Known to pie lovers throughout the UK, Fray Bentos is a name to get the stomach rumbling, as mine is now, just thinking about those delicious crusts, gravy and beef, eat hot or cold. Yet it is also the name of a town on the Rio Uruguay where we stopped briefly as the trip continued and I leaped off the bus, excitedly asking the driver "Es Fray Bentos?" "Si" came the reply, and so I hurried off to photograph the scene below of a Fray Bentos car park then failed to find any Fray Bentos road signs or any pies for sale in the bus station snack shop and we were off again.
Bright eyed and bushy tailed we left Concordia, crossed a bridge at the blunt end of the Salto Grande hydroelectric dam, entered a forest, passing a big army barracks, and stopped at a border post where myself and another scruffy bloke were asked to open our bags. Usual story: cop/soldier, machine gun on shoulder, rummages around for a while until he finds plastic dirty clothes bag (full at this point), opens it then waves me away. Salto's ultra-modern bus station looked like an airport and even had a duty free store. Neither of my bank cards worked in the cash machine, the exchange desk was closed, and rain pummelled down, so I took a taxi to the hotel and the driver let me pay in Argentinian pesos. The Hotel los Cedros is a throwback to the 1970s, as is much of Uruguay, and at 8am they not only let me check in but also directed me up to breakfast on the 3rd floor where I wolfed down bread and ham and pineapple and yoghurt and cornflakes and anything else delicious, and washed it down with fresh orange juice - a speciality of the locale - with a view over the small city in front of me, shrouded now in cloud. The hotel room had an ashtray in it! I lay on my back, read and smoked then slept all day, got up to eat then slept some more til morning. No, this sign doesn't mean 'do not urinate on the grass' it means 'keep off the grass' which I took as some sort of omen from the unknown telling me to give wacky-baccy a miss in Salto, which I did because I couldn't find any, not even from the Rastas selling rolling papers, pipes and bongs. This was real Smalltownsville and any misdemeanour (eg. selling weed to foreigners) is sure to get noticed and talked about and the cops involved although that didn't stop some brazen lady in a revealing vest sidle up in broad daylight and ask if I was "solo". So I told her my wife was around the corner and then holed myself up in the room with ashtray, listened to the rain, and wrote. In between showers I ventured out and found a conservative market town built on cows, sheep and fruit, and you could see all that agricultural work etched on the deeply bronzed faces of farmers and Gauchos sauntering up Main Street, fresh off the vast estancias out on the pampas, fish out of water or cow out of field in the big city. The Gauchos are Latin American cowboys, excellent horsemen, herding cattle across the grasslands, roping them in with lasso or bola, and society holds them in great respect with gauchos often featuring in literature and folklore. During times of regional war, cavalries on all sides were made up almost entirely of Gauchos, also famed for their hunting skills. Salto felt like a town with a tightly held secret whereby the small population has made a pact to keep this secret at all costs and subsequently I was greeted as a highly suspicious interloper indeed, even though I'd shaved, done my laundry, showered and scrubbed myself spring clean from the detritus of the road. There be a stranger in town .. and I got the feeling they didn't get many and didn't want many, if any. The waiters were surly, shop and hotel staff squinted at me and nobody once struck up a conversation. I was the outsider outside the secret of Salto and eyes followed me everywhere, except from the armed guards outside banks whose experience told them I was an innocent chap just wandering though their midst trying to find a place where it doesn't bloody rain! Salto railway station defunct, this platform serving as some sort of outdoor casino decorated with dead leaves, empty beer cans and garbage in general, has become a meeting place for dossers. An extensive passenger rail service in Uruguay has been slowly scrapped with only freight riding the rails today and people put on buses. Now, like in neighbouring Argentina, the government is considering reversing this policy and rebuilding the service. The most famous native son of Salto's Football League, founded in 1911, is Luis Suarez - a professional footballer infamous for taking bites out of other footballers during the match - who was born here, and I can now conclude that the reason for these wild incisor-gnashing hunger induced rages may just be that Luis is having a snack-attack mid-game, and imagines the flesh of those people he takes bites out of to be a juicy steak or an opened can of corned beef ... who knows? Nice name for an English language school and I share Artigas's festive greeting to not only the townsfolk of Salto but to all you readers out there in cyberspace, even if I believe that Christmas is nothing but a convenient way for capitalists to indoctrinate kids with greed. Have a good one regardless. At 9.15pm it was a 200km drive due east on an empty highway from steamy Santa Fe into Concordia on yet another river border, this time with Uruguay, and we paused in the city of Parana, capital of Entre Rios (Between the Rivers) province. Sleepy farming towns followed at Paso de la Laguna, Jubileo, and San Salvador and as we descended into the wide valley along which flows the Rio Uruguay, bolts of lightning lit our path, scattering across the sky, at times drilling into planet earth, and