Sola flor de Buenos Aires, Puerto Vista, Primorosa, Dignalita de la Veta, que parquea mamá que es cosa edad, pedagrana, lea de ventana, poloniales y patrulla federada.
Sola flor de Buenos Aires, Puerto Vista, Inora, Padajoque, Fiel, Díaz, Pérez, Tamaque, Sevillén, Pófez, Pumar.
Hello friends, come travel with me and 23 other Norteamericanos to the inviting, diverse, but a bit less visited ABC countries of South America, Argentina, Brazil and Chile.
We're on a guided tour that I booked after viewing an internet video.
South America is shaped like a Ben and Jerry's ice cream cone and in fact the tapering southern end is known as the Cono del Sur, the southern cone. That's where we will be.
In advance I had exactly one friend from Brazil, the national athletic hero Eleonora Mendonza. As a Newsweek correspondent and a marathon runner myself, I witnessed her start and triumphant finish at the first Olympic Women's Marathon in Los Angeles, 1984.
My only previous time in the region, in 1992 I was in President George H.W. Bush's press entourage for New York's Newsday when Air Force One landed in Rio for the first United Nations Earth Summit on the environment.
I reported on Bush schmoozing world leaders and jogging around a military track below Rio's Sugarloaf Mountain.
Bush stayed at the fancy Sheraton near Ipanema Beach. The White House press was hilariously consigned to the last available quarters, a no-tell motel with mirrored ceilings and pornography on the TV.
For the 2017 return I bought guidebooks and worked on my Portuguese and Spanish for a grueling three days.
Hi everyone, Paloma here. Welcome to Top 25 Portuguese Phrases.
Bom dia. Good morning.
Hola. Hola. Hola.
I took jetliners down to Rio, but because my wife Irma decided not to go, Gate One Travel soaked me with an $1,100 single supplement.
I resented this charge so deeply that I resolved to fly to and from South America for almost nothing to reimburse myself.
In his twin-engine beachcraft, my friend Don Terry was going to Costa Rica and he took me that far.
I rented a paraglider for the rest of the way. Sure, a little slow and windy, but so cheap and really exhilarating.
My Rio, Rio by the CO, flying down to Rio where there's rhythm and rhyme.
Hey feller, twirl that old propeller, we've got to get to Rio when we've got to make time.
You'll love it, soaring high above it, looking down on Rio from a hemp and a blue.
Send a radio to Rio de Janeiro, where the big hello just so they'll know and stand by there will fly their mario.
Everything will be okay, we're singin' and wingin' away to you.
Landing at our hotel near Copacabana Beach, I was back in Brazil after 25 years.
Brazil, almost the size of the USA, South America's largest nation was discovered for Portugal in 1500 by Pedro Alvarez Cabral.
African slavery and mines and sugarcane fields followed.
Brazil needed no war for independence. The Portuguese royal family moved to Rio in 1808, refugees from Napoleon.
After the king went home to Lisbon in 1821, a son stayed behind and declared himself Emperor Dom Pedro of Free Brazil.
His son, Dom Pedro II, was overthrown in 1889, Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca establishing an often tumultuous republic.
For years, the world knew Brazil, mainly for coffee, and Carmen Miranda, a Rio Carioca who sang in Hollywood about a hungry sparrow, a tico-tico.
Tico-tico tá tudo a vez aqui, o tico-tico tá comendo a minha culpa.
Se o tico-tico tenta que se alimenta, que tá comendo a minhoca no fumao.
This is just a old samba built upon a single note.
The quieter music of Antonio Carlos Jobim helped boost the samba and the bossa nova to worldwide prominence.
To North Americans, his most famous song is the one set on Ipanema Beach.
Foreigners also know Brazil as the home of football immortal Pele and the glittery abandon of springtime Carnaval.
Nearly bankrupt Rio managed to stage a successful 2016 Summer Olympics.
I wanted time to run some of the scenic marathon course conquered by a Kenyan, an Ethiopian, and bronze medalist Galen Rupp of the United States.
Where I did run while waiting for the tour to start was the beachfront path with a distant view of Christ the Redeemer.
Around the Arqueco Copacabana Palace Hotel, the densely populated beach district was rife with security fences,
barring the have-nots of the hillside favela slums from the rich Carriocas condos.
