Argentina's brilliant city. They're exploring the excesses of the nation's richest families proclaiming their posterity, or at least trying to grab a piece of immortality for what? Their names?

These are the pyramids of Argentina writ tiny. The metropolis is just north of earthmoving Patagonia where seismic forces are working to crumble South America's lower tip  back into seas. 

So it will take a tad longer in  geological time to crumble all of these little buildings-for-the-dead back into watery dust. 7,000 miles away from Rome yet all built in that ancient city's classic forms - I wonder what will remain of these ruins in a couple of millennia? Judging by the cracks already - you think archaeologists of the fourth millennia will find as much remaining as we do today on the Italian boot?


Here I prefer the word necropolis to cemetery. The olden latonical word has such an ancient sense of what? Dread? Already, well over a century of weight's chipping and cracking at these facades, while hairy grasses are reclaiming the domes - tamping them back into earth. All while gravity and inner moistures are doing what they do to the flesh and bones entombed within these sepulchers of the rotting rich. Brrrrr...

Real estate gone now in Buenos Aires Recoleta cemetery, so the families built upward creating a sort of congested dead lock - dread lock? The hubris of wealth crammed resources into these spots that geological time's crumbling, pounding, and packing back down.

Recoleta Cemetery is not so much a final resting place, but a slow-motion vanishing point.  

*GEEK STUFF:* Captured by my Canon 7D Mk II on February 2, 2019 then processed in PS-CC with a myriad of custom tools and filters. The tombs seemed a clutter of the unfeeling muscles of once-powerful Argentine historical footnotes.

Patagonia 5: Puerto Chacabuco - Soft Scrapple

For details, click on any image...

It's 291 nautical miles from Montt to our second
stop at  Chacabuco south through the Golf of Corcovado.

It's about a day and a half by ship between the red pins.

Puerto Chacabuco is a relatively new port city. In 1991 a savage wilderness fire and the eruption of nearby Mount Hudson volcano silted the Aisén river and blocked access to Puerto Aisén which caused the construction of a new port in the sleepy village of Chacabuco some 10 miles south of Aisén. Transition's fattening up Chacabuco and its population of 1,243. 

However, the town's location along the far side of the Aisén river is magnificent. 

At sunrise on Tuesday 1/22/19 we awoke to this view from our balcony on the
ship's port side with Chacabuco visible (below) from the starboard.

Daytime temperatures dropped about fifteen degrees, on average from Santiago mid-day 90 degrees to Puerto Montt and another ten degrees in Puerto Chacabuco. The town's weather is wet much of the year, but in mid-summer-January that still left us wearing heavy jackets over long sleeves in the port's morning which we ditched by late afternoon.

Joe & Mary Mayberry, Gib & Marti Armstrong and
 my wife Rita model Chacabuco January mid-summer fashions.
BTW, that's our Norwegian  Sun anchored to the right.

On the other side of the river from the image above, Chacabuco sits
 in a river valley and is beginning to sprawl as a result of
its replacement of Aisén in 1991 as the region's major port. 

And what's to do in Chacabuco? Well, just about nothing. So we engaged an old VW bus-like ride to visit the new National Simpson River Park.

As you can see, the topography is rugged and mountainous.
Our bus had an ancient low gear which left us expecting to push.

The trip did reveal the life style of people living along rural Route 240 as well as structures in both Chacabuco and Aisén.

Generally the people are NOT poor. Rather they live in tidy, secure, and comfortable structures in a rocky countryside dotted by small livestock farms. NOTE the canted metal roofs in all of the structures above. Why? Tons of snow of course. Note also the lack of foundation shrubbery which is always destroyed by the collapse of snow upon them from those roofs. This is a challenging place in winter.

 The last President of Chilé kicked off an expensive (and not overwhelmingly popular) series of national parks. One of the newest is the Parque National Rio Simpson. Which features, well, some wild flowers and the Simpson River. 

The Simpson's a nice mountain river, and well, ho-hum. Perhaps if you are a Saudi
this is inspiring. And certainly to fly fishers it's inspirational. I'm neither. Seen one river,
seen 'em all? Well no, but this one is pretty average even within its mountainous setting.

The trip up to the park though wound cooly through valleys alongside a rushing stream fed by waterfalls dropping from the peaked walls of the old Pioneer Trail.

Note, just to the right of the base of the lower waterfall. See the guy? I left him there 

to put the height of these glacial fed falls in perspective. Rain  returned as  I teetered
atop the two-lane highway bridge's  railing to grab this shot above the stream. 

In the very center of the port sits Radio Chacabuco there on the right. It was hidden behind a few downtrodden  

shops but worth the effort. See the dirt road? What you can't see well in this painting without blowing it up is the line of new  construction there between the mountain base and the field at the road's end. 

A Levittown development's happening there with perhaps a hundred homes going up. Chacapuco's about to change as its expanding port juices economic activity. This image captures the transition right before it happens. And, of course it's just the painting to bring country life to a chi-chi Santiago, New York, Lancaster, Atlanta, or Viennese up-market condo, right?

Chacabuco caused one of us to wonder if this is where you flee to escape the rest of the world. Near-antarctic winters are intense and even the summer's are challenging. But the farms and port apparently create jobs and incomes sufficient to live snugly with the weather, volcanos, and earthquakes. It's not hard scrapple, no... but definitely soft scrapple.