Travel with Indigo

After an uneventful and relaxing cruise of a few days, we reach Punta del Este, the Palm Beach of South America, for a week’s stay.  Its fine marina, rare for South America, is well-protected and located in the heart of town, an easy walk to many fine shops and restaurants.  It’s also just a few yards from the elegant and sophisticated Punta del Este Yacht Club, where I chance to meet its Commodore of the past eleven years, Horatio Pastori, a former Olympic level sailor and native Uruguayan.  His business of major road and civil construction is now in the trusted hands of a son, so Horatio and wife Alicia get to spend a lot of their time at the yacht club.  He issues me a temporary membership and kindly allows me the full use of the club’s facilities.  Horatio, Alicia and I become instant friends and they welcome me warmly into their special world.  I also meet the manager of the club’s restaurant and bar, Alvaro Garcia, who very nicely presents me with a coffeetable book on the history of Punta.

At dockside, I come to meet Enrique Marthi, who has been a huge help to our captain in getting us a berth.  He too is a warm-hearted and charming guy and works as the lead captain of a fleet of seven Italian express yachts of about 70 feet, all nearly identical, which I at first take to be a charter fleet.  Only later do I learn that they are the personal yachts of Carlos Pedro Blaquier, at age 79, rumored to be South America’s wealthiest man.  It is a quirk of his that he would own seven smaller yachts instead of one large one, but he claims with some reason that if one breaks down, he has six others to choose from.  While in Punta, he lives on one boat, his wife on another.  A third is used for dining and crew quarters, and the others for guests.

As the owner of Indigo, I am invited to have lunch with Carlos and his top executives and a few friends.  Upon arrival, I am given a personal tour of the yacht where he sleeps, which has a massage room and dressing room and a small office with video-conferencing ability.  Then we head to the dinning yacht for lunch.  There, one long table is set for the dozen or so ladies on board, mostly wives of the executives, and also Cristina, the beautiful and ever-smiling wife of Carlos, and another table is surrounded by the men, with me seated next to Carlos.  When I ask why the gender split, Carlos replies with a twinkle in his eyes that “Women are good for the bed, but not for the table.”

One of his executives, Gustavo, is a good friend of the commanding officer of the Argentine warship based in Ushuaia on Tierra del Fuego, a ship that makes regular patrols to and from Antarctica.  With a phone call, I am introduced to the captain and invited on board for dinner when we arrive there.  His other executives, Luis, Jorge, Alejandro (whose excellent English makes him the designated interpreter), and Enrique join us at the lunch table.  Lunch begins with Uruguayan caviar and fine champagnes, followed by beef and vegetables from Carlos’s own estancias (ranches), all wonderfully prepared by Natalia, his personal chef.  Fine wines flow generously.  Dessert and coffee follow.

Carlos has doctoral degrees in both philosophy and law and went to work out of school for his first wife’s father’s company, called Ledesma, then a producer of sugar from its sugar cane fields and some other crops and cattle.  Ten years later, Carlos became president and greatly expanded the company so that today, it has forty percent of the Argentine paper market, owns something like 250,000 acres of estancias that produce grains, row crops, fruits, raise cattle and pork, and grow sugar cane, the pulp of which is used to make paper.  It has about 6,000 employees.

A few days later, Carlos and his executives come on board Indigo for a tour of the boat, and we all enjoy good company, many laughs and the wine and appetizers prepared by Chef Geraldine.  Carlos presents me with a wonderful coffee table book of his obsession, a modern palace called La Torcaza, after a dove-like bird that is found on its grounds.  He inscribes the book and invites me again for lunch on his yachts.  At this second lunch, I meet Esteban Caselli, the former Argentine Ambassador to the Holy See in Rome and now the Ambassador for the Order of Malta to Peru.  It is clear that Esteban has been asked to lunch for the purpose of meeting me.  Now retired from his construction business in Buenos Aires, Esteban spends his time among homes in Naples, Florida, Punta del Este, Buenos Aires and in the Argentine countryside.  His oldest son, Antonio, is now the Ambassador for the Order of Malta to Argentina and maintains his office in the embassy in Buenos Aires.

A few days later, I invite Esteban to come aboard Indigo for a tour and while there, he kindly offers the use of his private car and driver, actually a former federal policeman and now full-time security man, during my stay in Buenos Aires.  He also introduces me over the phone to Juan Scalesciani, a wealthy Argentine who made his money in the oil business, sold out to Chevron, and now develops hotels and has a pharmaceutical company.  He is the developer and owner of the fabulous new Palacio Duhau, Grand Hyatt, in Buenos Aires, likely the best hotel in all of South America.  I am invited to luch with Juan at the hotel and Esteban also introduces me by phone to his son Antonio, who invites us to lunch at the embassy when we arrive in BA.  In short order, and utterly by chance, I am introduced to some of the wealthiest and most influential men in Argentina.

Over several days, I enjoy the warm hospitality of Carlos and Cristina, Esteban, and Horatio and Alicia, as well as fine meals in the Punta restaurants and its terrific yacht club.  Horatio fires up the yacht club’s small cruiser and takes me for a spin around a large nearby island, also a national park.  I also take a car to the surrounding towns of Punta Ballena, La Barra, and the funky, hyper-cool Jose Ignatio.  What stands out in my mind is the abundance of very modern architecture in homes, hotels and shops, much of it extraordinary.   The beaches are not, by Florida standards, visually appealing, their sand a light brown color and the water murky.

The three weather services we use all report calm conditions and the official government pilot we are obliged to take on board for the trip to BA report no serious weather problems are in store so we leave Punta.  Later that night around midnight, a bad storm strikes the area and right away, the ports at Punta, Montevideo and Colonia are closed.  Winds climb to over 70 knots and, blowing over the shallows of the Rio de la Plata, whip up enormous sharp-edged waves.   I am in my cabin attempting but failing to sleep as the boat gets tossed around like a cork rather than its 280 tons of steel and aluminum with full fuel tanks.  One wave knocks us so violently that the glass tabletop in the salon flies off its mount, shatters and chews up the woodwork.  All the exterior seat cushions fly off into the night.  Liquor cabinets flop open spilling their contents all over the place.  Finally, the captain changes course, putting the weather on the bow instead of the beam where it struck, and the ride smooths somewhat for the remainder of the run into BA.

The Rio de la Plata is an enormous dent in the east coast of South America and is by any reckoning more an estuary or bay than a river.  Into its west end flow the Parrana and Uruguay rivers, both heavily silt-laden, thus making the Plata an ugly brown color.  It has a well-earned reputation for unannounced storms.  On the bottom of the Plata are more than 2000 shipwrecks, which dot the nautical chars so densely, they make navigation treacherous.

As the sun begins to color the still stormy sky, winds continue to blow at 35 to 40 knots and the ride remains uncomfortable.  Across our bow defining the western horizon is a long low blanket of dense dark clouds, these the leading edge of an infamous Pampero stormfront blowing east across the land from the pampas.  This one, we learn, is fairly harmless with winds only to the 35 to 40 knots we are currently experiencing.  But here, in the span of just twenty-four hours, we are hit by two different storms in something like a pincer.  We’re all real happy to see BA come into focus and finally to enter the protection of its harbor.