Peregrinations

Dear Argentina,

I am so sorry not to have written to you, since I arrived in Patagonia. You really should do something about all the temptation that surrounds me, in this most beautiful of perhaps all places. We do all suffer from different tastes, which is a blessing don’t you think?

May I tell you, in way of apology for my tardiness, about a little meander I took in your magnificent Andes? It will only take just a few lines, as my fingers are still so raw from clinging to your rock face, shoulders bruised from wedging my bony skeleton against one of your hard, narrow ‘chimneys’ and my knees still bang together even thinking of what I was doing to myself, against your iron hard body.

Perhaps later, you would prefer me to tell you a softer story. One about walking far, far up, to huge glaciers through wonderful giant Lenga woodlands and watching great condors drift across steep ridges. Besides your incomparable-self for company, there was Billy, an artiste murale from Seattle, dressed in black running tights, black baggy shorts and lacking any supply of food, except mine that is. Far to the rear but bent over and gamely putting one foot in front of the other there was a very young and also very small, Jewish girl, with a backpack that would have given a seasoned Andean mule second thoughts about hauling it down a mountain and no thoughts at all about hauling it up.

Why, I might entertain you with stories of riding out on fine horses, across a great Estancia with a beautiful vivacious Argentine woman. An exotic mixture of Spain, Italy and Texas, whose hair and eyes are as black as the stallion’s we were in search of, along with his harem of wild mares.

Then there was the walk in the Bosque los Arrayanes, a fascinating forest, with a half-mad Italian mountaineer. Heart sick, home sick, sick of her mother and one of her brothers and desperately trying to climb, or trek or walk away from everything in her past - god save me Argentina, from another indisposed Italian woman.

I can tell you about gazing at your great volcanic Lanin, and all her thousands of meters that she stretches into the sky, from a forest of Araucaria araucana or as we Anglo’s call them, Monkey Puzzles, beside a cold clear glacial stream - not a fleck of anything in that water. A libation so good, so pure, that I only sipped it from my water bottle for several days, to enjoy the savour of thousands of years of glacial treasure, from the store house of an Argentine God who perhaps knew a world that was younger and more innocent.

Then another short little piece for you, on driving, again with the unfit Italian Princessa, down Ruta 40, with no one but an old Guanaco to see us go by. I do hope he went back to surveying the landscape with that Llama like inscrutability of his, after the electrical currents of her demons had been blown far away to his East.

Ah, Argentina how you have entertained me and now I shall entertain you a little, in the days to come, with some of those small delicious empanadas of my peregrinations about and over your inimitable self.