Last updated 14 July 2006
I have been living in Buenos Aires for half a year. Unbelieveable. At the end of August, I'll be going back to London.
Before that, though, I'm going to do some travelling around el Cono Sur, the 'Southern Cone' of South America. The first trip will take me, of course, to my second home: Patagonia.
February March April - Patagonia May I'm on my way to Patagonia to celebrate the arrival there, 151 years ago, of the first Welsh settlers: Gwÿl y Glaniad, the Landing Feast. There will be big community teas held in all of the old chapels, Bethesda and Moriah, Bethel and Seion. Lining these paths are signs exhorting the visitor not to leave those paths, although there are clearly marked footpaths visible that lead off into the undergrowth every now and again. I have never ventured on to one of those before, partly out of respect for the wildlife and partly for fear of the feral dogs. I didn’t know about those until recently, when a birdwatcher informed me of their existence, and told me that she herself never left the main path near Costanera Sur, and that only in the well-visited hours of the afternoon when you can't throw a stone anywhere in the Reserva without hitting a porteandntilde;o ambling about. I go jogging two mornings a week in the Reserva, at eight in the morning when there's hardly anyone about, and I have never seen a single dig. However, I now know the Spanish for 'a pack of feral dogs': una manada de perros sueltos. The Reserva as seen from the air. Photo (c) www.monografias.com
I have heard before that one's eyes adapt after a while in the dark, and I find it to be perfectly true. I can't see colours, but I can see and distinguish lots of shades of grey. * * *
I get my flight sorted out finally, although it is still horribly expensive; and of course two weeks later Violeta forwards me an email with a special offer at half the price I have paid. I pack up my things and leave the flat in Once where I have lived for almost half a year. Next stop: Misiones, the northernmost province of Argentina; and then Brazil. After that, I will return to London; my flight is irrevocably booked for 5 September. I can't believe at all that I will soon leave South America and return to Europe. And in truth, it won't be a return to how it was before. I have changed a lot in the nearly seven months I have spent in Argentina. I've come to trust myself more. I've realised that I want to travel more, live in more places. My world has grown larger. Place outside Europe are calling me; I want to live in Chile and in Mexico, in North Africa and the Middle East; and who knows what other places that I'm not even thinking about yet. I will be homesick for South America in London, just as I've been homesick for London in Buenos Aires.
June
July
If you're wondering how on earth Welsh people ended up living in the Patagonian pampas, have a read here
And so back to Buenos Aires, and my last week and a half there, before I go on the road again, to the north, the famous waterfalls at Iguazanduacute;, and Brazil.
In Buenos Aires, a treat happens that I've already resigned myself to missing, this time.
A nocturnal outing in the Reserva Ecologia. These take place once a month, on the Friday nearest the full moon, and one has to book a place on the preceding Monday morning. Every time I have tried in my months here, the line was engaged solidly, and by the time I got through, all places were booked. So when Violeta rings me in the afternoon of my last-but-one Friday in my flat to say that if I ring the Reserva straight away, I will be able to book myself in for tonight's tour, I am greatly cheered. I've been moping around the flat all day, miserable about my rapidly (all too rapidly) approaching return to London (or rather, about the fact that I will have to leave Buenos Aires; I am actually looking forward to London, but leaving Buenos Aires will be a terrible wrench). This has been made worse by the uncertainty about whether I will actually manage to return at all, as plane tickets are not only unpleasantly expensive, but also incredibly hard to get hold, the entire month of September being apparently booked solid for no good reason. All the travel agencies I've rung say that they have never seen anything like it. This doesn't make me feel any better about my situation, half willing and half unwilling to go but not sure whether I will in fact be able to.
I ring the Reserva's number forthwith, and they have, indeed, places still for tonight's excursion.
