Coffee and Mate

Salta, NW Argentina, home of the empanada. Empanadas are really good, baked crust filled with cheese or spicy meat filling or any number of other combinations. They are served with a variety of sauces. They are delicious the first time and the third time and the fifth time but all that is over.



Plotnik doesn't want any more empanadas. No more rolls either. Every meal starts with rolls. Nor steak. All the hype about Argentinian beef appears to be just that. It's no tastier than American beef and a LOT tougher. These cows must do pilates. They're tight and wiry. Their meat looks delicious but chews like iron ore.

So let's talk about coffee and mate.

COFFEE AND MATE

Coffee! Cafe con leche! The real deal, as good as the Tropical, made behind the bar of the breakfast room at the Hotel Belgrano in Perito Moreno by the same pudgy Señor from Monday night, when the 8am bus from El Calafate finally rolled into town at 10:30pm. Delicious, invigorating, intoxicating, purifying, sense-awakening coffee -- you can see it has been awhile since Plot and Duck have had a real cup.

And remember, they brought their own! A pound of Martha Brothers French Roast, ground for espresso, and paper filters and a plastic filter holder, all of which have been a basic pain in the rear to lug around because the filter cup doesn't really fit in the suitcase and it jams up the backpack.

But even with your own coffee, you need to find hot water, which isn't too hard, and while you can't find half and half you can find hot milk in carafes in the breakfast areas of most hostels, and that will do, as long as you have enough time to sit around, brew it, drink it and savor it.

But Plot and Duck never have enough time in the morning. They're catching a bus to some town or waiting for a minivan to pick them up to take them to a glacier or a national park or a waterfall, or hurrying to get to the museum so they can see it before everything closes down for the afternoon siesta.

Most stores in Argentina appear to be open from 8 to 1, and again from 5 to 9, but Plot and Duck always seem to be arriving when everyone's asleep. If the shop keepers are not asleep at noon they want to be and you can't get anyone's attention. It's really hot most places during the day, especially up here in Salta, and the owner of the shop didn't eat his enormous steak dinner the previous night until eleven pm so everyone needs a nap, whether they close down their shops or not.



But back to coffee. The pudgy señor makes it in an espresso machine and the sleepy waitress in the little brown and white uniform brings it and Plot takes one sip and looks up at Ducknik with love in his eyes. She takes her own sip and a huge smile crosses her face. "Ai, chihuahua, Pata, cafe. El licor de los dioses. Mmmmmmm."

Yes, that nectar of the Gods will make anyone's day.

Contrast this to late the next afternoon, in real time, but a hundred years in perceived time. Perito Moreno, where the good coffee is, is a typical small, corrupt Latin American town in the middle of nowhere but still the biggest thing for miles in any direction, so the military owns it and the local government parcels it out. You stop at the military post on the way in and the military post on the way out. Perito Moreno is the new world, circa 1970.

But once you leave Perito Moreno you leave everything behind, including people. The small cinder block house out in the bush where Tiburcio Sayhuehue (Sigh-WAY-way) lives is the old world, the very, very old world. It might be 1850.



Tiburcio is a descendent of the Tehuelches, who used to own this place, for a thousand years or so, before the Argentines put a bounty on the heads of men, women and children, hunted them all down and eliminated them, afterwards offering all their ancient land to Europeans to settle.

(This is harsh stuff. All you nation builders out there, remember how our nations became so powerful. There were others here before us and we brushed them away without a second glance.)

Anyhow Tiburcio Sayhuehue is a gaucho so he is never home during the day, being instead out somewhere on the estancia tending horses or herding cattle or building a fence, but Bruno, the Plotniks' thirty year old guide for the past two days, who knows everything there is to know about every plant, every animal, every bug and every custom in this part of the country, decided that the two Californians needed to accompany him to Tiburcio's house to drink mate.

This was another way to stretch out the fine day the three had had down at the Alero de Charcamarta, where there are many ancient paintings as well as a hike through a canyon as pretty as any Plot has ever seen.



You get to the bottom of that gulch and you walk right up to and can touch the work of artsts who lived from 10,000 to 2,000 years ago. 10,000 years ago!



And it's right there, painted all over the walls of the alero, which is an enormous rock overhang by the side of a river. The painted hands are like some kind of sacred graffiti, and not only hands but animals, suns, full moons, guanacos giving birth. There's even one small cave next to a larger cave that looks like it was set aside for kids -- tiny hands, painted low on the walls.



On the trail you step around guanaco poop and then see puma poop. Everything about a puma is treacherous, even his poop. You can figure what probably happened to that guanaco.

Afterwards, in the afternoon, on the pampa, you drink mate. Mate is an herb that grows everywhere and is as treasured by Argentinians as tea by the Brits or coffee by the Plotniks. It's not even the taste -- it's the procedure.

On the bus from Calafate, Plot watched the three young reggae-listening bus drivers, who took turns of a few hours each behind the wheel manipulating that evil Route 40, as they passed each other cups of mate, that they filled from a thermos of hot water and drank out of a mate with a bombilla.

Yes, it's confusing, but mate (MAH-tay) is the name of the herb they drink, and it's also the name of the little gourd they drink it out of, packed with the herb, using the metal straw, or bombilla (Bom-BEE-sha) (Argentine pronunciation). The way it goes is the first person gets the idea to have mate, fixes it, pours the hot water in and hands it to the second person. The second person drinks and hands it back to the first person who now re-fills it with hot water and hands it to the third person. It's like passing a joint around, except it tastes so much worse.

