As an aspiring travel writer yet unenthusiastic traveler, I'd like to use this opportunity to take the travel out of travel-writing once and for all.
I've always wanted to be a travel writer but haven't really been keen on all the travel it entails. All that luggage and diarrhea and attempts to communicate with people who can't understand a word you're saying while everyone steals your wallet and tries to sell you underage hookers is all just a little bit annoying. Plus there's always some hand gesture that you apparently should never make, something that means "Hi!" where you're from but which always means something like "Your mother loves donkeys" wherever it is you're traveling in. Also, wherever you go, people there HATE YOU. It's true, they do. They hate your smug little trekking shoes and your backpack and your sheepish friendly smile and your pathetic attempt to say "thank you" in their language and all the money you obviously have so you can just walk among them going "Wow, that's an amazing blehblehbleh" or "Gee, I never knew that about myehmyehmyeh".
But I'm here to tell you the good news: you need not travel to be a travel writer! You can do just as well as a travel writer by simply jumping to unfounded conclusions on what a place is like. Plus, in case you need to pepper your piece with facts, keep in mind that everybody has been everywhere and written about everything already. That means there's an enormous junk pile of travel writing littering the internet like an ocean full of digital flotsam, most of it churned out as page filler for glamorized advertising floats like Travel + Leisure, and it's all there waiting to be recycled and regurgitated into yet another travel article, one that still conveys a sense of wide-eyed wonder that great travel writing can do, but without necessitating all that unsavory "adventurous" (read "frustrating") traveling by you beforehand. Anyway, I was heartened by this idea of travel writing without all the travel, so I decided to write my own travel piece on... I don't know, I'll pick... Argentina? Sure, Argentina it is. Now, mind you, I've never been to Argentina, but I think you'll find it's all here in my travel piece on Argentina. Let the adventure begin!
When my plane hypothetically flew into Buenos Aires, the first thing that would've struck me was perhaps the majestic ring of snow-capped peaks that may possibly embrace this city built on what might probably be the Rio Argentino delta? The presumably "golden" (though probably actually brown) waters of the Argentino or whatever it's called may well flow through these mountains that I will assume are there, standing like an antipodean Olympus towering over the horizon like a race of guardian deities who... etc. etc. It was these mountains (the Andes?) that may have lent their name to Buenos Aires, which a cursory search of an online Spanish-English dictionary tells me means "good air." I assume the Spaniards had a sense of humor because I'm pretty sure Buenos Aires must be a smoggy polluted city, since all cities are (except maybe Zurich or something). Anyway, looking down from my hair-smudged airplane window on this fantastic sight that I guess would've stretched out below me while eating my complementary pretzels (let's face it, I'm probably traveling on a budget airline), I was seized by a sense of adventure and longing. I wanted to get out there (I mean after the plane lands), to discover this place, these people, their language, their customs, and explore every part of what I can only assume there is to explore in Argentina, judging from this atlas I have on my lap as I write this.
And so it began, my Argentinian adventure. But first I had to turn down the TV volume, because I couldn't concentrate with my girlfriend watching Project Runway next to me. She told me that I could fuck off and write somewhere else because she can't very well pick up the TV and go to the bedroom, could she? And so I did! I moved from the couch next to her, grabbed my bag of spicy corn Doritos, and made my way to the bedroom to flop down on the bed, face first, as I stretched a little and then zoned out for about ten minutes staring at the ceiling, before I took a sip of my Sprite and resumed my... Argentinian adventure!
Buenos Aires is a city of anywhere between at least probably about something like one million to, I don't know, ten million people? One in so-many people in Argentina live in Buenos Aires, which may also known as "the rooftop of the world" I'm guessing, although that might be the Himalayas or maybe Bolivia? It's a city where, probably in some way, tradition meets modernity and East meets West somehow, though I'm not really sure how, and I may just be saying that because I'm Turkish and everything I've ever read about Turkey says that, so all that East-meets-West drivel is ingrained in my brain and I can't help but spew it out when writing inane travel pieces. Anyway, so many different cultures will have blended for [centuries?] to produce modern day Argentina: the local Indian tribes which may or may not have been called something like Quataguaras and Pantamaribotoinos (before all getting wiped out by smallpox and slavery), the Spanish Conquistadores (why not just call them Spanish Conquestors? And while we're at it, why not call quesadillas cheesadillos?), colonial Spain, and something about the Pampas where gauchos roam free herding cows with ponchos (I mean the gauchos wear the ponchos, not the cows... I also don't mean gauchos wear cows, I mean... never mind).