It's very odd to arrive at the Reserva‘s gates in the dark. It is usually open only during the daylight hours, from 8AM to 6 PM in the winter months. A knot of people are already waiting. The moon is not yet in evidence (but will be later on). The temperature has been mild during the day (think September in the UK) but now, without the warming presence of the sun, it is getting rather chilly, and I wish I'd put another layer of fleece on. Violeta is there with her boyfriend Diego and her seven-year-old daughter, universally known as La Princesa. La Princesa is a fabulous little person, fearless and giggly and with the makings of a star. One day she will be famous, I'm sure of it. She takes dance and theatre classes and is already a really good actress. She and I have a mutual admiration society going: I love her independent spirit and the serene belief she has in life and in herself. And she admires my multi-coloured hair and - currently blue - eyebrows.
Children stay up way longer in Argentina than they do in western Europe; I have seen abbes in arms in restaurants with their parents at one and two in the morning. So La Princesa joining us on our night walk at the not-very-advanced hour of 8 PM isn’t a sight to give any Argentinean pause.
The excursion is a slow business to start with; We (the group, luckily the second, much smaller of two groups) walk fifty yards or so, then the guide stop and talks at length about the birds we would be able to see if it was daytime. It seems a bit pointless, and an unwelcome disruption of the silence of the night. Not that that silence was unbroken to begin with. Along the part of the Reserva nearest the city runs the avenue Costanera Sur, where countless grill stands ply their trade. These go from morning to late at night, selling the Argentine specialty asado, barbecue'd meat. God knows who wants barbecue'd ribs for breakfast, but on those mornings when I leave the Reserva after my morning run at 9 AM or 9.30 AM, half the stalls are opening up or already open, and the smell of grilling meat drifts on the morning breeze. In addition to the scent of their wares, several of the grill stands find it necessary to attract their customers - or perhaps to alleviate the tedium of their work, or their lives, who knows - to play thumping music at top volume.
So beside the droning voice of the guide - Jorgito, or Little George - the leaves of the trees and the rushes rustling, the night breeze also has to compete with thumping rock music.
It gets better once we leave the main path near Costanera Sur. Gradually, the sounds and sights (the brightly-lit tower blocks) of the city fal behind us as we go on further into the shadowy darkness of the Reserva at night. The night is dark but not black; a grey of ranging densities. The path ahead of us is a lightish, almost luminous grey; the fields of rushes and pampas grass to the left and right masses of denser grey, shifting in the wind. There are sleepy quacks from the ducks, and a melodious almost-singing that sounds like nothing so much as a number of small xylophones being played at high speed.
It's the frogs. Argentine frogs don’t croak, they sing like that. I don’t know if that is an Argentine or a South American or pan American phenomenon. It never ceases to astonish and enchant me.
There is light in the sky behind us, and turning round I can still see the lit-up skyline of Buenos Aires on the horizon, but ahead and to both sides all is darkness and rustling shadows.
And then I gets better; much, much better. We leave the main path. There are three main path, as wide as single-track roads, in the Reserva: one that skirts the edge all around along the river front, and two that cross the interior, the wide stretches of grass and trees between the two shallow lagoons.
'Oh yes, they're always about,' Violeta says when I ask her. 'But I've never been attacked.'
Neither had the birdwatcher, but she knew of someone who had.
Perhaps it's all an urban myth.
Here we are in the Reserva in the dark, chilly evening, and Jorgito the guide proposes we all venture forth into the shadowy sea of waving grasses that grow higher (way higher) than our heads. So we go, single file, into the darkness.
We slither along the narrow path, slippery after recent rainfall. The grasses are all around us, twelve feet high at least. The air is humid and still, with a strong yeasty, earthy smell. We walk for what seems like hours, deeper and deeper into the sea of towering pampas grass and rushes. We pause briefly in a clearing surrounded by slender trees, and Violeta and I turn towards each other and say together: 'Imagine sleeping out here!' and burst out laughing. La Princesa sits down to rest her legs, Violeta's boyfriend says very little (not being much of a son of nature), and the stomach upset that has been plaguing me all afternoon goes away completely.
When we emerge again on to the main path, the rustling of the grasses is replaced by the hissing of waves. We're near the beach, and in another couple of minutes we stand on the beach. And there hangs the full moon, huge and orange and low in the sky, painting a glistening road of light in to the water.
'The moon's made of cheese,' says La Princesa, and I go off clambering over the rocks down to the water's edge, wishing I could wade into the water and swim along the road of light, all the way to the moon.
