Montevideo Beach Adventure

Montevideo has a fantastic promenade that stretches along a lengthy expanse of its coastline. We passed a chilly but sunny day exploring it on some rented bikes. The beaches were mostly deserted except for a few locals playing catch with their dogs, but the promenade itself was bustling with people jogging and the benches along side it were laced with amorous couples. Despite the bracing wind, it was the place to be.

The overall feel of the beach area and promenade reminded me of an older, more established Tampa, Florida. Much more suburban than say, Miami, and certainly more sedate. The water itself looked pretty dicey. Just based on appearances, I'd say its seems more polluted looking than Coney Island. Word is,the nice beaches are further away from the city proper (Hamptons anyone?).

So yeah, that's the scoop on MV.

GIANT SANDWICH!!!

There is something in Uruguay called a chivito. It is a sandwich made of steak, ham, cheese, eggs, lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise. They are often large. They usually come with french fries. Eat them often enough, and you will DIE!!!

Unfortunately, I did not photograph an actual chivito. The photos above are using a sandwhich stand-in, also made of steak (breaded and fried for extra healthiness!). Perhaps the fact that this was not a chivito is why he was not able to overcome it. The two impressive chivitos he faced, he did in fact conquer.

The Carnivalesque

Fell a little behind in the posting, about three days behind by now. In the interim, we've left Ugy and are back in Buenos Aires. We've only got a day and a half of South American adventure left to go, which is crazy. By the time we board that plane, we'll have been here for 54 days total.

So we spent two more days in Montevideo. It was city-like, but without much city-life, at least as far as we could tell from where we were staying. Our neighborhood, the Centro was bustling during the day, but at night it was wah-waaaah (insert your own sad trombone noise), just like mid-town in Manhattan (excluding K-town of course. Miss you K-town!)

As for interesting things to do during the day, Montevideo offers multiple free and low-cost museums of varying quality. The photos above were taken at the Museo de Carnival. According to the museum, the Uruguayans really carnival it up, though in my admittedly limited experience, they seem like pretty sedate, mate-loving folk. They don't really rock it out all night like the Portenos across the pond, but it could be that all the cool stuff was happening out in the more suburban neighborhoods by the beaches (more on that in the next post).

Here's a really bizarre building in the Centro. It was briefly the tallest (and most unfortunate looking?) building in South America. Like so many grand old buildings in Ugy, it seems mostly abandoned with a few solitary windows lit up here and there at night. Must be very spooky to live there. Spoooooky.

Montevideoooooo!

Don't know why, but somewhere deep inside I feel like Montevideo should be spoken with long drawn out vowels as if it were a prize on "The Price is Right." Go on, try it.

So we're here, in the capital city and I already like it a lot. Full disclosure, in the breakfast room of the hostel in Colonia, there was a cheesy sepia-tone portrait of the Flatiron Building (why?) and it made me rather misty. I miss you NYC. ( Image, almost in sepia tone, of washing breakfast dish at hostel. GLAM!)


But Montevideo with its 1. something million inhabitants, contains some verifiable hustle and bustle and most of all, there is VARIETY! There are museums, and crappy old cars, and shiny new cars, and clothing stores and architecture and some random horses, and a big port. There's even a place that sells kebabs. Chicken Kebabs!


Here's a sneak preview of a post that I hope to have some more starling entries for by the end of the trip. I call it, South American Mannequins of Horror. More to come....

Sunshine and also News of a Strange Shortage

What a day it has been here on the sun-washed peninsular town of Colonia. We tackled some actual touristy adventures today, visiting the seven small museums sprinkled throughout what used to be an old Portuguese fort. The most interesting thing we saw was an enormous shell from a gliptodont, a dinosaur which is a mash up of all things turtle and armadillo-like in one ugly package.


We also took a super long walk down the coastline in an attempt to find a very expensive (and utterly failed) mega entertainment complex which cost millions to build in the 1900's and had a race track, bull fighting ring, and probably lots of stalls selling wooden hoops and sticks for children to chase around. The bullring still stands, and though we eventually found it and followed local kids into it through a hole in the fence, it was a shambly carcass of a building and we did not linger much longer than it took to snap this picture. After leaving, we somehow got very, very lost (still don't know how it happened) but eventually relocated the ocean and made our way back.

My most pressing issue at the moment is that I'm experiencing a book shortage. No can find books in AINGLISH here.
My reading list for the trip so far has consisted of a couple novels:
"The Hummingbird's Daughter" (magic realist light, not bad)
"Travels with my Aunt" and "the Human Factor" (Both by Graham Greene-I'd heard that he'd written in Argentina- both were great)
"Let the Great World Spin" by Colin McCann. On sale at target. Treacly but fast.

