Día de la tradición

In San Antonion de Areco, a small town about 2 hours from Buenos Aires, the 10th of November of every year is a festival called Día de la Tradición. What's traditional about this festival is that it's a celebration of the gaucho culture.

Gauchos are like Argentinian cowboys. Similar to American cowboys in that they played a vital role in settling and building up the desolate open spaces of both the US and Argentinian pampa. Gauchos are mythical figures for the Argentines, representing ideals of simple, hardworking, down-to-earth people, but who are known to give in to the pleasures of the drink or a knife fight at the local pulpería ( the typical bars that dotted the pampa). They work hard and they play hard.

Día de la Tradición consists of a horseback parade or procession through the town, everyone in full gaucho gear, of course. Then it's out to the park on the outskirts of town for rodeo competitions, folk music, asado or barbeque, and a day in the sun with the family.

Me and my Chilean friend Alejandro arrived at the bus terminal just in time to miss the 11am bus to Areco. Actually, maybe we timed it perfectly to have a long, leisurely coffee at the station before getting on the 1pm.

We got to Areco in the heat of afternoon. The town is really pretty, peaceful and quiet. Lots of historic old architecture. We wandered around, getting slightly lost a couple of times before finally finding the rodeo. ( You wouldn't think it would be that hard to find a rodeo in a small town, now would you... but it was.) We headed straight to the barbeque table, getting a couple of huge glasses of beer and some choripan, barbequed sausage on fresh bread.

And then we just did as everyone else was doing. Got out of the sun under a tree, and watched gauchos ride around on horses. The most interesting sport was one where they'd put a guy on this wild horse, then hit the horse and it would start bucking and trying to throw the guy off. The one who stays on longest wins. Every time the horse would throw the guy off, it would go sprinting toward the crowd, and then veer away at the last second.

In between sets of rodeo, they'd put on folk music over the loud speaker, which was neat. Alejandro shared with me the details of the huaso tradition in Chile. These Chilean cowboys have something in common with Gauchos, because of their similar colonial history, but they're not quite the same. We also had a lot of fun observing all the people decked out in gaucho gear, and judging who made the most convincing cowboy.

The bus ride back to the city took an hour longer than usual, what with all the sunday evening traffic of cottagers and vacations trying to get back to Buenos Aires. We'd been joking all afternoon that we'd wanted to steal some gauchos horse and ride back to the city. Sitting in a traffic jam at 9pm on a Sunday night we were thinking that that may have actually been a good idea....