by the time we pulled into Concordia bus station at one thirty in the morning the rain was back, smashing down onto the streets of what looked like a pleasant, affluent town that has made its name and money in the trade of citrus fruits and oil from palm trees. By the grace of god there was a guy selling big cups of milky coffee in the still bustlingly busy bus terminus, farewells bade, drivers shouting cheerful olas, packages picked up and deposited, kids well wrapped, Grannies kissed on cheeks, tears dabbed with hankies, frantic waving from windows once on board, so I bought a large dose of caffeine con leche and went to watch the downpour and the hullabaloo and an elderly lady laden down with plastic bags full to the brim which she was forever putting down to smack vigourously, pick up, walk off, put down, smack, repeat every five metres, under a deluge now beating a rhythm of its own on the roof. The rain did in fact take breaks and so during one such I went walk-about and found these two, above, enjoying a tango on the forecourt. Somehow it didn't surprise me. Round the corner I came across this mad-assed scene and still struggle to work it out ... could well be a depiction of what they did for a laugh back in the olden days, but that pig-wolf-bear-man bottom leftish in red and gold tunic is disturbing me, as is that dark central scene. Taxi drivers idled outside all night long, chatting or sitting in their vehicles listening to gentle music while the tango couple danced on. The rain - nature's percussion - then hammered down again as some kind of background music to a large part of this trip, so back in the dry on a wooden bench I recharged my laptop from a wall socket as three friendly wild dogs sniffed and snuffled around, one befriending me ... licking my leg in an excited manner .. so to distract the hound from doing that we had a playful wrestling match and after a few minutes I was giving myself a good scratch and shoo-ed the wretched mongerel away. He was used to it. About 04.30, when the rain abruptly stopped again, I roamed the neighbourhood in a most welcome cool breeze, and sitting to smoke on a bollard my mind also roamed, back to Porto Alegre and a city which for some reason I'd really taken to. Not an event or a sight or a woman and certainly not the weather ... merely the experience of having been there. As dawn broke, more and more people arrived and I got a ticket from two large amiable small-town guys packed into a tiny booth and who were greatly entertained by the opportunity to speak English and listen to my attempts in Spanish; war going entirely unmentioned. When our bus to Salto left at 07.10, under sky blue, I pondered on a very mellow night spent there, wide awake, tango filling the air ... Gracias Concordia. Nb. My brief experience was nothing compared to this bloke who invites himself round to people's houses. In this part of the world, Mate is your mate. Its full name is Yerba Mate and according to the website, '... has the “strength of coffee, the health benefits of tea, and the euphoria of chocolate" all in one beverage.' It is pronounced mah-tay. Tasted like grass chewed, swallowed, ruminated and regurgitated by a cow to me, but everyone to their own, eh? The Uruguayans and Argentinians absolutely love it and the process involves a cup like the Mate cup-of-all cups (top photo) and a spoon-cum-straw used for mashing it all up and stirring it around for a bit before topping up with hot water served from a flask that is kept so frequently under an armpit that it almost becomes an extra limb for the body, a perfect example of this being the fella pictured above. Just a cursory glance tells us that he is a real expert Mate drinker, all his life probably, slurping away on his tubular spoon since infancy, before he could walk or talk, Mate was his mate, and still is. Women love it too. We finally got into Santa Fe six hours late at 5pm. The hotel I'd booked had overbooked and the British gringo/enemy was back out on the street looking for another one which came quickly at the Hotel I Can't Remember The Name Of where the receptionist, in his fifties, gave me an interested second look and I gave him my best smile as I handed over the passport. We were back in that uncomfortable no-man's-land where he and I both struggle with how to handle the meeting and trying to remember not to mention the war. Speaking about 10 words of Spanish doesn't help either, especially as most of those words are for food. The USA has a Santa Fe too, in New Mexico, which is involved in a movie starring Errol Flynn as well as a book but that has nothing to do with this Santa Fe, surrounded by water, and by which flows the Rio Parana which has followed us all the way down from Foz, eventually joining the Rio Uruguay then the Rio Plata and the Atlantic Ocean. Waiting for a bus (see photo right) is an Argentinian pastime that I'm also very fond of. The sun was out too and the two day stop went like this ... SPORTS NEWS Browsing a local paper I came to the sports section and was disappointed to find that the Argentinian version of London's Arsenal FC are languishing 4th from bottom of the Primera - a league with 30 teams in it- in stark contrast to the high-flying Gunners over in enemy territory. Arsenal de Sarandi, nicknamed both Los del Viaducto (viaduct men) and El Arse (the Arse) can be followed and supported in a suburb of Buenos Aires ... if you ever find yourselves out that way. And looking at the table, it's gotta be said that by this stage of the season, it's time to get your arses in gear lads! This trip was still being travelled off the cuff, plans meandering like a stream through rainforest, the way I prefer it.
