Vacations and Safety, January 2007

Buenos Aires is dead. The grocery stores, cafes and the running track around the park are empty. Most restaurants and museums are still open and full, but with tourists. English and Portuguese are spoken everywhere. A friend's brother here on holiday was largely disappointed with the lack of local flavor. "Where are the Argentines? I hear more Spanish in the U.S.!" It seems like everyone, rich and poor, takes some time off during the summer.

Argentines vacation as the Europeans do. They take vacation at exactly the same time, and everyone goes to the same few places. Vacation is either from the first or second half of January, or the first or second half of February. The East coast beaches are the preferred vacation spot for the "Porteños", the name for Argentines from Buenos Aires. The people from Mendoza ("Mendocinos") prefer the beaches in Chile due to their proximity. This year, occupation rates in the Argentine beach resort towns of Mar del Plata, Pinamar, Valeria del Mar and Cariló are around 97%. The beaches are packed during the day, and the restaurants and clubs have lines around the block during peak hours. Argentines prefer to rent houses from other Argentine families who live off-season on the coast. Rental rates for a house at the beach during high season are anywhere from $700 to $30,000/month, depending on the size and location of the house.

The Argentine beaches are wide and lined with sand dunes. The water is cold and at least where we went, not particularly clean. The beach we visited was largely uncommercial. Having sent all our beach gear into storage in the U.S., we assumed we would be able to rent some chairs, a boogie board and/or an umbrella or two at the beach when we arrived. Nope! Not off season! There are places to rent chairs, but as part of a tented cabana, which is connected to 50 more cabanas about 200 yards from the water, so everyone is packed in right next to each other and far from the water. Brilliant. Come to the beach to sit right next to someone from Buenos Aires. I couldn't find any umbrellas, chairs or water sport gear to rent within a 40 minute walk from our beach at Valeria del Mar. And the only thing being sold for consumption was bottled water and some corn on the cob by a dude that walked by and yelled out, "Choclo!" (local name for corn). There are a few restaurants connected to hotels and other cabana resorts lining the beach, but no fast food stands. It's un-American I tell you!

So, like the Americans that we are, we took an American-style beach vacation in Argentina dammit. We visited off season (last week in December), paid less for our house rental, had the beach all to ourselves, and only stayed a few days. Ha! The American way! Now we are back in Buenos Aires, suffering in the heat with all the tourists. We showed them…yeah.

The other preferred vacation destinations for Argentines seem to be Bariloche in the Mountains to the Southwest, and Mendoza due West near the border with Chile. My family also managed to squeeze in a weekend trip to Mendoza this holiday season and visited vineyards, ate fantastic food (in the places that were not closed for vacation), and in general hung out with the tourists there too. Mendoza is such a beautiful place and the view of the Andes in the background is spectacular. The wine is also superb and the price is still right.

But the price is still not right for plane tickets and hotel rooms for foreigners - unfortunately for all our visitors, tourists continue to pay more than double what the locals pay for the same services. My parents paid double what we did to fly to Mendoza from Buenos Aires and stay in the same hotel. I recently read an article explaining this phenomenon. The jacking up of hotel fares to tourists is primarily because of the government-mandated price controls. Prices can't be raised on locals, but no one said anything about the tourists! Hotels have to make money somehow. Try to find a reliable quote for an Argentine hotel online these days. Also, the airlines that fly internally basically have a monopoly, so they can change whatever they want and provide crappy service. They don’t disappoint. The airlines cut a deal with the government to raise prices for tourists and keep the prices for Argentines nice and low. So, you can say this entire tourist price-gauging is the government's fault. They really only care about controlling prices for people who can vote for them, not those who provide them with lots of foreign exchange! In spite of all of this, people still come. Hotels and airlines are booked. It's like a perverse version of "Field of Dreams" – “If you screw them, people will come.”

