A lost memory of San Antonio de Areco, Argentina

I was sitting on a bus this evening, on my way home from an entertaining evening of whisky tasting, when I was struck with the vivid memory of one particular night in Argentina. I'm not sure how the mind works, or what it was that triggered this thought but it was so clear that I couldn’t help but write it up.

The night in focus would have to have been around April or May in 2001. By that stage I could speak rudimentary Spanish and was able to talk to people outside my immediate circle of friends. It was a strange time, people often thought I could understand everything that was going on and didn’t take the time out to explain the finer details of what we were doing. This led to many an interesting night where I was unsure if I was ‘going for a lap around the block’ or a ‘drinking tour of the local towns’, either way it didn’t really matter, I was always happy to join in.

The reason why I felt the need to write this up was because it is such a clear demonstration of the warmth and friendliness of the Argentinean people. I returned there earlier this year and found that this was a uniform characteristic of most of the places I visited in Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru). Such generosity of heart should not go unnoticed.

So back to the story, it was April/May 2001, I would have just started to play rugby for the town open side, this put me in an odd position, I was just 19 and playing against the 35 year olds, I was Australian, a representative of the number one football team in the world, yet I still found it hard to stop a 110kg prop barrelling down the field. Being in the rugby team was cool, it opened up a whole new group of people in the town, as a result I was invited to a lot more dinners and BBQs. Being the only foreigner in town really pays off.

One night I found myself invited to the house of La Chancha (affectionately: The Pig). I honestly thought we were dropping someone off home on the way back to my place; instead I was being invited to a famous asado (Argentinean BBQ, famous for the quality and quantity of meat). Now, by this stage we were eating asados about twice a week, yet it was still a great honour to be invited back to the house to eat with the family. The house was a humble home, but damn cool, it was in the fringes of the town, and had a certain dishevelled charm. The hosts were gauchos, the Argentinean equivalent of our bushmen, farmers, or cowboys. I really dislike using that term ‘cowboy’ because it misses out on all that it is to be a gaucho, defender of Patagonia, the solitary romantic capable of traversing scrubland for days on end, whose only friends are a horse, a dog and a knife… yep, even though I was living in the gaucho central of Argentina they still held a special place in the culture of the country, and mythical status in my mind.

The asado is a very particular ritual, if you get it wrong you lose a lot of face. Each person has their own techniques, often passed on through the generations, involving the preparation of the meat, the time of cooking, the heat of the coals, the cut of the meat and so on and so forth. This one’s charm came from several different fronts: a) it was completely unexpected and a privilege, b) I was dining with gauchos, my host La Chancha could not comprehend why I found this so interesting, c) they took the time to teach me what it was to cook in their country. Now a lot of people had taken a lot of time to explain the intricacies of the Argentinean culture, and I am grateful for that, but this one moment struck home because it was so unexpected, and demonstrated that friendship, warmth and patience were consistent traits of the people of the town. This is something that still amazes me.

Another new feature of the evening was the setting, a humble, character filled backyard, eating chunks of perfect meat off a rough wooden bench, no need for plates. A constant flow of meat from the grill, more wine than you could shake a breathalyser at and to top it off: an evening of folkloric guitar, another respected facet of Argentinean gaucho culture.

This was a forgotten memory that emerged almost four and a half year later on a bus trip home. I have no photos from the evening, we drank enough that by all respects I should not remember it, I quickly changed down a grade in rugby and after that did not spend too much time with my host La Chancha,. However the evening still lives on, now more vibrant than ever. I cannot for the life of me remember why it chose to surface tonight of all nights, but this does nothing more than add to the charm.