By Peter Kaminsky
Source: The New York Times
Fishing for large brown trout in Tierra del Fuego. The fish become huge after spending time feeding in the ocean before returning to the area’s rivers.
WE paused at the mouth of the Irigoyen River where it empties into the steel blue waters of the southernmost Atlantic, or Mar Austral, about 700 miles (as the albatross flies) from Antarctica. Across the river, two gauchos on horseback and a pack of dogs attempted to cut out a pair of bulls from a herd of wild cattle. Men, dogs, horses and cattle crashed down the bank, crossing the river about a hundred yards from us.
They thundered across the pasture and charged up a dune at the ocean’s edge. The gauchos worked their lariats in wide loops that caught the late afternoon sun as they tried to lasso the fierce bulls. And then, like the roar of a passing freight train that trails off in the distance, the melee disappeared and we returned to fishing.
Within minutes, my brother Don — a Manhattan physician whose professional life is as stressful and overscheduled as that job description indicates — wore a beatific smile as he fought a vigorous sea trout. After three pleasing runs, the trout came to hand, bright silver in color, indicating a recent arrival from the sea. He weighed about four pounds, which is small by Tierra del Fuego standards where, if you come at the right time (late November to late March), you may rely on hooking sea-run browns over 10 pounds, and reasonably hope for a 20-pounder or better.
Fishing the Irigoyen is a different ballgame from the much larger, and more famous, Rio Grande, where I caught some very big sea trout on earlier trips to Tierra. The Irigoyen has high banks and large stands of native lenga trees (they look like wind-bent scrub oaks), which serve as a windbreak; you are, for the most part, spared the polar gales that scour the steppes through which the Rio Grande flows. The Irigoyen is also a smaller river, which means that there is no need for ungainly double-handed spey rods and 100-foot casts.
On the other hand, since it has few deep holes, the fish always seek secure shelter somewhere near tackle-busting deadfalls. In such conditions, the big fish are maddeningly wary. I didn’t do the math precisely, but my aching back confirmed that over the course of the first two days each of us went about 2,000 casts without a bump.
“Sea trout fishing is like that,” consoled Alexander Trochine, the young manager of Far End Rivers Lodge, where we were staying. “They come, they go, they feed, they stop feeding. The biggest fish can have the subtlest takes.”
Of such nostrums are the hours between hook-ups often filled: they are an essential part of the successful guide’s tool kit.
Meanwhile, we got into the groove of the Argentine day, where lunch always includes a huge helping of grilled meat and vegetables washed down with a hearty malbec. Our first midday repast was typical. It started with wild mushrooms (they sprout in profusion in season) and caramelized onions. For the main course, we dug into a crisp yet succulent leg of lamb with French fried potatoes, and a garden salad.
After such a feast, one has little choice but to follow the still-honored, and welcome, custom of a long siesta. The bunk house was spartan but comfy, heated by a woodstove, and thankfully it had none of the sporting “art” and fly-fishing tchotchkes that typify many of the international upscale sporting lodges that have sprouted in the years between the dotcom boom and the subprime bust.
But I was amused by a reproduction of an antique map on the wall, showing the Tierra del Fuego archipelago. The southernmost island — i.e., the one most exposed to the harsh elements — might well be one of the planet’s most inhospitable landscapes. Could it be coincidence or providence, I wondered, that this forlorn dot on the globe was claimed by the Dutch and that they named it Staten Island?
On the morning of Day 3, while fishing with Alejandro Martello (a genial and expert guide whose acquaintance I had made the previous year on the Rio Manso in northern Patagonia), our angling hex finally lifted. At the end of a promising drift, just before my fly, a Girdle Bug, hung dead downstream, I felt a take. I raised my rod and came tight, rather than slamming the fish. When I brought him to hand and then released him, I gauged that he went 10 pounds.
By Matt Gross
Source: The New York Times
Cerro Catedral in the Bariloche resort in the Andes overlooks Nahuel Huapi Lake. Bariloche is completing a four-year $8 million improvement program
WHENEVER summer rolls around, I start thinking about snow. The Rocky Mountains may have melted, but I knew that somewhere below the equator — in the impossibly distant, sexy and expensive ski resorts of the Andes — the lucky ones were strapping on a snowboard, freshly fallen powder under their toes.
It didn’t help that my old college buddy Dan, a hard-core skier, would call me up each June and egg me on. It’s too far away, I would tell him, too extravagant. And anyway, I had a full-time office job. Finally, in the time-honored tradition of a ski bum, I quit my job. So last June, I called Dan. To explain my change of heart (and my financial situation), I invoked Argentina’s 2002 economic crisis, which had made the country affordable, even for unemployed snowboarders. Dan didn’t need much convincing.
