Beunos Aires

We are introduced to hot sweaty Buenos Aires with a day tour of the city. Elizabeth the tour guide begins at the famous Recoleta Cemetery one block away from our hotel the Alvear Palace. She makes an apology and says not everyone finds the idea of a cemetery so entertaining, but this one is something special. And she did not need to apologize. The cemetery has more than four hundred above-the-ground burial chambers, built mostly of marble and decorated with sculptures of angels or the members of the family buried there, or anything else that will impress and show the undoubted status of the family. It's like walking through the streets of a small city with each burial chamber with it's own personality and style like its own house. In fact buying a plot there, we are told is the equivalent price of an apartment in the same area. They are often like little pantheons with greek columns and elaborate friezes. The tour is intended as a show-piece of the flamboyant Spanish-Argentinian art and architecture. As we spend the hour there Elizabeth tells us the amazing stories and gossip of some of the people buried there. One grave is that of Evita who resides not in anything indicating her Perron connection, but in that of the Duarte family that she came from.

It's true, Argentinians eat a lot of beef. everywhere we go there are steak houses and restaurants indicating their beef options. In one big busy water-front restaurant where we stop for lunch, the waiter waits until we are seated and then comes to each woman in turn and fastens her handbag to her chair with a plastic strap. "Just in case" he says because there are pick-pockets and thieves prowling around all the time. Even in crime prone Jo'burg we have never seen anything like this!

It's also true that Buenos Aires has outstanding architecture. We see many French-style European and Spanish-type structures that give the whole place a sense of elegance and old-fashioned style. Like Madrid, it feels like a capital. One of the most opulent is the world-renowned Colon Theatre where we take their hour-long tour of the interior. A kind of Paris Opera combined with La Scala and an overlay of Covent Garden all in one. More evidence of the Spanish-Argentinian flamboyance and showmanship

But if you want to see the epitome of this it must be the tango. We spend the last evening at a tango show. In a small theatre-restaurant with a stage, we first have dinner and then the music and dancing start. The music is a piano, cello, accordion mixture of exuberant joy laced with sadness and the dancing blows us away. I remember the tango scene in "Scent of a Woman"and imagine that it will simply be a polished version of that. But it is a great deal more. Five professional dancing couples doing the tango in unison with wonderful costumes of the thirties and fourties, the time when the tango was born in the BA neighborhood of La Boca. The frowning possessive fake-stern men and flirting seductive women perform in the romantic sexy style of swirls and high kicks around the legs and make it look so flowing and easy.
We buy the DVD on our way out , and can't resist playing much of it again back in our hotel room.

Santiago

Santiago Chile

Our first day in Santiago is also my birthday. Emma arranges a room-service chocolate cake delivery with candles and participation of smiling hotel staff at 07h00. I try to be gracious in my sleeping shorts and grizzly slept-out appearance. Celebration breakfast and more chocolate cake
We do a hop-on hop-off bus tour of Santiago and find the Centro crowded, shabby and unattractive. We know little about the Chilean history and don't connect with the plugged in bus commentary Thousands of people bustling about their morning business, most looking down-market  and ranging from Aztec-like Indian to Spanish-European. We don't see any of the smart-tie and-suit-brigade we noted at breakfast at the Grand Hyatt. Then the bus eventually hits the Sandton of Santiago Barrio El Golf and suddenly it is Dubai style sky-scrapers, exuberant architecture and suave yuppie financial service execs all over. Elegant restaurants and smart shopping.

We settle in a good-looking steak-house restaurant and immediately start eating too much. A big shared Caprese salad and then medium fillet for me and well-done prime-rib for Emma. Plenty of wine and smiling eager waiters plying us with everything they can muster. We come away from it meat-sated and heavily satisfied.

