Jannis & Martine

Yesterday we finally finished a rather complex and tiring week of travelling across this country called Paraguay… 

After we had found out that there was a Dengue fever epedemic in the Pantenal area located in the south of Brasil, we  decided to go to Paraguay instead. As the north of Paraguay also is affected by the same Dengue fever epedemic, we limited our visit to the south part of the country.
The idea was to travel in a straight line from the east to the west, by entering the country via Puerto Iquazu in the far north of Argentina and leaving Paraguay again at the border with Bolivia, in the southeast. This way we could get a good look at the country, in not too much time. It seemed a good plan, until we had a couple of reading sessions in our travel guides, which resulted in this very long story:

A first thing that was a little unexpected, was that Paraguay has almost no ATM´s outside its capital. Even most of the smaller cities don´t have them. So we couldn´t pin money everywhere. A little tricky, as we had to bring a lot of cash into the country, especially since Paraguay is the most corrupt country in world…
So we decided to skip the eastern part of the country and go to the capital first to get some cash. From there we would move to the western part of the country, onto the Bolivian border. So, one problem solved, and we still had a good plan.

But, then we found out that crossing the border from Argentina was not so easy, as there were no direct buses going from Puerto Iguazu to Asuncion, the Paraguayan capital.
We had to take a bus that first crosses the Argentinian/Brazilian-border, this bus then travels for 30 minutes through the Brazilian city Foz de Iquazu and it then crossed the river to Ciudad del Este, a Paraguayan city just across the border. There we had to go to the bus terminal to try to catch a bus to Asuncion as we didn´t want to stay in Ciudad del Este, as it is not known as one of the safest cities in the world…
After some more reading and asking around we found out that we didn´t need to get any passport stamps to travel through Brazil for 30 minutes. So we could stay in the bus after we got our exit stamp at Argentinian customs and go directly to the Paraguayan border. That was easy and good.
What was not so good, that we had to get off the bus at Paraguayan customs to get our passports stamped, and that the bus wouldn´t wait for us. We had to wait for the next bus. What was even worse, was that Ciudad del Este´s  border crossing is pretty hectic as all sorts of people are trading stuff in the tax free zone over there, and there are lots of (maybe corrupt) police hanging around there too.
Luckily enough the Paraguayan people in the bus were very friendly and they helped to get us off the bus at the right spot (we had missed the tiny customs building). Even the police were very friendly: after we had gotten our stamps the policy told a bus driver to drive us to the bus terminal. At the bus terminal we quickly got on one of the many buses the Asuncion, the capital. So far, so good.

When we arrived in Asuncion at the bus terminal it was already getting a little darkish, so we quickly asked around if a bus was going to the city centre. Asuncion is also not known as one of the safest cities in the world and the bus terminal is a 45 minutes drive from the city centre….
We quickly found a bus for the city centre, so, as we normally do, we asked the bus driver to give us a signal when we would be near the main plaza. He said yes, so we waited for almost an hour, and just before we were going to ask if we had arrived yet, he realised we were still in the bus, quickly stopped next to another bus and told us to quickly change busses (all of this in very difficult to understand Spanish, as they speak a mix of Spanish and Guarani here, the old indian language).
We changed buses, and after some more talking and more language-difficulties the bus driver got us to the city centre, we got out and found a nice hotel just before dark. A good ending to a hectic day after all.

After having stayed a couple of days in Asuncion we decided to go to the deserted eastern part of the country. Here you can only find a couple of thousand Guarani people, and more than 30.000 ex-Dutch/German Mennonites (conservative christans), living in 3 big farming colonies/villages. We wanted to vist 1 or 2 of these villages, and then move on cross the border. A difficult task, we found out…
After some more reading and talking at the bus terminal, we found out we could take a night bus to one of the villages, Lomo Plata, so that was pretty easy.
But to go to the border from that village, you first had to take a bus in the morning to one of the other villages, Filadelfia, and then wait for another bus that leaves in the evening and takes you to the customs building at the border. After that you had to wait the whole night to catch another bus at 5 o´clock that would be coming through from Asuncion to take us across the border.
To make things more difficult we had to purchase the bus tickets at the bus terminal in advance, as the people of the bus company told us that you we couldn´t buy these tickets at the border crossing. So, we bought the tickets for the border crossing in advance, but with no departure date on them as it would be no problem to enter the bus without a reservation, they told us. So, it all seemed to be arranged, and we still had a solid, if not a little complex plan.