From Foz I said a reluctant goodbye to Brazil where I'd really respected the guys on the street who had given me a nod and casual “ola” simply out of civil bonhomie, plus the oh-so natural smiles and joie de vivre of the women, as well as the evident struggle to survive for so many in the jungle (wood or concrete) with its abundance of dangerous animals. Not forgetting the coconuts or sucos or Becky. So from there I headed to the border, then across a bridge into north-eastern Argentina on a local exhaust spewing bus I'd hopped on early morning, about 75 metres from the hotel doors. By 9am we were pulling into Puerto Iguacu from where the bottom of the waterfalls can be viewed. A friendly guy in a kiosk sold me smokes and changed $100 at the Argentinian non-official rate, so I walked away with $150 worth of pesos. I've never made so much money travelling. Second stop was for coffee and croissants which I found at the bottom of a Sunday-empty small town main drag. Outside the cafe was a supremely fit and tanned Swiss Miss dragging coolly on a cigarette. “Hi,” she said when I'd stuffed the grub down, going on to tell me that she'd just qualified as a teacher in Basel - seeming not at all happy about the prospect of classrooms and kids - and was doing this four month venture solo around the entire South American continent before the world of work begins. Hats off to her, and alongside perfect English and Spanish she certainly had the confidence and wit to survive. She wanted to talk though, and talk she did. After about an hour of this my lapsing attention was perked up by the mention of Bariloche, a resort town in the Andes about 2,225km distant, a place I was umming and ahhing about going to. “Really touristy, tacky and way overpriced,” Swiss Miss told me with such no-nonsense distaste that as a result I ditched the idea to see the mountains – pretty much brown rock all the way along, desert in places – because nothing can better the Himal Massif, and it would be four or five days on a bus through an unchanging landscape, so instead I chose to explore inland Uruguay (the land of good old Pepe Mujica) via Santa Fe, which is still in the Argentine. Contrary to what I'd read on an online timetable, the bus left at 9pm rather than 1..30pm, and so I had all day to kick around town, hindered by a blazing sun. Swiss Miss gave me a cute kiss, picked up her laundry and set off north in the opposite direction, and after whiling away the afternoon in the shade of a hostel garden where the drunken receptionist kept yelling, “They stole our spoons!” by early evening I sat eating a beefburger at a table on the pavement and watched a pretty little girl, maybe 10 years old, watch out from a step over a sheet covered in friendship bracelets, wooden parrots and toucans. There was no hard sell or pestering of passers by, just a gentle smile and educated patience. Business not being brisk, for sure she was hungry. Argentinian burgers are BIG – 8 inches square - and I ate half then wrapped the remainder in a napkin, got up and paid. On the way out I handed the burger to the girl and for some reason told her what it was. She replied with the sweetest “gracias senor” I'll ever hear. I gave her a bottle of water too and she smiled shyly and took it with tiny, grubby hands. As everyone knows, I'm far from sainthood, but I had felt unbelievably selfish stuffing my face, pockets full of pesos, while kids went hungry nearby. The walk was uphill to catch a night bus to Santa Fe, on which I struggled to sleep with the image of that girl's innocence playing on my mind. Troubled sleep did eventually come and I woke, still sad, in sun-kissed arable land, cows galore, near the town of Corrientes. Then I became angry thinking of recent news from my 75 year old mother about a family member who had been harassing her, letting her know exactly how much he expects to inherit when she dies. Nice, huh? But don't worry, because when I'm next in the UK, I'll show the scrounging slob exactly what he's going to get. At some point, out on the flat fertile prairie dotted with trees, covered in cows, we were stopped by police who boarded, checked out every face and ID card before pulling off two skinny young Chinese backpackers. While the cops questioned them on a grass verge it soon became obvious that this would drag on and so passengers not in trouble with the law began getting off too, ostensibly to smoke or stretch legs. I chatted with a student from Rosario and told him I was Dutch, then word came that the Chinese tourists were from Hong Kong, couldn't speak English or Spanish, and