18: "To the north, to the jungle: Part 2"

I got up at 7:45, before my alarm. I left my dorm and went to the hostel lounge and ate breakfast. There was no one else there. I took a couple of trips to the buffet and filled up on sweet bread and coffee.

I packed up and left and walked to the plaza to take a bus north to Puerto Iguazu. There were parents walking their kids to school, carrying their miniature backpacks for them, holding their hands.

I got to the plaza and saw the same kid as the day before. He was sipping a mate. He waved to me and raised his head. I waved back.

I sat in front of the souvenir stand and waited with some locals for the bus. I saw a man greet an old lady and give her two kisses, one on each cheek. I’d never seen that before in Argentina.

They didn’t show any movies on the four-hour ride. It was quiet and bumpy and relaxing. We drove through rolling, green countryside. We passed yerba mate factories and pine tree farms. Misiones used to be famous for its jungle. It’s got a subtropical climate. Now, most of the forests near the highway have been clear-cut, scorched.

We got into Puerto Iguazu, where the ground was orange clay, like in Georgia.

I got off the bus and walked around a few blocks looking for a hostel.

It was too late in the day to try to go to a national park and see Iguazu Falls, so I walked down through town to the river, to the Paraná. It was overcast and humid.

Down at the port of the river there’s boats that go downstream to Paraguay. Across the river is Brazil.

I walked past the port, across a creek, to a grassy corner near the bank. There was a picnic table under a tin shelter. There was a big boat rusting, grown-over, in the weeds.

I sat down under the shelter and it started to rain.

I listened to an Entitled Opinions on Kurt Weill and wrote postcards for friends in Canada and Israel, for my grandmas in the U.S. I read some more of Brief Interviews. I took pictures as the rain stopped and the sky lightened. There was an empty, rusting oil drum in front of the shelter, in the grass. It was Shell; red and yellow.

I walked back up the hill, to town. I looked up the addresses I hadn’t brought with me and walked back down the hill, downtown, and mailed my postcards just before the post office closed. I stopped at a tourist restaurant and ordered a pizza and a Coke. I was the only one in there.

I came back to the hostel and wrote a blog entry. There was a girl at the computer next to me looking at her pictures from Machu Picchu. The Internet wasn’t working and every few minutes someone would come in, check, see it wasn’t working and leave.

I sat out on the patio lounge and read and borrowed a cigarette from a girl sitting across from me and wrote. There were only a couple other people sleeping in my 10-person dorm. They left before I woke up the next morning.

* * *
I got up late. My alarm didn’t go off.

I went to the bathroom. The toilet wasn’t flushing.

I went down to eat and sat and was reading. They served coca tea and buns and toast with dulce de leche and jam. The girl I borrowed a cigarette from the night before came down to the kitchen and took her plate of food and looked for a seat. She sat at my table.

She’s from Asturias, in Spain, but lives in Barcelona and is a civil engineer. This was her first time in South America. She pronounced her s’s and c’s with a lisp.

I left. I took a bus to Foz de Iguazu, to Brazil. We crossed the Argentine border and we all had to get off and get our passports stamped. We crossed the Brazilian border and some people got off but most stayed on and I stayed on. We drove into the city, which is bigger and more cosmopolitan than Puerto Iguazu.

I got to the bus station and bought a ticket to the national park. I didn’t have any Brazilian reales, and didn’t have any small peso bills. The guy at the gate converted the bus ticket for me. I think he ripped me off.

We drove back out of town, back past the road to the border crossing, and down to the park entrance. I got off the bus and bought my entrance and a salami sandwich. I said obligado like I learned in Sao Paolo.

I got on a double-decker bus and went to the upper level where the plastic drape windows were pulled back. We drove to the waterfalls. The breeze made people zip up their coats and cross their arms and tuck their chins.

We got off. I could see a glimpse of the falls down through the trees. I followed the path to the first overlook. I stopped, stared. I leaned against the railing, gazed. The waterfalls were coming from everywhere, from the forest, from cliffs. The part I was looking at wasn’t even half of all there was.

