Different Faces of South America
A bumb in the road wakes me up. The night bus must have driven through a pothole. I’m looking at my cell phone: 6.13 am, waaaay too early, I think. I keep trying to sleep, but the pothole was just one of many. I open up the curtain and am suprised how nature has changed. Nothing reminds me of the dry, hot and dusty Concordia where Ricardo dropped me off the day before: everything is tropically green, wet and full of red earth. I have the feeling that I woke up in Laos or Sri Lanka, but I am in Misiones, the northeastern tip of Argentina and I am driving through the jungle.
An hour later I’m in Puerto Iguazu. Since it’s raining, I spend the day in the hostel and prepare myself for the waterfalls: a part of the falls is located in Brazil and the other one in Argentina, both sides have a national park and people disagree on which side is more beautiful. I decide to go for the Argentinean side and pack my daypack.
The next day a bus takes us to the entrance. The tour starts with a 2h hike on the circuit below the falls, innumerable footbridges and stairs lead deep into the jungle, once in a while a few rays of sunlight make their way through the thick leaves of the tropical trees. As I get deeper into get into the jungle, I start to hear a loud noise of water, there is absolutely no doubt about the powerful presence of something, but yet, I can only see trees and palms. And then, almost unexpectedly, at the end of a stairway they appear in front of me, the falls of all falls, one of the new wonders of this earth, so beautiful that even the creators must still enjoy loking at them. I can’t believe what I am seeing, it is completely breathtaking.
The rest of the afternoon I continue my tour around the falls, wondering whether the fish above the falls have the smallest clue about what awaits them in just a few meters further down. Up to now, few things have completely blown me away, but the Iguazu waterfalls are so impressive that I decide to go to the Brazilian side the next day in order to get the whole picture of this spectacular piece of nature.
After my short trip to Foz de Iguazu in Brazil (and a damn good meat sandwich) I continue to make my way to Paraguay. The Iguazu waterfalls are actually located on the three borders between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, but Paraguay does not have any access to the falls, which kind of describes very well the overall situation of the country . Paraguay is like the stepchild of South America: it has no access to the sea, no mountains and can only boast of one of the least visited UNESCO sites in the world. It is not that most travelers do not know nothing about the country, most travels do not even know Paraguay exists. And, in almost all South America, there is a consensus that there is nothing to do in Paraguay except from buying cheap and counterfeit technology. However, I decided that I still wanted to give Paraguay a fair chance.
Entering Paraguay was the simplest thing on earth, it was actually so simple that I could easily enter without my passport being controlled. Paraguay does not seem to be afraid of illegal immigrants. After some looking arund I do finally encounter the Immigration Office and make my say an official thing. Ciudad del Este is ugly: there are huge shopping malls and tents and stalls at every corner selling technology, so I’m happy to hop onto the bus to Encarnacion just have an hour later.
I arrive to the hostel in Encarnacion. It is a small and cosy hostel with a lot of great positive vibes and an atmosphere that feels like a family. I quickly feel at my ease and together with almost all the people from the hostel we spend the next few days on the beach of Rio Paraná, we have barbecue in the courtyard and we drink beer together in the evening. I start to speak more Spanish again, which I kind of like as the last days had been dominated by French and English travelers. During the evening of the second night in Encarnacion I happen to be sitting at a table with a Brazilian, a Chilean and a Colombian. What sounds like the beginning of a joke was more like an intensive course in South American culture, because suddenly I realize that everyone of the guys around the table represents one of the different faces of this wonderful continent:
Alex comes from Sao Paolo and is a professional chef but currently manages the hostel in Encarnacion. He stands for the warmth and hospitality of South America. As soon as I had entered the hostel on the first day, he had offered me a beer and it did not take long until he had placed a plate with a huge piece of lasagna just in front of me the very same night. As I offered to give him some money for it, he sent me to hell and, then eventually offered me to go to the corner shop to get some new beers. Alex is a storyteller, he jokes around and successfully sabotages every single of my plans to go to bed early. He has a talent for entertainment and has made it his life’s work to make people feel good about themselves.
