It's Not All Blueberry Pie

Here it is Wednesday. This morning the phone rang early and a voice started off in English: "ehh, Meester, ehh, Plot-eh-neek?"

There are five hours difference between Buenos Aires and Saint Plotniko and when you send queries by email they never know in which part of America you live.

It was Argentine Airways. When Plotnik responded in Spanish "Si, soy yo," he knew he had made a mistake.

Now she went back to Spanish and began firing numbers very rapidly.

Numbers are the hardest part for anyone in any foreign language. For some reason we are used to our names for our numbers, and we learned them just about before anything else. When we hear somebody else's names for the same numbers it takes a few split seconds to compute, and when there are ten or fifteen numbers that's ten or fifteen split seconds which means after a while you are several numbers behind. On the phone it takes supreme concentration for Plottie to keep writing down the correct numbers.

"Cuarentasietecientotreintiocho" is a lot of sounds for 47138.

So he never knows whether he wrote it down right or not. This morning Plotnik wrote down a whole series of numbers and he and Duck will know how he did when they get to Comodoro Rivadavia, a small town on the Atlantic Coast 'way 'way down in Southern Argentina, and attempt to board their 7am flight for Buenos Aires, where they'll transfer, if all goes well, to their 11am flight to Salta. Or not.

He just got off the phone with the advice nurse at the Kaiser Travel Medicine Department, one of Plotnik's favorite departments, because he only calls them when he's about to go someplace cool.

In Salta, the nice advice nurse said, there is malaria in outlying regions, and dengue fever too, but Kaiser doesn't have much to say about dengue fever because there is no vaccine for it. Malaria (mosquitos who bite at night) they can deal with, but dengue (mosquitoes who bite during the day) is somebody else's department. Actually, it's nobody else's department. You've just got to be careful and spray your clothes with insecticide. Fun, eh?

Also this morning Plotnik got an email attachment from Chalten Travel, the company who deals with bus trips up and down Argentina's Route 40. Plotnik must fill out the form, sign it, scan it and email it back. Southern South America seems every bit as web connected as we are, but both Chile and Argentina have severe restrictions on currency (receiving deposits for hostels, airline tickets, excursions etc...) from out of the country. It sounds like the tourist infrastructure is 2010 but the financial sector is stuck somewhere in the 1980s.

Which is around the time both countries were torturing and disappearing their own people, each country's military eagerly participating in their own unique Dirty Wars. There is a square in Buenos Aires where each week mothers of children who disappeared all through the 1970s, 80s and 90s still gather to protest and seek information about their kids.

Plot and Duck will go there. And they'll go to the Victor Jara memorial in Santiago, Chile. Victor Jara was a dissenter and folk singer whose songs are today well known by millions of people. He was murdered in 1973.

It's not all blueberry pie and ice cream, is it.