Christmas in Patagonia

A bit late.

Outside Bariloche, December 23, 2006

We had to travel to Southern Hemisphere summer to find the winter that hasn’t arrived in New York. While the rain has stopped, the wind kicks up ripples on the lake, the sun stays mostly obscured and the temperature struggles to stay above fifty. Cerro Negro and the other peaks seen from the hotel are snowy and partly hidden by clouds. If Bariloche felt more than ever overrun by Argentine and foreign tourists shrouded in parkas and surprised by a wet cold in December, the Hotel Tronador, especially when looking back up toward it from the edge of the lake, is unchanged from two decades or even six ago.

We are in the five bedroom family cabin, all cypress exterior, almost yellow and broad-beamed wood. The middle building we stayed in during the visits in the 80’s is next door with its wide sitting room and porch looking out on the lake. Both these buildings, Beatriz says, date from the early 1940s. She and Cristina are instantly recognizable. The first thing out of Beatriz’s mouth was how thankful she was that I helped facilitate visa interviews for her two sons back those twenty years ago. For years I’d forgotten doing that, small courtesy as it was, but it came back as soon as Dana Dee said Beatriz talked about it. A small act for one enlarged through the years for another.

The hotel has been a family business since 1929, without, one suspects, much change in the basic formula. All rooms are full pension, the beds more soft than firm, with plain while sheets and as many blankets as the night requires. The silence then is absolute, as is the dark when the sky is moonless or cloudy as it was last night. We walked up to the falls. The overlooks are now rudimentarily fenced for safety and the tri-level falls – after this week of rain and the heavy snows of the last two winters are full and loud. There is no place to look that does not bring a view to rival great country like Yosemite or the country around Seattle and up into BC.

http://www.hoteltronador.com/

December 25

Christmas morning 8:30, nobody else up yet although Colin in his parents’ room can be heard demanding water. Papa Noel arrived last night by crossing Lago Mascardi in a small outboard motor boat, ringing a cowbell as he approached. For once we did not need more cowbell. His pilot feinted left for a brief moment as if to pass us by because there were no good children at Tronador, but then turned back and docked as we’d all – one, no more than two believers, and a dozen or so complicit adults and older children – trooped down the path to the lake edge to greet him. Santa had slimmed down this year, perhaps Mrs. Pere Noel put him in a Pilates class. He also wore a shiny dark mask that would not have looked out of place on Jason. Maybe he had a backup plan of cat burglar in case this Father Christmas thing didn’t work out. More likely, it was to not be recognized later as the hotel staff member who, as Bobby suggested, had drawn the short straw and had therefore to put on the suit. He proved multi-lingual and with information about each child. He knew that Seb had been a perfect boy on the airplane. Santa’s burlap bag contained small wrapped gifts, chocolates it turned out, and then he went off, more cowbell here, to “see the maids.” I think this was to mean with presents, but it could also have been the North Pole equivalent of a girl in every port. By this time the sun had set and Cerro Negro seemed aflame above its snow and I got a spectacular end of day picture. It was our first warm and sunny day. Some of the roses along the buildings, slowed by the five days of rain and cold, started to open to support the large but now bedraggled ones that had been open for a week or so.

After Santa went to the maids, we went to Nochebuena dinner, the dining room candlelit and showing a skinny tree, decorated with tinsel and round silver ornament balls. Instead of lights, it was filled with unlit candles that, Beatriz or Cristina told Dana Dee, would be lit briefly at midnight and we were invited. Dinner was consommé with sherry, which except for the walnut bits scattered in it, tasted just like every other consommé. Here’s something about consommé though – you always feel healthy when you eat it because the only other time you’d eat it regularly would be as you are recovering from an illness and know you are going to be OK, but still need to watch your diet. Ham and cheese tart and then roast turkey. Seb fell by the wayside then, but the rest of us returned for the lit tree, about three dozen lit candles and a taped version of O Tannenbaum to which the family and those guests who knew the German lyrics sang along. It could have been the year the original hotel opened, 1929. Everyone in the room then hugged everyone else, one by one, and that was the beginning of Christmas. We went out into the clear cold night and Joe and I tried to reacquaint ourselves with the Southern Cross.