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.

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), is keeping a resepectful distance from the guanaco. Like llamas and camels, they spit. 

More potential puma chow:

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 lot of flare. The beret is de rigeur. In the rain they wear leather capes.

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 meant to cross all the time, and was simply contemplating the beauty of the landscape.

My wife’s horse had a named that sounded like Mordrador, which she suspected meant Biter. Hers was a talkative horse, and had a long conversation with her about how hard the life of a horse was on the Estancia Cristina.

Her horse also did something we had never seen before. We came to a stream, very near our rooms, and in the bed were extremely fresh puma tracks. Her horse took one look at the tracks and walked backward up the bank. I was not very happy myself, as I had been wandering alone around the estancia the previous day.

We were assured that only very few tourists had ever been eaten by pumas.

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

The WQ (weirdness quotient) of Buenos Aires is very high. Note what is holding back the stone curtains

Every Thursday in front of the Casa Rosada, the main government building in Buenos Aries, march mothers wearing white scarves. By now the mothers are in their 70s and 80s. Some of them are discovering they are grandmothers.

Their children disappeared during the military dictatorship in the 1970s. The military arrested those suspected of leftist sympathies, or whose property they wanted, or high school students protesting bus fare rises, or children of arrestees,  and they were never seen again. Thousands disappeared. They were murdered, some by being handcuffed and pushed out of helicopters over the Rio de la Plata.

When an arrestee was a woman and pregnant, the military let her deliver her baby, and then killed her. A military family then adopted the baby.

After they lost the Falkland War in 1982, the military destroyed almost all the records of these murders.

With DNA testing, hundreds of people in their 30s are learning that their parents, who raised them and loved them, were also the murderers of their mothers.

Some of the adoptees do not want to know. Others want to know the truth, no matter what the emotional cost.

No one has been brought to justice for the murders, although prosecutions have begun.

Human rights activists are trying to identify the victims and the criminals. Most documents have been destroyed but some remain.  One website has some documents, under the heading Nunca  Mas – Never Again- “Learn what happened. Only by knowing what took place, can we prevent it from happening again.”

Another small pleasure of life (in addition to menu translations) is people who live up to their national stereotype. When we flew to Buenos Aires recently, the gate at the airport was total and cheerful chaos:  but everyone got on, and we left on time. It was a foretaste.

To many, Argentina equals tango.<o:p>Argentina is enjoying a boom in tourism, and, according to the article “Argentina sees comeback of tango, for tourists” in The Buenos Aires Herald (February 3, 2008), fully 10 % of tourism income comes from tango. About 85% of tourists go to a tango show.. Tourists flock from all over the world to go to tango palaces, to tango bars (milongas), take tango lessons, etc. There is a 24 hour tango cable tv channel.

Tango started in the brothels of the port, and was considered scandalous by proper Argentines. But Europe took it up around 1910, and then it was acceptable in Argentina.
In the 1930s the tango star was the lounge lizard Carlos Gardel, who was shot by an irate husband. When he died in 1935 several women committed suicide because they could not imagine life without him.In the 50s and 60s tango was replaced by pop and rock groups. But when the military government of the 1970s forced many Argentines to take refuge in Europe, the refugees would listen to tango songs, which are like the blues: “I am out of luck, my girl has left me, I lost my job,” etc). The Europeans liked this music, and after the military government fell, Europeans flocked to Argentina expecting the tango.The Argentines, a little bemused, provided it. There are now tango tours of Argentina. In our hotel at breakfast we saw a group of Americans being shepherded by a young woman dressed in a tango outfit (no doubt to her embarrassment). Throughout the city there are pictures and statues of Carlos Gardel. Tango resounds in every shop. The street puppets sing and dance the tango.The effect is hallucinatory. Argentines dine at 10 or 11 PM, but they get up at 6 or 7 and do not take a siesta. We asked our guide when Argentines sleep. She said she had concluded they sleep less than other nations. I think they suffer from national sleep deprivation, and Argentine magic realism, the dreamlike state in which anything can happen, is the result. The anything includes

the tango.

Serving as a world language has its disadvantages. The English translations of Spanish menu items in Buenos Aires were interesting, but in Patagonia the menus were challenging. At a café in a national park, we were presented with the following choices.

Entradas
Minestrone
Soup of Gourd
Caesar Salad: mix of vegetables, cheese chicken, grudges, cream of anchovies and capers.Tibia de Vegetables
Vegetable Tibia: peppers and carrots in Julian, tomatos roasted, asparagus, champignones skipped in soybean sauce on mix of green, with grudges of cheese and Popes bolangere.

Plato Principal
Steak of Garlic Sausage to the Cheese, on pure enceballado to the screw, rustic sauce of red wine and Popes.

By careful comparison with the Spanish menu we decided that the Popes were potatoes (papas), but some items (to the screw? grudges?) remained shrouded in darkest gloom.

I ordered minestrone.
Our guide was going to tell the restaurant that it needed to employ the services of an expert translator (his girlfriend) to work on its menu, but we Americans all cried him down, as someone who wanted to ruin one of the simple pleasures of life.