One man's vacation is another man's opportunity to commit robbery. If you look out of my apartment window, you can see hundreds of dwellings where the inhabitants are clearly gone - their shutters are down and not moving. Home invasions while people are away on holiday are going through the roof. I'm not sure if this is related, but I recently started getting lots of calls and quick hang ups at home, perhaps to see if we are still around? This is one of the silly things about everyone taking vacation at once - it is both an invitation to the thieves to rob empty apartments, and also to target the only people left in the city - the tourists.

I'm hearing what seems like an epidemic of Americans and tourists getting mugged these days. The robbers are getting bolder, robbing people during the day and laughing as they attack in a group, beating people up and relieving them of their money and jewelry. It seems that wearing cheap stuff isn't even enough preventative medicine these days - one American woman lamented her recent mugging online, proclaiming she was wearing nothing of value when it occurred. All she did to provoke the attack was eat out in a restaurant with her other friends speaking English. Lesson to visitors when you visit - practice your Spanish when you are out and about, especially on the street.

In addition to being robbed at home or mugged on the street, another thing I'd like to avoid while I am here is being involved in a traffic-related accident. I know, everyone says they live in the city with the worst drivers, but even walking in Buenos Aires is dangerous. One friend has compared driving here to “Fish-schooling with a NASCAR twist”. I've heard the most dangerous time to be on the streets is between five and six a.m. after the clubs close, where the cars, manned by drunken divers, literally swerve on the streets. In less than four months, I was very close to being hit twice crossing the street by cars running red lights or turning like a bat out of hell on a green arrow. Shaken in the aftermath of both incidents, I am mostly proud I could muster up and deliver all the Spanish obscenities I have learned in my life in a timely fashion to Argentine drivers. "Cabrón! Hijo de puta!” Swearing in Spanish is so fun. But I digress.

The paper has been running articles lately about how only China and Russia have more traffic fatalities per capita than Argentina. Most traffic-related accidents here are due to excessive speed and alcohol consumption, but the laws here aren't strong enough to really deter anyone from either. At the beach, the paper reported how a number of drivers on a recent weekend simply refused to take breath tests and sped away from cops who had stopped them for driving erratically (how they got away with that in a place where police used to-and sometimes still do- "disappear" people for a lot less I'll never understand). Thankfully, and in true Argentine style, mothers of victims of traffic accidents are now starting to demonstrate and put ads on TV against drunk driving and excessive speeding. Hopefully the laws and enforcement of these will come next. So in the short-term, my husband and I calculate our risks every time we go out - do we drive ourselves and hope to avoid an accident, or do we take our lives in our hands and go with a NASCAR-inspired taxi driver? Yikes.

Oh it's so much fun to rant and rave. But the fact is I am quite happy with our lives here. I am writing this update from a café across the street from our house with free wireless Internet. I can sit here for hours and only order a coffee - just like the Porteños do. The coffees come with a free glass of soda water and two complimentary chocolates filled with caramel. I got my hair cut, colored and styled yesterday by a famous stylist at a beautiful salon three blocks from my house, all for the grand price of US $60. My kid spends his mornings at a summer camp near our house, playing outside, learning Spanish and how to swim. A dinner out in Buenos Aires often begins with a complimentary glass of champagne. And I am having a hard time finding a bottle of red wine I don't like for under $12 (my pick this month is the Bodega Fin del Mundo Cabernet Sauvignon 2004 Reserve from Patagonia - check it out if you can). So let's face it - despite the crazy drivers, thieves and price gauging of tourists, this is one of the nicest places in South America to spend some time.

I ran the Buenos Aires "Hash" recently (the "drinking group with a running problem" – I give this one a 9 out of 10 on the fun scale) where I met a newly arrived Australian couple with two young kids. We bonded on our mutual agreement that Buenos Aires is close to Europe but cheaper and with bigger apartments. I won't insult those who are pulling tours in nasty places by complaining in earnest - there are definitely worse places to be.