The Redeemer was gleaming from a corcovado on that first night when we met each other and Pablo Califano, tour manager from Buenos Aires.
The veteran guide told me that all too many US tourists arrive in South America with little backgrounding.
It's pretty much like one place, one country, all is one country.
Where the people come to Brazil thinking it's Argentina.
So we have to explain all the time that no, no, here is Portuguese, no Argentina, Chile, Spanish.
I don't blame the people that comes without knowing because they also come to learn, to explore.
We were bust off to the first of many steak houses and renditions of the girl from Ipanema for a sirloin of beef and a fast-forming camaraderie.
Next morning a buffet breakfast, included, and a bus to the electric train climbing the 2300 foot corcovado,
which is hunchback in Portuguese, through the forested Tijuca National Park.
For panoramic views of Rio, second to São Paulo in population, and since 1960 replaced by Brasilia as Brazil's capital,
you can't beat the highest point in town.
Sofa.
Back on the city tour, we glimpsed the Hocinha favela, biggest in Latin America with 150,000 people.
Too dangerous to explore because of the sporadic violence between police and drug gangs.
In stark contrast, the upscale São Conjado beach and condo district,
where from a peak near the knob top Gavea, hang gliders launch, soar, and land on one of Rio's safest shores.
A block off the sand, the girl from Ipanema Bar.
Here a Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes wrote their tribute to the tall, tan, and lovely teenager who walked by every day.
Eluisa Pinheiro was her name.
The tiny table and the composer's chairs survived, though I heard that Elu Pinheiro moved away from Rio.
In the shadow of Os dois Hermaus, the two brothers, President Bush's hotel still there, I looked for today's girls from Ipanema.
They were gloriously in evidence, no doubt with some self-consciousness.
And who knows, maybe someone will write a song about these guys from Ipanema.
Another must for tourists, the cable car up Sugarloaf, Palme de Azucar, with an intermediate stop on the lower Urca Peak.
The first non-Indian reported to have hiked up Sugarloaf was a British nanny in 1817.
Cable cars have been inching to the top since 1913.
The iconic mountain is named for the clay molds once used in refining sugar.
As we ascended, I looked for the military cadet running track where I joked with Bush about his two-mile workout, and there it was.
A hazy summit view of where Gaspar de Lemos came ashore on New Year's Day, 1502, mistaking Guanabara Bay for a river he named River of January, Rio de Janeiro.
Pablo took time out for a yerba mate, the hot jungle stimulant wildly popular in South America.
Rio's mountains caused the city to drill lots of tunnels. Through one, we reached the Sambodroma, the Samba Drone.
My long sight of the Carnaval parade and of the Olympic marathons start and finish.
Turning off the broad avenue named for one-time dictator Getulo Vargas, we made our slow way through bazillions of Brazilians.
The Metropolitan Cathedral of St. Sebastian, hardly your typically Baroque Latin American church, opened in 1984.
In the basement are artifacts of the Portuguese royal family.
Headquarters of Petrobras, the state oil monopoly, cash box for the huge bribery scandal that has ensnared national politicians.
Oi is not only a phone company, it's a sentiment shared by the impeached former President Dilma Rousseff, her mentor Lula, and the embattled President Michel Temé.
The political and economic chaos in the nation of 205 million is troubling Brazil's neighbors.
Brazil is like the big brother in South America, because they are the ones that say which direction we go.
It's the biggest country, for sure, and it's the most populated. It's half of the people from South America.
Walking through a street market to see more of downtown in free time, I backpedaled from the second would-be robber I encountered in two days.
Warnings about Rio Street Prime are quite accurate. Take the subway. The same crowded, noisy but convenient experience as in London, New York, or anywhere else.
The former royal palace and other buildings near the waterfront are among the few examples of classic architecture in forward-looking Rio.
For charm, the modern trams cannot compare to the venerable open trolleys that lurch from the cathedral to the hilly cobblestone Santa Teresa neighborhood.
You have to take this breezy ride.
In South America, the rich live down on the boring flats while the poor get the million-dollar views, like this outlook from a relatively friendly favela in Santa Teresa.
