Paraguay to Buenos Aires

Old and colonial in Colonia (Uruguay) ...



Grey day in La Boca
Trying to look ..... ??

Random photos of Iguazù. One of those places where photos `just can`t do it justice`.


Tango in a cafe, La Boca, Buenos Aires.


beardy weirdy










From the delights of Salta (food, proper shops, and not having to take any long and tedious bus journeys for a whole week), we left for the eighteen hour bus journey to Paraguay and the capital - Asuncion.

We planned a direct route through to Iguazu which meant stops in Asuncion and Cuidad de Nasty before arriving back in Argentina on the other side. We`d been told the nicest parts of Paraguay were everywhere except our destinations so we weren`t expecting to be too impressed ...

We were impressed with the currency though, where one pound equalled 11,137.80 Paraguayan Guaranis. For every transaction we had to use Kasparov-esk brain power to work out whether we were paying nine pounds fifty (105,745.58 PYGs) or 95p (10,572.34 PYGs).

Other things we were impressed with included the amount of dog produce on the pavements. Also the number of policemen, militia style policemen and `bodyguard` style policemen with dodgy beards, dodgy suits and dodgy poses (legs apart and hands clasped in front of body - like Hollywood interpretations of bad agents from Blahbekistan who get killed in their dozens while the hero does his stuff).

Finally, the view out over the river was OK, though we had to look over the shanty town to see it ... and over the shoulders of the various styles of policemen. We stayed for just the one night in Asuncion before the six hour bus to Cuidad de Este.

We stayed just the one night in Cuidad de Este too, as it`s a very nasty place. It`s a shopping centre town where Brazilians and Argentinians pop over the border to buy electronics and clothes. Argentinians have to pop over the border by first popping over the Brazilian border. Leaving Paraguay we popped over the Paraguayan border without first bothering with exit procedures, passport stamps etc. We popped through Brazil without stopping for entry or exit procedures at the borders, then we held our breathes entering Argentina again, but they didn`t care. We were on a local bus that just drives straight through borders - and why not. As one of our (my) sad tourist missions is collecting passport stamps then all this convenience and (probable) illegality was done at mixed blessing.

Close to Cuidad de Este is the Itaipu Dam, one of the seven wonders of the modern world (they told us) and the worlds largest hydroelectric power station. Fascinating ... so we went anyway. It could have been fascinating in a boys sort of way, but the tour was intensely dull (it was free, but all in Alien speak (Spanish)). The statistics were all big, and it is massive, but strangely not that impressive. It`s almost 8km long and 200metres high and the spillway can let through 40 times the average flow of Iguazu. In the dry season, in August, the spillway was closed, so we just admired large amounts of concrete. We got the bus back after a couple of hours with only one photo (in Iguazu I somehow took 70 photos!!! (before realising that evening that they were all the same and deleting most of them).

The next stop was the Iguazu falls, with their own enormous statistics that I can`t remember. There were three walks on the Argentinian side. One leads to the top on one side, one runs to the bottom (and across by boat to an island) and one goes by walkway out to the top of the middle section. Each walk takes an hour ish, and there are plenty of photo opportunities along the way ... which I seemed to take full advantage of.

The next day and a mere 16 hours by bus saw us arrive as badly rested as always in Buenos Aires. The bus was big with comfortable reclining seats and served a `champagne` nightcap - but it was still a bus and a 1,500 kilometre journey.

Although Buenos Aires is a capital city (and we`ve decided as a rule capital cities are nasty places) it`s got plenty of not nasty bits in defined districts. There are some colourfully painted tin buildings with plenty of tango dancers for the tourists (La Boca), an area with lots of parks and tango dancers for the tourists (Palermo), the new fashionable nightlife area (with men dressed dapperly and thin women with muscly legs and ladders in their fishnets dancing intensely for the tourists (Recoleta)). Also there`s another fashionable area by the old docks (Perto Madero) but we didn`t see anyone dancing and the place was a bit disappointing. Finally there`s the centre where we went to see a show full of tango dancers (the show was very impressive - and we`ve seen plenty of tango in our time).

As a three day trip (for more passport stamps) we took a ferry to Uruguay and to Colonia de Sacramento. Colonia is a very nice, small and historic town. We left immediately for Montevideo, perhaps to substantiate our theory about capital cities. Largely we went because we found the name somehow exotic, and when we left we were both sporting some natty t-shirts with `Uruguay` and `Montevideo` all over them.

Back to Colonia and then to Buenos Aires we left for another 15 hour bus journey in big comfortable first class seats. After sleeping through the night we arrived totally exhausted the next day in Puerto Madryn (the top right corner of Patagonia) for a spot of whale watching .........