Felipe on the other side, is a chemist. He has very well-kept Rastas, a long beard and lives in Santiago de Chile. Like no other, he represents the closeness to nature that is way more deeply rooted in South America than in Europe. Although the Spanish colonial masters had killed or abducted many indigenous people in the past, the influence of these cultures has remained stronger than i.e. in the USA. Felipe is younger than me, but he seems to be wiser than Master Yoda. I can’t tell how he does it, but he seems to know all the laws of nature and when he tells me about is lifestyle without meat, sugar and alcohol and how it strengthens the power of his body and mind, he is so convincing that I, for a couple of minutes, seriously think about turning into a vegetarian. Thanks to Alex I did not.
And then there was Franco. Franco is from Colombia, but has been living in Buenos Aires for years. He is undoubtedly the embodiment of the Latino culture of picking up, dancing and flirting. The sexual tension that is around South America’s way stronger than anywhere else I have been to: stunningly beautiful people and a lot of naked skin are combined with the seductive rhythms of reggaeton music, which can be heard at every corner, all night long. People send deep and intense glances every day and there is a seductive smell of sweat and perfume is in the air, everywhere! Franco not only lives and loves the sexual tension, he creates it, with a mixture of humour, charm and of course his Colombian salsa skills.
The evening becomes night and the night becomes morning. Only when the sun is already clearly above the horizon, I decide to go to bed. The next few days continued just as intensively, South America barely sleeps. The highlight of my stay in Encarnacion is the Paraguayan-Brazilian the carnival and Franco is on fire. Lightly dressed women and men would dance through the Hippodrom, a stadium which had only and exclusively been built for the carnival celebrations. When it is finally all over, I’m exhausted. In Paraguay, I had only briefly seen the not quite so spectacular ruins of a mission city and spent the rest of the time almost non-stop with the three characters of South America. I loved it, we had a great time, but again, I feel it is time to move on.
I want to go to Bolivia, but I have an offer from a French friend to do a small road trip with two Australian girls around Salta and Jujuy. Since Salta is on my way Bolivia, I accept the offer. We spend a few very relaxed and nice days on the road, we see an unbelievably beautiful and vaste variety of nature, we eat Llama and, we get stuck in the mud. The Ruta Nacional 40 in Jujuy has hardly any paved parts and the night before it had poured buckets of rain but that had not impressed us at all. It was probably also due to the bad weather that there were no other cars on the road, but again, we were not impressed as we had heaps of fun driving through the mud and the puddles. Everything changed when we approached a 15m long field of mud which did not seem that hard to conquer, however – I was driving at the moment – the car decided to not listen to our commands any more and just turned left, straight into the deepest part of the puddle. We were officially stuck.
Karma, however, wanted that we had stopped just 10 minutes earlier because of two guys that were laying in the middle of the road next to a their motorcycle, which by the way was the only other non animal vehicle we had seen on the Ruta Nacional 40. We thought of the worst, but the two Argentinians, as it turned out, were just a little bit drunk and decided to get some rest on the road. It did not take long after our small mishap, that the two Argentinans arrived. As they saw our car the started laughing loud and offered us their wine with Coke. We accept thankfully and find out that there is a small village nearby, from which one of the boys gets us a shovel. Two hours and a lot of mud later we are on the road again and invite our rescuers for dinner before we finish our road trip in Tilcara.
Despite all the adventures, the fun and the good company I have, for the first time in my trip, a little down time. On the roadtrip I thought a lot about the wedding of Miguel and Gigi, after all it will take place right here in the Jujuy. Ethereums value, again, had fallen a lot during our roadtrip so that I had already lost more than half the money originally invested for the wedding. I am having a hard time to imagine how I’ll make it here in March. On top of that, the last hostel had bedbugs, these little disgusting parasitic animals hiding in pillows and making life hell for travelers. I feel itchy everywhere and I can’t find my antihistamine, probably because I didn’t take it with me at all.
And, as if that wasn’t enough, the altitude and the cold in Jujuy had struck me a little bit, I feel constantly weak and have a slight cold. One likes to think that travelling is constantly nice and pleasant, that it is just like being on an eternally long resort vacation, but in those moments, I swear, I would almost prefer to be back in cold Berlin. It’s the first time that I’m not looking forward to the next chapter of my trip, after all, I’m going further up the Andes, where it will be even higher up and even colder. I think about flying spontaneously to Brazil, but eventually pull myself up again, also because in a few hours my bus leaves for La Quiaca, the border town between Argentina and Bolivia….