But first, there is a new corner of my continent of choice to discover.
I fly to Iguazú. Buenos Aires from the air is a never-ending jumble of off-white skyscrapers - ever so slightly tattered-looking apartment rather than office blocks - and intersecting roads. As the plane banks I get, for a moment, a clear look of the wide avenue 9 de Julio and the while needle of the Obelisco against the cold blue sky. Then we're over Puerto Madero, the futuristic footbridge Puente de la Mujer (Women's Bridge), gleaming white and looking like a Concorde aeroplane for a moment. More skyscrapers, new and gleaming this time like London's Docklands, then a large patch of untidy green with two irregular bodies of water like big puddles: my Reserva Ecologica, which from the air looks much tidier than it does from the ground. We're over the river now, glistening brown and silver in the bright winter sunlight.
Every time I fly over the river I think of the Disappeared, many of whom, after they had been tortured to death, or almost to death, were thrown into aeroplanes and dropped into the water at night to make their bodies with the evidence of torture disappear; and perhaps to enable the torturers to pretend that their victims had never existed. No body, no proof, no corpse, no death, no trace.
There was no way of saying how many of the bodies had still been alive, let alone conscious, when they were cast into the Rand#237;o de la Plata.
For a long time, I couldn't go near the river without thinking of the dead, the not-yet-dead, drowning or dying of exposure, aware and desperate, or perhaps unconscious but still breathing.
'It's not the fault of the river,' somebody told me, and that helped. Now, I think of it as a river first, a body of water, a place in its own right; gleaming silver in sunlight or dull and brown like earth on cloudy days, the mouth of the River Paraná that brings alligators and turtles down from the subtropical north of Argentina on its long journey towards the sea.
So now I can see the brown waters from the plane, and somehow remember the dead but at the same time, see just a river that is nothing to do with the uses that humans have put it to, for their own cruel and unfathomable ends.
What happened here was not the fault of the river.
Now we're flying over fields, flat and greyish green. Then the landscape changes, becomes hilly. Other rivers wind their way like huge snakes through the land, and more and more trees appear.
When we come in to land in Iguazú, there are high, waving tree tops everywhere, and the soil is as red as bricks.
The air is humid and warm and full of birdcalls.
My first port of call is the Jardand#237;n de Picaflores, the Hummingbird Garden. This is a recommendation of Consuelo, who was here recently on a birdwatching holiday. In the garden of their house, an enterprising family have hung half a dozen bird feeders filled with sugary water, to attracts hummingbirds.
The garden is filled with bird calls and the whirring of wings. There are at least a dozen hummingbirds, in perpetual motion, sipping from the feeders. (They're almost impossible to photograph because they move so fast. So my pictures are rather blurred. I'm better with landscapes and inanimate objects that don't run away. My camera is the old-fashioned kind that has to be focussed manually. By the time I've focussed it and sorted out shutter speed, the hummingbird is long gone.)
They're beautiful, iridescent green and blue. There is also a black-and-white one. I hadn't known there were black and white hummingbirds.
Puerto Iguazú is a small place, quiet and provincial. The roads are as wide as everywhere in Argentina, and only the main ones are paved. On the outskirts, where my hostel is, the road surface consists of uneven stones and red earth. * * *
It's warm in Iguazú, 900 miles north of Buenos Aires -- and thus 900 miles nearer the equator; north is warm and south is cold here in the southern hemisphere. This morning in Buenos Aires (was I really in Buenos Aires just this morning?) an icy wind was going, and the temperature barely rose above eight degrees. I wander about the streets under waving palm fronds, amid buzzing mosquitoes, and enjoy the sleepy stillness.
The famous Iguazú/Iguaand#231;u (the first spelling is used in Argentina, the second in Brazil) waterfalls occupy territory shared between Argentina and Brazil. The border is the River Paraná. Iguazú/Iguaand#231;u is a Guaranand#237; word meaning Big Water. The Guaranand#237; are an indigenous people living in what is today southern Brazil, Paraguay and this corner of north eastern Argentina. Guaranand#237; is still widely spoken; it's one of the official languages of Paraguay (the other being Spanish). My friend Violeta in Buenos Aires is from Brazil originally, and of Guaranand#237; and Portuguese descent. She has taught me a few words in the language; my favourite is the Guaranand#237; name of the passion flower, Mburucuyá. (The 'y' pronounced as the 'j' in raj.)