Into (and out of) Arhentina

Cerro Rico (rich mountain) where all the silver came from and where (to date) over 8 million miners have been killed .... now also a tourist attraction ... so here I am sporting dynamite, detonator cord etc.


The train cemetary, Bolivia.

Urm, they`re flamingos (helpful captions)







She`s a Bolivian beauty standing outside a hotel made of salt.


The photo that really didn`t come off quite as hoped.

The Spanish school came and went, as, it turned out, did our ability to speak any Spanish.

We`re in Argentina now and we may as well not have bothered trying to learn Spanish because here they speak Geordie Spanish. We can`t understand them and they have no chance of understanding us. The Bolivians, as it turns out, all speak the Queens Spanish and also must have had a good imagination when it came to understanding us. If the Argentinians weren`t all so nice we`d be convinced they were like the French and were deliberately ignoring us to make us feel small.

Anyway, satisfied, as we naively were, that our Spanish was now marvellous (so long as everything we wanted to say we could achieve in the present tense) we moved on from Sucre and back to Potosi.

Potosi is the highest town of its size in the world (blah blah) and used to be bigger than London, Paris and everywhere else in the days when the Spanish were pulling huge quantities of silver from the hills. Now the mines are run by small independent groups of miners whose only troubles in the world are an incredibly short life expectancy and swarms of gawping tourists.

We bought a stick of dynamite, some ammonium nitrate (dynamite on it`s own is for wimps), detonator cord (told not to knock it accidentally), some coco leaves (pre-cocaine state) and, to cap it off, a two litre bottle of lemonade for the miners.

Anyone can buy the dynamite and lemonade in the market, and there were several randomly occurring explosions - mostly when the miners had had too much to drink (the miners have a pleasant drink which is 96% alcoholic) or for the benefit of tourists. We chuckled merrily when our guides lit a couple of bombs and passed them around our group (they`re on a three minute fuse (give or take)).

The presents to the miners are a small pay off for our annoying them as they work heaving huge trolleys around (Indiana Jones style) or manually hammering into rock or shovelling rocks in the boiling heat and darkness for up to 24 hour shifts.

Crawling around in tiny tunnels with random vertical shafts for either descending down or not accidentally falling down it was very hot, very dusty and a lot of hard breathing (at about 4,500 metres). On the way in we`d noticed lots of compressed air being pumped into the mines for essential oxygen. Essential oxygen for the occasional bit of machinery to work, as we all breathed in the arsenic, asbestos, cyanide and silica cocktail that tends to kill the miners by the time they`re forty.

Momentarily putting aside the misery and plight of the miners´ lives .... I had a really nasty headache for the rest of that day which no drugs could stop (although the coco leaves (the local remedy for altitude sickness) did the best work).

After Potosi we took a local bus for the six hour trip over unmade roads to Uyuni. Although Uyuni itself is small and nondescript, every tourist to Bolivia goes there (at the same time as us it seemed) for the tours to the Sal de Uyuni.

Day one of our four day tour took us out over some of the two thousand kilometres worth of salt fields. With mile after mile of flat white salt then cue attempts at hilarious perspective photographs of people`standing` in someone else's hand. With more patience they can look really good ... it`s a shame we didn`t have more patience.

In a burst of excitement I tried to get our tour group (six of us) to stand behind my open bag for a great and clever illusion photo. In my mind it looked as if we were all small people standing in a big rucksack. In actual fact it looked like we were a bunch of people standing behind a large bag - which was in the foreground. The driver looked on in very bored fashion like he`d seen tourists try these photos every day for the last twenty years (but never with such a bad result). Our group seemed to get much amusement (less from me) over just how bad this photo was.

Anyway, next tour stop was Fish Island. By far it`s greatest feature was that it was riddled with enormous and dramatic cacti, not really a feature at all was that from a distance it has a profile that vaguely could look like a fish. Fish Island must have been the only suggestion in the hat.

That night, promised as the most comfortable of the tour, was spent in a complete dive. After we`d had our fill of dinner (and stuffed the other 80% of served food into pockets, onto the fire, other peoples plates or just tried to compress it to make the amount left look less insulting) we played a bit of frisbee, and when it was dark, gawped at the stars. The stars were as incredible as you`d expect for somewhere so totally remote and without electricity. The toilets were also as disgusting as you`d expect for somewhere so remote, and given there were only two toilets for about twenty tourists (half of whom seemed to have food poisoning) you wouldn`t have chosen to settle down for a nice relax with the Sunday papers.