Lapa, once a poor district but now a nightlife hotspot marked by an 18th-century aqueduct, connects to Santa Teresa via the intricately tiled Celeron staircase. Chilean artist Jorge Celeron created the stairway as a gift to his adopted city.
It's on every guidebook's top ten list.
At dawn, out to the airport, past Sugarloaf and the memorial on the Marathon course, to Brazilians who died in World War II, fighting as U.S. allies in Italy.
Galeão Airport is co-named for Jobim these days, Tom Jobim, as Brazilians know him.
We are to fly around South America on the Chilean Latam, formerly Lon, which has not gotten around to repainting all its planes with the new name.
A two-hour 732-mile flight to the Iguazu Falls in green lowlands near the unusual triple border of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, once a backwoods refuge for Nazis escaping Germany in 1945.
We landed at Fosto Iguazu, Brazil.
Just as Niagara Falls, shown here, are split between the U.S. and Canada, the Iguazu Falls are divided between Brazil and Argentina.
The difference is that Eleanor Roosevelt, when she first saw Iguazu, said, poor Niagara.
The South American marvel consists of 276 cataracts up to 269 feet high, plunging from a nearly two-mile-long volcanic upheaval of the Iguazu River.
Brazil and Argentina operate national parks to preserve the falls and the surrounding jungle.
In the local Guarani-Indian language, Iguazu is great water.
A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Iguazu is home to cute Quatimundis, racoon cousins.
Visitors can get close enough to get wet, not to mention the roar.
Rainbows abound.
For my part, the most astonishing site was another natural beauty.
Crossing the border into Argentina, we reached the Amirian Hotel in Puerto Iguazu, a quiet town 12 miles west of the cataracts.
The hotel is smack on the triple border, where the Iguazu dead ends into the longer Paraná River, facing Paraguay.
Here we could buy handicrafts from Guarani ladies.
Argentina, a nation of 44 million, about 30% the size of the USA.
José de San Martín led eight years of battles to liberate the land from Spain in 1818.
Later waves of immigration from Italy and other European countries left Argentina feeling more strongly European than some of her more racially diverse neighbors do.
Many people tend to say, and we believe this in Argentina, that the Argentinians, we got off the ships, because a large part of our ancestors came from Europe.
Nazis like Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele found haven here under populist authoritarian President Juan Perón and his charismatic actress wife, Eva Duarte de Perón.
At the height of her popularity, the benefactors of women and the poor died of cancer at only 33 in 1952.
Evita is remembered not only in a certain Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, but also on the 100 peso note.
Military leaders including Jorge Videla and Leopoldo Galtieri ruled harshly from 1976 to 1983.
During la Guerra Susia, the Dirty War, the junta killed, disappeared and tortured thousands of suspected leftists and dissidents,
seizing their babies and awarding them to childless right-wing couples.
With democracy restored, Argentina's Presidentes Mauricio Macri, former mayor of Buenos Aires, First Lady Liliana Macri, is notably elegant.
We have exported several things to the world, dango, beef, we export football players, soccer players.
Argentina also has exported the fine Malbecs of Mendoza, Che Guevara, and in 2013 Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
Pope Francis is a dango fan.
Day two at Las Cataratas de Iguazu, the Argentinian side, on a train that broke down,
but eventually dropped us at Hilly Nature Trails yielding vistas as spectacular as those from the other side.
Day three at Las Cataratas de Iguazu, the Argentinian side, on a train that broke down,
but eventually dropped us at Hilly Nature Trails yielding vistas as spectacular as those from the other side.
No, then I'll do it still.
662 air miles to Argentina's cosmopolitan capital, descending over the Rio de la Plata on a rainy day.
No surprise in the southern cone because cones often come with sprinkles.
On the 16 lane Avenida Nueva de Julio, widest street in the world, we checked into the Panamericano Hotel.
BA, with its 15 million people, is the rushing New York of South America,
and we were staying right in the clattering equivalent of Times Square,
a peso coin's throw from General Perón Street.
Best starting point, the Plaza de Mayo, where at the Casa Rosada, the pink house,
Evita, emoted from the presidential balcony, and playing Evita, Madonna, sang there.
Perennial locus of demonstrations, the square is where the scarf-wearing mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
began protesting the disappearances of their children in the 1970s.
They still march for social causes every Thursday afternoon.
