Gauchos And Cannibals

An undisturbed night parked at the beach, followed by a walk on said beach…

…mostly to ourselves on a Tuesday morning, and then we set off for cold town Montevideo.  

It seemed late in the day 10:30 to be precise, for rush hour but traffic acted like all the drivers drive like their hair was on fire. The streets were patched to death even in the nice neighborhoods so GANNET2 bounced like pogo stick.

We took the coast road twenty minutes back into town under a pale winter sun. Note the sign that says “No Parking” in the right lane. Uruguay may be expensive but it’s still Latin America:

I usually drive in the left lane to avoid badly parked cars but in Montevideo the left lane was a race track so I found myself weaving to avoid stopped cars.

It was a great start to the day. We drove into the city into Old Town to check out a couple of museums.

We passed through a high class neighborhood near the waterfront:

Old town on the peninsula across town is a grid of narrow streets turned into canyons by relatively tall buildings.

And then things got tight. I’m not intimidated by narrow streets in the Promaster. Front wheel drive gives a tight turning circle and pretty good at judging widths. Layne gets stressed like here:

Which descended into a chicane with two steel posts designed to keep commercial vehicles out. Faced with a reverse up a city block, not hard to do unless you have two cars behind you, I got out and eyeballed it. I can do this I said out loud to my swooning partner. 

I couldn’t actually see the posts from the driver’s seat but I was pretty sure…fully inches to spare. Next problem: parking 21 foot 9400 pound behemoth in a city that doesn’t have enough parking and as usual keeps the garages too low for an 8 foot 9 inch tall tank. We drove around a bit ready to give up and figure something out. 

We drive around a bit looking for a solution and finding none. I’d have done better on my old Vespa 200:

But we deployed a tactic we used to use looking for parking in San Francisco: we stopped worrying about it and hey presto! A car pulled out right in front of us and opened up a space right next to a garage so we could fit in easily with room to spare. Cars came out under the E (estacionamento-parking) and it was a one way street so we weren’t blocking sight lines. It was perfect. 

And the first museum was a three minute walk away while the other one was a ten minute walk from here. The first order of business was to walk Rusty and I’m

pleased to say he is doing well. His hind legs are weak even with glucosamine but he’s alert and enjoying this walks and we all are sleeping soundly at night like we never did in the cottage. A cannon stuck in the sidewalk for some reason: 

We left him snoring on his bed on our bed:

First stop the former bank of Uruguay now housing the cowboy museum courtesy of Banco Republica Foundation with free admission.

We skipped the coin collection but the story of the gauchos - cowboys- was beautifully laid out. Some of the displays were written poetic Spanish that required a translation app. 

Layne figured out how to take a screen shot a technique that escaped me but take my word for it: the nomads of the open plains (called pampas in Argentina) are as mythically romanticized as are cowboys in the US. 

Gauchos are described not as an ethnic group but as a social group living nomadically on the margins of society. 

The gauchos are course riding ranch hands today found in Argentina Uruguay and southern Brazil. In the past they more akin to gypsies living mobile lives not unlike weirdos driving around in Promasters. 

In the exhibits there was much less of the guns and more of the lifestyle, they lived with leather fur instance, rawhide lack nails  or wire they used the one material they had. They built their homes out of hides stretched over wattle walls tied together with rawhide strips. They wore leather and rode horses and lived in family and tribal groupings:

And they traveled in formations familiar to admirers of Remington’s art: 

Horses: 

More horses:

Did I mention they live and love horses?

You get the point. 

But they used ropes too, lassos you might be familiar with but bolos are their speciality down south: 

Hold the rope handle and whirl the three balls round your head. Upon launch they fly at the legs of the animal they want to bring down and the balls wrap the rope and down the calf or the man goes. 

It’s a fun exhibit in an extraordinary setting, the former bank.

And out front the inevitable  homage to the independence hero Jose Artigas:

So those are the gauchos and up next the cannibals. The Museum of the Andes 1972 was a ten minute walk away. 

I ran a test on Bruce last night and he had no idea what I was talking about so I’m guessing I need to give some background about what happened when an aircraft crashed at 12,150 feet on October 13  1972. 16 people survived 72 days trapped on the mountainside with no food no proper clothing and no proper source of drinking water. I was a boy in an English boarding school when the book came out and I couldn’t put it down. They ate each other! And they had a camera. And here it is the museum, the actual camera, an Olympus Pen F with a 30 mm F2.8 lens, for the record. 

You can understand as a teenager the idea of people slicing the fatty parts of their friends bodies and grilling them in the sun to survive was horrific appalling and fascinating. At my age I’m just grateful now I’ve never faced such appalling decisions but the story has stayed with me all my life. This coat was given to one of the Uruguayan university students because it was barely Spring and it was going yo be cold in Chile where they were going to play rugby.

He gave it to an injured survivor to try to stay warm in minus 25c, minus 13 Fahrenheit nighttime temperatures. The injured passenger died and he took the coat back and eventually came back to the world wearing it. And here it is. From the internet:

It’s a story worth reading or if like most people you prefer moving pictures there are films on the story called Alive! Two of the survivors token days to struggle out of the valley where the plane crashed and got down below the snow line to get help. They made sleeping bags from airplane insulation to keep them alive as they hiked out. These are the actual bags:

72 days they spent at the crash site before helicopters came to rescue them.

The survivors suffered intense thirst as they had no water and snow is a very poor source of water surprisingly. They tried to create a still to melt snow in the sun: 

Well worth the visit for a nerd like me. It put me in mind of visiting Devil’s Island in French Guyana last year.  

I read the classics when I was a schoolboy but in my own time I was gasping at the adventures, Helter Skelter, the story of Charles Manson, and of course Papillon, the convict locked away in Guyana. And the incredible survival story of the Uruguayan rugby players.Ive been over the Andes several times now and I couldn’t have survived the cold and privations.

On the left is Jörg Thomsen the creator of the museum with two of his employees. In the end the story of cannibalism is overshadowed by the ability of those young students to work together to survive, they did what they had to do and even the relatives of the dead have expressed their support for their bravery in doing what they had to do. It’s the ultimate taboo but aside from the cheap thrill the struggle to live in impossible conditions is the real story here. Ordinary people doing the impossible. Much harder than driving around in a van or I dare say living as a Gaucho.