Buenos Aires, Argentina
My last visit to Buenos Aires was a whistlestop assignment exactly 40 years ago. All I can remember was that the generals had gone, but the ache of the Falklands/Malvinas debacle had not yet subsided. Most memorable was the haunting story told me by my wealthy, upper-middle-class host about the loss of his twenty-something daughter. By his account, he was called sometime after midnight by a local police chief and told that she had been at a party of rowdy youngsters taken to the station to sober up. He was not to worry: she would be released in the morning. When she hadn’t returned by midday the next day, he called the station again. No one had any recollection of the late-night phone call and he never saw his daughter again.
Returning to the country last month, I was invited to a family lunch party at a cattle ranch – an estancia – an hour outside the city. It was a charming occasion. My hosts were a delightful pediatric surgeon and his wife, their three daughters and a mass of tousle-haired grandchildren dashing in and out of the pool. They appeared about as liberal-minded as their British equivalents might be, and they were big and optimistic fans of Argentina’s radical chainsaw-wielding President, Javier Milei. “He’s our only hope,” our hostess said, while the doctor added, sardonically, that he might just get the country from the “fifth world” to the third. When I, tactlessly, told my story of the missing daughter, it was met with skepticism. “If she really disappeared she must have been up to no good,” our hostess said. “We used to know the Guevara family. Che was a horrible person – and cruel to animals. He had a very nice brother, though.”
Buenos Aires feels like an affluent city – its Haussmanesque center sprawls for miles while trendy barrios such as Palermo cater for a large population of hip youngsters. The old joke is that Argentines are Italians who speak Spanish and think they are English while behaving like the French. They say they are not Latin Americans, but rather Europeans living in Latin America. Having lived for four years in crime-ridden Rio de Janeiro without incident, it was annoying to have my phone stolen off a café table by an itinerant sock salesman. Only then did I encounter the form-filling and bureaucracy that drives Milei crazy. Hardly surprising that BA claims to have more shrinks per capita than Manhattan.
The purpose of my trip was to fish the famous waters of North Patagonia. But almost more astonishing than these wonderful rivers, winding green and blue through an environment otherwise not unlike Arizona’s arid Monument Valley, were the gauchos. This is the last true cowboy culture in the world – and it’s large. Nobody knows the precise number, but there are said to be well over 100,000 of them employed across the giant ranches that make up this vast, underpopulated country. While the modern US cowboy spends his life in a pickup truck or an ATV, the gauchos still live life almost entirely on horseback. Many boast no more possessions than they can carry on their saddles.
At El Rural, the annual country fair in Junín de los Andes, astonishing skills were on display. In one show, three horsemen had to separate and corral three specific cows from a herd of 24 in just 90 seconds. In another, two teams of riders played a kind of horseback basketball, galloping flat out over a 200 meter field. I’m told the game is called el pato: they used to use a dead duck as the ball. It’s unsurprising that Argentina is unrivaled across the world at polo.
My last destination was a fabulously authentic homestead close to the triangular Lanín volcano that forms the border with Chile. It consisted of fine horses, a polo field, several thousand cattle and 40,000 acres of meadows and mountains. Our host is never seen without his leather boots, bombacho baggy trousers and a six-shot revolver in a holster at his waist. After breakfast, he entertained us by throwing coins in the air and shooting them as they fell. “I assume these were all shot by Bertín,” I said to his glamorous wife, Dolores, as we surveyed the 30-odd antlered heads displayed in the living room. “Oh no,” she said, “they were all shot by me.”
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