South America Blog
About this blog
Wayne Bernhardson is the author of Moon Handbooks to Buenos Aires, Chile, Argentina, and Patagonia. Here he shares his vast knowledge of South America and its people.
Recent Posts
- The Papal Cumbia
- The Uruguayan Sacraments: Tango & Mate
- Taxing the Tourist: Argentina's AFIP Aims Low
- Fortress Falklands: A Book Review
- Pope Argentinus I, The Musical: Ragtime Meets Tango
- Credit Where Credit Is Undue?
- ¿Adios Hugo?
- When "No" Is A Positive
- Chile and Its "Crazies"
- The Oscars: A Post Mortem, So to Speak
- Sacrificing the Atacama? A Chilean View of Dakar
- Chilean Oscar Faceoff? "No" v. "Kon-Tiki"
- Friday Digest: Southern Cone Nuggets
- Dancing in the Mud? The Andean Aftermath
- Floods & Mud: Summer Storms Hit the Andes
Win This Book - For Darwin's Sake!
Today is the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin, history’s greatest scientist and one of its greatest travelers, who changed the way we look at the world. Recalling five years aboard HMS Beagle, Darwin wrote that the part of the landscape that remained longest in his memory was the Patagonian steppe, but he also left a vivid description of some of the world’s wildest terrain at South America’s southern tip: more >>
Breaking the Bank in El Calafate
In 1990, when I first visited the Patagonian town of El Calafate, tourists were still a relative novelty. Seven years earlier, Argentina had emerged from the Southern Cone’s nastiest 1970s military dictatorship, but the gateway to the Moreno Glacier was still barely a blip on the international travel map. In the process of writing my initial guidebook to Argentina, for a publisher best left unmentioned, I castigated the town as “an oversized encampment of rapacious merchants fixated on making a year's income in a few short months by maintaining high prices rather than increasing sales.” more >>
A Desolate Market: Selling - Not Buying - a Vehicle in Argentina or Chile
Last Thurday’s post on purchasing a car in Argentina or Chile drew a couple comments, from Chuck Goolsbee (who came to a talk of mine in Seattle a few months ago) and Bruce Lakin (whom I met recently in Malalcahuello), that deserve a little more elaboration. I’ll deal with Bruce’s questions first, and Chuck’s in the coming days. more >>
The Coriolis Effect (Photographic Version)
Some years ago, I was flying north from San Francisco to give a slide talk on Chile at the Vancouver, B.C., bookstore Travel Bug. As it happened, I opened Alaska Airlines’ in-flight magazine to find a two-page ad by Crowley Maritime, a West Coast shipping company, proclaiming that “The Key to Working in Alaska is Making It Appear like You Were Never There.” more >>
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