I continued on along the concrete path, stopping and staring, looking at other people looking. The din from the falling water would fade away then come back again when you realized how loud it was.

I walked onto a concrete overlook. I saw a pair of pants floating down the river, away from the biggest, most violent falls.

They were black, fanned out. They looked like slacks or maybe cargos. No one else seemed to notice. They bobbed around, were turned in the currents, and kept going down the river, through the rapids. I didn’t see anything come after them.

I walked along the trail to an overlook that stretches out over the crest of a waterfall. You can look right down on top of the void. The railings seemed well-built, but had gaps in between each other. People were posing for pictures, getting soaked by the mist from other falls higher up. Others stood off on the main trail, looking nervous and waiting for their friends or family to come back from out over the water.

Some people had plastic ponchos on. I zipped up my coat up all the way.

It was nice to be so close to something so dangerous, to something loud and old and that would destroy you in an instant. I felt like the narrator in a Poe story, like in Descent into the Maelstrom, awestruck before some terrible, enormous thing.

I walked back to the main path. There was a concession stand and a gift shop and photo booth, and an elevator to go to another observation deck. The employees had that amusement park employee stare.

I left the trail and walked to the park restaurant. There were coatis wandering around everywhere. They look like armadillo mixed with raccoon. They say they’ll bite if you feed them. Some people were feeding them. The park employees would chase them away when they’d creep towards the picnic tables.

I ate a sandwich and drank some water. The day was overcast and cool.

I walked on the waterfall trail again. The clouds were parting and the sun came out and there were rainbows, like they say there’s supposed to be, and butterflies.

I took a bus back to the main gate and listened to an Entitled Opinions with Paul Ehrlich on the fate of the earth in the 21st century. It was finally sunny and bright while he was talking about population disaster and the earth’s carrying capacity.

I got back to the bus station and got on to go back to Argentina and Puerto Iguazu. When we got off at Brazilian customs they stopped me and said I hadn’t gotten a stamp when I crossed that morning. I told them I’d read that one-day visitors didn’t need visas. I was speaking Spanish. They were speaking Portuguese. I couldn’t follow them.

The girls stamping the passports called for a manager. He was a young guy, probably 20 years old. He said they’d let me go just today but don’t do it again or there’ll be a fine. I said tudo bem and tried to give a thumbs up and left. I waited in the late afternoon with some Australians for another bus to come by.

I got back into town. As I walked to my hostel I saw the Spanish girl with her backpack heading to the terminal. We didn’t say anything to each other as we passed.

I ate pizza again at a different tourist restaurant, then came back and wrote and read. The Internet still wasn’t working.

I went to bed.

The next day my alarm worked and I got up and ate breakfast and packed my bags and stored them in a closet and then headed out. I bought cheese and bread and a tray of fruit and took a bus to the Argentine side of the falls.

It was a clear, warm day. I walked along all the catwalks and trails and stairways that wind through the jungle and over and around the falls. I saw monkeys and coatis and a toucan. The highlight of the Argentine side is something called the Devil’s Throat, which is an overlook above the most intense part of the falls.

There’s a miniature train that takes people out to that point. I walked along the train tracks, on a mud service road, to get there. It was a mile or so and quiet, except when a pickup truck or a train would come by. There were all sorts of butterflies along the way. A few other people were walking on the trail. I saw a big bullfrog squished flat. Its body was in the trail of a tire.

The Devil’s Throat is this big half-circle waterfall that’s probably a couple hundred feet high and wide. The overlook is a concrete platform with two sections to it. There’s photographers who stand-up on ladders and wear ponchos and take portraits with the falls in the background. They have clipboards for you to fill out forms and a poster board showing examples.

Big clouds of mist fall down on the platform every minute, soaking everybody. It’s like standing on the walkway over a flume ride at a theme park.

You can’t see to the bottom of the falls, there’s so much steam and mist. It’s an abyss, I guess. I thought about that Nietzsche quote of looking down into the abyss and only seeing yourself.