The falls are apparently larger than Niagara, and attract hundreds of thousands of tourists from all over the world every year. Even now, in the middle of winter, dozens of coaches are parked by the park entrance every day. Even in the town of Puerto Iguazú, I hear around me more English, French and German than I have for months. I decide to visit the park early in the morning to avoid the hordes.
So I get up at 6.30 AM and catch the first bus out to the National Park, a forty-minute bus ride outside the Puerto Iguazú, at twenty minutes to eight. I am optimistically dressed in summer clothes; crop trousers and a T-shirt, and even though I am also wearing a sweatshirt and a fleece hoodie to ward off the morning cold, I'm shivering. Yesterday afternoon was so lovely and warm, and now I might as well be back in wintry Buenos Aires. The morning light is glorious, but a cold wind is blowing.
The shops in the visitors' centre by the park gates are only just opening up, and not even the coffee machine in the café is going yet. Hardly any other tourists are about yet. At least that part of my plan is working.
I walk off into the crisp morning and do finally get my coffee in the one open café, by the small train station in the park. From here, a narrow-gauge railway ferries visitors closer to the falls. The coffee warms me up a bit, although my extremities still feel like icicles. I spurn the train (I haven't come to the jungle to sit on my arse watching the scenery pass by outside the window. I've come to walk in the jungle!) and plunge into the undergrowth. That is to say, I take the first footpath that opens off the paved main path, and walk along that. This is more like it. I am tramping along a beaten earth path - muddy in places - with shrubs higher than my head on both sides.
The idyll is temporarily interrupted when I hit a paved road. I have been hearing the sound of cars going by occasionally, but assumed them to be on the main road to Iguazú, which I hoped soon to leave behind. I had assumed the interior of the park to be pure wilderness; and have accordingly stocked up on sandwiches, water, sunscreen and insect repellent like a proper jungle explorer (for one day) -- as advised in the information leaflet handed to me with my admission ticket in the visitor centre upon entering. The leaflet also contains a map, on which I now see that there is not only this tarmacked road inside the park, but also a big hotel of the Sheraton or Hilton kind.
It comes into view presently, an ugly grey concrete structure surrounded by tennis courts and a car park. I suppose the park and the sub-tropical research station in it have to be financed somehow, but still. Ugh.
(I also find out later that there are cafés dotted about at regular intervals, a fact about which I manage to be at once pleased and disapproving.)
But soon, the ugly hotel is forgotten.
What looks like a lighthouse is some sort of observation tower, unfortunately closed. Maybe it's open in the summer? (This night, I will dream that the tower was, after all, open and that I went inside to climb up; but I'll wake up before I can get to the top and the view. I wonder what that's about.)
I follow a path through the jungle, that after a while emerges and hugs the hillside, giving beautiful views of the river gorge below.
Soon I'm warming up nicely, walking up and down the hill.
After about an hour of this, I have skirted the lower part of the hill and am confronted with the first of the three hundred-odd waterfalls that make up Iguazú, the Big Water.
Everybody in the park has been - and will be for the rest of my stay in the north - telling me how unusually dry the season is. It has hardly rained at all this winter, and the falls carry much less water than they usually do. (I do later pass a couple of places signposted as falls that are completely dry, just a sheer rock wall where the water has completely dried up.)
But I find the fall I am currently facing pretty impressive as is. I stand there for a long time, just watching the water rush down the mountain, enjoying the noise, the damp air, the rainbows, the sheer size of the spectacle. And, as ever, I try to imagine what it would have been like here before the park and the paths and the fenced-off view points, when all of this was the Big Water of the Guaranand#237; people, and people would have fished and swum and washed in the water, children played and shrieked under the cold white water falling down on them.
I am on what is called the Sendero Inferior, the Lower Path. There is also an Upper Path, which I can see looking up.
