Postcard from Argentina

It may be presumptuous of me to assume that Diary readers noticed your editor has been missing. Anyhow, as is obvious, I'm back.

I was actually working on the other side of the equator for a week, doing some driving in Argentina. It was, at the very least, a wonderful adventure.

The full details I'll leave for some other time and other outlets. But the short story is that, after 24 hours of travelling, 17 of them in three airplanes, I was in the northern part -- arguably the most interesting one -- of a country I'd not been to before.

I had been in the Andes previously, in Bolivia last year when I was covering the Land Rover G4 Challenge. This trip was also with Land Rover, but it presented much more personal challenges because this time I was doing much of the driving instead of shadowing G4 contestants.

If you consider that I have always had a strong fear of heights, and many of the 'roads' I was driving on were rubble tracks not a lot wider than the Discovery 3 I was driving, with sheer drops into deep valleys on one side, you'll have an idea of the challenge.

It was one I knew I'd have. But, just like the G4 event, it wasn't going to stop me going. I'm truly fortunate to get such chances to see new places and new peoples.

In the extreme, we drove to 5,008 metres as the literal highlight of the trip. This is well into altitude sickness territory, but I was lucky to suffer no more than a little light-headedness when I got out of the car at the top. Among our group were colleagues from Ireland, Holland, Austria and France, and many of them suffered rather more severe symptoms on the way down.



Putting it into perspective, in Kilcullen I live at some 400 feet above sea level. At the highest point of the journey we were well over 16,000 feet, higher than Mont Blanc.

Which is all by the by, really. Apart from the rigours of a trip that tested both machines and people well beyond the norms they were used to, we also had a chance to dip into the cultures and history of parts of Argentina which are poles apart from each other.

In the north-west, the Andes part, I learned about the parts played in the area by the first settler tribes, and the changes wrought through their subsequent subjugations by the Incas, and later the Spanish.

I saw the ancient city of Quilmes, now excavated and restored as the most important historical monument in Argentina -- but best known in the country today as the name of a beer.

I learned how immigration from Europe later laid the foundations of modern Argentina, with Italian incomers making a particular contribution to the mix of native tribes, Spanish, and the remnants of the Incas.

With my own particular interest in wine, the development of the wine industry in Argentina, and particularly in the Calchaqui Valley where much of this particular odyssey took place, had its own special fascination. I even camped in an estate which has officially the highest vineyards in the world.

At the other extreme, in Argentina's capital Buenos Aires I spoke with a woman who remembers as a child the terrors of the time when 'The Generals' ruled the country and tens of thousands of people disappeared, an era which Argentineans are still coming to terms with today.



In Buenos Aires itself, there are as many people as populate the Republic of Ireland. My brief time there has provided me with a myriad of pictorial and anecdotal 'snapshots' which I hope will gell into a decent introductory piece about a city that mixes European and Americas influences in a most interesting way. Not least through the Tango, about which I knew little before but that is now embedded in my understanding as a story-telling genre as powerful as any opera or ballet.

This has probably been the first full week since the Diary was started that nothing has appeared.

Apologies for that, if it mattered. But I'll do my best to get back now to local business as usual.

Brian Byrne.