Buenos Aires is a bustling city that lives 24 hours, as most big cities are described as doing in most travel articles and documentaries, so I'm just gonna go with that. There seem like there would be wide boulevards, and apparently a big library in which their great national writer Jorge Luis Borges (aka Georgie Borgy) was the director, and also Evita, tango, Maradona and football, but not necessarily in that order. Among the most beautiful parts of the city is the El this-o or La that-a district where quaint colorful wooden houses probably offer great photo-ops as adorable old people dressed in outdated suits and hats tango on the street and children play football in the background, offering iconic images of Latin American contrast where young and old, modernity and tradition meet (again) in the same photo frames, etc.Inset: tango or flamenco or something
Football has a big place in Argentina, which boasts Maradona who won the World Cup (by scoring a goal with his hand which is technically cheating but he got away with it), and also Lionel Messi, who plays for Barcelona. But the big football rivalry is between two of Buenos Aires's biggest teams: Los Blancos and Los Negros, or whatever, teams that are the opposite of each other, basically. Naturally the rival supporters pretend like they hate each other and declare they are sworn enemies, because deep down they must all know that without each other everyone's lives would suddenly seem meaningless upon the realization that they've all just been wasting their time obsessing over grown men kicking balls around a field. Ah, my Google search says the big rival teams are River Plate and Boca Juniors... but I assume Boca is the better team if they feel like they can compete with River Plate with just their junior team. Just sayin.
Buenos Aires has cafes, restaurants, bistros, shops, hotels, hospitals, stadiums, police stations, fire stations, grocery stores, supermarkets, street lamps, roads, lakes (maybe), parks, roads, bridges, airports, sewage pipes... it's a city that has practically everything cities have. And the food is probably good. Mostly meat, as I found out when I once went to an Argentinian restaurant at a nearby strip mall. There are probably trendy quirky places too that don't just serve food but also probably have tango or something, or do some kind of cool mime show while you eat blindfolded with your hands, making it the latest in culinary experiences or what have you, but you can read about those in Monocle or something.
After seeing (Googling) all the sights in Buenos Aires, including the Museo Nacional (National Museum, duh), the parliament or presidential palace which are usually pretty buildings, a cathedral, because there's got to be a cathedral, and some famous tall monuments and statues dedicated to great Argentinians like Evita or Maradona, or Evita's husband (something Allende?), or whoever founded the country, like Martino Jose Vascopulpos Capanegro Villa De La Jorges, who probably fought some kind of war of independence against the Spanish (and then basically created a creole Spanish government that was probably just as oppressive, racist, and oligarchic as the one preceding it, but which could at least now keep all the taxes for itself instead of handing it all over to some Spanish king who's probably an inbred German anyway).
Inset: Diego MaradonaAnyway, after seeing all those sights, I went to Patagonia, a land of wide windswept plains and rolling hills full of those aforementioned gauchos roaming around and herding cattle, living a life of freedom on those wide desolate expanses where I may have daydreamed in the car which I imagined I might be driving southward to the end of the world. And to add something mildly sensational here: "to the south of me was Antarctica!" Um... I'm just going to lie and say I met some gauchos and joined them around a campfire where I wore a poncho and ate sausages and beans and they sang gaucho songs on their guitars and I rode one of their horses as the sun set, and then when I left we were friends for life, and would I ever see them again? and isn't the universe so big? and aren't we so small? and where does the time go? and is there even "time"? etc., superficially profound blathering inserted here that conveys all those sentiments. Moving on.
My finger took me to the southernmost tip of Argentina on the atlas: Tierra Del Fuego! There's that hilarious Spanish sense of humor again, they named a place full of glaciers and penguins "Land of Fire." So here I was at the southernmost tip of the Americas, you couldn't get more south, this was as south as south goes for south America. That's about it. The penguins were probably cute.
Moving back up north a bit, I took a boat or a plane and went to the Falkland Islands, known by a different name in Argentina, Los Islos Falklandos or something like that. They are British, which would explain the giant "U.K." written all over them in this atlas.
Oh, the Andes, I see, are not really around Buenos Aires, but way to the west by Chile. So scrap that first paragraph of this article, or at least the bits about mountains. Also the river isn't Rio Argentino but Rio Plata. My bad, I should really take the time to look at the atlas more when I'm writing these travel pieces.
And so my journey was at an end. I went through a quaint village where the locals made special local handicrafts and they sang and danced in their own weird way and they had their own stories, myths and legends, like people in villages do. I left feeling a bond with them all, and I would've taken photos of some old people in traditional dress and happy cute little children, and I would've eaten their food (more meat? or maybe beans? seems like villagers would eat beans).
Ok, this time my journey really would be at an end, because eating a whole bag of corn Doritos just gave me stomach cramps, and also I want to continue binge re-watching Breaking Bad on TV. So to end it all, I imagine I would've got on a plane at Buenos Aires Airport, and as I looked back on this magical land of wide plains, mountains, sea, rivers, farmland, people, sky, clouds, streets, buildings, cars, and the sun, I couldn't help but think something like "I'll definitely come back" and "aren't people all really just the same everywhere?" and "we're all brothers and sisters on spaceship earth" and "you already watched three episodes of Project Runway, can I watch some Breaking Bad now please?"
By the way, Argentinian women were SUPER HOT according to Google's "Argentinian women" search results. Seriously.
Attila Pelit is not a writer or editor for any publication whatsoever and he has no significant travel experience to speak of either, which makes him not much of an authority on anything, especially not Argentina. His articles haven't appeared anywhere, and he's a regular contributor to absolutely nothing. He currently resides in Istanbul, Turkey, and quite frankly he doesn't even know much about that place, although he can bullshit his way through somehow.
