Last weekend at Mar de Plata, we casually found the III Gastronomic Festival, which takes place around the same time every year. As soon as we saw the poster sign, we went over there looking for something to eat for lunch, but we found it was rather an exhibit of stands with products, not all of them from Mar del Plata. Among the offered products were cheese, honey, dulce de leche, chocolates, liquors, kitchen equipment, etc. Walking around the place, we found out about some guided tours that were offered for the low price of 6 pesos (US$ 2), and one of them was about visiting places that produced their own beer. Obviously, we signed up for that one.

The tour passed -but didn’t stop- by Los cuencos, a nice bar/restaurant at Roca 1404, a block away from the commercial Guemes street. You can have locally brewed beer there. Since we happened to stop by earlier to eat lunch there, we already knew the place. We chose red beer. It had a quite particular full bodied taste and quite aromatic. Only apt to those who want to experience other flavors. It went good with the food, a nice flounder with echalottes sauce and side vegetables -14 pesos, or 4.5 dollars- and a caprese salad. The beer cost 10 pesos.

The first stop was at the popular Antares brewery, where we could taste the different types of beer they made there. At that time, we tasted Kolsch, a light beer with a fruity taste; Scotch, red beer, one I tasted gladly -but I liked Kaunas’ better, which I will talk about later-; and Porter, black beer. These are the “classic” beers, which sell at 6 pesos (2 dollars) the pint, and 6.50 the 660 cm3 bottle. Then, there was the “special” beers group, which we tried later that same night, when we returned to the brewery.

They are, Cream Stout, quite similar to Guinness -and one I really like-; Honey beer, with a honey aftertaste -honestly, I liked Buenos Aires Buller’s kind better-; Barley Wine, with a higher alcoholic content and with a similar taste to white wine; and last, but not least, my favorite: Imperial Stout, dark beer with a taste close to coffee. Quite delicious, a rich beer without that caramel-like taste Quilmes Stout unfortunately has. The pint of special beer costs 7 pesos (less than 3 dollars), and the 330 cm3 bottles sell at 4 pesos. Luckily, Antares has opened in Buenos Aires now -if nothing funny happened, it opened in Palermo, at Armenia 1447. I’ll stop by for my pint of Imperial Stout. Soon.

The second stop was at Kaunas, a small brewery with an also small production which is distributed in local bars, and also gets bottled and sells. The style is closer to the english kind, much darker. Particularly, I liked the red beer -ok, I’m fond of red beers-, called Nut Brown Ale. Less aromatic than the one at Los Cuencos, easier and quicker to drink, but quite delicious. Highly recommendable. At the brewery, the small bottled beer sold at 3.50 pesos, and the 660cm3 bottles, at 5 pesos (less than 2 dollars). I don’t know if they can be found outside Mar del Plata, and I’d really love to know.

The third and last stop was at Posta del Angel, in Santa Clara del Mar. The place is really nice, with a patagonian look going on. Besides the brewery, there’s also a small bar, crafts store, and other things. We bought a black beer liquor there, which I still haven’t opened yet -and I will comment about it when I do-. We didn’t test much of the beer there, the cups were really tiny, but the red beer seemed really good, although it had less body than Kaunas’. Anyways, I brought a 660 cm3 bottle of red beer home. By the way, Santa Clara del Mar, a place I hadn’t been to before, seemed very quiet and nice. I’d like to spend a few days there in a not so far away future.

Of course, I you visited any of the places mentioned above, or want to mention any other thing about the topic of breweries, you can leave you contribution in the comments area, so that other reads have more information.

Peruvian food in Buenos Aires has been traditionally asociated to a cheap alternative, usually available in neighborhoods such as Abasto, where many peruvians live since the 90’s. To transform this peruvian food into an attractive option for the gourmet market is a complex task, one that implies separating from the “cheap food” imaginarium and fighting the racist prejudices against Peru which are easy to find in Buenos Aires.

In this sense, peruvian food -which, at least in Buenos Aires, consists basically of creole coast and andean dishes, but practically none of the forest region food- starts with a disadvantage facing other culinary traditions. And peruvian food is one of the most attractive and interesting foods of this area of the world, and quite a reason of pride for those who live in Peru.

And to insert itself in the gourmet tradition, peruvian food has to transform itself and adapt to the form plates are served in the haute cuisine tradition. On one side, it has to stop looking like “cheap, popular and aboundant food”; on the other side, adapt its preparation and presentation ways to a haute cuisine tradition.

Do you think this is not happening? In the last number of Luz magazine that comes with Perfil newspaper on sundays (july 3 issue), the peruvian chef Marco Espinoza, owner of Moche restaurant, said about he behavior of the first customers of his restaurant:

“When they realized we had peruvian food, some customers wanted to leave. We offered them not pay for anything if they didn’t like the food. Now, they’re our clients!”

Now, well, it’s important not to exaggerate with a certain purist defense that would say “peruvian food, when adapted to the gourmet market, loses its essence”. First, because the culinary tradition in this country is in fact a product of multiple hybrids with chinese, spanish and other places’ cuisines. So there’s no much place for purism. Second, because within Lima, and not only in Buenos Aires, “cocina novoandina” (nouvelle andean food), a marketing-derived name used to designate the gourmetization of traditional peruvian cuisine, has grown considerably. So, in the end, andean cuisine is separated from the imaginarium of “cheap, popular and aboundant food” and taken to the more expensive restaurants territory.

And here’s another important issue that we could take as a hypothesis: where do prejudices over a culinary tradition meet negative imaginaries on a particular social group? Many people from Lima have little positive preconceptions about everything from the highlands. To what instance does this “novoandina” representation is not trying to eliminate these negative imaginarium about the products that are historically related to the highlands?

I must remark this is just a hypothesis and part of a discussion proposal.

At least in Buenos Aires, the movement to trace a distinction between peruvian food of a more economic background, and a more expensive tradition, begins several years back. The fist step was made by places like Contigo Peru, but now it has more expensive exponents such as Moche (apparently, still doesn’t have its own website) and Cilantro. Note: we’re not talking about highly expensive restaurants on the base of prices, but we’re on a cost level quite above the average supply of peruvian restaurants in Buenos Aires in the 90’s.

I might have left out some restaurants, so you feel free to leave your contributions on the subject in the comments area to cover those historic holes I’ve left.

There are interesting references about the restaurants mentioned here at El Cuerpo de Cristo (spanish), an argentinean wiki about cuisine and culinary issues. Links, spanish only:

Contigo Peru
Cilantro
Moche. There’s also a note about this restaurant in La Nacion newspaper, although it’s pretty light.

A few days ago, Pablo Schweitzer published in the mail list about cultural tourism managed by the people of Naya (spanish only) an interesting message about the problems of tourism and social inequality. We’ve covered the topic several times in this blog, but I thought it was a good opportunity to return to this issue, mostly because Pablo’s text summarizes, in a short space, a series of important items. I will leave you know with Pablo’s text, and I want to thank him for his permission to publish it. By the way, Pablo is working on a website about these problems and, hopefully soon, I’ll be able to tell you more news about the topic in this blog.

Tourism, poverty and social justice?

Usually, receptive tourism is considered and export. But from the social point of view, I believe we’d have to see it as an import of consumers, with the social impacts it implies.

Pablo Schweitzer

In my routine of travel blogs and sites reading, I found out, at Tim Leffel’s site, that Budget Living magazine, targeted at backpackers and people who travel on low budgets, had closed. And its editor says this:

“The name ‘budget’ worked great with readers,” he said, “but it was a hurdle for advertisers. The name was a mixed blessing.”

That is: while the “budget” denomination is appealing to the public in general, in the same way the word “backpacker” is in our environment, advertisers finds it horrible. Thus, we have a product that may appeal to many people, but also attracts the “wrong” readers, from marketing’s point of view. Why wrong? because they’re not willing to spend a large sum of money in their travel.

Such assumption has caused that at many latin american countries, the travels section is written for five stars travellers. This happens even in newspapers, despite some of them are quite massive. The conflict is important to analyze because the issues between “the public’s interest” and the “advertisers uninterest” should be resolved. Otherwise, we’ll keep lacking good publications for the public that wants to travel without spending too much.

And there’s another issue: my perception -only, since I couldn’t prove it with numbers- i that at least here, in Argentina, the backpacker public is noticeably reluctant to support editorials initiatives regarding to cheaper ways to travel, even when these are good and not pricey. As I wrote in the entry dedicated to “extreme backpackers”, many times there’s some sort of common sense by which one “should not spend a dime at all”. So, in this extreme version of the story, the backpacker is not someone who spends little, but someone who wants to spend nothing. Of course, in the long run, such attitude holds potential dangers in relation to the local people who provide tourism services and who have to deal with people who want everything for free; and without any editorial proposals. The reason is simple: many readers don’t want to spend anything, even when the publication would help them organise the trip and save, and advertisers just don’t want to see their ads there. And that’s that. At least in this part of the world, the only travel magazines existing are aimed at middle-high class tourists. Luckily, we have the Internet, but a complement from the editorial world would be really good.

A few days ago, I said I was using Google Notebook to build a weekly summary of selected entries on different blogs about travel (spanish only). And I came up with and idea: to build a series of entries dedicated to Internet tools that can be useful to travellers; for example, to collect and publish information. I have no idea how regularly will I publish this section, but I already have in mind some more applications to check.