And a few non-fiction books that YWL picked up- "Freakonomics" and "Blink" Both were entertaining in the way that NY Times magazine articles are entertaining, but I prefer meaty fiction.

So, I've got one novel, "Anathem" by Neil Stephenson who I like based on "Zodiac" and "Cryptonomicon", but I should have perused this one closer at the used bookstore. Its HEAVY sci-fi; the kind where you have to learn a whole twee new language system and a billion other details before the story even begins, and after 30 pages, I just don't think I can do it. Young also has another non-fiction left- "The Omnivores Dilemma" but after glancing at that one, it's also a no-go because it is all about food. Specific details about very lovely, diverse, interesting sounding food, while my current diet is a cycle of pasta w. red sauce, pizza, grilled chicken, salad (lettuce tomato onion) over and over. (Note: As of last night Young has finally lost interest in steak. Apocalypse nigh?). The following picture is the face I make after eating chicken for 3 out of four meals in a row (the one
non-chicken meal was pizza).

So laugh all you want Kindle owners- I now see the wisdom of your purchase. In about seven days I've got a 24 hour plus travel day and without books to keep me sane...oooh. No bueno.

U-don't know what Ura-missing (not damn much)

So there's been a notable decline in the quantity of posts lately, and there are two reasons for that. The first, is that Internets in Uruguay are spotty at best. The second reason, is that honestly, I don't have all that much to report.

After leaving the springs, we went back to the second largest city in Uruguay, Salto and struggled to entertain ourselves for a single afternoon/evening. We strafed the city, street by street, for every possible entertainment, finding little of interest other than a river front and a few haphazard plazas with requisite dude-on-horse statue. We visited the one art museum ( but couldn't take pictures of the best feature- and amazing old-timey shower cage that had a special hose for the nether regions...ewww, yet, practical!). We were happy to get on the 5 a.m. bus the next morning to head to Mercedes. Promising name right?!!


Mercedes makes no claims to being a tourist town (Salto doesn't really either), but man oh man. There was nothing open, nothing to do, not even on a Saturday afternoon. We later discovered that all the locals were engaged in one of two activites- horsey business, or more likely DIRT BIKING! Yeah, dirt bikes and little motos were HUGE in Mercedes. Saturday night for the kids seems to mean buzzing down to the waterfront, or back up and down the barren pedestrian street in an endless loop. For us, it meant wine out of a box (only the finest for team curious) and television.

(Below: We find entertainment at the grocery store)

I don't mean to be so critical of Ugy. It's a nice place and the people are sweet, but they really are totally lacking in what I guess I would call an entrepreneurial verve. Say that every store in the town is closed, and your store, which, say, you live above, is also closed while you sit upstairs watching futbol. What might happen if you were to open, even for a few hours, at a time when everyone else is closed, and watch your t.v. there, occasionally participating in commerce? Might it not make your life better with minimum effort? I don't know. It's so mysterious.

Anyhoo. We're in a much more cosmopolitan town today (you can see the towers of BA like tiny little boxes across the water). There's stuff to do here and things are open, so I am happy. Also, we've got several promising leads to fill the gaping whole in our crew, so that is rather excellent as well. Fingers crossed that we will find our perfect match.

Image Time

Still kicking around in Termas De Dayman in Uruguay. Bathrobes. The elderly. Babies in hot pools of water sans diapers. Functional Internets. Awesomeness.
Aside from the babies without diapers thing, this place is nice. The water in the thermal pools (constructed of concrete, not natural pools like hot springs and without the sulfur stink) is varying degrees of very hot and there are grassy areas to relax. The weirdest thing is that "yakkity sax" unaccountably plays almost every 15 minutes, preceding an ad for the termas (where everyone already is). Bizarre. It's also very certain that we're the only Americans around. No long hair backpackers. No college t-shirt rocking students. Just Uruguayans and some Argentinians. Evidently the place is mobbed on weekends.


Above is an image from our time in Concordia, the border town between Arg. And Urg., which was brief. The mansion above is one of the town's only sites (though there are some depressing casinos), a lovely old mansion which is absolutely falling apart on the inside.

Below, Concordia's sunny plaza, in bloom.


Here's the Uruguay river, as viewed from Concorida (the land looming behind Young is Uruguay).

That's all I've got today. Tomorrow, posting from Salto, land of slow internets, so maybe no posts. We'll see.