We quickly put together a trip that was part “Sideways,” part “Endless Winter.” Beginning in San Carlos de Bariloche, in Patagonia, we would hit as many mountains as possible over the course of an eight-day week, hopping south to La Hoya, north to Bayo and Chapelco, and maybe even over the border to the volcano at Pucón, Chile. Along the way, we would stuff ourselves silly with beef, wine and empanadas.
Hanging off the southern lip of Nahuel Huapi Lake is one of Argentina’s two main ski centers: Bariloche, comprised of the quasi-Alpine town of Bariloche and its mountain, Cerro Catedral. (The other, Las Leñas, was described to us repeatedly as not only expensive but boring.)
Bariloche is also the faster-growing. In 2003, two independently operated faces of Catedral were merged under one company, Catedral Alta Patagonia, which embarked on a four-year, $8 million improvement plan. To date, more than five lifts and gondolas have been added, along with a terrain park and half-pipe for snowboarders, and more are planned.
What’s more, Bariloche has a reputation for living large. There are hostels for backpacking boarders and five-star hotels for nanny-toting Continentals. There are populist steakhouses and upscale bistros. And everywhere in between are rowdy bars, slick nightclubs, casinos and even brothels. In short, there are all the amenities demanded by the cosmopolitan South Americans who pour in every year from Buenos Aires, Santiago and Rio de Janeiro.
And so, last August, Dan and I found ourselves on the Sextuple Express lift in heady anticipation of our first descent from 7,835 feet. Five days of snow had laid a foundation of packed powder below the spirelike peaks that give Catedral its name. The sky was clear, the Nahuel Huapi glistened below us, and frosted mountains edged the horizon in a jagged rim. Dan shuffled nervously in his steel Volant skis while I strapped on my Burton, and then we hit the snow.
The first ski day always seems perfect — more so in Patagonia. The picturesque setting, the speed, the excellent snow and the crisp weather all conspired to provoke a sense of near euphoria. That my families and friends back home were suffering through the dog days of August only compounded that image. One pal sent me a succinct e-mail: “I HATE YOU.”
We spent seven straight hours carving tracks across the mountain’s 2,800 skiable acres. We especially liked the longer runs served by the new Amancay gondola, and watched as snowboarders executed smooth 360-degree turns from a jump below the Punta Nevada lift, landing just uphill from a wine-tasting. The scents of marijuana and grilled chorizo wafted through the mountain air, accompanied by the sounds of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nirvana. Reef, the clothing company, held a “Bikini Open” that we somehow failed to attend.
When the sun began to set, we stowed our gear and settled into a corner sofa at Mute, the hippest bar at the base. A waitress with short dark hair and a pierced lip brought us Quilmes beers and Irish coffee while the resident D.J., Manu, played chill club tunes for the crowd of wealthy Argentines with shag haircuts. Eventually, we took the 83-cent bus back to town, where we ate at Kandahar, a cozy restaurant that serves local game — deer carpaccio, rabbit confit, smoked trout — in what feels like Oscar Wilde’s hunting lodge. Then we slept.
As perfect as that first ski day was, it also hinted at shortcomings that soon grew more obtrusive. Casualness rules at Bariloche. Trails, for example, are frequently unmarked. While that was a welcome relief from the exhaustively mapped mountains of the United States, it also meant that we often nearly ended up in gullies from which there was no skiable escape. This annoyance seems to be a legacy of Catedral’s prior life as two independent operations; it also explains the dearth of trails connecting the two sides.
More frustrating, some lifts marked as “Nuevo!” on the trail map were unfinished, and the advertised half-pipe had not been built — because too much snow had fallen. Too much snow!
Catedral also seemed oddly wary of winter. On our second day there, several lifts had to be closed because of wind, creating a two-hour wait at the Sextuple Express. The mountain’s management may simply be overreacting to a 2004 incident when high winds tangled six chairs on the Punta Nevada lift. (The worst injuries were broken bones.) Still, with Catedral peaking at 10,000 visitors a day, one would expect that such issues would be resolved, as they have everywhere from Vail to Verbier.
By Luke Jerod Kummer
Headstones inscribed in Welsh fill the graveyard at Moriah Chapel.
THE kettle in the center of the table anchors an elaborate Welsh tea service at the Ty Gwyn teahouse. An assortment of Celtic fruitcakes, tortes, spiced breads, fruit jams, and scones are spread on the table covered with a blue and white gingham cloth. In the corner of the room, a choir of a dozen people is softly singing the Welsh hymn “Awn Ymlaen Dan Ganu.” You might almost forget that you are a whole hemisphere away from Wales until a hostess, carrying a fresh tray of pastries, smiles and asks, “Les gustaría más pasteles?” (“Would you like more pastries?”)
