ARGENTINA – Kerk Boon Leng Photographs & Notes

buenos aires

These days when great cities around the world all aspire to look, eat and speak like each other, Buenos Aires stands proud and apart as an icon of idiosyncrasy.

Originally a struggling Spanish colonial outpost surrounded by endless fertile fields of grass facing an important sea, Buenos Aires grew rich exporting beef, grain and wool. People from all over Europe especially Italians came by ship settling in the port city. Millions arrived between 1880 and 1945.

Wealth, immigration and Buenos Aires’s end of the globe location helped it develop a unique character, a keen idea of cultural superiority and even its own street lingo called lunfardo.

Today Buenos Aires is a somewhat old fashioned and dignified looking place full of impressive late 19^th century European urban architecture. The buildings are built of wonderful marble, wood and stones when Argentina was the fifth richest country in the world but have since been grimed by age, neglect and lots of graffiti.

Buenos Aires is beautiful in a besotting kind of way. I like Buenos Aires very much but cannot explain why. Perhaps it was the tango on dim street corners, the energetic banner and flag waving soccer fans in the plaza, generous glasses of malbec with giant beefsteaks or the most elegantly beautiful waitress I have ever laid my eyes on serving us our lunch menu of pork with Dijon sauce on chips.

Maybe it is better left expressed in the lyrics of a famous tango song by the city’s eternal hero and heartthrob, Carlos Gardel

Mi Buenos Aires querido, cuando yo te vuelva a ver, no habra mas penas ni olvido.

El farolito de la calle en que naci fue el centinela de mis promesas de amor,

bajo su inquieta lucecita yo la vi a mi pebeta luminosa como un sol.

Hoy que la suerte quiere que te vuelva a ver, ciudad porteña de mi unico querer

[ My beloved Buenos Aires, the day I see you again,

there will be no more sorrow or forgetfulness

The lamp of the street where I was born was witness to my promises of love,

It was under its dim light that I saw her I saw my babe as bright as a sun.

Today luck wants me to see you again, you my beloved port city ]

DSCF9763 — All images copyright Kerk Boon Leng November 2013

Nov 29, 2013Nov 2, 2014 by dkwts Categories: ARGENTINATags: Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires images, Buenos Aires in October, Buenos Aires Travel, Spring in Buenos Aires 1 Comment

missionary position

Evening after work hours in the city of Posadas

Posadas is a city of around 350,000 people and serves as the administrative capital for the northeastern Argentinian province of Misiones. It sits beside the Parana River and is linked to Paraguay by a bridge to a town called Encarnacion on the other side. There isn’t much to see in Posadas. It looks like the kind of place you would move to at a point in life when you need to play detox catch up with your mind and body after years of bad air, food and views. It is wonderful to watch from the car window each evening when we arrive back from upcountry many young and attractive people either jogging on the nicely paved and brightly lit riverside esplanade or sitting around sidewalk cafes for coffee and a meal. The highways into and out of the city are wide, empty and newly constructed giving the place an air of quiet prosperity and purpose. The city seems to be there mainly to serve as a hub for the agricultural and forested hinterland as we saw almost no heavy industry. With green surroundings and slight elevation at 350 feet above sea level, the climate of Posadas is subtropical and pleasant although locals have told us that 40 degrees heat in the January summer is common.

All images copyright Kerk Boon Leng November 2013

Nov 16, 2013Nov 25, 2013 by dkwts Categories: ARGENTINATags: ARGENTINA TRAVEL BLOG, MISIONES TRAVEL ARGENTINA, posadas argentina, posadas misiones, posadas photo blog, posadas travel blog Leave a comment

pining for panambi

DSCF1057 — The lights lingered for a last display of luminance as we were leaving Panambi

Our hosts Miguel Gonzalez and Maria Duarte with the rest of their companeros from la Cooperativa Agricola Rio Parana Limitada or Titrayju (spanish acronym for “land, work and justice”) as they prefer to be called, drove us in a two vehicle convoy to their yerba mate factory near the tiny remote village of Panambi east of Obera and a hop away from Brazil. It is a place you won’t find easily on a map but I saw the place signage so I know that’s the name of the place we visited.

When we arrived an almost centenarian European looking gentleman with ruddy face walked across the road to welcome us. He was accompanied by a younger person wearing a worker’s beret who could be his grandson or even great-grandson. He shook everybody’s hand and guffawed infectiously as I looked on and snapped away at the jaw-dropping view in front of us. The sun shone through the clouds giving clean soft lights to the trees and fields beyond. It was a picture perfect moment of taoist significance. Of longevity and laughter in a fecund landscape.

DSCF1053 — All images copyright Kerk Boon Leng November 2013

Nov 16, 2013Nov 21, 2013 by dkwts Categories: ARGENTINATags: Misiones travel blog, panambi, photos of panambi, Tierra, Titrayju, Trabajo y Justicia Leave a comment

Argentines call this region ” la Mesopotamia” ( Greek for ” land between rivers”) because two of South America’s great rivers, the Parana and Uruguay, flow here flanking its boundaries before draining into the Rio de la Plata. Three provinces make up this region. The northern-most and smallest is Misiones. Here Argentina, the world’s 8th largest country, is reduced to a thumb-shaped land the size of Belgium squeezed between Paraguay and Brazil.

To local people, Misiones is la tierra colorada– a subtropical arcadia of red nutrient rich soil supporting an eclectic flora of rainforest trees, exotic pines, tea and the province’s principal cash crop, yerba mate.

Yerba Mate, Argentina’s national beverage is grown often alongside tea on a plantation scale in the province. Drank as an infusion of leaves with stems ( con palo) in a gourd shaped cup ( mate) with a metal straw ( bombilla) it initially tastes mildly of dried grass and aged woodchips.

The story of yerba mate is also the story of Misiones as it was the missionary settlements (hence the name) founded by European Jesuit priests that led to the growing of yerba mate for commerce by the native Guarani people.

In the 17^th century the Jesuits came to convert the area’s indigenous tribes to Catholicism. The Guarani were nomads but the Jesuits placed and protected them in settlements and taught them western agricultural methods and ways to domesticate the wild yerba mate plant. The Jesuits’ social and evangelical experiment ran against the policies of the Portuguese and Spanish governments who relied on captured Guarani slaves to work the colonial plantations. This clash led eventually to the expulsion of the Jesuit Order from the Latin American colonies and destruction and abandonment of the missions.

From 1880s onwards Misiones saw huge European immigration notably Poles, Ukrainians, Germans and other non-latin Europeans into its territory in search of farmlands and work. Today over a million people live in Misiones. Outside of Posadas, the capital, the province is a place of tiny remote settlements and small towns such as Obera, Eldorado and Apostoles, the yerba mate capital of the universe.