The next lot of falls is on an island that sits like a huge, overgrown rock in the middle of the river. And even if there weren't any falls visible from it, I would still want to cross; I love exploring this place, walking about in the jungle like this. Ever since I arrived yesterday and saw the red earth from the plane, the dense forest made up of trees I don't know - apart from the palm trees, in themselves exciting - but which looked like jungle trees; overgrown with feathery mosses and all manner of creepers - ever since that moment, I've been excited and delighted to be here. I want to stride off into the jungle and explore, get to know it, get to know its plants and animals, the way of nature. Orchids grow wild on the trees here, and other plants that I've previously only ever seen in the greenhouses in Kew Gardens. I'm hoping to see monkeys and snakes and toucans too, all of which live here, but I'm almost equally excited by the fecundity of the plant life; the strange and beautiful contrast between red earth and the green canopy of the trees.
So I clamber down many uneven rocky stairs, to get down to the edge of the river, where a boat crosses to the island every twenty minutes or so. And then there are more steps to climb on the other side to get to the top of the big rock that is the island. I take off my fleece hoodie. Being cold is now nothing but a distant memory. The path meanders through the trees and finally comes out on a sort of small rocky plateau where the first thing I see is not, as I'd thought, more falls, but instead a number of vultures sitting about, rather ominously, in the trees. I wonder whether the visitors to the park are fully counted in and out each day...
I am now quite glad that there are cafés in the middle of the wilderness. Once I have returned from the island, I make a stop for coffee, a cheese roll (chipa, made of manioc meal and cheese, very typical for this region, and very delicious), and fruit salad.
The train stops where the Upper and Lower Paths converge, and from there takes people on to the biggest fall of all, La Garganta del Diablo, the Devil's Throat. (The Catholic Spanish and Portuguese seem to favour this name; I have already seen a Devil's Throat rock formation in the desert in north-western Argentina, and will shortly see another waterfall by this name in the Brazilian Serra Verde mountains.)
So there is a train, but there is a also a footpath.
I haven’t yet had my fill of walking yet, I’m too delighted by the jungle and the red earth. So I walk.
The path is a red dirt road framed by the luxurious green growth of the subtropical jungle on both sides. Alongside it runs the track of the little train; which presently comes puffing along, with dozens of people sitting in its open-sided carriages. It doesn’t really puff at all, it’s not a steam train nor is it out of breath, that is merely my fanciful imagination. Perhaps there is something about this jungly place, where everything grows with ease and in abundance, that makes me see everything in it as somehow alive - even the train.
The train chugs round the next bend and out of sight, and I am left alone in the jungle, feeling like an explorer, an adventuress fearlessly striding through the wilderness. I don’t care that the wilderness is pretty tame in reality, a part of me has regressed to the age of ten and sees jaguars and giant spiders behind every tree. I am thoroughly enjoying myself.
I ask a couple of workers who sit in the shade of a bush having a coffee break how far it is to La Garganta del Diablo, and am told, somewhat surprisingly, that it is another two blocks. Latin Americans measure everything in cuadras, even a jungle road. There are towering trees and big clumps of bamboo which I am sure must have been introduced to Argentina, but a park ranger tells me that this particular bamboo is in fact native to the South American continent.
The last bit of the way to the Devil’s Throat is in essence a one kilometer (or cuadra) long footbridge that leads over the River Paraná to the point, mid-river, where the waters cascade down. The river here is wide and shallow and placid; the kind of river that one wants to sit down by and dangle one’s legs in.
I feel a bit blasand#233; about the Devil’s Throat, I’m going there as much for the walk as to see the falls. I've been looking at waterfalls all day long, and the fact that this is signposted as the fall, that hundreds of people are ferried here on the little park railway -- all of this make me even less keen to see this fall. I’m not overly fond of the obvious, the Big Thing, the Great Attraction. Hell, I don’t read most best-sellers purely on the grounds that they are best-sellers. But I’m here, I think, so I might as well go and look at this one as well. And the river is lovely, flowing so placidly. If I had more time, I would love to sneak on to one of the many small islands in its midst and sit there, reading, or just lie and look up into the green rustling crowns of the trees and doze and dream...
