Investment Biker Page 34

  Unfortunately, the futures exchange down here was all-in-one. If you bought a seat on the wool exchange you were buying a seat on the entire futures trading market. That wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted a pure play in wool and lamb, but I couldn’t get it with a seat.

  Another reason I liked having an account in New Zealand was that it gave me a presence on the Pacific Rim. These were the first markets to open in the day because of their time zone. Sometimes I wanted to put on a trade in the middle of the night and I might mind waiting until Europe or Tokyo opened. New Zealand came first to the extent that anything opened “first” these days.

  How might I use this? Say on Saturday afternoon I came to believe the dollar was going to cave in on Monday morning, that it was all over for the dollar. Well, I could short the dollar in New Zealand long before the markets opened in Asia, Europe, and New York. I could buy gold. If I thought the stock markets of the world were going to collapse Monday morning, here was where I could sell first, because it was going to be the first one open. If I thought there was going to be a big boom for some reason, again here was where the first market opened. In fact, Monday morning in New Zealand is still Sunday afternoon in New York.

  The New Zealand stock market had a few hundred choices. I picked out twenty, each in agriculture and raw materials and each with a strong balance sheet. While I was at it, I put a smaller bit into Australian agriculture, too. I looked for companies that would survive in case I was wrong about when to jump into this market, and the country’s hard times weren’t over.

  In many ways I was still a starstruck kid from a tiny town in Alabama, agog at the sights and the strangeness of the great world through which we passed. To ride across the Strait of Magellan! To roar across Tierra del Fuego! For most of my life these had been only exotic names on maps, and now I was within hailing distance of Magellan’s historic route.

  Much less frigid in winter than we’d expected, Tierra del Fuego is mainly flat, windswept, and lovely. It is occupied by sheep, geese, a few people, and guanaco, a llamalike animal.

  To attract people to visit and settle, the island was duty-free. Indeed, the Argentine government encouraged people to move into all the regions below Buenos Aires. Although it is a huge country, eighth largest in the world, a third of its people live in the capital city.

  Tierra del Fuego’s largest city, Ushuaia, is the southernmost city in the world. The city certainly needed to provide all the incentive that could be dreamed up to attract settlers. A bank manager told me the area needed hotel and fishing development. Empty stores and half-built lots said business wasn’t doing as well as it might.

  At this time of the year, June, sunup was at ten in the morning, sunset at four in the afternoon, providing us with short driving times. The light down here at the “Uttermost End of the World,” as the natives liked to call it, was an ever-changing source of wonder, otherworldly, pale, and bleak.

  Tourism will boom here. The scenery is breathtaking. Fabulous cross-country skiing could easily develop. The king crabs were wonderful. The town provided one of the few ways to get to Antarctica, which I was convinced was about to become a great tourist site. Just as Tamanrasset, on the edge of the Sahara, had boomed because travelers wanted to see the desert, Ushuaia would boom, too, as they visited Antarctica.

  Ushuaia might have a small population, but I felt the rumble of the coming boom. I was tempted to buy land.

  After all, the town had just come by its first real estate agents—could big growth be far behind?

  We took a boat out. On both sides of the choppy water steep craggy mountains rose, giving the Beagle Channel a haunted feel. Rocky islands were scattered about, one covered with cormorants, another with seals.

  Young seal bucks put on a diving show around us, bobbing, weaving, and torpedoing. On the rocks the seal social hierarchy was on full display, a king on top challenged by another big seal, while below younger males challenged each other. Farther away, other, older seals had opted out and weren’t bothering to contest the pecking order.

  Was there a lesson here?

  We were on the home stretch of our trip now. We’d been away from New York for fifteen months. My odometer, recorded in my notebook each morning before we left the hotel or campsite, had logged forty-three thousand miles. I figured we had another twenty thousand to go.

  I was very much looking forward to seeing South America. I knew Chile was booming, an economic miracle, and I wanted to see the effect it was having on other South American countries. My take on the continent was that it was coming out of a seventy-year bear market and was poised for a continent-wide economic boom.