The night trip to Lomo Plate went very well, and after we had found out there was no reliable bus service on Sunday we waited till Monday to cross the border. After hurrying a little (the bus left half an hour earlier than they had told us the day before) we catched the morning bus to Fildalfia and waited there until the evening for the bus to the border crossing. Everybody we asked told us the bus would pick us up across the main hotel in the village, but the problem was that nobody knew when this bus was leaving. Something between 6 and 8 o´clock most people said…
While waiting for this next bus we spoke to an Australian family who told us they had met an Italian guy in the hotel who was going on the same trip with us. So, while waiting for the bus which still hadn´t arrived at 7 o´clock, we crossed the street to the hotel and met the Italian guy.
He said the bus terminal was close by (we didn´t know as nobody had told us, and since there also are no maps available of these Mennonite villages), so we walked to the bus terminal to see if there really was a bus going to the border in the evening. There was, but it only left a little later, at 9 o´clock. A cvouple of hours later we arrived at the border crossing, and the friendly customs people told us that the bus to Bolivia wouldn´t arrive at 5 o´clock, but would arrive earlier, at 2 o´clock. So that was good as we wouldn´t have to wait as long as we had expected.

After having waited 4 hours in the cold night, the bus arrived. It then became clear that the Italian guy, Enrico, was travelling with another bus company that would arrive an hour later at 3 o´clock. And we couldn´t go either with ´our´ bus, as the bus driver said we should have reserved for this night as the bus was completely full. He really wouldn´t take us with him, even though we had valid tickets. He even wouldn´t let us stand (this is normally no problem over here, but this time it was), but (strangly) he had exactly one place left for Martine if she wanted to come….
So, there we were, waiting again in the cold night, feeling a bit screwed by a sort of corrupt bus company.
We decided to wait, to try to get on the bus of the other company. When the other bus arrived Enrico explained to the bus driver that we had missed the previous bus, and that we wanted to come with them. That was no problem, but we had to purchase new bus tickets, as this bus was from a different company.
We did, as we didn´t want to spent anymore time waiting, travelling, and waiting again in another empty, dusty, boring Paraguayan village.

Shortly therefater we entered Bolivia and travelling again seems to go pretty smooth now, except for the first 1000 meters…
Just after crossing the border the (very old) bus we were driving in, broke down. The bus driver spent more than an hour fixing the drive shaft (some broken bolts or something), but after that it was only another hour before we had arrived on our destination, in a country which is probably more used to foreign travellers.

Jannis.

As promised, here is an impression of the famous Iguazu waterfalls, we visited a couple of days ago.

First we went a day to the Brasilian side of the Iquazu Falls. It was a bit of a hussle to get through customs (the bus doesn´t wait at the Brasilian border for you to get an entry stamp in your passport), but the views were certainly worth it:

We thought it couldn´t get any better. But when we visited the Argentinian side the next day, this side turned out to be even more spectacular. You get more of an overview of everything at the Brasilian side, but at the Argentinian side you get to walk the whole day along all sorts of big and smaller waterfalls. All the time you are accompanied by all sorts of animals, such as all sorts of colourfull butterflies, tropical birds, salamanders and some cute other animals we don´t know the name of.

After a day of strolling along the various waterfalls and animals, we REALLY thought it couldn´t get any better. But the final, main attraction, had yet to come, the Devil´s Throat waterfall (within a couple of weeks we will publish pictures of it on our Flickr-webpage).

We had already seen it from the Brazilian side, (as you can see above; it´s the big waterfall in the left of the picture), but from the Argentinian side you can get really close, so there it´s much more  spectacular.  It is huge and very impressive. You can´t even see the bottom of this fall as there is water moisture from the falling water everywhere, like it´s raining.

After seeing its main highlight we finally said goodbye to Argentina, after having travelled through it for 4 months. The last day we spent arranging our crossing to Paraguay. Not an easy task, as Paraguay is not much visited by travellers. But we worked things out, so here we are in Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay.

