Argentina Travel Photos: After the Fall

After spending my first night in Mendoza I made a beeline for Maipú, a small town outside the city and the de-facto center of travel in Argentina's wine country. As I walked southward from my hostel and turned left on to the Paseo Sarmiento pedestrian street, I passed only scattered local commuters, most of whom were waiting around or inside bus shelters that had been vandalized to at least a moderate degree. Past the middle section of Paseo Sarmiento, political graffiti and urban decay began to give way to a long promenade of brand new-looking eateries and shopping outlets, which were obviously closed due to the early hour. After a long, drunken afternoon biking between bodegas, I was shocked to find that although Paseo Sarmiento was indeed bustling with rush hour pedestrian traffic, nearly all of its dining and retail establishments were on the verge of being empty, the majority of people in the vicinity passers-by or even homeless vagrants. This dichotomy -- a developed-country infrastructure serving a population on the verge of being poor -- would come to define the majority of urban landscapes I saw in Argentina.

Two more days in Mendoza and I was off to Córdoba, Argentina's second-largest city and one about which I didn't know a whole hell of a lot. As my bus pulled into the city's main station I was surprised. Although there were at least a few dozen mid-rise structures in the vicinity of the bus depot, the city looked and felt almost skeletal, as if it could just as easily vanish overnight and be gone tomorrow. After dropping my bags off at the Che Salguero hostel and taking to the city's street on foot I had a slight change of heart. In general, Córdoba gave off a much "bigger city" vibe than Mendoza had, from its busy Arturo Illia Boulevard to the massive Plaza San Martín, centered around a statue of General José de San Martín, the national hero of Argentina and one of the liberators of South America. In spite of all its grandeur, however, Córdoba seems scarred in some respect -- the fanfare remains, even though the party has clearly been over for some time.

Before my travel in Argentina, a friend I'd met the previous July in Vietnam had warned me about how dirty and dingy its cities were, largely as a result of political graffiti and other associated vandalism that had run amok over the years. Obviously, as you can see, many walls, statues and other structures in Argentina haven't been preserved in their original condition. Although some travelers might tend to see this as a reflection of local peoples' disregard for their communities -- and some might even go so far as to call it ugly -- I found the colorful desecrations almost pivotal to the character of places I visited. On one hand, the vandalism represent a fundamental disintegration of the social order that might otherwise prevent it -- but on the other, it speaks to the desire of local Argentine's to claim and create their own future destiny, as disfigured and bizarre as some outsiders might perceive it to be. Or at least that's what I'd link to think.

I don't have statistics to back this up, but I would venture to say that Argentina has the lowest birth rate out of any of the Latin American countries I visited during my two months traveling in the region. I say this not as a fanciful extrapolation of the low birth rates plaguing the Europe from which Argentine culture was largely derived, but because I simply didn't see a lot of children most places I went. When I did, the circumstances of their upbringings seemed almost uniformly bare bones, with parents often nowhere in sight and grandparents performing many of the childrearing tasks to the best of their abilities. One thing that became clear to me as I made my way southeastward across the Argentine land mass is that today's Argentina is less well-off than yesterday's -- and the thought of what might be coming down the line was unsettling, especially when I thought about the eerie parallels between Argentina's recent past and what's currently happening in my country.

In no uncertain terms, I fell almost immediately in love with Buenos Aires. As had been the case with most of the rest of what I'd seen during travel in Argentina up to that point, my infatuation was rooted as much in pomp and grandeur as it was in the grittier aspects of the city's character. With Buenos Aires being the national (or federal, as it were) capital, it isn't surprising that the majority of graffiti in the city encompassed a decidedly political scope, with much of it aimed at Kristina (sic) Fernández de Kirchner, the sitting president. Aside from the fact that she is the widow of a deceased former Argentine president I know little about Kirchner, other than seeing most of her political ads depict her as a friend to regional politicians who are textually described as being friends to their own people. Evidently, even such tangential familiarity seems to escape residents of Buenos Aires.

I had also been warned that Buenos Aires was positively brimming with garbage, another statement whose truth I can't particularly refute. To an extent, I fear it's patronizing for me, as an American in the midst of Argentina travel, to suggest that the perpetual grime and grit of Buenos Aires gives the city even a portion of its world-renowned charm. I feel likewise uncertain that my personal opinion regarding the larger implications of Argentina's waste problem -- that it suggests at worst a continued breakdown of societal order and at best a contagious and expanding apathy toward said society's failure to restore itself -- is valid or appropriate for me to hold. I will say, however, that said trash's usual juxtaposition with the faded, torn-up political advertisements that often line the sidewalks in central Buenos Aires is satisfyingly apropos.

Upon seeing the impossibly grand Avenida 9 de Julio, the world's widest proper road, I quickly declared Buenos Aires "Paris on Steroids." A cognate of sorts to the Champs-Elysées anchored by a huge, phallic obelisk rather than a triumphant arch, the Avenida is flanked by homes and commercial buildings that seem architecturally and aesthetically akin to those you find in the French capital, albeit far taller, wider and more plentiful in number. Many of the rest of Buenos Aires' streets are anemic by comparison, even in trendy parts of the city like Palermo, which is subdivided into neighborhoods like "SoHo" and "Hollywood." The streets and walkways that crisscross the Buenos Aires' historical center border on dilapidated, although this is rather par for the course in Latin America: One of the first things you hear upon arrival in any given South American capital is to "stay away from downtown," especially at night.

I went until literally my last hour of travel in Argentina without hearing so much as a word about Eva Perón, perhaps the most famous Argentine historical figure globally. Even when I entered the Recoleta Cemetery, the city-scaled graveyard of the rich and famous that's supposedly most famous for the former first lady having been buried there, no conspicuous signs of her name or image existed. In fact, I had to ask one of the guides leading two local women through a tour of the cemetery for the approximate location of Evita's tomb, then pass several times through the rows in the vicinity where she directed me before stumbling upon her final resting place, which was rather modest and anonymous all things considered. As I stood in front of the crypt with less than a dozen other onlookers, it dawned on me that this was just another example of how uniformly skewed most peoples' perception of Argentina is: the country is significantly more Italian than Spanish; it is also significantly poorer than its infrastructure, architecture and airbrushed politicians would suggest. Indeed, the memory of the public figure for which most of the rest of the world knows even a part of the country's story is so far removed from the reality of contemporary life here that her remains are literally relegated to an isolated corner of a huge cemetery in a bigger city that is almost nothing like the Buenos Aires she left behind. The more I travel internationally, the more people I meet who believe America is still very much like the country depicted in Hollywood blockbusters and history books. I now know how some of them must feel when they see the real thing.