Bordering the Plaza, the colonial era Cabildo, the town hall,
and the cathedral where they could not resist a little bragging about the boss's promotion.
An eternal flame signaled that the cathedral held the remains of the liberator San Martín.
Not so reverently, a class of school kids tried to coax a laugh out of the tomb's long-suffering honor guards.
Outside, another long-standing political protest,
an encampment of veterans of the lost 1982 Falkland Islands war with Britain.
Argentina calls the islands the Malvinas.
These ex-soldiers complain that they are being cheated out of government pensions.
Argentina was so bitter over losing the war that the Tower of the English,
a gift from the local British community in 1916, was officially renamed the Monumental Tower.
The claim of Argentina of sovereignty, of course, has to be on the table.
It's a national cause and we grow.
Learning about the islands, they're very close to us.
Unfortunately, the decisions were made by, and I'm not afraid to say this,
two crazy, really crazy people. It was Galterin and in England, Margaret Thatcher.
And that caused a very deep wound in between both countries.
Past government ministries reflecting BA's French architectural influence is the Riachuelo River,
the 19th century harbor where immigrants labor.
They lived in tin tenements in La Boca,
now a colorfully painted tourist trap with gift shops and cafes.
Don't venture too far or you may be mugged for your camera.
La Boca, a kind of Hollywood boulevard on the river plate, exploits Evita, the Pope,
and above all, the tango.
Professionals rehearse on the cobblestones and try to snag tourists for photos.
With our group's women tourists, they succeeded.
At the Recoleta Cemetery, founded in 1822 and boasting 4,800 elaborate mausoleums,
everybody has to see Evita's resting place.
Turn left at the prophet, look for the flowers, and you will find it.
Peronista worker unions still send floral wreaths,
and yes, the brass plaque reads, don't cry for me.
In nicer weather, I walked the metropolis on my own.
The office tower where Evita spoke in 1951.
A footbridge in Puerto Madero by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.
An old warship nearby named for 19th century President Domingo Sarmiento.
The Floralis Generica, a sculpture with petals powered in and out by the sun.
Tango lessons for the travelers, enthusiastic or, like me, not so much.
First, the pros showed how it's done.
Luciana Pontoriero stepped the tourists through the basics.
Couples did their best to take it from there.
Few of us would get tens from Carrienne, Lynn or Bruno on Dancing with the Stars.
The reward was dinner and a tango show at a touristy club in the Congreso district.
Here, after the dancers took their swooping turns, I weedled the management into letting me surprise my new friends with something in a Brazilian vein.
Some of us chose an optional gaucho party on the Pampas, whose authenticity I had my doubts about.
Some, noting that Uruguay was just across the broad Rio de la Plata, took a day trip by fast ferry, not to the far distant Uruguayan capital, Montevideo, but to charming little Colonia.
They might not have realized that in Spain, going to Uruguay is a vintage euphemism for having sex.
They say at Recoleta that if you pet the dog of a honeymooner who died in an alpine avalanche, you will return someday to Buenos Aires, so I did it.
Bidding adios to BA's landmark obelisk, we climbed west toward the Andes.
I was hoping to see Aconcagua in Mendoza province at 22,841 feet, highest peak in the western hemisphere.
But the entire mountain range was under cloud cover, so we also missed the Christ of the Andes on the Argentine Chilean border.
No other country is shaped like Chile, 2,653 miles from the driest desert in the world, the Atacama in the north, down to blustery Cape Horn in the south, but on average only 110 miles wide.
Spanish conquistador Pedro de Valdivia founded the capital in 1541, naming it for St. James, Santiago.
A liberation army led by Argentina's San Martín and the Chilean-born Bernardo O'Higgins crossed the Andes to defeat Spanish royalists in 1818.
Santiago, 1,700 feet up at the foot of the snow-capped Andes, is bisected by the Mapocho River. 7 million of Chile's 18 million live here.
The proudest new landmark, symbolizing Chile's free market prosperity since the 1980s, until recent setbacks, is the 1,000-foot-high Costanera Center, tallest tower in Latin America.
Presidential offices are in La Moneda Palace, a former mint. Socialist President Salvador Allende, elected in 1970, by 1973 had alienated corporations and the military with nationalizations of industry.