had failed to get stamped entry visas in their passports. As we stood around in the audience, field of horses behind, two plainclothes guys, guns in holsters, handsome and muscled enough for the movies, interrogated them. One cop spoke English and shouted at the girl cowering on a plastic seat that had been offered her by the driver's mate. “Why no visa? Why! Where enter Argentina?” Non comprendo, so I volunteered my services as a speaker of rusty Mandarin, which they couldn't understand either as they only spoke Cantonese. Must have been a pretty strange trip not speaking or comprehending one single word, and I imagined them cuddling desperately, whispering to each other up and down the continent, peeking out from under brims of baseball hats, scuttling from place to place in abject fear. After two hours on the grass, followed by a trip to the nearest cop shop where phone calls were repeatedly made, the Hong Kongers were finally given a stamp and we went on our way, the girl curled up on a seat, whimpering on the road to Santa Fe. Don't remember seeing any people like those above but I did kick back for 5 days and had a cool time among the natives and assorted nationalities who were backpacking and touring, moseying and nosing around the small city and outskirts while the package group tours whizzed in and out in a few days and nights, seeing the sights, the shows and the souvenir stalls, spending money then whizzing off to the airport. During one coconut and fag break, sat on a plastic chair, eye-line straight up the street, I was thinking it might be good if I found Becky again when a scruffy bloke came limping along - the Brazilian version of yours truly - looked me in the eye, broke into a big smile and said loudly, "Hey Gringo! How you doin' man?" He shook my hand then sat down, and in a much softer voice asked, "You want some Becky?" Coconut slurped, we set off on a trek into the suburbs on cobbled roads, passing red brick single storey houses wrapped in jungle tentacles, gardens jungle too, man meets nature, and after 20 minutes in soft drizzle, both of us limping, I said, "Where we going? Paraguay?" "Just down here," he laughed and pointed to a dirt road to the river. "Wait under that tree man, it's dry. Five minutes, ok". About ten minutes later when I thought my $20 had done a flit over the border, he came hobbling heroically back up the hill, puffing and panting, trees dripping fat drops of water from huge leaves. He passed the Becky over then took my hand and put it to his heart which I could feel hammering within his chest cavity. "Very bad," he smiled before waving and walking away. "Nice to meet you man." This casino doorman sums up Paraguay: something's not-quite-right, militaristic, Coke in hand, full of guns, semi-official, and trigger happy if given half the chance. This guy was none too friendly either and there were many such para-military types in town with pump action shotguns guarding pharmacies and supermarkets. Then I read that, the illegal drug trade in Paraguay is significant in trans-shipment of cocaine to the rest of the world. A local bus from Foz took us there across Friendship Bridge, through passport control on the Brazilian side, customs non-existent, guards smiling and friendly - probably joking about el Gringo going over to the dark side - and then onto Paraguay where the stamp was smashed into passport then back on bus and into Ciudad del Este, or City of the East, sprawling chaotically up and over the riverbank, still dense jungle back in the 1960s, now the world's third largest free trade area behind Miami and Hong Kong, all of which operate with minimal taxes and an endless supply of cheap yet quality products plus the inevitable warehouses chock full of counterfeits. These mostly electronic goods come directly from the economic tigers of Asia, and today it is the Taiwanese and Koreans who have followed their products and make up a majority of the population in one of the strangest places I've ever been to. There's even a nearby town named Presidente Franco ... I mean, come on. The Hotel Executive has a wooden interior, pictures of elaborately dressed and coiffed famous Paraguayans hang on walls, an iron lift with gate crashes down into the lobby, the room has creaking floorboards with a well-worn rug on top, bed linen stiff and starched, and an ashtray sitting with majestic defiance on the desk. It was easy to imagine business deals being done in here in shirtsleeves and tie amid a fug of cigarette smoke. With an eye for Latin American dodginess, US TV show Miami Vice used the city as a location