I'm a Gaucha!

The 6 hour bus ride from El Calafatte was real boodiful. Stamped out of Argey and into Chile (yey another badly applied stamp!) in desolate border towns surrounded by rolling scrubby hills and dark lakes. Every once in a while in Chile the driver honked his horn to alert what looked like dopey Llamas (but may also be Guanacos, the local equivalent) and large birds of prey, sunning themselves on the toasty tarmac.

Eventually the bus heads down a deserty highway with the mighty Torres Del Pine mountain range spiking the background to our right. A grand set of dark granite towers piecing the clouds. This national park is the main reason folk visit Puerto Natales. Although watching dawn turn the towers a firey red was pretty much in my top three things to see in the American Subcontinent, 'logistical complications' (read Argey monkeys cocking up my plans) left me with only two half days before the departure of the Navimag ferry I'm booked aboard.

Dropped by the Church in Puerto Natales, Val, myself and James, a new addition Brit fellow with a geetar and a plum accent, make our way downtown to the recommended Erratic Rock hostel. We plod on down trying to figure out how this new currency works (still Pesos, but everything is now in thousands) and roll up at the ER to find an enthused yank inform us they're unfortunately rammed. But he sends us on up the road to a 'cute' place called 'Alma Gaucha', run by a cowboy mate called Johnny Callaghan. This should be interesting.

Outside an innocuous looking corrugated metal house stood the Alma Gaucha sign. Johnny answers and lets us in, a rotund Chilean donning a beret, cowboy booitz and sporting an impressive moustache - the archetypal 'Gaucho' (the name for South American cowboys). It's common practice for Gauchos and wannabes to rename themselves with something more fitting to their cowboy status. Their mothers may call them Sanchez, Julio and Carlos but their boys call them Johnny Callaghan, Tom Wayne and Wild Bill Westford. All these names sound better if you slur them in Texan drawl. Puerto Natales has loads of 'em knocking about, and I bet there's a Clint in town.

The walls inside this mainly one window lit establishment are dressed in a definite 'Gaucho' theme. Saddles, ponchos, lassos stirrups, Marlborough posters and random strips of leather. A tin shed in the corner houses the kitchen area, next to portable a gas heater and a long heavy wooden table set with doilies and a carved wooden duck. Four quid a night. Done. We fill our mismatched floral sheeted empty 4 bed dorm with bags and hit the town for some meat.

Opposite the church again, we wander into an equally bizarre establishment for lunch. A pokey little restaurant that resembled the bastard child of a Victorian dining room mating with a wild west ranch, with records & covers nailed up all over the walls. A record called 'Nasty Sex' sits on a gramophone ready to spin. But instead they have a badly compiled 80s and 90s megaamix playing, dropping no more than 20 seconds of each 'hit'. Michael Jackson, Peter Gabriel, Wham, Queen, Madonna, Hot Chocolate. A veritable overdose of 80s pop. A short fellow in a tiny bow tie brings us 3 hits of the local Austral beer. An old ornate standalone cast-iron stoves warms a blackened kettle and its immediate area in the corner.

Over tortillas and steaks con fritas we find out Jimbo's been cheffing a couple of months at a Gaucho restaurant and hotel in the back of beyond down the end of some Argey dirt road. He found a cheffing position on the net somehow and pretended he had experience ('I've worked in a restaurant... just as a waiter') and with his GCSE Spanish he jumped aboard, armed only with a good knife. From what I can gather he spent the next 3 months learning how to kill and carve up animals for Gaucho consumption. His Spanish is mint too - though he confesses he speaks kitchen Spanish; which is pretty much a knowledge of different food stuffs, swearing and saying 'Bueno' at the end of every sentence (sometimes twice). He worked long days with only one westerner in town (a dutchy) and spent late evenings chilling with the Gauchos over red wine and coke. When he finally got fired (!) one of the Gauchos hand-made him a knife sheath out of fresh cow hide.

Sounds cool eh readers? An authentic travel experience. That ain't in the Lonely Planet. Though to keep his head straight he had a Mac iBook full of music & movies. He kindly transferred a full series of Family Guy, 7 hours of the latest season of 24, Anchorman & The Big Lebowski all onto my 80gig media player gadget. Looks like I ain't gonna be the most sociable fella on the Navimag ferry.

That night the Valerie, Jim & myself make our own chorizo and mozzarella pizzas and park a few bottle of Chilean vino tinto over some suspect Argey card games and a few too many Marlborough reds (or 'Cowboy Killers' as James calls em). Rumours spread around the hostel campfire was that ol' Johnny C has never in fact ridden a horse, and that he's actually a 'Pseudo-Gaucho' (GASP)!!

Happy days.


Wild Barn