Argentina III: Shattering the Myth

It took only minutes to leave Foz do Iguaçu and Brazil, the informal return of Bolivar’s permit taking the longest. The customs officer was the chatty type and while he was making sure we’d had a good visit, his colleague arrived carrying a book (“Sex After Fifty”), and sporting a diamond stud in his ear. I don’t think much work got done in that office, but I hope they at least made a note of Bolí’s exit. By 9:20 AM we were back in Argentina for the third time this year.

The Misiones Province was very different from our earlier arrivals. The jungle was a mixture of dark green and light and crept right up to the highway’s edge. It was a rollercoaster of a road, with smooth downhills that Fran took advantage of to get a boost up the next hill. The surface had a dusting of burnt orange earth and for the first few miles, indigenous families and their homes were visible behind a thin barrier of trees. These constructions were very small, consisting mostly of plastic sheeting, plywood and pallets, reminding us of the Chaco region in Paraguay. There didn’t seem to have been much left here either, after the arrival of the white man.

Stopping in Posadas, we needed pesos. Luckily a little candy store three streets over was also a Western Union. The old lady behind the steel bars however took one look at our $100.00 request and shook her head, so we were sent off to a mall where bigger reserves were on hand. At breakfast the next morning we sat looking out on a very wet day, and the Paraná river whose wide strip of silver separates Argentina from Paraguay. Encarnación was no more than an ashy smudge across the water but despite the rain, the stale bread and the tinned fruit cocktail, I thought how nice it was to sit in one country and look out over another. It was, you could say, the glacé cherry on the cornflakes.

Grabbing a break in the weather, we climbed on Bolívar and set out.  As Posadas faded into the mist, the flat, rain-soaked landscape stretched before us. We’d been in many remote spots before, but something about this particular vista brought forth a sinking feeling, and a loneliness like no other. But we had to go. Like Macbeth’s witches, we three were huddled down, in thunder, lightning, and in rain. The hills of yesterday were gone, replaced by a lost horizon, sodden palms, and wet capybaras grazing among white egrets, their feathers so bright they became beacons in the gloom. In the few villages, the streets shone with a red muddy wetness, probably similar to what greets the cleaning crew at a particularly gruesome murder scene. When it got too hard to see, we stopped at a tiny gas station and took a coffee break with a couple of Brazilian bikers on their way home. For two days we hugged the Paraguayan border. In one section, giant electric pylons cut across the road and we realized we were driving the other side of the Yacyretá dam. Seeing those towers on the march, the plains were transformed from a green emptiness to a vast corridor, its mission to bring power to distant cities.

We’d chosen a different route to cross the country this time, but it was very much the same. The grasslands were fertile with a horizon so low, fifteen minutes sometimes felt like fifteen hours. We were crossing only a small section of the 1,200,000 square kilometre Pampas but even out here the days and the scenery rolled into one. We did pass through several pleasant towns, where the highway becomes a straight, wide main street before reverting to its real self again. Some homes were very nice, but others were in a bad state of crumbling concrete that sunny colours couldn’t hide. There were cows, lots of horses grazing the long acre and palm forests. Places to stop for the night were few and far between. We were using Google maps to find hotels in wherever we found ourselves at the end of the day. On the outskirts of Calachaqui the Regional Hotel looked better on the outside than in. No matter, it was only for one night. The dining room on site was cause for celebration. There we stood, freshly scrubbed and waiting at 7:59 PM, but the doors remained locked. Outside, Bolívar had been joined by six or seven pick-up trucks, most travellers on this road being in the agricultural business. Eventually the doors opened at 8:30 PM, but the meal was well worth the wait, even if it was served to the tune of a loud TV reality show. But after a day spent counting blades of grass, everything’s an improvement.

Now that we were back, we’d returned to stashing blocks of money among various bits of luggage, and taking notes of where we’d put it all. At Western Union we were always given the same, old, 1,000 peso notes (0.98 cents each). Last time we’d received six of the new 10,000 peso notes, which were clean, crisp and smelled nice. Introduced back in June, they were a huge improvement on the previous top bill of 2,000, which was rarely seen anyway. But they may as well never have been printed, for all we saw now were the limp, orange 1,000s, which have to be admired if only for their refusal to die. So, it was back to sitting in the counting house (on the bed), counting out our money, and then taking out the wire brush and Dettol at the end of every episode. All I can say is, it’s a heavy price to pay for a good steak.