and from the window I looked out onto streets devoid of humankind other than the occasional SUV prowling sycamore-lined avenues, the upper foliage giving protection against sun now pounding the pavements. There was certainly money out there, in the high-end vehicles, neat and tidy apartment blocks, smart office facades and showy boutiques often advertising with Chinese calligraphy, watched over by a vigilant man in uniform holding a big gun. Foz, within spitting distance just across the river, was a world away from this place. Needing cigarettes to smoke in the room, as well as a place to get money to pay for said smokes, I took a wander, but it was a Sunday and Sundays in South America mean people religiously stay at home after morning mass in church, so most places other than pharmacies are closed, meaning I had to take a chance in using a cash machine - I'd read about people getting mugged by pillion passengers on mopeds, sometimes getting a cosh on the head as well as a lost wallet, or a broken bottle in the face - while the room had no safe and even if it had I wouldn't have used it after dealing with dodgy Pedro on reception squinting at me in a surly manner when I exited earlier. This was important belongings down the front of underpants time in an air of covert disquiet. A wad of colourful banknotes in pocket and still in one piece I ventured further and found a grocery store open, outside which sat a man chatting, selling cigarettes and newspapers from a cart, with an armed guard, and beyond was a small park where younger men sat in shade, shifty eyes on me flashing the cash, so despite the presence of a big gun I about-turned, mission accomplished, and made my way back to the cool of the hotel's ceiling fan, stopping to sit under a tree to decide if Ciudad del Este was really as dodgy as I was imagining. Before long someone had bummed a smoke and loitered too long, checking me out: unshaven in scruffy blending-in-and-not-looking-like-he-has-any-money attire. Bollocks to this ... back to bed for siesta. Waking in early evening, stomach rumbling, scruffy attire thrown on, I found a new, this time friendly, receptionist who pointed me in the direction of a restaurant, which turned out to be a casino and disco too, where I munched on a beef kebab and watched a handful of punters try their luck on the fruit machines. When a DJ turned up and began spinning discs while singing badly along into a microphone, some sort of del Este karaoke, I left and found a coach outside the hotel unloading a pack of tourists who stood shouting and laughing in both street and lobby, so I smoked outside, and watched a man in shorts, vest and flip-flops amble up to an open car window and reach in. There was a volley of abuse from the driver who sped off ... no shots fired. The next morning I checked out a day early and was surprised when the shifty receptionist of yesterday handed me back $25 for the room. Bingo! On the border the taxi was pulled over by a man in uniform with a large gun hanging from his shoulder who told me to open my bag which he then began to search, stopping when he looked inside the plastic bag holding dirty clothes. Safely back at the Taroba Hotel where the peace was palpable only 5 kilometres from the previous hotel, the receptionists hooted with laughter when I told them where I'd been ... "And you are still alive!" The falls are a series of cascades and the one on the left is an 80 metre drop known as the Devil's Throat due to the intense whirlpool created in a pool at the base of the fall, i.e. you don't want to go for a swim down there. As we got closer, the spray made taking photos difficult unless you have one of those underwater cameras. Boats crammed full with Chinese tourists get as close as they can, and for $220 a go, the rich buzz over the water in helicopters. Argentina sits above the falls and Brazil below. Further upstream on the Parana river is Itaipu, the world's second biggest hydroelectric dam, operated by both the Brazilians and the Paraguayans. Cool day out ... |
Nb. Doesn't work in Google Chrome
RANDOM
FOTO BEDSIDE TABLERussell Shorto FOOD FOR THOUGHT
‘I don’t understand why when we destroy something created by man we call it vandalism, but when we destroy something created by nature we call it progress.’ Ed Begley Jr. * "The more I see of Humans the more I like my dog." Mark Twain * Only when the Last Tree Is Cut Down, The Last Fish Eaten, And the Last Stream Poisoned, Will Man Realize That Money Cannot be Eaten Cree Indian proverb Nb. Doesn't work in Google Chrome, no idea why not...
Archives
January 2016
|