They eat guanacos, don´t they?

A bit of sad news to report. On the bus back to El Calafate this morning, we stopped at the same little roadside ¨truck stop" that I stopped at on the way to El Chalten. These truck stops are just like you would imagine them from movies about the pampas, or the wild west for that matter. A tiny wood house by the side of the road. Hens and dogs in the yard. You walk into a dark smoky room, and an impossibly old guy in the corner with a beer in front of him and a marlboro in his mouth stares at you like you are the first foreign woman he´s ever seen, while his granddaughter serves you coffee or beer from behind a small flyspecked counter. The sign says that there are six kinds of empanadas, but both Sunday and today, when I ask hopefully about the exotic sounding banana and cheese empanada, the granddaughter shrugs, points to the empanadas, and says ¨carne.¨ It´s OK. They´re yummy anyway, only a little grease, a lot of yummy carne and a few onions.

The closer the Argentininans stay to carne the better the food is. I have a sneaking suspicion that Marcel from Top Chef was cooking at my last hotel, Los Cerros, because there was ill-considered foam bedecking most everything, from an ill-considered in and of itself beet and lemongrass soup (goat cheese foam), to the much sounder seasonal fruits (vanilla mint foam). The meals were exquisitely presented, to match the truly lovely decor (you can see it on the website ), but everything that wasn´t simply lamb, beef, or pork was inedible. There was a lot of scraping off of glazes, and garnishes. Because underneath, the meat -- I can´t decide which I love more, pink soft non'muttony lamb or richer, redder beef -- is perfect. To mix things up the other night, I got a pork steak, and it had the nutty flavor of a happy pig. But the sickly sweet wild honey port glaze was DISGUSTING. And the ¨Andean potato-onion rosti¨ turned out to be a bizarre strip of shoe-leathery potato skins topped with gluey onion jam and coriander sprouts?! I didn´t eat it. And that was a feat, making the local potatoes inedible, because I´ve been loving the yellow moist potato-y potatoes, and even considering the heresy that the Argentine potato might even be more deliciously simply lovable than the Argentine steak.

Another night a deconstructed (argh!) cherry tomato basil and goat cheese salad left me puzzled why the chef would take the time to peel the cherry tomatos, but not to check and see whether the goat cheese was good for anything other than scooping into cherry tomato size and shaped balls.

Go back to Vegas, Marcel! That El Bulli guy really has a lot to answer for. I´m sure most of the high-end tourists turning up at this place (they wouldn´t be here if they weren´t some of sort of naturalist types, there´s literally NOTHING to do in El Chalten except hike, climb, ice climb or horseback ride) would rather have solid simple Argentine barbecue. Maybe with some decorative gauchos for effect. But everyone at the hotel is from Buenos Aires, Madrid, New York, LA -- they don´t come to El Chalten to learn about the used-to-be-latest (poorly rendered) annoying trends in Continental cuisine. The wine is great-- and cheap. The meat is great. The potatos are great. The smoked trout and salmon is good. There are the ingredients for simple, unforgettable meals.... I´m going to get a t'shirt made that says ¨Stick to the Steak!¨

Anyway, you can see I´ve been avoiding the sad news I mentioned earlier. When I first came to the truck stop on Sunday, there was an adorable baby guanaco in the yard that the family of the Hostaria was keeping as a sort of a pet. It loved humans, and would bound up and lick you and kiss you, and sniff in your pockets to see if you had brought it treats. Kind of a hairy soft llama-like Pogo. You can imagine how much I loved it and wanted to bring it home! I thought Grady could practice herding it.

Guanacos are much diminished in population, like the buffalo, I guess, but contrary to what I heard before I got here, they are not much eaten, except perhaps as a curiousity. They WERE eaten by the indigenous people, but as Cecilia explained it, the meat is sweet and very tough, like horse, and once cows and sheep became readily available, eating guanaco went out of fashion. (¨Since I can´t post my pictures at the moment, here is what they look like: )

Anyway, I was looking to seeing the guanaco today, on my way back to El Calafate, but when we stopped at the rest stop, only the chickens were in the yard. I wandered around a bit, to see if it had gone down to the river to get something to drink, but it was clear it was no where to be seen. I went inside, and since I can´t understand anything the impossibly old man says (I don´t know that native spanish speakers would understand him either -- there´s always a guy like him, isn´t there? I know in Sicily, every bar worth its salt has a toothless old guy in a coppola who speaks a dialect so thick that his own children don´t understand him....), I asked the granddaughter.

¨Guanaco? Guanaco?¨

¨Muerto,¨ she shrugged. Then smiling, happy to be practicing her English, ¨he got eat¨, pointing towards the back of the room.

I thought she was pointing at the sinister old man. I knew I didn´t like him! Puffing away, staring at my boobs, and now, indulging an atavistic taste for guanaco meat....

Before I could get too carried away with my fantasy, the real culprit, a lovely thick haired Alsatian, came over and licked my hand. I didn´t want to pet him, and backed away. ¨Bad dog! Murderer!¨ He nosed my side, and eyed my empanada hopefully, wagging his tail.

So that´s the sad news. I guess the moral of the story is, don´t get too attached to baby animals in a land of huge ranch dogs.

Happy Valentine´s Day, everyone. I had the excitement of using a telefonica to call my Valentine this morning, which took me back about 20 years to my first trip to Europe. But the hotels don´t have phones in the rooms! Outside of town, there´s no cell coverage even, and everything is satellite. So, telefonica it is