The Mission

Update: 22

Finally we made it to Buenos Aires and it's fantastic. I think it's been referred to as the Paris of South America, and I can see why. We found accommodation in Palermo which has boutique shops, tree lined streets and trendy bars spilling onto the pavements every few steps. It's naive to think all of Buenos Aires is like this as parts feel quite sketchy - like La Boca outside the Boca Juniors stadium, but then if I was a tourist judging London on the area just outside Millwall's Den...

Our friends Sarah and Richard arrived the the day after us in time to destroy any progress we'd made on controlling our budget since Dan and Rachel had left us the week before. Sandra,  my nurse from those heady passing-out-and-wetting-my-pants days in Peru (it was altitude!) was also in town to celebrate the fourth anniversary of her twenty-ninth birthday so, as you can imagine, Saturday night developed into a steak and wine fest with Sandra treating everyone to champagne and Rich and Sarah dividing prices by six and ordering from the dangerous end of the wine list. When birds started tweeting and no more 2002 Malbec could be stomached, Sarah hailed a cab. This is when I realised how far my Spanish has come in the last seven months. The conversation went:

Sarah: Ooh, hello. Good evening. Hotel Marriott, please.

Taxi driver: Como?

Sarah: Marriott hotel, please.

Taxi driver: Que?

Richard: Yeah, hi mate. Hotel Marriott. In el centre.

Taxi driver: Huh?

Me (losing patience and wanting to go to bed): Hola! Otel Marrrriottttt!

Taxi driver: Oh! Claro! (of course) Hotel Mariott!

***

Our hostel in Palermo was alright. The key issue here, according to my wife, was that the cleaner was a man. While beds were made and clothes folded and put away, the pubic carpet on the bathroom floor hinted that he might not have been as good as his employers thought. After two days of tiptoeing out of the shower, Tam snapped and in a telling frenzy shouted, "Argh! Why can't we stick to our strengths? Never get a man to clean! They can't! Go and dig a hole or something. Leave the broom.  Get a spade!"

I know my place so didn't interrupt, but have made a note of this. I'm hoping it will come in useful when domestic life kicks off again sometime next year. My strength being lying around.

***

Our guidebook suggests going to see street tango in San Telmo (yes, we were humming St. Elmo's Fire all weekend too). Truth is: street tango may well have been prolific fifty years ago, but today San Telmo is filled with women in revealing dresses and filthily high heels posing provocatively with shady looking characters in black suits and hats for tourists to photograph. All day there and we saw one dance. I reckon half of them don't even know how to tango, they just stand around waiting to get tipped. Much like those guys under Waterloo bridge - just dressed up.

***

Overnight to Puerto Iguazu on First Class fully extending seats - they flattened right out into beds - was a pleasant change from the usual seats we take, but this is what happens when your employed friends visit. On arrival, Richard and Sarah headed off to their casino health spa luxury five pooled trampoline bed air-conditioned hotel. We caught a lift with Michael Jackson's sole remaining fan to a half pooled, one sheeted caving in bed hostel run by a youngish couple who watched WWF wrestling with the kind of passion usually saved for life and death situations and treated slapstick B-grade American sitcoms like comic genius.

Its not that we didn't like them, they were really friendly, its just that... should they be dealing with people?

Once we'd checked in, the four of us reconvened for a trip out to the mighty Iguazu falls. You may remember the film "The Mission" where - I think it's Jeremy Irons - a Jesuit priest is expelled from Paraguay and goes over the falls on a crucifix. Well, the people who run the Iguazu National Park haven't forgotten and throughout the visitors centre and on the train to the lookouts, Ennio Morricone's soundtrack loops on repeat. If this is what Jeremy Irons had to listen to all day, I'm not surprised it ended like it did.

I would guess that the major part of the falls lie on the Argentine side of the border with Brazil and so, from each country, you have two very different experiences. On the Argentina side, you can walk right up close to the water and see the falls from above which highlights the volume of water and the height from which it drops. From the Brazilian side, which we visited two days later, you get a view of all the falls and how they reveal themselves from a tropical rainforest. Both awe-inspiring. Verdict? We reckon the sight from Brazil wins.

Reaching the Brazilian side is interesting. Bus to the border, stamp out of Argentina, bus into Brazil. "Do we need to get stamped in," I asked the driver as he drove past Brazil immigration. Apparently not, we just needed to wait at the next stop for a bus in the other direction but "be careful as that stop is dangerous".

So there Tam and I stood, waiting for a bus at a dangerous stop in a country we weren't officially in although Argentina had washed her hands of us.

***

A few hours from Puerto Iguazu is San Ignacio Mini, a town of about ten thousand people next to the ruins of a Jesuit monastery. A slowly decaying place unlike anywhere we've been in Argentina. The heat vies with the humidity for first place on the oppressor chart and the red perma-mud from the unpaved roads must provide hours of amusement for the landlady who sits on a deck chair out front telling guests to mind the knee-deep traps after they've nearly drowned themselves on wet loam.

The ruins, however, are well worth the visit. If you had to calculate the ratio of what you get over what you paid for entry, San Ignacio would beat Machu Picchu. On our visit there were four of us (Tam and me with Laura from Alaska who now knows that a bum bag is never, ever referred to as a "fanny pack" outside the States, and a Frenchman who's name nobody could make out) and a school group. Other than that, it was empty.

The bilingual brochure handed out at the entrance refers to the founders of these missions as "The Jesus Company". I think they mean Jesuits, but I didn't miss the irony - on two levels: either the band of happy minstrels or The Corporation.

For a good two hours we walked around this jungle-covered site feeling like we'd just discovered it ourselves. General consensus was that San Ignacio Mini couldn't have been ruined any better and justly deserves it accolade of UNESCO World Heritage Site (except for the French guy who thought "eet smells layk shocolate cayke").

***

Still on the Paraguayan border, we caught a bus to Posadas which is the border town in Argentina on the southern bank of the Rio Parana facing the city of Encarnacion in Paraguay on the north side.

There are many indications that Paraguay doesn't see too many tourists. Starting with the measly few pages allocated to the whole country in our South American guide book and then the lack of any tourist information about the place at all. I think, though, the most obvious sign was at the border itself where the authorities appear accustomed to stamping only either Argentine or Paraguayan identity documents. On being presented with Her Britannic Majesty's politest request that we pass freely without let or hindrance, Francisco B. Arguello F., Inspector de Migraciones (as he wrote in my passport) spent about ten minutes consulting with his colleagues, phoning whoever, taking the passport to the back, photocopying, entering into a computer and just generally making a lot of hindrance. 

We'd only gone over to get a stamp and walk around the market for  few hours, so when I was approached by a man wanting to pay me two-hundred US Dollars to take two DVD players (what are they? Eighty bucks each?) back into Argentina while getting a lift in his beat up van through customs, we knew it was time to leave. I don't know what the catch was, but if Francisco B. Arguello F. was that sticky about letting me in with only a camera, god knows what he would have been like letting me out with contraband masquerading as DVD players.

***

We're in Rosario now making our way back to Buenos Aires where we've hired an apartment for a week from Sunday. Tam's parents are joining us, so I've done a laundry and had my smart shirt ironed. 

Until Uruguay, hasta luego.