  Even though we were near Chile there was no decent road north to Santiago, its capital. The only paved road north was up Argentina’s coast to Buenos Aires. Since no one here had any clear idea of how to drive to Central America beyond following the Pan-American Highway, we decided to wait till we reached Buenos Aires to gather more intelligence.

  We headed north to Buenos Aires over the pampas, plains differently colored and textured than those anywhere else in the world. Prairie hares bounded around us, and eagles soared overhead. Wild ostriches, smaller than the African variety and gray with white-trimmed skirts that fluttered, hopped across the plains.

  At Lake Argentina the sight of dozens of pink flamingos stopped us. The drive around the lake was a wonderful motorcycle ride, mountains to one side, the vast lake on the other. The forest and boulder-strewn terrain appeared primeval and spectral, the tangled moss and grotesquely shaped trees and rocks seemingly drawn into monsters by the magnetic attraction of the nearby South Pole.

  A huge, bluish mass appeared at the water’s edge on the horizon. Over the next five to ten miles its color deepened and the object grew larger as we drew closer.

  It was the Moreno glacier, one hundred and fifty miles long, one of the few in the world still moving. The air filled with groans and loud cracks that grew into rifle shots and booming explosions. The glacier became compressed as it pushed between two mountains, then spread again and broke up. When it finally met Lake Argentina, the glacier’s front was a 160-foot-high wall of ice that had taken hundreds of years to inch its way down out of the Andes. Its path cut the lake in two, like a moving dam. Occasionally large pieces cracked off and plunged into the blue water, creating blue-tinged icebergs and sending waves to thunder against the shore.

  Once this moving ice dam had cut the lake in two, every three or four years it burst under the immense water pressure behind it and collapsed in a spectacular scene lasting several hours. This created a remarkable sight few had ever witnessed because it was so unpredictable and sometimes happened at night. With collapse, the seven-hundred-year-old ice melted back into the blue lake, evaporated into the air, fell again as snow, and became glacier all over again.

  Considering how remarkable all this was, I was surprised at the meagerness of the tourist promotion. The southern tip of South America is remote, but so are lots of popular places. Part of this doubtless was due to Argentina’s insularity, which was changing as the country opened itself again to the larger world.

  The glacier presented someone with a great opportunity to become rich. All that was needed was an airport so people could fly down from Buenos Aires. Foreigners could fly into Argentina, go to Iguaçu Falls in the north, visit the glacier next, and later sail to Antarctica, all stellar attractions. A similar tourist boom had happened to the Galápagos. An airport was built, now thousands flocked there, and vast fortunes had been made. The town nearby, Calafate, is just sitting there waiting for the same thing to happen.

  We made friends with a sheep farmer and rode along behind his battered pickup. Most farmers here were in dire straits. His Ford truck was eleven years old, but he couldn’t afford to buy a new one anytime soon.

  We went out to the sheep farm of the Rudds, our new friends. The family had come from the Falklands more than a hundred years before and obtained land grants. As in our Old West, the Argentine gover
nment gave away land to entice settlers into taming the frontier.

  The size of acreage here was like that of Texas. The Rudds leased out to others a couple of fifty-thousand-acre spreads. Their land was a bit marginal, as each sheep needed ten acres to graze, but the Rudds were nevertheless working the farm in these hard times after many others had closed up.

  The Argentine government still owned much of the nation’s land, especially down here. To become a landowner, a citizen proposed a project to the government and executed it—built a house, say. After four years and lots of red tape he owned the land at a low price.

  The Rudds’ grandfather had owned 750,000 acres here, but the grandchildren had broken up the station, as ranches are called here and in Australia. Back in the grandfather’s time, around 1900, Argentina had been richer than the United States. Today we say someone is as rich as a Texan, an Arab, or a Japanese; in Europe before World War I the expression had been “as rich as an Argentine.” The Rudds’ grandfather had been one of the wealthy ones.