I took some pictures when the mist cloud wasn’t there so my camera wouldn’t get wet. I left the platform all wet and dried off in the sun and walked back to the park entrance. I took a bus back to town, grabbed my bag, and headed to the bus station.

The only bus going back overnight to Paraná was a luxury busline called Espreso. I bought the ticket anyway. It was about 40 pesos more than usual.

After we’d gotten out of town we were stopped at a police blockade. Some national guard people got on the bus. One guy came up, looked down at me. He asked to look through my bag, then see my passport.

I gave it to him.

He looked at it, then me. He was about to hand it back, then took it and sniffed it and looked at it again. He gave it back and said thanks and left.

I listened to a radio show about the historical Jesus as the sun went down over the Misiones hills and tree farms and what’s left of the jungle. Flocks of white birds were flying around and glowing in the twilight.

I got back into Paraná early in the morning.

17: "To the north, to the jungle: Part 1"

I had another week off school because of board exams. Sunday night I’d gone to the Paraná Costume Party, dressed as Tintin. I was writing an article about the party for 054, a travel magazine from Buenos Aires.

I’d gotten back at 3:00 in the morning and went to bed. I woke up Monday, wrote my article, packed my backpack, and went to the bus station for an overnight ride northeast, to Posadas, the small capital of Misiones province.

They served us dinner after the sun went down. First they gave us a plastic-wrapped Styrofoam tray. Inside were a plastic knife and fork, wrapped with a single-ply napkin; a toothpick, wrapped and sealed in plastic; a roll; a chocolate alfajor snack cake; crackers; and a lemon-flavored lozenge. Next they brought out tiny foil trays with our main course.

Inside were steamed rice and chicken rolled up with hard-boiled egg and vegetables. The windows on the bus steamed-up when we opened our foil trays.

The steward poured us Pepsi in little plastic cups, like they have at the dentist.

I was listening to old episodes of Entitled Opinions. First one about Proust, then one on Thoreau, then one on Virgil.

They started playing a Kevin Bacon movie on the overhead TVs. I think it was called Death Sentence. He played a vengeful father. There was a lot of stabbing and beating and running people over with cars deliberately and swearing, too. The TVs were turned way up.

A guy sitting up front had a loud message alert on his phone that you could hear through the whole bus. It played the first half-dozen notes of a Cumbia song; a trumpet and an accordion and a shaker all starting-up.

That guy kept getting messages every few minutes.

It was hard to listen to the radio show.

My seat was in front of the coffee and water dispenser, which is in front of the stairs down to the lower level. After they’d turned the lights out and most people were covered with blankets, a guy came up to the console and leaned against it to steady himself. He took a plastic cup from the cup dispenser, had a drink of water, then put the cup back into the bottom of the dispenser. He returned to his seat.

The guy with the noisy phone sneezed three times in a row up into the air. His phone stopped making so much noise, at some point.

* * *

We got into Posadas at 7:00 in the morning. It was gray and cool and drizzling. I sat in the bus station café and had a cup of tea and a croissant. I bought a bus ticket for San Ignacio, a village north of Posadas that’s got some Jesuit mission ruins and the old home of Horacio Quiroga. It’s along the highway to Puerto Iguazu.

I got into San Ignacio by 8:30. I got off the bus with a couple other people in the main plaza. It was humid and cool and still overcast. There were only a few people out.

A pasty blond-haired kid came up to me, carrying a mate and a notepad. He asked if I was looking for a place to stay. He told me about a hotel down the road, his brother-in-law’s place. He said they can sell me bus tickets there, and watch my bags, too. I asked him the bus schedule for the next day.

He seemed nice, like he wasn’t trying to take something from me.

I left him and walked toward where a Hostelling International place was supposed to be.

An old man was standing on the porch of a souvenir shop and stopped me and asked where I was headed.

He said that there was a cheap, nice hotel in the other direction. 25 pesos he said. I asked him how much the Hostelling International place cost.

He looked aside. 100 pesos, he told me.

I said no thanks and got to the HI place. It was 35 a night. I had a four-person dorm and a private bathroom all to myself.