I hear it long before I see it. There is a white noise that keeps getting louder. And louder. The river is still brown, shallow, slow, placid, idyllic. Only the ruins of a similar walkway, destroyed, so a sign reads, in a flood in 1992, show what a force the water can be. Huge concrete blocks lie in the water, torn apart and toppled over. Steel ropes, once handrails and supports for the footbridge and now just twisted bits of metal.
And then there is La Garganta del Diablo itself. At first, there is just a huge, all-encompassing roar, and a cool, damp white cloud of spray like thick fog or drizzle. From the humid heat of the sunshine I pass into this cloud of fog, and within seconds, I am thoroughly damp. There is water everywhere, flowing, flying, falling, roaring. I forget about being blasand#233;, I forget about everything. I run to the edge of the viewing platform, clasp the handrail - to prevent myself from falling or from jumping? - and shout in sheer ecstatic delight.
I've never seen anything like it. This is like the sea on a stormy day, but bigger and louder and more astounding. Like in a gigantic witch’s cauldron, amazing masses of water are boiling whitely, throwing themselves down and down and down the mountainside. Back in the 17th century, the word awful used to mean awe-inspiring, amazing, grandiose. This waterfall is awful in exactly that way.
I don’t know how long I stand there, transfixed. I want to be a fish and jump down there to know what it will feel like. But I don’t think a fish could survive this.
I know. I want to be water and throw myself down: ecstatic water, blissful water, shouting and screaming water in delicious free fall.
And then rise again as vapour and do it all over again.
My photos don’t do it justice at all.
And then the film in my camera is used up, but perhaps that is just as well. This is too big, too wild, too monstrously beautiful to be captured in square little human-sized images.
* * *
It’s hard to believe, but on the evening of this same day that has been so filled with wonders, I find myself in the coach station of Ciudad del Este, about to board a coach to the city of Curitiba in Brazil, some 400 miles away. * * *
I booked the coach ticket in Buenos Aires, and the lady in the travel agent’s in there assured me it wasn’t far from Puerto Iguazú to Ciudad del Este, that I could get a taxi. This I have found out to be broadly true, but Ciudad del Este is actually in Paraguay, not Argentina, and one needs to go through first a bit of Brazil and the into Paraguay to get there.
I don’t get a taxi, being a cheapskate, because I have found out that there is a local bus going as well, which costs just 3 pesos. (The taxi was going to cost me 80 pesos!)
the bus stops at the Brazilian border, and everybody troops out to get their documents checked. Then it stops again a while later, and everybody descends once more to wipe their feet on a mat soaked with disinfectant. But it just bypasses the passport control at the Paraguayan border. Which at the time I think is cool; time saved (I am a bit worried about missing my coach).
Then I arrive at Ciudad del Este (which is like suddenly and unpleasantly going from almost-first world Argentinean Puerto Iguazúto the third world: all very ramshackle, faded, run-down; with dusty streetchildren dressed in rags and begging. You get those in Buenos Aires too, but not in the smaller Argentine towns). There is the coach station. Where everybody keeps telling me it was 4.45 PM although I know it to be 5.45 PM. (My coach will be going at six.)
Until the penny drops -- local Paraguayan time is an hour behind Argentina. OK. So I’m not going to miss my coach. The station is not the liveliest place I've ever seen, but it does sport a café. So I repair thither for a cup of tea and a cigarette. A sign on the wall exhorts patrons not to smoke between the hours of 11 AM and 3 PM, for reasons that escape me. Luckily, we are now outside these hours, so I sip my tea and light up and try to follow the film on the TV set affixed high up in the corner. An American film with Portuguese subtitles is running with the sound turned down. I can sort of follow the subtitles, which cheers me up. The Portuguese course ended only a few weeks ago, but since that time I have been to Patagonia, packed up and left my flat in Once and have travelled to the northernmost Argentine province of Misiones. It feels like a million years ago that I sat in the small cold classroom of the Instituto Brasileiro in Buenos Aires, practicing Portuguese. But apparently, I haven't forgotten it all.
