tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26354605260253847822026-04-09T07:40:21.488-07:00The Best of Southernmost South AmericaWayne Bernhardsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03773247959700690756noreply@blogger.comBlogger931125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2635460526025384782.post-51242161615623271552026-03-24T19:48:00.000-07:002026-03-24T19:48:56.838-07:00

Today is the 50th anniversary of Argentina’s most brutal military dictatorship ever but, in the beginning, it was a bloodless displacement of President Isabel Martínez de Perón, widow of the famous caudillo Juan Domingo Perón. It soon devolved, though, into a bloodbath of some 30,000 Argentines—among them María Eugenía Sanllorenti de Massolo, my brother-in-law’s first wife.   

Wayne Bernhardsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03773247959700690756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2635460526025384782.post-26809291174599245372026-02-08T17:10:00.000-08:002026-02-10T17:40:22.813-08:00

 I have always been a baseball fan and, in the course of my guidebook-writing career in the Southern Cone countries, I would often say that I left home when the World Series ended and returned for Opening Day. This wasn’t quite literally true, but it did mean that I had something to occupy my time in the Northern Hemisphere when nothing was happening on the 

Wayne Bernhardsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03773247959700690756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2635460526025384782.post-33720281780802642472022-12-22T13:49:00.000-08:002022-12-22T13:49:42.288-08:00

Since arriving in Chile, I’ve had four occasions to change money—thrice at ATMs and once over the counter at a casa de cambio (exchange house). Normally in Chile I use an ATM but, in the latter case, I had to pay my mechanic for auto repair that exceeded the Ch$200,000 (about US$225) withdrawal limit for a single transaction.A casa de cambio in Pucón, ChileA BancoEstado ATM (also in

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At very long last, this past Monday, I arrived back in Chile for the first time since March of 2020, when I abruptly flew home to California as the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic became obvious. I was originally to arrive on the previous Saturday but, late that week, LATAM suddenly canceled my nonstop Friday flight from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX)

Wayne Bernhardsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03773247959700690756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2635460526025384782.post-67323531576478187222022-12-05T11:56:00.000-08:002022-12-05T11:56:57.722-08:00

Over more than four decades, I’ve visited the city of Ushuaia at least a dozen times—first, in 1979, when Argentina had nearly provoked a potentially ruinous war with Chile over three small islands in the Beagle Channel. At the tip of the South American continent, Tierra del Fuego had long had a reputation as the “uttermost part of the Earth” but, with only

Wayne Bernhardsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03773247959700690756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2635460526025384782.post-44633720415514420002022-06-28T16:08:00.003-07:002022-06-29T09:36:04.081-07:00

When I arrived in Santiago de Chile in late February of 2020, to begin updating Moon Handbooks Patagonia for the upcoming sixth edition, what we now recognize as the COVID pandemic had barely begun and few of us appreciate what was a transformative event it would be. A couple weeks later, after I had crossed into northern Argentine Patagonia, its significance had become

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A few weeks ago, while walking the dog, I rifled through a nearby Little Free Library and stumbled upon an intriguing title by the late Lyn Hamilton, a Toronto-based author of archaeological mysteries. The Moai Murders, as you might guess, is not about the destruction of iconic statues on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), but rather about events at a fictional “Rapa Nui Moai

Wayne Bernhardsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03773247959700690756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2635460526025384782.post-71977599716271465412022-04-22T20:45:00.002-07:002022-04-22T21:54:17.018-07:00

Early last week, anticipating our flight back to California (via Dallas), we rose early and went to the closest location of CentraLab, a private medical testing company in Buenos Aires. To return to the US, being fully vaccinated against COVID-19 is still insufficient to return; it requires either a PCR or an antigen test the day before flying. It’s worth noting that

Wayne Bernhardsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03773247959700690756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2635460526025384782.post-20425007980980020292022-04-11T13:15:00.003-07:002022-04-21T16:56:13.168-07:00

What is a cueva? In Spanish it’s literally a cave and some of them, like the Cueva de las Manos in southern Argentine Patagonia, are major archaeological sites and tourist attractions. But there are caves of a different sort in Buenos Aires and other Argentine cities, and any savvy traveler will get to know them because they are places to change money at an advantageous rate—

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The Plusmar bus line crosses the Pampas from Retiro to Olavarría.After I spent a week adapting to a five-hour time change and recovering from the hangover of perhaps the most miserable flight of my life, my wife arrived in Buenos Aires and, after a couple more days, we took the bus to her hometown of Olavarría for the first family reunion since the pandemic struck.

Wayne Bernhardsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03773247959700690756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2635460526025384782.post-84714093019967923402022-03-09T12:52:00.005-08:002022-03-09T13:28:15.076-08:00

I’m not Catholic—in fact, I’m an atheist—but after completing my first flight in two years, I think I finally understand the concept of Purgatory. Early Sunday morning I started the initial leg of an odyssey that took me from San Francisco to Dallas Fort Worth to Buenos Aires and, except at the very beginning and the very end, it was a disagreeable experience that I felt might

Wayne Bernhardsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03773247959700690756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2635460526025384782.post-10566303443726735802022-02-24T16:20:00.003-08:002022-03-11T09:43:02.417-08:00

In my previous post, I reviewed one of my favorite streaming series with a link to southernmost South America but, while I’ve been unable to travel there (spoiler—I’m scheduled to fly to Buenos Aires on March 6th), I haven’t been purely a video couch potato. I’ve also been reading and, while I love detective stories, I’ve been doing it in a way that has more content than just potboilers.In A