Complications

The only absolute certainty with film making is that things will go wrong. Very, very wrong. The fun part is waiting to find out exactly how. Will your actor break his foot the first weekend of shooting? Will your makeup department go AWOL on an effects heavy day with 14 actors waiting in chairs? Will you lose a location, a crucial bit of equipment, or find out that your animal actor actually can't speak french?

Yes. And you will suffer.

And suffer we are as predictably, a major speed-bump has hit Off Season. With exactly a month before shooting, we're suddenly scrambling to replace a key crew member. This has happened just at the moment where the schedule was set, actors and locations were squared away, and things were looking...so improbably good.

This crew-loss bomb exploded twenty minutes before we were set to cross over a hydro-electric dam into Uruguay. Uruguay, as lovely as it is (and it is lovely, the people we've met so far have been the warmest and friendliest ever) is not the place to be when dealing with a NYC film crisis. The internets at our hostel were Prodigy era slow (that's right, Prodigy!) and I couldn't get a strong enough connection to chat with Katie until long after our ulcers were well-marinated. We're already in solution seeky mode, and we need to be. Time is short.

On the travel front, we're not far from Salto, Uruguay's second largest city, in a smaller township called Termas de Dayman which is known mostly for its hot springs. So, the rich irony is that while my stress level has hit its apex, I'm in a place where old Uruguayans stroll around in bathrobes and drink copious amounts of orange soda.

Keep your fingers crossed for a Cold Hands miracle. Or, help us collect money to throw at the problem by reposting our desperate pleas for cash via our Kickstarter page. We're almost half way funded.

Waterfalls!

As promised, some HD footage of Iguazu.

The first video features a coati, a racoon-like animalito with a long snout and scavenger demeanor. We also took some footage of some little tree monkeys, but c'mon. We all know what a monkey looks like, right?

And here's some video of the big guy, the Devil's throat. Quite a lot of water a-flowing. My only regret is that I wasn't there at night to see them turn it all off. I bet that's really something.

To Uruguay, or not to Uruguay

Yesterday was a suitably bizarre rainy day spent in the middle of nowhere. The town is called San Ignacio, a collection of two paved roads and lots of red clay whose major claim to fame is a somewhat reconstructed Jesuit Mission (with a bizarre, yet more entertaining than I'd expected light and sound "Espectaculo" featuring actors projected onto sheets of mist to re-enact HISTORIC EVENTS).

Also, a water tower that vaguely resembles a really cut-rate UFO. So yeah, not much to do other than wander pointlessly, play hostel ping pong, and take stupid photos.

We ended up in San Ignacio because Iguazu is also in the middle of nowhere, and we're slowly moving southward through a lot more nowhere on our way back to BA for our eventual repatriation. Right now, we're not sure whether we're headed down through Argentina along the river Parana (yeah, sounds like the fishie) or whether we'll swing a quick left into Uruguay for some bargain basement estancia action. We may know more tomorrow. Our research on the future has been hampered by the fact that everything in Posadas, from which I compose this Item, is closed on Sunday. Except for ice cream (which we've already eaten- it was Fantastic). But on the plus side, we can see Paraguay across the river. Perhaps Paraguay is open for dinner?

Nowhere

Another day in paradise.

In a tiny backwater a few hours south of Iguazu with fast spiders and slow internets.
Tomorrow, some hot HD waterfall video action- if I can get a connection fast enough to upload. Until then, stay dry...

Iguazu

We first glimpsed the falls from the opposite side of the airplane as the pilot pulled some old Argentinian air force tilt maneuver to give both aisles a decent view. Even from the sky, the falls looked impressive, like some giant stuck a thumb deep into a thick river and pressed, hard.

From the ground, it's even more spectacular. We toured the Argentinian Iguazu National Park today (Brazil shares a side of the falls, but being Yanks, we would need a costly visa to visit). As with many natural wonders, words and photos fail to capture the essence of Iguazu's, well, majesty. Even in the dry season, the falls extended sweeping distances.

The most spectacular waterfall, called the Devil's Throat, pictured above and below, was so much waterfall madness that staring at it wasn't sufficient. I had to look away at times because it was so mesmerizing, and the viewing platform was so close (and misty) that you couldn't quite capture it in your gaze all at once. Perhaps if you were a horse, or a hammerhead shark, or just had widely spaced eyes- But anyway. It was great. That's all I can say.

Flying in we also saw that surrounding the tiny tourist hub of Puerto Iguazu, there's nothing but all that rainforest that we're all determined to save. Because of all the wild space, there were plenty of birds and a myriad of butterflies in evidence. Young even had a butterfly perfectly matched to his sneaker.