The Cold War was on, and the U.S. Embassy worried that Allende was too close to Cuba's Fidel Castro.
Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the CIA plotted a coup d'etat.
On September 11, 1973, Chile's 9-11, the Chilean Air Force bombed La Moneda under attack Allende committed suicide.
General Augusto Pinochet took power for 17 years of repression, killings, torture, exile for thousands. He shut down the Congress, later relocating the lawmakers to Valparaiso.
Since democracy's return in 1990, five presidents have served in peace. Michel Bachelet is in a second four years in office.
The military now looks like a harmless tourist attraction. And what is that band playing?
Central Santiago has numerous pedestrian-friendly streets where vendors tout their wares. Many are descendants of the fierce Mapuche Indians who gave the government fits until the 1880s.
As in Rio and Buenos Aires, crowds seem to be mainly millennials, office workers on robotic nine-to-six shifts.
On the main drag, the Alameda, a giant cultural center is named for poet Gabriela Mistral.
Chilean Pablo Neruda won Nobel Prizes in Literature for Chile. Isabel Allende, the martyred president's niece, could be a future honoree.
Perched on the tectonic ring of fire, Chile has suffered so many earthquakes that few colonial structures survive.
Still at San Francisco Church, a façade from its 1586 founding remains, along with a holy virgin brought to Santiago by Valdivia.
Steps away from a colonial museum is a charming little neighborhood called París Londres, named for a street intersection.
It's all cobblestone quaintness and sun-dappled plazas, until you realize that at number 38 Londres, the neat little building was one of the Pinochet regime's torture centers.
We rode out of town into Santiago's agricultural hinterland. I was hoping to visit my favorite blueberries. My wife and I love imported Chilean berries for breakfast, but we ended up at a vineyard instead.
Chile grows some of the best wine grapes in South America, also turning out the Pisco for the Pisco Sours, popular in Chile and Peru.
But enough with finding out how the 152-year-old Undurago winery makes its vino blanco and vino tinto, I was there for the tasting. Good stuff!
From Santiago, a 72-mile jaunt downhill to the Pacific Coast, to Valparaiso and Vina del Mar.
Valparaiso, a paradise valley in English, was once Chile's capital and richest city. It's still the chief port, shipping Chilean copper, timber and agricultural products to the world.
Structures in the city of Hills have been leveled by earthquakes so often that the oldest house in town dates from a ho-hum 1861. The streets make up in mural art, but they lack in antiquity.
The city of 400,000 is a paradise for artists. We saw a mindless graffiti all over South America, but here the painting became sublime.
It's okay, you can count with all the graffiti.
What?
Never gets a chance. See it.
Down at the port after a funicular descent, the headquarters of the Chilean Navy rose behind a monument to the heroes of Iquique.
A naval battle that was one of Chile's few defeats in the 1879-1883 War of the Pacific against Peru and Bolivia.
Five miles along the coast, Vina del Mar has grown larger than Valparaiso and much richer. In fact, it reminded me of palm-lined high-rise beach cities on the French Riviera.
First tourists stop a flower clock, unique until I recall that Michael Jackson had one kind of like it at his Neverland Ranch in California.
Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, is a Chilean territory 2,000 miles west in Polynesia, known for its Moai, nearly 900 giant stone heads. One of them was here, in Vina del Mar.
Back in Santiago, in the Bea Vista Nightlife district north of the river, stands poet Pablo Neruda's La Chascona, the woman with tangled hair, a house he named for one of his less well-groomed wives.
Tourists swarm the place. A nearby restaurant was the scene of a farewell dinner.
Those of us, including myself, not ending the trip with four days on Easter Island, would be seeing Pablo for the last time. He joined us in a toast.
While Pablo was on Rapa Nui, I was thinking about our last conversation. It was about what he wanted northerners to take away from the southern cone.
The spirit of every country, happiness of Brazil, probably the madness and the sadness and the melancholy of Argentina, Buenos Aires, and the way Chile moved forward.
I got all that and got home as cheaply as I came. Some Guatemalan guy had bought a DC-6 from the defunct Panagra, and for $99 we crept northward at 260 miles an hour. I got to see Aconcagua and Christ of the Andes, and best of all, I had made up for that unfortunate Gate 1 single supplement charge.
From California, hasta luego, compañeros!
