rakish richard's rants...

This is Where Mannequins Come to Retire...

Dear Reader(s?),

Hello today from sunny Cordoba, where we arrived last night on our second attempt at catching the bus. An unspecified alarm failure meant 100 pesos down the drain as we slept through our first of the day. Fairly undaunted, we trekked down to the bus station and booked the next one out, only a few hours later.

I'm writing today from an antiquated old machine, so sadly no photos on this post - a particular challenge as the first thing I have to talk about is our visit to the almighty Iguacu Falls.

For the first time arriving anywhere we were set apon with offers of accomodation. There just aren't that many western tourists around that we can see, so consequently it's pretty quiet when you pull in to the station. After swerving the more expensive Hostelling International branded vendors, friendly Luis found us and drove us round to have a look at his hospedaje. It was nothing fancy, but had a nice little verandah, a kitchen, and an airconditioner (sustainability susschmainability, it was 36 frikkin degrees...) so we parked up and made for the supermarket for some dinner. Twas a nice quiet night and we got plenty of sleep before the early start and trip to the falls.

You can get a bus from the main station, but Luis informed us we could catch a bus to the falls very close by the hostel, and we managed to get ourselves underway. Even such simple tasks like catching the bus can be quite a challenge when your Spanish is as bad as mine, but you'd be amazed how far you can get just by shrugging and flashing a smile.

Once off at the park itself, we bought our tickets and wandered in. It's a truly huge place, and while you can get a little toy train ride up to the Garganta del Diablo (the famous money shot at the mouth of the falls) you can also meander your way through a series of nature trails at the wider, less dramatic end of the falls. Now, when I say 'less dramatic' remember this is a purely relative term. There are around 300 individual falls to see. The first vista you see is about a mile's worth of perfect cascades, all of which slide off the sharp top of the falls, crash again onto the next shelf about a 1/3 of the way down, then fall once again into the river below. If I can edit this post later I'll add some pics but I'm sure I'm not the first to say the you really struggle to describe the place with words alone. The first thing we saw on the walks were lizards, LOTS of them. They're pretty tame due to the large numbers of people, but are strewn everywhere the sun is, and practically pose for your photo while they bob their heads up and down. The next thing you see (and this was nature highlight #1 so far) are these little fellas, who you might have seen zipping through the curtains of water to safer nesting places under the falls. There are great clouds of these birds amongst the mist by the falls themselves, with larger carrion birds circling above. The whole place has a truly National Geographic cover photo feel, and the only thing missing is the reassuring sound of David Attenborough telling you all about what you're seeing.

The next nature highlight, number 2, was a huge line of leafcutter ants, which we traced coming down from a tree, across the path, along the rope fence for about 60m, and off down a bank to build a giant effigy of a human made of little bits of leaves or something. They all carried uniformly sized bits of leaf, except about one in a hundred had picked up something completely different, like a flower or a piece twig. You could tell the other ants were really embarrassed for them.

After doing what they call the upper and lower circuits round the falls, we caught a little boat over to Isla San Martin, which sits right in the middle of the river delta with the falls spread right around it. There are some amazing views from here, and while your first views are quite close up and you seeWe trekked back up the hill after coming back from the island, and made our way up to the Sheraton hotel, which sits slightly up the hill and overlooks the falls. We'd heard a tip that they do a buffet lunch, but if they did then it wasn't they day we went, and we settled for a sublimely cool and calm beer on their terrace, right in the hottest part of the day. I recommend making the walk up there, it beats the little kiosks that are spread through the park proper, and they still treat you like a king at the Sheraton even if you're only getting one beer.

Refreshed and revived we wandered back down to the little toy train station, stopping to watch some birds repeatedly swooping to attack a 2 foot long iguana who was a little too close to a clutch of eggs for their liking, and caught a ride out to the mouth of the falls, the Garganta del Diablo. This is the real highlight of the place and is in a word, breathtaking. From the station you walk out about 1km on a catwalk over the high, slow flowing plateau above the falls. Below you are big white herons, turtles, basking crocodiles (or maybe caimans, my reptozoology is a little rusty), and the remains of the last walkway, washed away in 1999. The first thing you see in the distance is the mist, rising up well above the falls themselves. Next is the noise, which becomes literally thunderous as you get to the end of the walkway and the whole thing reveals itself to you. The sheer amount and ferocity of the water is tremendous and we spent ages just staring at it, a couple of hundred metres of water boiling over into the u-shaped mouth of the falls below. At the very end of the walkway you can see back towards the rest of the falls fanning out away from you, it's a real goosebumps moment and the most impressive natural wonder I've ever seen.

We'd saved the best till last, and I'm glad, cos everything else is just a little, well, unimpressive after seeing that, and we made our way slowly home with every intention of returning the next day to view it from the Brasilian side. Turns out rain put paid to the plan and we had a very quiet rest day, catching up on card games and postcards before catching the bus down to our next stop, Posadas.

This little town lies at the pinch point where the little peninsula that is North East Argentina extends from the main part of the country. It's a really awesome little town, laid out in a grid, like all the cities here it would seem. They really love a good solid grid layout here, in alternating one-way roads, sprinkled with the odd plaza here and there (usually named Plaza de 25 Mayo/Indepencia/San Martin), and have a fairly standard set of street names which seem to come up everywhere (Junin, Alvear, San Martin, 25 de Mayo, Rivadavia). So yeah, none of this meandering curving streets nonsense, it's grid grid grid, and the only things that stubbornly interrupt it are pesky intrusions like rivers and the coastline.

We made a little excursion from Posadas out to the Jesuit ruins of San Ignacio Mini. Those Jesuits sure got around, and had a good line in managing to convince local populations to build entire communities in very remote spots, where they'd live collectively and produce superb works of art and architecture on in their free time. These particular ruins are good and ruiny, all made of deep red stone like Banteay Srei in Ankor.

After a couple of hours poking around there we got the bus back into town and prepped for the night bus down to Santa Fe, choosing to spend our hard earned pesos with Expresso Singer. Turns out we might have been a little lucky in our first overnight bus journey, as Singer didn't really come through with the goods this time. We set off on time, but as the aircon gradually took hold it got colder and colder and we spent a good 8 hours shivering away without a blanket (I want my BLANKET!!) while the blank bluescreen of the roof-mounted TVs only added to the whole 'night out in an ice bar' ambience.

We arrived in Santa Fe at the ungodly hour of 5:30am, stocked/warmed up on coffee (reliably delicious, everywhere!) and took up residence at the Hostel Santa Fe, waking the poor senorita in reception who deserves a medal for letting us check in so early.

Santa Fe is a pretty cool spot too, student town so lots of young 'uns about and plenty of bars and street seating outside the bars. I read in the history of the town that it was relocated and rebuilt, to be based on the plan of Old Santa Fe. Old Santa Fe was, of course, based on a grid, and Santa Fe is about 6km of regular grid streets, awesome...

On the advice of the hostel, we took a local bus out of town to San Jose De Rincon, where we ate ice cream in the baking heat and watched the dogs and local population make rare trips down the sandy roads that circle the main plaza. It's a pretty sleepy little village but we had a great journey out there, putting Ana's spanish to the test and enjoying some cultural exchange. Pay attention to those languages that have masc/fem nouns, that's my advice. It's all too easy to tell a crowded bus that you're a female tourist, 'nuff said.

You don't have to walk past many shops to notice that the mannequins throughout Argentina look like they've had a hard life. There are a lot of chipped lips, moulded hairstyles and faded paint jobs. That snazzy mannequin in the window of M&S today might just live out its autumn years in the window of "Dandy Smoking Mens Boutique" 30 years later.

We're now down in Cordoba after a daytime bus from Santa Fe and it's shaping up well. I've caught quite a run of movies on the buses here, including Cinderella Man, The Shepherd, and The Last Legion. If I were to bake a cake made of the movies I've seen it would taste mostly of Russell Crowe. Garnish with Jean Claude Van-Damme only very sparingly.

We're on day 14 of Beardwatch, and it's coming along nicely. I'm not sure how much longer Ana can put up with it, but it makes me look slightly less of a gringo for the time being.

Righto then, I best be off now. I'll try to update this post with some photos when I next see a computer from this century, but otherwise we're off to explore little Cordoba at our leisure. Hope you're all doing well out there, and you haven't got all your money with Lehman Brothers...

A

posted by Arch @ 1:28 AM