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
Perla: A Novel
A couple weeks ago I reviewed Roberto Ampuero’s The Neruda Case, about the final days of poet Pablo Neruda around the time of the 1973 coup against Chile’s constitutional president Salvador Allende Gossens. Translator Carolina
de Robertis, a fellow Oaklander whom I have not yet met in person, provided me review copies of Ampuero’s book and her own novel Perla, which deals with the aftermath of Argentina’s more >>
Gracias, Dr. Favaloro
Over the past couple months, I’d been experiencing chest pain, and had attributed that to the series of bronchitis infections I’d suffered over the past several months in California, Argentina and Chile. Two weeks ago, though, they became so acute that my GP suggested I do a treadmill stress test and see a cardiologist who, evaluating the results, told me that “you’re a sick puppy.” more >>
LAN v. Aerolíneas: a Tale of Two Airlines
The Southern Cone’s two major airlines, Aerolíneas Argentinas and Chile’s LAN Airlines, both originated as state-run carriers at a time when virtually every South American country ran its own flagship. In the early days of South American air travel, it was the state that had the resources to purchase planes and operate flights to a network of destinations around each country and overseas. more >>
The Neruda Case
Whenever I'm on the road, after a 12 to 14-hour day spent updating my Moon Handbooks to the Southern Cone countries, I need to read to get to sleep. After a late dinner - rarely ending before 11 p.m. in either Argentina or Chile - I normally prefer something escapist like a detective novel, usually in English. I rarely read literature, even genre literature, in Spanish; although my Spanish is fluent, I learned by doing it - I've taken less than a year's instruction, and it's neither a native nor a literary Spanish. Rather, it's a combination of traveler's and academic Spanish that I learned on the road and in graduate school. I read Spanish-language newspapers, as well as history, anthropology, geography and the like. more >>
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