For my birthday treat Emma suggests a spa treatment back at the hotel. A bit cautious I opt for a pedicure and imagine that I will have some lovely Latin American spa-lady giving me a soothing foot massage and re-energising treatment. Instead I get a tough-looking woman who must be out of the Nazi gene-pool of people who escaped here after the war. Instead of young and alluring this post-middle age fighter with her clenched jaw and mean streak first with some reluctance kindly soaks my feet but then lies me down and with much more vigour starts a scary process of using sharp tools to  push back cuticles and rasp away any roughness. I imagine lying there, eyes closed that she is using the chisels and tools used for stone-cutting and wood-carving. Instead of relaxing and dosing off I lie there squirming and wishing it was over.

She ends the experience and then thrusts an invoice into my hand listing the various services performed leaving room for a "tip". I ignore it with a scowled smile and leave.
We give up the idea of a dinner and settle for a delicious wild-mushroom soup and Sauvignon Blanc in the room. We watch the next instalment of the Madiba memorial and crash.
Adios Santiago.

Over the Andes

This has been a long-held  'bucket-list' goal. The idea of going by boat across the glacial lakes high up in the Andes mountains from Chile to Argentina. Well, I can tick it off now. We fly from Santiago to Puerto Montt and from there by bus to a beautiful little harbour town Puerto Varras where we spend a night in a Swiss-type log-and-stone hotel before boarding the catamaran the next day and start a series of boat trips across three lakes.  From one lake to the next we connect by small jerky bus through rain forests over very narrow scary roads.  We are constantly surrounded by snow-capped mountain peaks and massive rock formations

We arrive finally at one of the most beautiful hotels we have ever seen, the Llao Llao (pronounced Shao Shao) perched on a cliff overlooking a lake and when we check in the receptionist says we were originally booked into a regular studio room but they have up-graded us to a suite.  There is something about an up-grade of any service, be it a hired car or a seat on a plane or anything else that can make one feel like some minor celebrity. Emma and I go whooping around the big luxurious suite like a pair of teenagers, not used to a thing. We open and close the big cupboards gasp at the views from the windows and big balcony with its towelling covered deck chair loungers and smell all the delightful bathroom toiletries. We collapse finally on the Frette bed linen and sink into the enjoyment

The hotel also reminds us of the Fairmont Hotel at Banf near lake Louise in Canada. But mostly it is a German or Swiss feel that comes from the big migration of people from Europe to Barliloche at the beginning of the 20th Century. They settled here presumably because the mountains and snow reminded them of home but with the benefits of freedom and space. The architecture is typical Swiss Alpine stone and log structures with pitched roofs and we are told immediately that Barilochi is famous for chocolate. Chocolate shops everywhere. Our normal carefully managed eating pattern gets dumped and we stuff ourselves.

Next stop Buenos Aires. 

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India Eight: In conclusion, Mumbai

We are very pleased to be staying at the famous Taj Palace hotel, overlooking the splendid "Gateway of India" On a "heritage tour" through the hotel the next day we learn that the hotel was built when the grand old man of the Tata empire was refused entry by the British racists who owned and managed, what was then the exclusive Watson's Hotel. Tata, in 1903 made it his business to outdo them and to teach them a lesson. He built the magnificent 5-star Taj Palace hotel, subsequently admired and loved by generations of politicians, movie stars, and all Mumbai afficionados. Apart from the "Crystal Ball room", extended conference facilities, several highly rated restaurants (The Zodiac, the most highly rated in Mumbai, where we have our farewell dinner) a gallery of top end boutiques, the most superb service, and many other features, there is now a memorial water feature in the great recption concourse to commemorate the 23 people killed in the hotel lobby at the time of the Al Queda killings in 2008.

There is constant movement of crowds around the Gateway, People lean over the railings and watch the yachts in the habour basin in front. We witness a long and nostalgic rehearsal by several naval and other military bands, for a big event, a week away. Like other places we have visited in India but more so in Mumbai, the traffic never stops and creates relentless frenzy day and night. Hooting and opportunistic shoving are the only ways to make progress in the crowded streets. In the major downtown district of Colaba, we see much evidence of British colonial architecture.The Victoria Terminus, The Prince of Wales Museum, the High Court. the University etc. One of our guides says the British have left much behind in Mumbai, but the best of all is cricket. The Indians eat sleep and live for cricket.We are told that when other sports teams return from international tours, they get a luke warm response at the airport But when the cricketers return, many thousands turn up.