Love, Martine.

About a week ago we finally left Buenos Aires for the north of the country. It took us 12 hours by bus to get to the far north of Argentina, just below the Paraguayan border. 

When we arrived early in the morning it immediatly felt tropical, very hot and very humid, so we really felt we had gone to a completely different area of South-America again.

The first couple of days we stayed in Posadas, the biggest city here, with about 300.000 people.  It was a good place to spent the Easter days there, as in all of the smaller towns and villages all shops and restaurants are closed, when there is a Christian celabration. We had experienced this before when we spent Chrismas in a smaller city in Uruguay and couldn´t find anything to eat, as all of the restaurants and supermarkets were closed.

Posadas is a very lively city, with very good cheaper and more very chique restaurants (where we had dinner) a good and cheap hotel (where we stayed in)  and a very new, fancy, long, trendy boulevard. This boulevard is very lively at night (but not at Easter night of course) and from there you have good view at Paraguay, just across the river. Since also the icecreams are much cheaper here in the north (as everything else), we had a very good time here.

Shortly after Easter we decided to go an hour further east and to spent a night in the little town San Ignacio which is famous for its Jesuit ruïns – one of the 30 villages the Jesuits had created in this area which they lived together with the local aboriginals, the Guaruani people.

This town seemed not only to be very famous for its (very impressive) ruïns, but it also is a very cosy place to stay, as it is located in the middle of the subtropical jungle. In fact, we liked this town and its subtropical envronment so much, that we ended up staying there three days and nights. In those three days we visisted the ruïns by day, by night (they are very nicely lit in the night), and we did a very nice kayaking tour.

This tour was just the two of us with a young guide (who had been everywhere around in the country) and it did not only include a couple of hours of kayaking along the Paraguayan border. This guy also took us tio an hour of safari-driving by jeep trough the jungle and another hour of hiking. A thing we learned from him was that the border between Argentina and Paraguay is marked by the deepest point in the river between these countries. The same principle is applied to the border with Chili, but there it is the highest point in the mountains that marks the border (we just published some of these border-pictures on our Flickr-webpage).   

After the hiking-safari-kayaking we left San Ignacio the next day for a 5-hour bus ride to one of the major highlights of our trip, which, as are a lot of the things we have seen and done untill now, is something with water again; The Iquazu Falls. 

These are the biggest waterfalls in the world, and according to many, also the most impressive. We agree.

Martine will tell some more about the Iquazu Falls, as she is the waterfall specialist between us… 

Jannis. 

Yesterday we tried to change the date of our post about Buenos Aires from the 13rd to the 14th to prevent bad luck, but then it sort of crashed. So now we are writing this for the second time…

Right now, we are in San Ignacio, a little town in the north of Argentina near the Parquayan border. It is getting very tropical here. That is a bit different from a few days ago, when we still were in Buenos Aires, where it´s autumn now. This means the weather was perfect! Nice and sunny, but not too hot.

For a change we stayed in Palermo, a trendy and posh neighbourhood on the other side of the city. Palermo is famous its beautiful green parks, nice fusion restaurants and its clubbing scene. You can also find the Evita musuem there, so of course we also had a look.

Especially Martine was very impressed by the fact that Evita comes across as a very strong women who achieved a lot in her short life (she died at 33 years), such as introducing women voting rights in this macho country. As Jannis said before, the weird thing about the Evita museum is that nothing mentioned at all about the fact that her husband Colonel Peron, was a dictator.

Next to Palermo is Recoletta, the wealthiest neigbourhood in the city. Recoletta is populated with a lot of big elegant buildings, embassies, impressive government buildings, massive statues and wide lanes with big trees. The wealth of this neighbourhood is best shown in its cemetery. The dead are not only just buried there, but each one has gotten his own little palace. No wonder a lot of famous people end up here. The latest addition is the ex-president Martine wrote about before. At the moment his grave is even beating Evita´s in popularity!

It was very nice to stay in trendy Palermo this time. But after we had seen the things we came for, we moved back to San Telmo, the nice and cosy neighbourhood where we had stayed before.