  How it happened is a lesson in technology and being in the right place at the right time. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Spanish mainly settled in Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia. Argentina had been no more than a vast, lightly developed territory of plains, without gold and without interest. Many of the cows and horses the Spanish had brought over escaped and went wild. Without natural predators—there were no wolves or lions in Argentina—they multiplied and became good-sized herds.

  Over the years, these cattle were chased down by Argentine riffraff called gauchos, who had to become great horsemen if they wanted a beefsteak. As there were few people in Argentina, the market for the meat they killed was small, so the herds kept expanding. In Europe, where there were no large plains, beef was a much desired delicacy, yet no matter how good a horseman a gaucho was, he couldn’t drive a herd to Paris.

  In the late nineteenth century, refrigerated transoceanic ships were developed. All of a sudden Argentine cows became unbelievably valuable.

  Whoever was in the pampas, whoever was horseman enough to ride down wild beefsteak, became rich. As in Texas, huge ranches were developed. The successful gauchos transformed themselves from riffraff into wealthy ranchers.

  At that time the United States did not have many cattle. We jumped into the European market, but the Argentines had the stock, left over from the Spanish strays. Vast numbers of immigrants flooded into both countries. It was a toss-up in Europe whether the North or the South American plains would make you more prosperous.

  These things sometimes take a while to clarify. It wasn’t until later in the twentieth century that it was clear that Argentina was the wrong choice. When entrepreneurs around the globe realized how lucrative the cattle business was, many jumped in—Americans, Australians, and Africans. Losing its easy money, the Argentinian government sought to compensate with protective tariffs, regulations, and exchange controls, all of which compounded its ever-worsening economy. As in New Zealand during the eighties, during the twenties, thirties, and forties the Argentinian economy spiraled downward. The government borrowed to maintain living standards in the short run, and debt accumulated. Perón, Argentina’s man on a white horse, promised easy prosperity and completed the destruction of the economy.

  Meanwhile America was building factories. Argentina had had it too easy, had hit the gold mine too quickly. They didn’t need to invest for the future because they were so rich. They chose Band-Aids to cover their wounds rather than the surgery needed to correct deep-seated cancers. Decades of suffering followed.

  …

  We’d had so much fun viewing the seals off Tierra del Fuego, we hired a boat to take us off Peninsula Valdés.

  July was the best time to visit whales here. Not only was the rest of the year too windy, but this was the mating season. There were few travelers since it was winter. At one point our boat was surrounded by a dozen right whales, most of which were so busy copulating they paid no attention to us. We might have been flies to humans similarly engaged. The boat maneuvered so close, we could reach out and touch their slick hides.

  These were called right whales by old-time whalers because they had the right oil, the right bones, the right blubber, the right everything. They came here every year to mate, and as usual each female had captured the attention of three or four males.

  Our guide pointed out two females on their backs, floating within a few yards of our boat. This was a female’s signal to the boys she’d had it for the moment, to leave her alone.

  We hiked down to a beachful of male sea elephants, resting and fattening up for the return of their females in August. When the females arrived and mating season began, the males had to stay on land to guard their harems from marauding woman-stealers. This meant for several weeks they couldn’t go fishing or eat, thus the rationale for fattening themselves up. We walked among them, huge, great sausages laid out in the sun.

  This peninsula teemed with animals. Another beach was full of sea lions sleeping, fighting, swimming, and squawking. We came across an injured penguin in from the ocean; a mara, a large rodentlike rabbit; sea elephants; burrowing owls; sheep; dogs; cows; pink-breasted thrushes; upland geese; and Antarctic pigeons.

  The days lengthened rapidly. We drove up the Argentine coast toward Buenos Aires through a countryside with few people. The roads were long and straight through the broad, empty pampas. For an entire day we didn’t see a single tree. These vast plains certainly contained abundant room for development.

  It was true, Argentineans ate more red meat per person than any other people in the world. Every little town had a big barbecue place, or, I suppose, grill, and in the cities there were scores of them. With the mixed grill they served blood sausages, cases crammed with baked blood and spices, which I found surprisingly tasty.

  Argentina will become a tourist’s paradise. Along with dozens of exotic animals, it has mountains, beaches, deserts, the Antarctic, skiing, hunting, the vast, wild pampas, and horseback riding—everything a traveler could want. Up north is extraordinary colonial Spanish architecture as well as the wonder of Iguaçu Falls. Now that the government is stable and has gotten rid of the military, or at least calmed them down and stopped the atrocities of the seventies and eighties, real development can take place.

  While our bikes were being repaired in Buenos Aires, Tabitha and I flew up to Iguaçu Falls in the north, one of the world’s ten largest waterfalls.

  Located on the Iguaçu River where Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina come together, the falls were breathtaking: a 300-foot drop that pounds the water below so hard it constantly produces a giant rainbow in its cloud of spray. Like Victoria Falls, Iguaçu Falls make Niagara look minor. Hundreds of years before being stumbled upon by Don Alvar Nuñes in 1541, the falls were a sacred burial place for South American tribes.

  From the precipice over the Devil’s Throat, the falls roared below, drenching us with mist. Rainbows arched over the water, while parrots and hawks cruised over the deep green jungle. Swifts dropped like stones into the mist to spear insects.

  All this made us feel a bit embarrassed by Niagara Falls, our continent’s answer to these falls. I first figured that somebody had done a great PR job up there, but then I realized Niagara’s reputation was the result of another of those historical tides that come and go.

  The northern part of the U.S. was a great boom area in the later part of the nineteenth century—a time when the railroads, not the airlines, gave definition to the word mobility. The newly prosperous wanted to see new things, and the railroads had seats to fill. Voilà!

  Niagara Falls were certainly stupendous, if that was all you knew, so a self-reinforcing process started. The railroads hyped the falls to fill seats, inexperienced travelers were impressed easily, and the cycle had begun. Stunts and more press followed until Niagara Falls had become—Niagara Falls!

  But like most things, the market became saturated, the falls even déclassé. Transportation technol
ogy advanced, allowing travelers to fly ever farther afield.

  Niagara does have one superior feature that the world’s great waterfalls cannot match, but it doesn’t do much for the tourist trade. During January and February, Niagara freezes and produces the most extraordinary ice formations that one can visit. You won’t find ice sculptures at Iguaçu Falls ever, but how many people want to go to Buffalo in February?

  Twenty miles away on the Rio Paraná is the world’s largest hydroelectric plant, Itaipu, and a frontier city, Ciudad del Este, or “City of the East.” It is a real boomtown, booming because of the tens of billions of dollars spent to build the dam. Nearby Foz do Iguaçu grew from 35,000 inhabitants to 150,000 as the dam was built. Here is a perfect example of an infrastructure laid down by entrepreneurs to construct the dam, and now available to service travelers and any industry that can take advantage of it.

  Itaipu means “singing rock” in a native dialect. Built as a joint project by Brazil and Paraguay, it is powered by the Paraná River, which divides the two countries. Financed by World Bank debt, the $25 billion dam is five miles wide and eighty yards high. Recently completed, it had taken seventeen years to build. The last generator had just come on stream, and now the dam produced 12,600 megawatts. Egypt’s Aswân Dam is puny compared with it, and our own Hoover Dam isn’t even in the running.

  Tabitha thought visiting the dam would be a waste of time, but since I’d read about it in the press for a couple of decades, I was eager to see it. It is as stunning as any man-made thing I’ve ever seen, and I include in this assessment the Taj Mahal, India’s Ellora caves, Easter Island, Machu Picchu, and Tikal. It is an engineering marvel, a most extraordinary product of mankind’s capacity to build. In addition to its size, it contains entire cities for workers and supervisors, including self-service elevators and an intricate latticework of interior catwalks and crossways. As at Ellora, everything had been planned and then carefully put together over a period of a couple of decades. It is a wonder of the modern world.