Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

Outside our room and down at the deck just above the waterlines, refueling is again underway. The promenade deck in front of our room and for about a hundred feet toward the stern of the ship has red cloth barriers over it, preventing other passengers from getting close to the refueling. We, however, can just open our door and go see. Which we did. Then, being the good northern European adults we are we turned around and came back inside. After all.

Way back in Santa Marta, after paying for our lunch at a bayside restaurant, I turned to go next door and follow Kate into the souvenir shop. When I put my foot out, only open air was available. There was a step, in the same white tile as the floor, and I didn’t notice it.

At the time I was proud of my ability to react quickly, turning back and onto the upper floor where my other foot already resided.

However. In so doing I wrenched my back. That’s how I got the foot back on the same surface as my other one, whipping my back around while my planted foot remained steady.

Since that afternoon, our first port in South America and our first one of this trip, I’ve had a sore back. It’s gone up and down in inflammation, mostly background noise, but today I torqued it again. This time I can’t move easily, even with some significant pain meds Kate has along. That means that, though Buenos Aires is within walking distance, I can’t walk the distance. So. No wandering around here, which I had very much wanted to do. Mark O. gave me a neighborhood, San Telmo, and it sounds wonderful. Maybe next circumnavigation of South America.

As Evita said, don’t cry for me, Argentina.

Tomorrow we head out onto to the pampas by bus so I’ll see some of it on the way there. Also, we’re here overnight again tomorrow night, so perhaps I’ll have a shot then. Gauchos and boleros.

Even so, the travel malaise I spoke about in recent blogs has abated and I’m eager to get outside.

We watched cormorants or grebes today, flying between our ship and the Log-In Pantanal, a cargo ship being loaded just across the way. These birds are fish eaters, with the ability, like loons, to turn and suddenly disappear under the water. When one comes up with a silvery, squiggly catch, the race is on to get it eaten. The others flock to the successful bird, flail around, trying to knock the fish out and eat it themselves. In one scrum I watched the fish passed among five different birds until one of them got that long neck pointed skyward and let the fish slide in.

We are in shirt sleeve weather here, perhaps 80-82 and sunny, a change from the cloudy jacket weather of the Chilean fjords and Ushuaia.

Got good news today. We discovered that our checked bags going home have a 70 pound weight limit. That means we should be able to check bags without penalties and carry our fragile treasures on board.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

34 degrees 43 minutes S 57 degrees 48 minutes W course 300 WNW Rio de Plata estuary

Threw out my back this morning. Gonna curb sightseeing here. Damn.

Our journey up the Rio de Plata to Buenos Aires moves forward at 12 knots, a stately pace, occasioned in part at least depth, I’m sure, and other traffic.

A cargo ship of some kind just passed us headed east toward the Atlantic. It had storage containers of a kind I saw in Ushuaia and couldn’t suss out. They were flat, about 2.5 feet deep and maybe 30×30, made of metal.

The water in the estuary is no longer ocean blue, but top soil brown. Rivers have many functions, but one of them deposits wind blown and erosion carried soil out first to deltas and then to sea.

It made me wonder if a time will come when we mine estuary bottoms and the fanned out oceanic streams of soil to replenish our ruined agricultural lands. A problem with that, of course, lies in the concentration of pesticides, fertilizers and toxic metals held in the soil. In the great fan of soil in the Gulf of Mexico, carried down by the Mississippi, the same phenomenon has created a great dead zone that no longer supports either plant or animal.

Today we return to Latin America though I learned last night from Table 31 dining partner Jerry that Argentina has a largely Italian heritage population, something in the range of 50%. Why not speak Italian?

The law of first impact. That’s why. This law of immigration studies says the first ethnic communities to settle (or seize) a new land have a disproportionate effect on later culture. This explains why Minnesota seems to have a largely Scandinavian heritage when in fact the dominant country of origin is Germany.

Caveat. We’ve seen port cities and then through a glass darkly. Still. The cultures of Latin America, at least the dominant European influenced cultures, those with Spanish or Portuguese first impact, seem thin to me. That is, the distinctions among them so far seem minor, the cultural equivalent of dialects, not different languages.

Also, the histories seem, as the United States must seem to Europeans, Asians and Africans, shallow. Long ago historical events happen in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, like the coming of the Conquistadors and the gradual settlement of South America by Spain and Portugal.

In the Andes or in the jungle there are cultures with deep histories, hundreds and thousands of years stretching away from the present, but this immersion in coastal South America has given me no opportunity to experience them.

From the top of our Arctic head to the tip of our Tierra del Fuegan toes, the dominant political cultures of the Americas are new. We are, in that sense, still very much the New World. Of course, for thousands of years there have been indigenous people here though even they crossed over from Asia.

Jumped up nouveau riche. Johnny come latelies to the human sport of culture creation.

The rise of China has put forward a civilization that is the exact opposite. It has known only internal struggle and change for most of the last 5,000 years and even has a dominant ethnic group, the Han, who have been present and in power, again, for much of those 5,000 years.

This means that the world will now have a hegemon as much civilization as state (one analyst calls China a civilization-state) and a second hegemon barely 400 years old, one with no dominant ethnic group and a changing, swirling ethnic mix. As they say, interesting times.