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Will the real Argentina please stand up?

By Mike Beris - 2008-12-25

You’ve heard from us about adventure cycling, what we’ve been up to, and some of the people we’ve met. But what’s it really like in Tierra del Fuego? How is it similar, how is it different to the Northeastern United States: what we call "normal"?

Well, I’m sitting in a gas station fast food joint using their free Wi-Fi, just like I’ve done at Panera Bread in Delaware countless times. There are workers who pump your gas for you, like in New Jersey, and they wear matching cold-weather clothes. The roads are full of compact hatchbacks, like the Volkswagen Golf (or "Gol" as its called here), that greatly outnumber sedans and SUVS. We’ve seen very few luxury cars, as most of the area we’ve been in is not too affluent. Car companies like Fiat, VW, Citroen, Daewoo, Hyundai, even some Ford.

The houses are what many suburban Americans would call "small," and we’ve seen some that can’t have more than one room. In Ushuaia, most of them were built out of cinder blocks and corrugated metal sheeting. There is more lumber on the northern side of the mountains, maybe because it’s too costly to drive the wood over them.

Now for what I’m sure lots of people are curious about: what are the bathrooms like? In most of them, you have to put the used toilet paper in a little waste basket on the floor. Many of the public restrooms like in airports and gas stations, just have one roll of toilet paper outside all the stalls! It makes you plan ahead.

Milk comes in 1 liter boxes that don’t have to be refrigerated before opening. Yogurt comes in plastic bags that it would be so fun to chuck at each other in a big, messy yogurt-balloon fight. To our dismay, there is no peanut butter! We’ve had a lot of marmalade sandwiches with strawberry, cherry, peach, plum marmalade on them. We haven’t tried tomato yet. In our quest for a PB substitute, we tried Dulce de Leche, which I guess translates to "sweet milk." Its basically like smearing caramel on your morning toast. Not bad at all. The hamburguesa completa is another One Road South favorite: it’s a cheeseburger with a slice of ham and a fried egg, along with lettuce and tomato. We haven’t seen one Mickey D’s yet, but there are a lot of pizzerias and fast food places (not too many chains though).

We’ve heard that Argentina is a bit more hygienic than other SA countries, and the tap water is generally fine to drink. This is great because we can fill up our plethora of water bottles anywhere they’ll let us, like at hostels and restaurants, without having to treat the water or filter it.

There are many differences that seem to indicate that Argentinians are not as wasteful as we are in the US. At restaurants, you don’t get a nice fluffy stack of extra napkins. They often have a tiny dispenser on the table that has notecard-sized pieces of wax paper. I go through about 25 of these for one hamburguesa completa, but I don’t think the locals do. You don’t see Big Gulps or other huge take-out drinks. Garbage cans in general look small to my American eyes. Outside people’s houses, there are small baskets on a 4-foot pole that hold maybe one garbage bag, instead of the 100-gallon Rubbermade monstrosities we get at the Home Depot.

The Argentina we’ve seen is mostly safe and tranquil. Tierra del Fuego has a lot of outdoorsy activities so there are lots of Adventure tourists (which we don’t really consider ourselves). If you want to see Patagonia without having to pedal across the whole thing, there are tons of tours and trips that will take you to the hot spots in a bus, let you hike around, then take you back to a nice heated hotel at night. Such luxury!