Back in San Telmo we visited the Sunday market again, and there we got free tickets for this Tango performance. This turned out to be really nice. It all started with an hour of Tango lessons, where, suprisingly enough, we didn´t do too bad. After this Tango class it got really busy with Argentinian people who all had come to dance on the Tango mucic. They all were really good, and since we only had started to learn, we quietly moved aside. An hour after that an orchestra of young musicians started playing fantastic modern Tango music, on which only the best were able to dance on. The live music gave us the goosebumps, but what even impressed us more was the final performance by a professional Tango couple. Since we had tried to dance the Tango ourselves, we realised the complexity of their dancing.

The day before we left Buenos Aires we had one last thing to do: visit the Boca neighbourhood. Boca is one of the main tourist attractions in the city, but as it is a rough harbour area, you can only visit it safely by going there by bus, even though it´s only an hour walk away from where we stayed.

Boca is expecially famous for its bright coloured houses, each part of which has been painted in a different colour, as their owners painted them with leftovers from the shipyards.

Boca is also well known for its soccer team which has a very special stadium. It is open in the front, so you can look into it from the outside. As the stadium is only a few streets away from the touristy area, we of course wanted to have a look at it. But having walked only a street or two towards the stadium, we already saw some strange acting boys watching us. So we decided to turn around. Not a bad decision, as we heard these boys yelling at us while we slowly walked away.

Boca was a very strange experience as it´s very nice and safe in the couple of touristy streets, but as soon as you start to wander around, you immediately enter a dangerous area.

After having been three times in Buenos Aires, it starts to feel like ´home away from home´. So leaving it behind at last, it feels like we are starting with a new holiday…

Martine & Jannis.

P.S.

Keep checking our Flickr-webpage as we are still publishing pictures on it frequently.

Following up on Martine´s post on Argentinian history I will add some more of this dry stuff….

Argentinia´s moving history of civil war, military junta´s and revolutions is not only restricted to what happened in the 70´s and 80´s. It goes further back. We began to discover some more of that when we visited Cordoba, the second biggest city of the country.

Having just been in Bariloche, Santiago and Mendoza, Cordoba was a bit of a disappointment. It is one of the major industry centres in Argentina, and as such it lacks any tree, is stuffed with sky-high grey office buildings, but, luckily, it has a few places with some very impressive of the old stuff. In fact, the older buildings that are left, are far more impressive than anything we have seen around here before.

To begin with, there are a couple very beautifull 18th-century churches with mosaic covered domes. And then there is one very nice street covered with buildings from the 17th-century Jesuit university and the very impressive church next to it. Both are UNESCO-heritage. During the visit to this university we found out that it still the most important university of South-America and that they have a pretty rich collection. They showed us a big 20.000+-collection of printed books, originated from the era when the book printing was invented. The funny thing was that they showed us some 100 of the oldest books they have, and all of these books had been printed by a Mr. Elsevier in Leyden…

At the end of our tour around this magnificant university, our guide suddenly tried to convince us that Argentina is not as ´South-American´ as its neighbours, but is more like a ´European´ country. I had read some about the fact that Argentinians are considered to be arrogant, as they are convinced that they are a better than the other South-Americans and that Argentina is just ´a European country´ located in the wrong continent, but now I was hearing this for real, from a highly educated person. He even started giving us ´proof´, giving ´facts´ that Argentinia is building nuclear powerplants for other countries, the bypass-operation was invented here and that the laws of all South-American countries originate from Argentinan law. So, our guide said, in Argentina the people really are more developed than the neighbouring countries, it is just because of all those bad politicians that Argentinia is not rich and that it is not as efficient as its European counterparts…

So, by trying to convince us that Argentina is not a Third World country, our guide gave us a really good look in the mind of the Argentinian people. When you think about it, all of this it is not suprising, as Argentinia was one of the wealthiest countries in the world (but the wealth was only shared by a few people) untill the economy broke down in the 193o´s…

Following up on our visit to the Jesuit university we went to a couple of towns around the city, that each had an old Jesuit estancia to visit, with all of them (there are seven) also being UNESCO-heritage. These estancias are very big farms (up to 300 people working on each) that were created by the Jesuit order to earn money that went straight to their university in the city, and to their missions troughout the countryside to turn the native people to the Catholic belief. This worked out pretty well, as they also had some respect for the native people as they tried to learn their language (we saw some old dictonaries of this ancient language back in the university) and let them use their art skills to build the estancias, churches and university. They even used democratic principles as the Jesuit order didn´t see the Spanish king as their ruler, but only God and the people they served…