I dropped off my bag and walked back to the plaza and bought some bread and cheese and apples. I walked to the Jesuit ruins. The site’s called San Ignacio Mini.

It was the middle of the week, and the end of winter. Most of the souvenir stalls were shuttered. It was quiet and damp. I sat on a bench under a tree and made a sandwich and ate a mandarin orange.

I entered the ruins.

A tour had just started so I hurried and caught up with them. The site was one of several in the region that was founded by Spanish Jesuits. The missions were havens for the Guaraní, havens from the other Spanish who wanted to kill them, make them leave, etc.

They say it was a flourishing a project, for the few decades it lasted. That the Guarní mixed their culture and style with that of the Catholics, and in exchange for a few not-so-bad compromises, got to live in pretty well-built, well-run, mostly-autonomous communities.

You can see that in the façade of the church, that’s got Catholic figures sculpted in a pre-Colombian style.

After the tour ended I hung around the ruins some more. There weren’t more than a couple dozen people in the whole overgrown, spread-out site. The main plaza - now just a grassy field - would´ve been a good spot to throw a Frisbee, I thought.

I went to the souvenir shop in the main plaza, where they were selling a lot of Guaraní-style wood carvings. The lady working there liked my hat, one with a knit llama pattern I’d gotten in Jujuy, in the northwest. Her son was sitting there listening to his MP3 player the whole time, not talking.

I walked out of the town, past an army base and down a flooded mud road to get to Quiroga’s old house.

Horacio Quiroga is one of the best-known Latin American writers. He was born in Uruguay in the 1870´s, but spent most of his life in Argentina, and especially in the Misiones jungle.

His best stuff is short stories. He’s influenced a lot by Poe and Maupassant.

It started raining as I got to his house. After you buy your entrance you have to walk down a narrow path through the forest, through a lot of bamboo, to get to the house. There’s signs that explain Quiroga’s life and have quotes of things he’s said about writing and art.

One of his best short story collections is called Tales of Love, Madness, and Death.

Quiroga’s father was killed in a hunting accident when he (Quiroga) was a little boy. Quiroga’s step-father, who he got along well with, committed suicide when he (Quiroga) was a teenager. Quiroga found the body.

When he was a bit older, he killed one of his best friends in a hunting accident like what killed his father.

He married a couple of times. The first wife he brought out to this house in the jungle in San Ignacio, where they were raising their kids. She couldn’t stand the isolation, the heat, everything, and swallowed poison and killed herself.

Quiroga committed suicide when he was in his late 50´s after he was diagnosed with cancer.

There were two houses Quiroga built, by himself, at this place in San Ignacio. The first house has been re-built, but the second is original. The lot is up on a cliff that used to look down to the Paraná River, the same river I live on further south in Entre Ríos province.

Now the trees and bushes have grown and blocked the view.

Inside the house there’s a lot of Quiroga’s actual stuff – his writing desk, his insect collection, a big snakeskin, his radio, his tools and workshop.

There wasn’t anyone else there when I went through the house. I thought I heard people coming along the path but they never showed up. I took some photos, walked around, tried to conjure the atmosphere. There was a sign in one corner of the yard that said “Place of Inspiration”. Next to it was a trail leading into the forest.

I followed the path. I thought there might be a lookout to the river. It got overgrown quickly and I had to turn back.

I left and walked back to my hostel. When I got back into the town a horse-drawn cart came down a sidestreet and turned a corner in front of me. A fat man was driving. He whipped the horse on the side to make it go faster. He keep hitting it on its leg. The horse tried to hurry and trot down the street. There were no traffic, no cars. It was empty, quiet. He drove on down the road and I turned a corner to another street.

I slept a few hours then got up, walked to town, ate a milanesa sandwich at a big empty tourist restaurant. There were some French girls at one table, but they left. Then it was just me and the waiters, standing around. I was reading an article in Ñ by JM Coetzee on an anthology of early Beckett letters. I came back after dark. There weren’t many streetlights and it was hard to see the road.

I read some of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, then went to bed early, about 9:00 PM.