Not let’s go to Google Notebook. Basically, it’s a plugin for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox navigators. The idea is to work as some sort of clips collector. But at the same time, it’s an interesting application for those who want to collect information for future trips. To use it, you just need to download the plugin and have a Google account, for example, the one you use to access Gmail. Once installed, you have to restart the navigator.

Let’s suppose we want to save information about an specific destination. For this example, I’ll use Tomas Jofre, a town in the province of Buenos Aires, that stands out for its parrillas and restaurants. For this, first, we open the notebook -you’ll see it in the bottom bar of the navigator- and create a new folder, let’s call it “Tomas Jofre”. Then we start to navigate in Google and find a note in La Nacion newspaper which talks about this destination.

We decide we’d like to save the full text of the note. For this, we select the entire material we wish to save, and right click, and in the context menu we choose “Note This” to add it to our page.

We’ll keep adding the texts we find, and they’ll all be stored in the same page, as you can see in this example.

While it’s an useful service, one we can use to make “clips” in the useful pages we visit, Google Notebook has some not so positive things. The first one is that it doesn’t allow collaboration among users. That is, it’s not possible, at least for now, to have many people interact to create only one page. The other thing is that you have to be careful to keep the folder where we want to send the clip, open; otherwise, we’ll have to do the whole thing over.

This Google service can be a good way to collect information and share it with other users. If you have pages created in Google Notebook about travel, you can leave your contribution in the comments area.

At Jujuy.com Sergio Aramayo has pointed out twice how the argentinean newspaper Clarin, edited in Buenos Aires, had confused Tilcara with Purmamarca (see it here and here, spanish only, where in the second case the place was confused with Cafayate). And to clear any doubts on how the topic is not really important to them, they have just made the same mistake, for the third time.

clarin y el norteHosted on Zooomr

Again, they’ve published a note about Tilcara and have illustrated it with a picture of Purmamarca. Now, we can only hypothetize on the reasons of so many mistakes. Does Clarin’s files have Purmamarca pictures labeled as Tilcara? No journalist of the travel section has been able yet to detect this error, one that has been made for the third time? Will there be an errata note in the next travel section of Clarin? We’ll see.

Update: the picture above is the picture that appeared on page 2 of the printed version of Clarin’s Travel section, last sunday, may 28th, 2006. The section’s website only shows the note, not the picture.

Some months ago, I published one entry (this one) about the touristic exploitation of the Che Guevara figure in Alta Gracia, Cordoba, a city he lived in for a good part of his life. Now, I’ve found out, through Diario de Cuyo, that the Che figure is still motivating new touristic projects.

Citing:

Alta Gracia’s Tourism Office (in Cordoba) has started a project to capture the growing number of visitors that are arriving to our country to visit locations linked to the emblematic figure of the Che, without overlooking the interest of local tourists in knowing his story.

The name of this touristic promotion will be “Che Guevara’s tracks in Argentina”, and the events that will be held by the Nation’s Tourism Office will be complemented in the cordobese city of Alta Gracia with visits to the former house (currently, Museum) of the Che Guevara.

The project establishes the argentinean cities the Che has lived in or has been related to, such as Rosario (place of birth), Buenos Aires, Cordoba, Misiones and Alta Gracia, and the Tourism Office of the Nation has organised meetings in which officers of these institutions will participate.

Facing this, and to get more information, some minutes ago I sent a brief questionnary to Alta Gracia’s Touism Office in Cordoba (turismo@altagracia.gov.ar) with a series of questions in order to obtain more information to share with you. The questions are:

What is the project “Che Guevara’s tracks in Argentina” about? What official organisms and representatives of the private sector are participating?

The note I read talks about a project in which other cities where Che Guevara lived in are participating. How is this coordination? What kind of joint actions will the cities carry out?

In previous occasions many people from Alta Gracia shared their opinions about the topic (in the spanish version of the original article). If any of you believe there’s something else that should be asked, suggest it in the comments area, and I will send it in a second email to Alta Gracia’s Tourism Office. I find it a very interesting topic since, according to the note I found, this new project linked to Che Guevara is part of a national project that involves Rosario and Buenos Aires, which speaks of a dimension much farther from a local initiative.

As soon as I get more news, I’ll update this note in the blog.

This week I published a brief note about the conflictive relation between tourism and the ocupation of land that was taking place in the location of Tilcara, in the argentinean province of Jujuy, which is visited by thousands of tourists every year. Starting on an email and a note published in Salta Libre, I told some of the things I’d read, and asked if anyone could provide some information.

