Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

It really looks like this - except 100,000 times bigger!

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Our boat delivers us to a rock island at the edge of the Viedma Glacier.

We cross the rock polished by the recently-retreated glacier.

We don our crampons.

We survey the summer landscape.

Our leader cuts steps to smooth our path.

We stroll carefree amid the summer breezes.

Charlie enjoys a refreshing cooling drink.

I laze in the summer sun.
And only one [...]

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 One would think this sign is superfluous: 
 No esta permitido nadar - is not allowed swimming
But this guy tried to climb on the iceberg:

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Venice is the most claimed city in the world : ”Cleveland- The Venice of Northern Ohio!”
Buenos Aires has its Venice, Tigre, built on hundreds of island in the river delta. Most of the houses are modest and un Venetian:
 
The houses are served by supermarket boats
  
But here and there is a truly Venetian pile that comes [...]

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The boat that took us to the Viedma glacier and then to the Estancia Cristina was the Nunatak. The name was explained by a sign on board:

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The Recoleta cemetery is perhaps the strangest place I have ever seen.
 
This city of the dead contains 60,000 bodies in hundred of mausoleums built like row houses. Perhaps the Via Appia in its heyday gave the same impression, but the Via Appia was not in the best neighborhood in Rome.
The monuments are neoclassical
 
or art nouveau

 or Mussolini-esque

 or [...]

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Between El Calafate and El Chaten, the only place to eat is La Leona.

 
The food was surprisingly good, as it was everywhere in Argentina.
Here is a puma that came too close to the kitchen:

  
And here is a former guest of the estancia, Butch Cassidy, who stayed there a month after he robbed a bank:

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 Because of the horrors that Argentina endured under the military dictatorship in the 1970s, it has a special sympathy for other victims of repression.
In the National Cathedral there are two memorials.
One is to the Armenian genocide, when the nationalist Turkish government drove out a million men, women, and children to die in the desert, their [...]

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Hikers develop an emotional relationship with their boots. They are the difference between a great hike and torture, and sometimes between life and death. Here at the Refugio Chileno in the Torres de Paine I make sure no one has tampered with the boots I had to leave outside while I was getting coffee (instant [...]

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I have found Ogden Nash’s poem helpful:
The one-l lama,
He’s a priest.
The two-l llama,
He’s a beast.
And I will bet
A silk pajama
There isn’t any
Three-l lllama.
ll in Argentinian Spanish is not pronounced like y but rather like zh: Zhama
Also, to call someone a guanaco is an insult. It means he cannot be domesticated; he spits.

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Guanacos are a wild member of the llama family. They seem to exist mainly to be eaten by pumas. Our guide had heard that pumas got 90% of  guanacos; he found that hard to believe, but suspected that pumas got half of them.
Sal, a member of our group and a serious photographer (note the camera), [...]

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The gauchos were impressive horseman. They could make their horses walk sideways. One morning they rounded up some mares that were having a great time around the lodge, and the mares did not want to go into the corral. They gauchos walked their mounts sideways and nudged them into the corral.
Gauchos also dress with a [...]

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I am preparing to mount my steed.
His name in Spanish meant, I concluded, “Staller.” Whenever we came to a raging glacial strea, he refused to cross, no matter how hard I kicked and yelled AIII! (Giddy-up), until Augustin, our gaucho, held up his whip and said something in Spanish. My horse then decided he had [...]

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Lee, Charlie, and Maidie  at Los Glaciares National Park in Argentina

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