And so the extra hour passes, and six o’clock arrives. As does my coach. My luggage is loaded aboard, my papers and ticket checked...
Ahhh, says the conductor. But where's the your entry stamp for entering Paraguay?
I don’t know, I say. The bus I came on didn't stop at that border crossing, and I assumed that because of the Mercosur (the common market between Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay), passport control isn’t always necessary.
No no no, says the conductor; you can't travel like this, you'll need to sort this and travel tomorrow.
He turns away and shouts to the man who puts the bags in the hold of the coach: Unload her suitcase!
But..., I say, hang on a minute, surely... But I am simply waved aside while my suitcase is taken out of the hold and the conductor turns to someone else.
My first feeble, then somewhat annoyed protests are answered with a renewed: You will travel tomorrow. Then the coach pulls out and drives away into the darkness. Night has fallen by now.
I am thoroughly vexed and perplexed. I even go to talk to the police in the coach terminal (somewhat reluctantly, as the reputation of the Paraguayan police isn’t by and large any better than that of Argentina’s). The first policeman has a very thick Paraguayan accent; he looks at my passport a good while, not quite sure what to do, and finally admits that he doesn’t know what to do with the situation and sends me to his colleague or his senior officer at the other end of the terminal.
That one also examines my passport for a good while and then tells me that, as I don’t have the entry stamp for Paraguay, I am hence illegally in the country.
But I didn’t know! I protest. How am I supposed to know?
That’s your responsibility, the police officer says. You should have insisted on having your passport checked upon entry in Paraguay. And he hands me the offending document back.
When I protest further, he even goes to ring someone else up from a phone box because his mobile isn’t working, but he still comes back with the same thing.
By now it’s 7 PM local time, dark, and I am tired and dusty and thoroughly dispirited. I just want to go back to Argentina where I know how things work and where I can communicate easily (I find the Paraguayan accent quite hard to follow). I want to go home, in short.
Only the last bus for Puerto Iguazú has left for the day. The last bus??
But it’s only seven in the evening, I exclaim, while the man in the information booth stares at me impassively.
You'll have to get a taxi, he says.
I get a taxi. The coach ticket to Curitiba had cost me 65 pesos. The taxi for the twenty or so kilometres from Ciudad del Este to Puerto Iguazú costs me 70 pesos.
I wonder how on earth I will explain my illegal status to the Paraguayan border control when the taxi driver slows down at the frontier and asks whether I will need to have my passport stamped.
It’s like this, I say, and explain the situation.
Then it’s best if we don’t stop, he says, and accelerates again.
Apparently passport control is optional when entering or leaving Paraguay.
We chitchat, and I learn that my driver is in reality a musician, a singer in a band. Taxi driving is merely his day job. He sings me a song, something slow and melting and, for some reason, in Italian.
And then we’re, blessedly, in Argentina again. I like things to be different when I travel, that’s one of the reasons indeed why I travel. But just now, I am relieved to be back in familiar waters. The Paraguayan accent is really most peculiar, like Scots English would sound, I imagine, to someone not used to it; and everything was different there, and made more complicated by my illegal status. I don’t think I've ever been illegal before, and on the whole I don’t much care for the feeling. I felt a bit like it ten years ago when my wallet was stolen in London and the woman in the German Embassy mis-spelled my name when looking me up on the system, and told me she didn’t have any records for me. I couldn’t prove who I was, and it wasn’t nice. I know my way around Argentina -- well, not all the time, but a hell of a lot more than I know my way around Paraguay. Later, when I am back in Buenos Aires Violeta tells me that there is a lot of clandestine coming and going over the Paraguayan border; arms and drug smuggling and person smuggling too -- children from Misiones, Paraguay and Brazil are sought after by childless rich couples in Argentina. Well, not all Paraguayan and Brazilian children, only the ones from the southern provinces, where a lot of Russian, Polish, Ukrainian and German people settled.
They want children with blond hair and blue eyes, Violeta says matter-of-factly.
The coach trip, when I finally get to make it the following night - now fully legal - is uneventful, long and very cold......
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