Lost in Argentina

I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions. I didn’t make any this year, but I still ended up with one. My undeclared resolution was to be more positive and complain less. That may come as a shock to family and friends, since I’ve given no indication of becoming more positive, but I do try to make lemonade from lemons whenever I can, so there’s that.

I bring this up because I’ve been bitching about AI lately and how it’s done me wrong, wrong in the sense of betraying me with directions. As I wrote last week, I’m not talking about directions as in baking an Angel food cake but directions as in geographic location (see Lies Abound). I can’t seem to get anywhere without undue hassle and Rube Goldberg–like complexity. AI has been more hindrance than help, feeding me incorrect information and never apologizing or admitting guilt. Such is the nature of machines. So, what is it they “learn,” exactly?

Take Argentina, for instance. Not the entire country, but the province of Córdoba, which I returned from last week after spending time doing research for a novel. I did not rent a car—which would have been a disaster—but instead took cabs and ride services whenever I wasn’t trekking through urban landscapes. I did a lot of trekking: hours and hours, days and days of it. I checked the soles of my shoes periodically to make sure they’d last. I had no backup pair, since I’ve learned to travel lightly. In fact, I had one leather travel bag, a carry‑on, for the entire trip.

Thankfully, the shoes lasted, and the bad data ended up providing opportunities for misadventures, new experiences, and plenty of physical exercise. If that isn’t making lemonade from lemons, then what is? In any case, I covered roughly eight square miles in Córdoba, including Centro, Nueva Córdoba, Güemes, and the historic area known as the Manzana Jesuítica—the Jesuit Block bounded by Obispo Trejo, Duarte Quirós, Caseros, and Vélez Sarsfield. I got lost at all of the sites on all of the streets, which gave me ample chances to sample the local food (including pizza baked with fried eggs on top) and drink my share of Quilmes beer (“El Sabor del Encuentro!”).

I stayed on Duarte Quirós in a small, cloister‑like guest house assembled from fragments of Córdoba’s colonial past—algarrobo doors, convent hinges, Jesuit arches. It was the perfect base from which to launch myself into the city’s past and explore the Jesuit complex, now part of the public university and home to the Iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús, an overwhelming Baroque, 17th‑century church with a wooden ceiling shaped like an inverted ship’s hull, giving new meaning to “nave.”

By the time I reached the town of La Falda in the Punilla Valley—about two and a half hours by bus—I had gotten better at directions. I still managed to get lost on the way to Palm Sunday Mass at a church less than two miles from my hotel, but at least it was rural enough that I wasn’t dodging pickup trucks screeching around corners or cars full of screaming youth excited about something that felt like the start of a high‑school pep rally.

In La Falda sits the most incredible site I visited, and for once I knew exactly where it was—just up the hill after taking a right out of my hotel door. So that’s what I did. I followed the hill to the top, where the Eden Hotel sits. While not part of Argentina’s official cultural patrimony the way the Manzana Jesuítica is, the Eden Hotel is recognized as a provincial historic site and a protected heritage structure within Córdoba Province.

The hotel began in the 1890s as a luxury resort founded by a German immigrant. It benefitted by a new railway line that connected La Falda to the Buenos Aires–Córdoba corridor and delivered Argentina’s elite directly to the hotel. In 1912, the hotel passed to Walter and Ida Eichhorn, who transformed it into a center of German cultural life in the Punilla Valley. The Eichhorns admired and gave financial support to a rising star in Germany named Adolf Hitler. You can still see symbols reminiscent of the Nazi movement in the museum’s poster boards and the PowerPoint presentation shown to visitors (e.g., imperial eagles), although officially there is no connection, and the staff will deny it until the llamas come home.

The Jesuit influence in the inner city and the experience of the Eden Hotel in La Falda have given me more than enough material to get to work on my project, which just might recall Indiana Jones. Getting lost and stumbling onto things—the serendipity of the process—is sometimes the only way to travel. It seems to be my specialty.

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To learn more, see Jesuit Block. For more, click on Amazon top right or go to Robert Brancatelli. Visit other blog readers under “Who You Are.” Comment by clicking on “Leave a Reply” below or the Contact tab above. Thank you, Julietta at the Virreinato Hotel and Leandro of Remises La Falda.