Picture Plot and Duck in Tiburcio's front room, or only room, not sure, the floor has been covered many years ago with old fashioned tiles but these tiles have been desecrated by a few or perhaps all of Tiburcio's ten dogs. Bruno knows the names of each of these dogs, and who is who's mother and whose father was the father of whose mother, and when the dogs see Bruno and Plot and Duck drive up in the pickup truck they run through the opening or over the top of Tiburcio's fence, as fast as they can, so they can jump up, stick their paws on everyone's chest and try to lick off their nose.



There are bloodhounds and half bloodhounds and kind of shepherds and kind of beagles and kind of God knows what else, and some are tied up and some are running around in crazy circles, and all have relatively recently eaten parts of animals with large bones and those bones are lying around all over the yard, which is dirt, covered with uncountable piles of dog, horse, cow and guanaco droppings.

To be accurate, guanaco droppings are droppings, little black nothings. Dog, horse and cow, in abundance, are like visible land mines.

"Come on," Bruno says, and Plot thinks "But Tiburcio isn't here, he's out somewhere with the horses." Bruno reads his mind and says "Don't worry, I've got the key."

Right, the key. The door is wide open. If it were closed it would be held closed by a piece of cord tied around a strip of metal. Out here there are no people and nothing to steal. The danger is that dog or puma might walk in and...what, drink mate?

Inside, there is a small wooden bench under the window onto which Plot and Duck sit, a large wooden table in the middle of the room, a wood burning stove, a striped corner chair and a beautiful dark-topped guitar hanging on the wall.



"Uh oh," says Plotnik, as he spies that guitar.

"Go ahead," Bruno says, and Plot now remembers that he told Bruno yesterday that he really misses having a guitar with him.

Plot takes down the guitar, which is heavily used on the first three frets and barely touched on the rest of the fingerboard. This means the person who plays it knows a few very basic chords. The guitar has been played within recent memory because it is only a few twangs out of tune.

Bruno packs Tiburcio's brown gourd mate with herb mate from a huge old red tin box. He pours the hot water from the kettle into the mate filled with mate, and sticks the metal bombilla into it and hands it all to Plotnik to take the first sip.

Plot is accustomed to drinking wine. He inhales deeply to capture the aroma. How shall we say this.



The mate in Tiburcio's bombilla smells like someone who died's feet, combined with the earthy, F U N K Y smell of garlic breath steeping in hot water. But you don't refuse an offer to drink the first cup of mate, so Plotnik sips out of the gourd and hands it back to Bruno with a smile.

"No, tienes que tomarlo todo," says Bruno. You have to drink it all. Plot looks down into the gourd and sees there is still water seething around in there, like a volcano, so he sips from the bombilla until it makes the empty sound, and it tastes really really bad, but Plotnik is cheered because he knows what's coming next.

Bruno takes the gourd, pours more hot water into it and hands it to Ducknik. Her expression, which was smiley-eyes-trying-hard-not-to-laugh when Plotnik was drinking, now falls to the floor.

"Disfrutate," says Plot. Enjoy.



Ducknik takes, literally, the tiniest sip in the history of the straw. She smiles at Bruno, who along with Plotnik, say together to her: "Tu tienes que tomarlo todo."

"That's right, Duckie, the whole shmear," Plot says in English, and then in Spanish "Disfrutate, mi cara."

Bruno says "No te gusta?" You don't like it?

Well, how can you disguise it? It tastes so terribly terribly awful. Plus, you know how Plot thinks about his health, and the fact that he and Duck have not gotten sick this entire trip, and this bombilla has probably been shared by every human, dog and puma to have come into this house. The first guy who painted his hand on the canyon wall down there below might have drunk mate with this bombilla.

(And perhaps now we know why the culture went extinct.)

Duck screws up her courage and downs the gourdful and hands it back to Bruno.

Bruno fills it up and hands it back to Plot.

"NOW WAIT A SECOND HERE," Plot says, in English, and then "Pues, te toca a ti, mi buen amigo." It's your turn, Bunky.

"

I don' theenk you like heem," Bruno says in English and Plot and Duck reassure him that yes, yes they do, and that after such a long hike, and such a beautiful day, it was wonderful to share mate with Bruno, and to feel part of the wonderful gaucho tradition that has filled both Plot and Duck's hearts to overflowing.

To make sure he doesn't have to think about this too much, Plot picks up the guitar and starts singing the song he's been writing in his head since yesterday, in gaucho style, where the chorus has to answer both lines the singer sings.

"La Pata de Patagonia, fue con su ganson," Plot sings, and Bruno puts down the mate and repeats "La Pata de Patagonia, fue con su ganson." This means that the Duck of Patagonia (play on words here) went with her dear husband...

"A conocer la estancia, con su guia el macacon," which means to get to know the Cattle Estancia with their guide, the macaco. This makes Bruno laugh because he just got called a macaco, one of those gaucho words he taught Plot yesterday, which means a bad horse. The gauchos have at least as many words for bad horse as the eskimos do for ice.

After the song is over, Bruno screws up his courage and says: "En serio, el mate sale muy malo." This means the mate sucked. A truer sentence was never spoken.

The dogs go nuts once again when Plot and Duck and Bruno come out of the house, and get back in the truck, and head down the little dirt path towards the hills, and the oasis, and the River of Faces, past all the guanaco feeding on the hillside with the big chief, the sentinel standing guard, off by himself fifty yards away.



Then up a few more hills and down the next, and there's the white and green estancia down in the valley where they are already roasting the baby sheep for tonight's big asado.