We learn that Mumbai has a serious housing shortage and that accommodation is extremely expensive. An exception is the big fishing village ilocated,ronically, close to the expensive parts of Colaba, where the fishermen and their families make their living and, by some government proclamation, may not be removed. Our guide takes us on a walkabout through the squaled village. Everyone is working at the fishing business. Even very you children are sorting fish or shrimps from the day's catch. No photographs are allowed. They don't want to encourage "poverty tourism"

Several people in our group have read "Shantaram" and we decide to have a drink at the famous "Leopolds" located in a side-street behind the Taj. It's a very noisy young crowd. Leopards is smaller and less appealing than the descriptions in the book. We leave and start walking through the busy shopping and night-activity streets. There is a pulsating energy about this place and a sense of high drive in its people. As we brows in the various shops, the alert owners pick up our accents and start using the odd Afrikaans word. They say that they can give us prices in Rands. The direct SAA flights to Mumbai are establishing us very well in the tourism hierarchy here.

It may be its Bollywood vitality, or the sense of industrious progress and commercial vigor or just the Arabian sea air blended with Indian sweat. We don't know exactly why, but we all agree that we feel special fondness for this place

the Taj Mahal

I don't like to use the over-extended word "icon" and I like even less "iconic" But the magnificent Taj Mahal really is.
One of the world's most famous buildings the Taj Mahal was built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his favorite wife Mumtaz who died in 1631. He had nine other wives, but when Mumtaz died he went into a steep decline, losing his health and will to live. She made him promise as she was dying that he would build a monument to their love. And did he make good on that! The perfect proportions and the exquisite craftsmanship have been described as " a vision, a dream, a poem, a wonder"

I'm a little scpeptical as we approach it, and imagine that these things are often over-hyped. But seeing it is so dazzling that the experience sucks you in. It's even more beautiful than the pictures and the thousands of people milling in the grounds all seem to be in a woozy daze of wonderment. We realize theat the famous (iconic?!) picture of Princess Diana sitting on the marble bench in front of the long water reflection gives us only the view of the Taj itself and neglects the substantial other buildings which make up the whole beautifully symmetric complex. That picture must also be one of the reasons why hundreds of peole at a time line up for the platoon of professional photographers who take endless pictures for them in the same wistful Diana pose.

As Shah Jahan was getting older, his third son, who was very ambitious to be the successor, killed off his two brothers and had his father effectively `'house arrested`' in the palace which, at some distance overlooks the Taj. Shah Jahan spent his last days admiring it from afar.

This story has everything. Heart rending romance, sibling rivalry, intrigue, murder and...great architecture!

In the footsteps of Linbaba / Shantaram

Leopold's!

India Seven: Some surprising bits of information...

Just in case you thought I was dozing in the bus.
I have learnt some interesting facts:
*that India has never invaded another country in her 5000 years of history
*Algebra, Trigonometry and Calculus originated in India
*The "Place Value System" and the "Decimal System" were developed in India in 1000BC
*Ayurveda is the earliest school of medicine known to mankind.
*Sanskrit is considered as the mother of all higher languages. Experts agree that it is the most precise and therefore the most suitable language for computer software (Forbes Magazine July 1987)
*The world's first University was established in Takshila India in 700BC
*Chess was invented in India
I'm not going to bore you with the raft of other notable facts about this incredible country, but I do want to say that a visit here puts those of us who think the world begins and ends in the West, in our place.
The other thoughts in the back of my head are:
*Why is this then the dirtiest most squalid place we have ever seen?
*Why, in a population of about 1.2 billion are more than 400 million, one third, illiterate?
*Why are 42% of children under the age of 5 years mal-nourished?
Like South Africa, India is a country of unending paradoxes.