Day two took us down to the borders of Bolivia, Argentina and Chile via some dramatic scenery, volcanoes and lakes. The lakes all passably represented their names (green, white, red and err, probably a blue one). Each lake had slightly more flamingos than the last (that were slightly closer, slightly more pretty and slightly more pink). Each lake therefore made the previous copious photos of flamingos slightly more redundant.

The scenery was so dramatic with strange lava formed rock formations and volcanoes all around that I felt totally inspired to take my toilet in the wilderness. This mostly because I had chosen not to spend my time relaxing in the previous nights facilities (no Sunday papers) and also more worryingly was my own slightly deteriorating condition. I`d broken the golden maxim - take only photos, leave onlyfootprints etc.

I was however a changed man, and by the end of the tour I was converted to taking my dignified toilet outside. I approached the task of trying to convert others to my new preoccupation with zeal. Unfortunately my main campaign was led on the second night. In pitch darkness, the temperature at minus fifteen degrees and a howling gale- myself and Ben (on our tour group) set out with determination and toilet paper (in different directions). Two minutes later we were back, I´d popped an Imodium and Ben sat firmly on a chair for the rest of the evening. The `bathroom` on that second night had no flushing water and no running water and was grim. It wasn`t greatly improved with the redecoration provided by the arrival of the food poisoned tour group.

On the third day at five thirty in the morning we dressed swiftly by candlelight and were too late to see the sunrise through the sulphurous steam of many geysers. Nevertheless it was a dramatic sight that justified, retrospectively, the shocking waking time.

Next we moved to yet another lake, but this one was fed by lots of steamy springs that gave us the opportunity for the first hot bath in two months. This was absolutely lovely (not quite as lovely as the preceding minutes of isolation a short twenty minutes walk away).

Later in the day we dropped off the English/Argentinian couple (whom we`d been having a good old chuckle with) at the Chilean border. Our tour group now consisted of the driver, the overly attentive cook (with no teeth), myself and Sam and a Spanish couple. Despite wanting to discuss the Basque separatist issues of the day (they were from Bilbao), instead the conversation moved to, for eg, `my name is Bart,I am 34 years old, I live in England`. How proud our Spanish teacher in Sucre would have been.

On our return to Uyuni from the trip (the remains of the tour were just more of the same stunning, weird and unique scenery - most of which formed a perfect natural lavatory) we caught the 2am train out to Tupiza. In a land so diverse and beautiful it`s annoying how much they like their night travel. Nonetheless the lights of course all went off as soon as the train left the station and we were able to gaze at the stars and immediate scenery out of the window. Ten minutes later the windows iced up on the inside. Fortunately wearing all our winter clothes and market purchases of gloves and scarfs etc we were only just about cold.

Tupiza has more fantastic scenery, we were told, however somehow we didn`t find ourselves greatly motivated. The food was shocking as always and we were so close to Argentina that, after a day, we caught the 4am bus out (4am!! what`s wrong with them)??

We`re in Salta now, in Argentina. They have big supermarkets with proper food, they have health food shops and the restaurants serve food that would actually be a pleasure even if we were eating it back home. Today is Sunday and we walked to the out of town shopping centre, looked around the shops, had a MacDonalds (the proper food is great, the health food shops are probably excellent, but we couldn`t resist the only MacDonalds we`ve seen so far. We are bad people).

They have an excursion here called ´Tren a las Nubes` (train to the clouds). It`s one of the great railway journeys of South America with 21 tunnels, 13 viaducts, two 360 degree loops and two zig zags. It climbs four thousand metres and there`s stunning scenery along the route.

Anyway all that`s irrelevant as typically the train has been broken for months. Not wanting to be robbed the experience, we ended up just feeling like we`d been robbed. We took the close substitute `minivan a las Nubes` tour which attempted to follow the train line. Twelve hours in a dodgy minivan on unmade roads didn`t quite achieve the same `great train journey` experience.

Each evening in Salta we`ve been sitting on a restaurant steps at 7pm waiting for the place to open for dinner. We walk sheepishly in at 7:30 and order some food - probably from the cleaners. The waiters have all arrived by 8pm, and they come and eat their dinner on next door tables until 8:30 when they get changed into waiter gear. By around 9pm, after a few more tourists have dribbled in, we get our food. We finish a couple of minutes later (quite hungry) and try to get the bill. By 10pm the place is heaving ...... there are a few fatties in Argentina.

Anyway, next stop is Asuncion in Paraguay. We leave on Tuesday (16/8) for our small 16 hour bus journey. Terrific.