Cities and Scalpels

In Buenos Aires I had to guard 2 peso pastries from the incessant drips from the ubiquitous swamp coolers that were planted at nearly every window of every high rise throughout the sprawling city. A city so big it almost seems unreal. Escher-esque in its proportioning. Streets radiate from round plazas in the cardinal directions as well as the midpoints, challenging heavily the idea of easy-grided street travel.

We flew in at sunset, by way  of rough brown crumbling snow-tinged giants of the sculpted Andes. Then it was an hour of maddeningly flat plains (pampas) not unlike the Midwest, perfectly empty earth. Then it was a disorienting span of buildings, every square inch of street and high rise stretching to the sea and seeming to easily rival Los Angeles in orders of magnitude. Each region defined as if cut with a scalpel and placed side by side.

Looking out over the Buenos Aires cityscape is not unlike looking up at the heavens on a clear moonless night - the effect is a feeling of nearly complete insignificance which now feels strangely invigorating. The contrast of peaks to plains to city gave the feeling of three totally separate worlds, each seemingly unending, the edges clearly defined I felt miniaturized. I remember Travel writer Paul Theroux describing a similar feeling while training it on the Patagonia Express.

Buenos Aires had Tractor beamed us in with its overwhelming gravity like the sun to a speck of space dust, becoming our own  comet, swallowed on the humid heat and animal tango passion, digested for a couple days and a million lifetimes, the goal to be excreted from Retiro omnibus estacion and sling shot south again into the voids of waiting experience and through the raw and bleeding edge of dominion into wilderness, slough the suffocating embrace of concrete and the yoke of steel and petrol, the stifling purgatory of the modern.

As the brakes were applied, the wings folded down and the sun starburst through the gap for a split second. We banked over the Atlantic and finally headed west after flying due south all night from Miami and east for the afternoon for our landing at Aeroparque. We collected our burdens, nearly 175 pounds of "necessity", hailed a taxi and waded through the light traffic and haze-tinged golden sunset with over 10 million Portenos.

Ok, ok enough with the dramatics but that is how it begins to feel when treading through the not wholly unwelcome miasma of congested humanity of Mar Del Playa, burning exposed flesh on playas - or what argentinos call plaishas- Lonely Planet warns wading offshore and sandside will be armpit to armpit. But more like finger tip to finger tip now at the edge of the season... Theroux wrote that nothing is sadder than a beach tourist town out of season. Mar Del Plata still pulses with life, has its moments despite heading into fall. Many places have already been shuttered but middle and upper class Portenos dominate, very few international tourists.

All this while Patagonia beckons, flirts from behind the curtain of these bustling and vibrant cities with amazing pastries - only 2000 miles left - a of yawning cramped and lurching highway odyssey.