That democratic principle didn´t go very well with the Spanish king, so in the 18th century he expelled the Jesuits from the whole of continent. After that the university, the churches and all of the estancias supporting them were taken over by other Catholic orders, but, as they had less respect for the natives (they saw them more like ´dumb´ people who you had to integrate in Spanish society), that didn´t work out very well. Within five years the estancias were all but bankrupt, and as a result the Cordoba university also had become a shadow of its former self. The expellation of the Jesuits marked also the start of the period in which a high number of the native people got killed by the Spainish….

One of the towns around Cordoba did not only have a Jesuit estancia, but also another thing connected to Argentinia´s and Latin America´s moving history, but something more recent. This town, Alta Gracia, was the place were the famous revolutoniar Che Gueverra spent his childhood. Che was somebody who, after having travelled trough South-America & Central-America for a while, got heavily involved with the poor, and wanted to change the fact that all the the rich here rule the whole continent.

So he was a man concerned with the poor people and a man of principle. But, he also was heavily involved with the libaration of Cuba from dicatorship, which in the end resulted in helping another dictator, Fidel Castro, to power. Shortly after Cuba had been ´liberated´ he tried to liberate Bolivia from another dictator, but then the CIA killed him. All of this makes Che a pretty controversial person, but the museum we visted in Alto Gracia didn´t show anything of this and only showed us how nice, friendly and concerned with the poor people Che had been…

We found out that this is pretty typical of Argentian museums devoted to famous person, as the museum devoted to Evita is about the same. We visited this museum a couple of days ago in Buenos Aires and this was a bit of a disappointment. Apart from showing how nice, friendly and concerned with the poor & womens rights Evita had been, it did only show LOTS OF the dresses she had worn in her short life. Nothing about her controversial husband, who was a fan of Mussullini and facism, banned freedom of speech the and who still influences current Argentinian politics.

A strange, confusing and very interesting country…

Jannis.

Since we are now in a big city, we are publishing pictures on Flickr again, back from when we were in Patagonia and in the Lake District.

So check out our Flickr-webpage for the latest pictures. We just published our pictures from our visit to the Chiloe archipel, and more will follow the following days.

Jannis.

Since we arrived in South America almost 4 months ago, we spent most of the time in Argentina, so by now I understand much more of its moving history.

While travelling trough Argentina we came across all sorts of little monuments, signs and pictures of disappeared people. For instance in front of the hotel we´re staying in now is a little sign in the pavement saying:
Here used to live Maria such and such who disappeared on 23-12-1977.

A few years ago Argenina´s government has created a day off, as a memorial day for when the military took control of the country in 1976. Within a period of 5 years over 30.000 people disappeared without a trace. Some weeks ago an Argentinian student explained us about this day and he said he wasn´t too happy with it. He told us you should not look back at history….
But last week we were in Cordoba at this memorial day and there we saw this impressive huge demonstration, and lots of people were carrying pictures from their lost loved ones. Then we realised it is still very much alive with the people over here.

It showed again when a few days ago Raul Alfonso died. He was the first democratic president of Argentina following the departure of the military junta (after Argentina lost the Falklands war). On the day of his funeral it was very quiet in the streets, more quiet than when Argentina has to play soccer (they lost with 6-1 from Bolivia last week with Maradonna as coach). I guess in such a soccer-minded country that means something……

The military junta is the government of which Maxima´s father was part of. I was too young back then, but since Maxima came in the picture, everybody knows. So before I went to Argentina I knew about these disappeared people. But now for me it became more than just another story in the news: the story has names, the names have faces, the faces had a life and family, etcetera.

All of this has changed my opinion. I still think Maxima comes across as this charming and very nice woman, and she´s not responsible at all for her fathers acts. But I feel she definitely should distance herself from what her father did. As she never did before, I feel Holland is now respresented by somebody that might not disapprove of the murders her father was responsible for.

Is it that I am feeling to strongly about this, now I´m close to where it all happened, or did I just ignore it before?

Love, Martine.