Logbook 4 - Paraguay and a dodgy traveller
After a few days in the quiet Brazilian town of Corumba I take a bus through the Pantanal nature reserve, but there isn’t much to see at this time of year, so I carry on south to this country that only gets a few British visitors each year, one of whom has plenty to talk about.
Graham Douglas
The first time I simply walk across the bridge from the Brazilian side, past the empty booth on the other side and change some money before realizing that the border post is not going to open and that entering Paraguay without a visa stamp is an expensive thing when you come to leave.
Crossing at Pedro J Caballero I have to have my fingerprint read by a new laser device. Paraguay is the least developed place I have seen so far. After buying a ticket a notice is posted saying the bus has been cancelled because the traffic police impounded it, and we have to wait 2 hours for the next. The journey is timetabled at 5 hours but actually 6.5, not because of traffic - the roads are empty - but because the bus serves as a lorry for transporting all kinds of goods. It takes 45 minutes just to get out of the border town as we keep stopping to load up with sacks of cement, packets of noodles, bottles of bleach and then some enormous bundles of clothes which need 2 people to force them through the rear window of the bus from the horse-drawn cart whose driver waved us down in a busy street.
In Concepcion there is an enormous statue of the Virgin in the middle of the main boulevard. It is so big that the tourist office is lodged in its base. The main street is showing signs of an emerging middle class who frequent a wine-bar restaurant which also does music at night. But drinking a tea at another place I am approached by a group of feral boys aged about 9 or 10 who demand “Give me 1000 pesos !” without any pretence at smiling or begging. The bar owner waves them away, so they throw small stones at him and when he shouts at them, they start stabbing a screwdriver into his counter.
I had thought of going to Brazil along the Paraguay river which the guidebook recommends as a real adventure but phoning all the hotels in the town where the weekly boat leaves gets me only one reply saying the number has changed because the hotel is shut. So, I head instead for Asuncion, a necessary break but not a place to walk around at night since half the streetlights seem not to be working. In the central square in the afternoon women approach tourists as soon as they are out of view of the police, and looking down to the river the area is covered with shanties. I take a bus back to the bus station to stay at one of the small hotels, that seem safe and friendly. And next day, I cross back into Argentina to see the falls of Iguazu, and bump into one of those people who one rarely meets in Europe.
Arriving on the Argentine side he gives me a couple of cigars and buys me a beer before telling me that he hasn’t got the money for a hotel, and if I could oblige and give him my bank account number, he will pay it in 2 or 3 days when his sister who owns a farm in Kenya sends it to him. He also talks a lot about a moneychanger here who he relies on to give him a good rate for Swiss francs and about the corruption that continues in Argentina.
Two English girls come along, and he invites them to join us and gives them his “I am a nice man of the world and you have my 100% attention” smile. More cigars, more beers, and he is a bit peeved when they leave. I leave him to his self-promotion and book myself into the cheapest hotel, but when we get back to the question of a loan, he doesn’t want the cheapest place. I give him just enough for one night at the second cheapest and no bank account details, just my email. Sure enough I never heard anything more, still it all seems to be part of the travelling process, and he didn’t mug me.
But I’m recognizing the type now, they always talk a lot, they inform you that they speak 5 languages, they know lots of people wherever you happen to meet them, and they can’t resist trying to impress young women - but they don’t always want money, just attention will do. This year I met a guy in a café in a small town in the Alentejo, who immediately read me as a lone foreigner and also saw that I liked the Brazilian waitress, who shortly came out and gave him a head massage. There are always territorial imperatives with these guys, the opposition must be neutralized or co-opted before they can constitute a threat. As we sit chatting, he is waving at nearly every passing car “He’s got a BMW now, what’s he been doing?”, he says, and telling me about the time when he was an undercover policeman with the drug squad in Amsterdam, but had to leave when things got too hot, and now works as a police translator in Portugal.
Then comes the piece de resistance, his explanation of “The Romanian Supermarket Trick”. This involves 2 guys who first of all concentrate their attention on chatting up the youngest of the check-out girls, and then one day go in with 2 trolleys and fill each with exactly the same goods. One pays the friendly check-out girl and walks out, while the other leaves his trolley behind and starts loading their car. The first one takes the receipt, then goes back inside, grabs the second trolley plus a big roll of toilet paper, goes to the same checkout and pays for the new item “Just forgot this” and off he goes with a 2nd trolley load. It takes a very alert security guard to spot this unless he has been trained.
OK mister I will stop looking at your girlfriend and get on with my travels.
Iguazu is one place where all the adjectives apply, it is awesome, jaw-dropping, stunning, breathtaking, this mass of water that produces so much spray now when the river is high that you can’t see very far down. This is from the Argentine side, and to get the full feeling you have to go along a walkway with railings that ends right above the cavern into which the water is plunging. Approaching from the Brazilian side is not as good, whatever they tell you.
The weather is cold now at the end of June and I head north looking for a few days sunshine before I have to go back to Buenos Aires for my flight home. In Montevideo I love the street full of bookshops and the slow pace of life. There is a solemn ceremony one day, a Day of Reconciliation when the current president shakes hands with the son of the last dictator, and the big crowd cheers. Nightlife at this time of year is a bit limited but I found a pleasant bar with music in the old town. There is a Tango tradition in Uruguay which is rated as less conservative than the one in Buenos Aires, Maia Castro being one of the new Uruguayan singers I particularly enjoyed.
One day I took a walk out of town looking for some tourist attraction or other, but instead I came across the most extraordinary cemetery I have ever seen, which is far more impressive than the tedious La Recoleta in Buenos Aires. The cemetery workers stopped me taking photographs of individual tombs but many are stupendous excesses of funerary art which are well worth coming to see. One is in the form of a Sphinx, complete with hieroglyphs, others are original works of romantic sculpture, a pair of lovers sinking into the stone of their grave for example, and there are flowers arranged in beautiful displays as if for a film. If you want to see it take a bus along Avda General Rivera and find the junction with c/ Tomas Basanez , it’s called the Cemiterio del Buceo.