Now, Jaro Godoy, the author of the note in Salta Libre, answered my questions and extends some of the topics in his note. He authorized me to publish the text, so I’ll copy it below:

Dear Jorge: I’m very interested in giving this topic the difussion it needs, the problem is worsening with the passing of he days, there’s much injustice from the usual generals, I’ll give you some details:

The intendent of Tilcara, authorizes without reason, the construction of more hotels, hostel, sidewalks, casinos, and now there are rumours of a night club. The intendent pays no attention to any accusation. The Province Government has just sold land in Yacoraite (an archaelogical site), where 15 families have lived their whole lives, to Mr. Adrian Garcia del Rio.

The UNESCO has sent fonds to some organizers, all of them with economic mindsets, who don’t really care about preserving these lands, such as Mr. Jose -Architect “Champa”, who has a Tea House in Tilcara and land properties in Juella. They’ve made a congress in the Hotel del Turism in Tilcara, to -in theory- help the tilcaran people. In that congress only 7 tilcarans assisted, the rest of the people were outsiders who intend to keep building hotels destroying nature. The Patrimony of Humanity was made with economic reasons and was thought for big opportunist enterpreneurs to buy land without caring for anything at all.

A CLEAR EXAMPLE OF HOSTILITY AND PERJURY:

On saturday 10, 2005, a City Commissary, evicted the young mother Mariela Cemarrelli -Sister of Cachamay (a very popular tourist guide)- from the home the Government gave to her deceased mother many years ago -Fiscal land in B°24 Viviendas- Malka, this sir in complicity with Judges and the Police, proceeded to evict without pity this woman and her two children, who at this moment have nowhere to live.

The situation in Tilcara is getting more dangerous every passing day, today the few tilcarans left are at risk and there’s no law that protects them.

We’re exposed to strangers coming with documents, taking away the little the’ve got left. And that belongs to them for human and moral rights.

It’s up to this, my friend, the little information I can share with you about the obscurity around this topic, that no government wants to deal with, much less intervene.

The touristic enterpreneurships are multiplying these days, of course camouflaged behind big walls, but soon they’ll see the light, when there’s nothing we can do to stop it, the land since it was declared patrimony has raised in some cases 3000 %, it’s a big business for certain dark sirs who ride around in their Mercedes and dissapear.

If anyone wants to add or rectify some information, you have the comments space to your disposition. I’m really interested in digging more into this problem in Tilcara, which is not only quite interesting, but it hasn’t been boarded by the argentinean media.

During the last weeks, I’ve received many chain-style emails, unsigned, which stated that several evictions had been taking place in Tilcara in the last weeks. The email said that people who had been living for a long time in Tilcara and who were part of the original communities of the area, were being displaced from their land, for the purpose of building touristic enterprises in the site. The topic grabbed my attention, of course, and the first thing I did was write to some media of the argentinean province of Jujuy to verify the information. The answer I got was that they knew about the email, but there was no source that certified the truthfulness of the version, so there was no news.

But since the subject seemed interesting for this blog -you know, here we’re quite far from spreading out the vision of “everything in tourism is positive”- I kept sending some emails around, to find out more about this. The issue gained even more potential when I came across an article in the Salta Libre site (spanish). There, some of the eviction situations were told citing names and last names. And it states the following:

“Men and women, who have taken care of the land and its animals for centuries, have been dispossesed of everything they own by unsensitive death merchants. They are being kicked out without compassion for lacking the papers that today the law remembers to demand from them; of course it’s late now, their land, the one they’ve cultivated sowing corn, watching for their goats, their lambs, their chicken, already have new owners in papers, land owners avid of increasing their fortune, occasion pirates that glanced at the business oportunity, corrupt officers that sign buy and sale papers within a week; the land is being literally “cleaned” to build new houses, hotels, and everything that helps to the modernization of the worldly patrimony of humanity in tilcaran land, its legitimate owners are abandoned to their fate in disgraceful huts, and soon will become slaves of their own land.”

These days, I’ve sent several consults to diverse sources to check the veracity of the information, and to see what’s the relation between this situation and the important growth tourism is having in this area. If anyone has more information, leave your contribution in the comments area. If you prefer to contact me, privately, to hand me more information, you can do so at jorgegobbi@gmail.com. As long as I recollect new information, I will publish it here.

Let’s continue with the video series of non touristic areas of Buenos Aires. After such a good reception of the videos dedicated to the Premetro -they had over 200 views in two weeks- this time its turn of Parque Chacabuco, the area I’ve lived in for the past three years. It’s a view of the zone from the roof of my building; besides the park, you can see the surrounding districts of Bajo Flores, Caballito and Boedo. Since the day was very bright and nice, you’ll notice a few people walking in the park. There are two videos; the first one is the longest, and includes my walking tour around the building’s roof. The second one, shorter, is only focused on the view of the Parque Chacabuco. Again, the videos are hosted at my DailyMotion account.