Argentine Patagonia is home to awe-inspiring glaciers, condors, rugged wilderness – and a community of Welsh immigrants who have preserved the culture and language of their homeland. The center of all things Welsh is a hamlet of many gardens but no stoplights called Gaimán, where both Spanish and Welsh are likely to be heard on the street. Gaimán (population 4,000 or so), lies in central Patagonia near the Atlantic in Chubut Province, where the cultures and languages have mingled for more than 100 years but remain distinct.
Charged with planning a trip to Argentina in January for my girlfriend, Nita, and me, I seized upon the possibilities of adventure travel in Patagonia’s southernmost corner. Although sleeping on a glacier sounded like great fun to me, I knew Nita would prefer something a bit cozier.
When I discovered Gaimán and its picture-of-quaintness tea services, I decided taking a three-day side trip here would make an excellent bargaining chip for heading farther south and exploring the wilderness later on. After flying into the nearby town of Trelew, we spent a night in the Hotel Touring Club, an outpost of bygone grandeur and local hospitality where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid once stayed while casing the bank across the street and then deciding not to rob it.
A taxi took us through fierce dust-blowing winds to a small railroad station that Gaimán has converted into a municipal museum, called Amgueddfa Hanesyddol. On exhibit are colonial artifacts, photographs and documents. When we arrived, Zoe Gauci, a native of Wales who had been jaunting around Latin America for the preceding nine months, turned with digital video camera in hand to the wizened museum curator.
“My grandmother speaks Welsh and no one else in my family does,” Ms. Gauci said. “Would you send her a message?” The curator, Tegai Roberts, whose own ancestors were among the colony’s earliest settlers, happily obliged. The half-dozen visitors listened to her speak in a strange musical language.
The efforts of British officials to restrict the use of Welsh in public stimulated interest in the 19th century in finding a new home in such places as the United States, New Zealand and Palestine. In the museum we learned that when Michael D. Jones, an ardent Welsh nationalist, realized that Welsh immigrants to North America had assimilated even more than the people who remained in the homeland, he looked for refuge to a nearly uninhabited place on the southern tip of the world.
In 1865, a clipper ship called the Mimosa, flying an Argentine flag with a red dragon, a Welsh national symbol, superimposed on it, sailed from Liverpool with 153 Welsh men and women. When it landed in Puerto Madryn, about 50 miles northeast of Gaimán, the passengers found a land nothing like the green hills they left. Only yellow shrub rose on the expanse of clay that an undying wind had swept dry as bone.
The first crops planted by the settlers failed because they didn’t understand that the growing seasons are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere. Each night they huddled in fear of attacks by what they thought would be fierce aboriginal people. Yet it was the aboriginal Tehuelche who ultimately taught the Welsh when to plant crops and how to hunt the guanaco, or wild llama, and the ostrich-like ñandú. Despite periods of drought and famine, the community survived and dispersed throughout the region.
During our visit at the museum in Gaimán, Mrs. Roberts told us that the Welsh also brought the first irrigation system to Patagonia. Thus, the valley of the Río Chubut, which surrounds Gaimán, is an oasis of poplar trees and violet flowers in the desolate plateau. Active farming and a healthy tourism trade in Gaimán have caused it to thrive in recent years.
Before going to the museum, we took a taxi to the Moriah Chapel just outside of Trelew. Built in 1880, it is one of the oldest on a 40-mile trail of 17 Welsh chapels that wends through the Río Chubut Valley. At each stop visitors can see where colonists gave thanks for their new home. At Moriah, a cemetery has some black slate headstones, imported from Wales and engraved with the names of many founders of the colony.
Over the years since the initial settlement, Mr. Jones’s dream of a Welsh-speaking realm has seen mixed results. While Welsh is widely spoken around Gaimán, it is usually a second language. Intermarriage with Spanish speakers became common, and many Welsh speakers have Spanish names. Recently, use of Welsh in local schools has led to a Welsh revival.
Each October, Trelew also is home to the Eisteddfod Welsh cultural festival featuring a two-day contest of bards, both Welsh and Spanish, that attracts more than 1,000 people from throughout Argentina and abroad.
But the most visible expression of Welshness in the area is the teahouses in Gaimán, which keep alive a tradition from the old country that starts at about 3 p.m. every day.
Mrs. Roberts’s sister, Luned González, a retired headmistress of Gaimán’s secondary school, said that Welsh women in Gaimán would celebrate nearly every occasion with steaming kettles.
“Every Sunday when I was a girl,” she said, “the church pastors used to go from house to house having tea.”