It's funny how some short days can be so long, and yet rides of 500km, which you are not looking forward to, can fly by. This is especially true if the back of the journey gets broken by 12:00 noon. To relieve the monotony of the prairie, we’d taken to adding a coffee break to our midway gas stop. Argentina had very nice the little coffee shops at their gas stations, and the clean toilets were an added plus. At one cafe they didn’t have a 50 peso note for my change (USD .05 cents), so I was offered an Opal Fruit instead. It was an orange one, my favourite flavour, so I took it. Little interactions like these were what brought Argentina alive for us. The coffee ladies always replied with a kindly “Per-fecto”, while outside at the pumps the attendants had a hard time keeping straight faces watching both of us climb off Bolívar after 200+ kilometres of sitting upright and staring straight ahead. Sometimes we had our photo taken, usually by women on their way back to their cars from a coffee or toilet break. This was odd because I’d have expected the men to be more interested in a life on the run from responsibility, but it was the women, and older ones at that. Maybe they were attracted to what they imagined was “The Great Escape”.  We could have told them a few home truths, but why shatter the myth?

Click Arrows for Slideshow:

Out among the fields of wheat, maize and soybeans, the sights that made Argentina famous: elegant streets, fine dining and the Tango, all seemed very far away. Small towns came and went, each with the same sleepy, Sunday morning feeling. There were “Inicio Zona Urbana” signs, which would be followed a short while later by a “Fin Zona Urbana” sign. If we woke-up in time to catch them, the next five minutes would be spent trying to remember if we’d seen a building somewhere, anywhere. Maybe on the horizon? For all intents and purposes, we might as well have been in a Latin Iowa. The hardest part was (1) finding a hotel at the end of the day and (2) finding an open restaurant. By the time the locals were beginning to even think about dinner, I’d already flossed and had got out another brick of cash ready for the morning. Often, we’d just skip dinner and hope for a decent breakfast ten hours later, but Argentina’s culinary reputation doesn’t extend to its breakfasts. Unless, of course, you’re nine years old or under. A menu of Bundt cake, medialunas, alfajores and orange squash does not a “desayuno” make. Unless, again, you’re nine years old or under.

Coming into Mendoza it began to rain. This continued over the next several days and formed snow on the mountains, which in turn caused the Los Libertadores pass into Chile to close. When it opened three days later, we waited an extra 24-hours to allow the backlog of trucks to get ahead. On Friday we set off. It was a brilliant morning. Outside of the city the grapevines had miraculously sprouted a lime green cover and the sky was the deepest blue. On the horizon a great bank of white-capped mountains reminded us of why we were there. The road was a two-laner but beautiful to drive. We passed a few trucks unhindered but got stopped at a police checkpoint further up. There are police checkpoints everywhere in this country but we’d always received just a friendly wave in the past. This time unfortunately the wave said “Come on in”. There hadn’t been any cameras but they either knew, or guessed, we’d been passing on the double yellow lines. After our early start we now lost thirty minutes on the side of the road negotiating down from a threatened court appearance the following Wednesday, to handing over a reduced “fine” of $20.00. At this point all parties seemed satisfied, hands were shaken and a final Google Translate from Cop Number 2 instructed us to “Enjoy the snowy peaks”. Yeah, right.

Riding into the Andes, our semi-comatose senses finally woke-up. It had been so long since we’d seen anything higher than a horse’s rear, you couldn’t blame us for getting excited. Along the river, tunnels were blasted into canyon walls and even though we were stuck behind the slowest of trucks, (too terrified to repeat our crime), the scenery made us delirious. Up we climbed, catching glimpses of waterfalls cascading down bare rock, and peeks of blue-white mountain-tops beyond the dusty foothills. After passing a sign for the border, only 6km away, disaster struck.  Cresting another hill, down below was a line of stopped traffic. The trucks, who were allowed to keep going, were in the outside lane, so we followed them, until we came upon a group of Brazilian bikers. “Come wait with us” they said, and we tucked ourselves in and got lost in the small crowd. For a long time no progress was made and conversation dwindled as none of us had a common language. A group of vicuña passed daintily in the snow to our left and someone turned on some music. One guy lay on the ground, his head by his rear wheel, and fell asleep. Every thirty minutes or more, we’d hop back on the bikes and drive a few meters further up the slow, gradual grade, then stop again. Bit by bit, we were joined by other bikers. At 3,200 meters (10,500 feet) we reached the Tunnel of Christ the Redeemer. Somewhere in the middle of that darkness we left Argentina and entered Chile.

It took at least another hour, maybe more, to reach the long, tubular building that housed the integrated border facilities. Like the approach to Noah’s ark, the bikers respected an invisible line of two by two, and inch by inch we finally made it inside. It was here we realized we’d done it again: we’d crossed a border on a holiday weekend. Some people just never learn. Four and a half hours after getting stopped, we exited the tube into the snowy back lot. This was Chile, but that’s a story for another day.

 Click Arrows for Slideshow: