(Iguacu Falls, Brazil – Iguacu, Argentina – Missiones, Argentina – Buenos Aires, Argentina).
It’s Sunday night in Buenos Aires and, unlike the Honey Island damp-internet-retype-because-the-dial-up-chewed-up-your-typing experience, I’m not losing several long winded messages to you on a dodgy dial-up connection through thunderstorms (leaving you with the barest bones of highly wrought travel notes: lucky you!).
But it IS raining.
Iguacu falls were beyond expectation and very loud and extremely wet. Nothing can prepare you for the relentless roar, the vast, amazing rainbows and the drenching spray for up to a kilometre away.
We had two days at the falls: above, under and in the Iguacu River: firstly on the Brazilian side (something of a circus dodging the local raccoons or long-nosed-bears who are after a free feed and will bite and scratch and look decorous to get one) then over the border to Argentina. This was rather more correct and controlled and very much more spectacular on a variety of catwalks above and around the many cataracts (with the remans of previous bridges carrying encouraging signs: “Destroyed by Floods in 1992”) leading to a fast boat ride under the falls then tracing the international border before a fast left turn to avoid Paraguay.
The Argentine town of Iguacu is fairly leisurely compared to the energetic boom town of Foz Iguacu on the Brazilian side. (Our tour leader had taken care not to let us loose there due to street crime). The large Arab population has also fed US suspicions that the 9/11 terrorists had trained in that area. The payback was the Brazil government’s demands for user-pay visas for travellers from the US and from countries friendly with “Our Great and Powerful Ally”. The Paraguayan side is a tax free zone, and very wild indeed, it seems. Brazilian and Argentine border patrols are regularly impounding busloads of goods and people of dubious legality.
The Argentine side of the share borders also features many half-constructed and now abandoned high-rise hotels which are apparently the remains of a failed plan where the government paid the full cost of developments up-front. The developers then absconded leaving skeletal construction sites. This was also where our vibrant tour leader from Brazil handed us over to the very correct Ms Ingrid over delicate, fresh churros and mountains of fresh dipping caramel.
The northern Missiones area of Argentina was settled by many Germans early last century, and is very controlled. It is also the site of the remains of early Jesuit missions before the Jesuits were expelled by Portugal and Spain for inconveniently disrupting the enslavement of the Indian populations. One of the memorials to local indigenous builders are the terracotta mission tiles, which were moulded over the thighs of Indian workers.
After a whole day of roads to and between missiones we were a bit “over” missions, and not quite prepared to the overnight sleeper bus: not as luxurious as the Brazilian version to Iguacu with seats converted to full linen-covered beds, but not too bad. It was a longish night of leg rests, fully reclined seats, bad videos: VERY LOUD, dinner and breakfast served on TV dinner trays, rot-gut wine in passenger kits to assist sleep, and early police stop-and-searches for drugs on the bus in the wee small hours to wake you up again.
Buenos Aires is wonderful, if you have money. None of the downtown banks has glass windows as they are still subjected to physical attacks by protestors following the financial crises of 4 years ago when the peso was severely devalued over night and the banks, God bless ‘em, would no longer pay out American dollar accounts with anything but pesos. The middle class savings across the all of Argentina were decimated: many subsequently lost their jobs or had wages forced down to near-starvation levels. It’s comforting to know that the government has now ensured that it is illegal to employ anyone without paying them a wage…
The city’s grand older days are in the architecture: art deco and art nouveau design and decoration are everywhere, like the best of Paris and Madrid and perhaps New York of the 1920’s. The downtown and tourist areas are awash with tango: buskers with squeeze boxes and stylish locals go about their business making we travellers appear somewhat grungy. That is until you get out of downtown to the other areas.
After yesterday’s somewhat bemused and dazed organised look around the sights followed an overnight on the Sleeper bus from Posadas. As usual, entering a big city through it’s multi-level bare concrete bus station guarantees that you see the arse-end first. Our sleep-deprived tour included Evita’s balcony, Evita’s grave, the ever-present graffiti from Peronists who are attempting to regain power, and outdoor tango at La Boca. This is the primary-coloured shacked port area settled by Italians in the early 20th Century and the short-stay accommodation to numerous Nazi escapees c/o the Vatican. This was followed by tango at the Recoleta cemetery, and tango performed last night at a tourist dinner performance with rot gut vino at a price. The Inca, Gaucho and Tango dancers (impressive) were backed by a most lugubrious band, the most lugubrious of whom were the accordion players: not a lot of joy filled faces…
Today was a “free” day away from my very “interrresting small tour group and our very correct Argentinian group leader, Ingrid: “I am third generation German and I went to the German Schule here in Buenos Aires…”
(We are behaving Most Correctly and Punctually).
So, being a free day, and having been marketed and monumented out yesterday, I took the pre-metro to the deep south of Buenos Aires into the places that most tourists don’t go. And it’s not so pretty (but a great deal more real).
The quiet desperation of day-to-day in the suburbs is pretty evident. The tram crew is a driver and an armed guard. It felt safe enough to get off and walk around in the massive cemetery at Balbastro with the Mothers’ Day crowds buying flowers and tending graves. The poorly maintained tenement suburbs and rubbish strewn parklands and shopping malls didn’t inspire confidence. The tram line is part of a brave town planning experiment to build a high-rise low-income housing barrio on the city outskirts. The newer areas look fine . Not quite do fine are the Redfern/Collingwood/Manchester bare-concrete high rises at the tram terminus with their extreme political graffiti and the roofless bus and tram shelters (because the panels have been “borrowed” to build shanty towns elsewhere in the city). The local bakery sells bread through a grid cage across a basic counter.
Closer in to the city, and in a more prosperous area of boulevards at the end of the “Subte” metro Line A, I found the only preserved museum trams operating in South America running around a large older residential city block to the Subte depot. It was all very pleasant to trundle the streets in a 95 year old tram which is only slightly older than the swaying wooden metro cars which brought me there. In daily use, they are boxy trains of polished wood, arched windows, varnished slat seats Edwardian mirrors and groaning motors protesting their age.
The tram survives because, the ubte trains also use the same street tracks to reach their depot in the early hours. This very nice neighbourhood is regularly woken by the sounds of full-sized 85 tear old trains grinding along their suburban streets to the workshops in the dark early hours.
All of which is rather less dangerous to paiople on the streets than the huge piles of dogshit. There are MANY LARGE doggies living in the apartments of downtown Buenos Aires, and the cobblestoned streets and sidewalks are suitably decorated in various piled and smeared shades of shit-brindle.
Not many dogs to be seen in the far southern suburbs…
More “Wisdom of the Tour Guides”:
…..
Thomas, or Brazilian tour leader was an extreme sufferer of ADHD and Optimism. He had a good line in Argentinian jokes:
What is an Argentinian?
An Italian who speaks Spanish and thinks he is English.
When there is thunder and lightning, why do Argentinians go outside to look at the sky?
- Because they think God is taking their picture with a flash camera.
…..
Ingrid, our rather more “correct” Argentinian guide, when commenting that Buenos Aires’ main boulevard is the widest in the world, is careful to mention that you cannot say such things to people from Brazil because “they have to have the biggest and the best of everything…”
Tomorrow we’re off to Uruguay, which promises to be less like down town Buenos Aires and more like its suburbs. We’re promised a day of gauchos and meat (!) on Tuesday, before (more) missions, and a return for one more day in Buenos Aires on Thursday. It won’t be enough.
It will be a relief to return to Europe where the languages might remain a mystery, but at least you won’t have to keep remembering to put the toilet paper into the nasty little bin beside the loo. SUCH a good look by the end of the day…