We're headed back tomorrow because the park itself is just that massive. Perhaps we shall see a tapir...

This Guy.

Let's admit that tourism isn't always pretty. But language discrepancies are Always Awesome.

Leaving the Desert

I don't think I could live in the desert. After a week in the region surrounding SALTA (Tilcara and Cafayete to be exact) I'm still in awe of the people who can call this area home. It's beautiful, there's no mistaking that. But every time I venture out towards the craggy splendor of the dusty mountains, my reptile brain screams "No! You will not survive out there!!" And it's true. A water bottle will only last so long, and the sun will certainly ravage, and btw, all the bushes and vegetation are covered with spines, spikes and barbs. Dawdle too long, or get lost, and the night winds will freeze you solid. It's not touchy-feely mother earth out here, it's some sort of bitch-goddess.

Yet strangely, the bitch-goddess smiles upon grapes. At the foot of the mountains here in Cafayete, thar be vineyards, produing mostly malbec, cab-sauv, and torrontes. The vines are currently all bare and spindly, despite other trees showing the first hints of spring.

We took out some bikes today to visit a few, but were thwarted, as often happens on our foreign bike journeys. We ended up taking a long pointless journey up a dusty road to find all three wineries we wished to visit closed. Not a huge tragedy, but we were very pleased to find a place serving up wine sorbet... torrontes and cabernet flavored. It took away the hurt of all that fruitless biking.

Above, a gorgeous abandoned Cafayete hospital.

Ponder if you will, what does a dental mechanic do?

Tomorrow, we're taking some sort of aeroplane to Iguazu, a tropical locale on the border between Argentina and Brazil. Word has it, there's some sort of waterfall there. Should be humid. No offense desert, but cannot wait for some leafy greenness.

Desert Life

GlobalCurious is back after a few days of slo-living in the high dry town of Tilcara. Since the last update I've gaped at many breathtaking views, sat white knuckled on several ledge-clinging buses, seen hella goats, awoken to the bleating of baby sheep (Kids! and they sound alarmingly like real kids), shivered violently under an embarassment of stars, and I have seen some cacti. Many Many Cacti. But these stories are best told in pictures...

Mountain Time / Kickstarter!

Feeling great up in the mountain air, but the only internets is a shared console in the lobby that has buttons like this :ññ¡¡¡¿¿¿¿ÇÇÇÇ (¿awesome!).

Will be back online Sunday eve with plenty to report, including some fantastic photos of oversized succelents. Oh yeah.

In the meantime, if you haven´t yet visited the OFF SEASON Kickstarter site, please check it out, pass it along, and if you can, give us some support. It´s going towards an excellent film that i promise right now will not have three increasingly awful sequels. Thats not how we roll.

SALTA!

Things are looking up again. Spent almost all of yesterday in a Salta hostel bed so sway-backed I started having delusions of being sucked into it a la Johnny Depp in Nightmare on Elmstreet. After almost a solid month of plowing relentlessly forward through an ever changing climate with probably less than ideal nutrition (Argentinians don't serve much at restaurants that isn't red and bloody or flat, round and covered with cheese), I was knocked out by some fast-acting super-fever. Young rustled me up various medicines from the late night pharmacy, including a "add hot water" fever reducer that tasted like the devil's armpit, but despite its evil taste, it did not have the dark magic to exorcise my temperature. Making the day of bed rest particularly uncool was that we were planning a hike through a very awesome sounding cloud forest, and it was a gorgeously warm day (or it appeared that way out the window...sniff).

The pics above are of some Salta sights that we visited before the plague felled me. The architecture here, particularly the churches, is remarkably beautiful and the buildings are painted in striking hues. The waterfall pics are from a park at the top of a scenic overlook which can be reached either by hoofing it up a looooong flight of stairs (there are Stations of the Cross posted along the way, to give you an idea of the suffering involved) or you can take a gondola (guess which we did? 10 pesos! Shazaam!).

We also hung out at the central plaza where we saw some teenage school girls attack a friend with eggs and flour, coating her, and then sing her happy birthday. Seems like a pretty shitty custom to me, but the birthday girl took it with good humor. I prefer to eat the cake, not become it, Thanks.

Anyhoo. Today when we awoke the weather was miserable. Cold and rainy. I scored a delicious and soothing Sopa de Gallina, and Young got some Mondongo, a zesty tripe stew. I've got a lingering nanny-goat cough (as does much of the population here), but everything is looking good for more adventures tomorrow. Fingers crossed that the bed doesn't eat me first.