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Since March of 2020, when I fled Argentina and Chile with the onslaught of the COVID-19 virus, I’ve been not quite housebound, but have only managed scattered day trips in the Bay Area and the couple short road trips to California’s Central Coast and the Sonoma/Mendocino County shorelines. Like many others, I’ve spent more time than I might care to admit in front of the TV screen, streaming

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At the end of last month, I wrote that my wife and I had postponed a planned trip to Buenos Aires because of the spread of the Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus there. In addition, our route would have taken us through COVID-friendly Texas and, given the frequency of flight cancellations by American Airlines, it was possible we might have had an unwelcome delay of a day or more in Dallas/Fort

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Recently I dreamt that, having arrived at Buenos Aires’s Aeropuerto Internacional Ministro Pistarini (commonly called “Ezeiza”), I was in a taxi to our apartment in the barrio of Palermo—where my wife and I had been longing to go ever since the pandemic began. En route, though, I realized I’d left the keys at our California home—and then I awoke wondering whether that was a

Wayne Bernhardsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03773247959700690756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2635460526025384782.post-82038212925948078062021-04-27T10:23:00.004-07:002021-04-27T22:44:36.934-07:00

In 1970, Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky released El Topo, a surrealist movie that seemingly created the Acid Western genre and was a Mexican entry for the Oscars (it was filmed in Mexico, but ultimately not nominated). This year, Chilean director Maite Alberdi’s El Agente Topo (The Mole Agent) is most emphatically not a sequel, but this

Wayne Bernhardsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03773247959700690756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2635460526025384782.post-89424939739068010362021-04-15T16:52:00.002-07:002021-04-18T15:01:56.020-07:00

In 1939, as the Spanish Civil War wound down, thousands of refugees fled across the border into France—which then confined tens of thousands in a deplorable detention camp at d'Argelès-sur-Mer. In partial response, poet Pablo Neruda—also a diplomat—chartered the French cargo vessel Winnipeg to carry 2,200 Spanish refugees across the Atlantic and

Wayne Bernhardsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03773247959700690756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2635460526025384782.post-91955495375728754882021-03-19T13:33:00.002-07:002021-03-25T17:48:22.465-07:00

Proof of life?On February 24th, I received my second dose of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine and, two weeks later, I undertook a full-scale grocery mission to Berkeley Bowl West for the first time in a year (my wife—also fully vaccinated now—was doing the shopping in that time, while I had only made occasional brief sorties to a neighborhood grocery). It felt like a milestone, one

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In most years, the Northern Hemisphere winter becomes my Southern Hemisphere summer and, while I’m not a stereotypical summer beachgoer, these short California days get me thinking about the area below the Equator. Sadly, during this pandemic, it’s gotta be virtual, but one option is the cinema. Fortunately, Argentina has one of the Western Hemisphere’s most vibrant film industries, and this has

Wayne Bernhardsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03773247959700690756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2635460526025384782.post-77795471339963616642021-01-29T10:25:00.000-08:002021-01-29T10:25:07.092-08:00

Tuesday afternoon, I received my first dosage of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, and am scheduled for the follow-up in about a month. The vaccination itself was painless but, later that night, my left shoulder started feeling sore and I could not shift positions as I normally would during sleep. In the morning I awoke with a slight headache, but that subsided after a walk with the dog(s) –

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In the early to mid-1980s, when I first visited and then lived in Buenos Aires, it was in the Congreso neighborhood barely two blocks from the national legislature (which was out of service then, as Argentina chafed under a military dictatorship). Still, the area itself retained a certain elegance, with the ponds and fountains of the Plaza de los dos Congresos and architectural

Wayne Bernhardsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03773247959700690756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2635460526025384782.post-45495682479530157322020-12-30T18:45:00.001-08:002020-12-31T09:46:56.688-08:00

In the current months of semi-quarantined torpor I have, like millions of others, spent an inordinate amount of time in front of the tube. Often my tastes run to Scandi-Noir mysteries but, over the past week, we discovered a worthwhile alternative that takes me back to Buenos Aires and elsewhere in Latin America with Rompan Todo (Break It All), a six-part documentary on rock

Wayne Bernhardsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03773247959700690756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2635460526025384782.post-667777272814259082020-12-13T17:09:00.001-08:002020-12-13T17:09:26.847-08:00

In mid-2019, Chileans and many foreigners flocked to the coastline, about 500 km north of Santiago, to see a major solar eclipse—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for most people. Tomorrow, though, there’s yet another chance, but this year’s event has complications for eclipse-chasers in Argentine Patagonia or southern mainland Chile, the path on which the moon will blot out the sun for

Wayne Bernhardsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03773247959700690756noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2635460526025384782.post-26391901684219891952020-11-27T19:43:00.002-08:002020-11-28T08:00:28.062-08:00

In the early 1990s, I finished my original guidebook to Argentina for a publisher whose name I will decline to mention here. Shortly thereafter, the same publisher offered me a contract to update their existing guidebook to Chile, which I accepted, and my career as a guidebook writer seemed like destiny.While those two assignments might sound comparable or almost identical, there were significant

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In March, after the COVID pandemic drove me back to California, I put aside thoughts of returning to Argentina and Chile for the foreseeable future. It didn’t help, of course, that my passport expired in September and, amidst evidence that the US Government was slow-walking renewals, I couldn’t even find the document in question—making its renewal a moot point. Somehow, in the process of

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