Into Argentina

Salta was our first stop in Argentina. It´s a bustling city, full of students and business people and old colonial buildings. To my delight, they observe the siesta too, so from 1 to 5 men sit around cafes drinking coffee and smoking and looking through papers. Since it was just a stopover point, we did not stick around for long but I did get to take the teleferico (cable car) to the top of a big hill, which was empty and felt like a resort town in winter. The weather has finally evened out now that we are at a lower altitude - Salta smelled wintery and wistful.

From Salta we took a whopping 23-hour bus to Puerto Iguazu on the Brazilian border. Argentine buses are the stuff of legends, so we were all giddy with anticipation for this one. There was an attendant who served us three meals, including wine with dinner, and played shitty American movies. The seat reclined about 150 degrees and was wide enough to sleep on my side. Aah..

Puerto Iguazu is the town closest to Iguazu falls on the Argentine side, so we were expecting a tourist trap with nothing much going for it. But somehow the town manages to accommodate tons of visitors and still keep doing its chill pretty thing. It sits on the intersection of two big rivers, Iguazu and Parana. This intersection, called Tres Fronteras, is the meeting point of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Our first night there, I took a walk along the river over to the lookout to watch the sunset. As it happened, this was the day of the first Argentina game in the World Cup, and the road was lined with groups of people in jerseys pumping music and drinking mate. Everyone, and I mean everyone, had a mate gourd in hand.

It was warm enough to go swimming, so I spent two afternoons at the pool of the fancy hotel in town. And one of the evenings, we stumbled upon an outdoor market selling nothing but cheese, salami, olives, and wine - as we found out, these make up a picada, which is served with crackers and is a typical Argentine snack. There were tables there, so we had a dinner of ham and cheese and salami and chilled red wine.

I've been tiptoeing around the subject of Iguazu Falls, which was of course the whole reason we were to Puerto Iguazu in the first place. That´s because they are difficult to talk about. What I did not realize before I came there was the sheer expanse of the park, and how easy it is to spend a whole day there. You can visit the falls on the Brazil side, where you get to look at them, or the Argentine side, were you get to walk around and up to them and try to wrap your head around what all that power must feel like. They stretch for miles and are surrounded by a lush green forest, which was filled with these amazing creatures. Here again, people were right to insist that it´s a must-see.

It´s been fun being here for the World Cup. The hostels are filled with Europeans sitting around tv´s. Cabbies always want to talk about how the U.S. is doing. There's a big screen set up in one of the squares in Buenos Aires, and people get together to watch matches. Everyone sort of slows down when Argentina is playing, and watching the games is a legitimate excuse to skip work or miss homework.

Whores on Horses

Last stop in Bolivia!

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid met their demise near Tupiza. It looks like cowboy country there, so we donned the hats we'd been saving for the occasion and went for a ride. It was a slow trot most of the time, but a couple of times the guide set the horses galloping - see the first picture - and on the first attempt, my horse bit Lina's leg. (She still has a horse-mouth-shaped bruise on her calf.) On our way back to town, we came across a very drunk man who went off on us, and the only words we could make out were 'cabalderia' (cavalry) and 'putas' (whores). So that's our new moniker.

Let's get high. And salty

After four juice and pastry filled days in Sucre, we decided it was time to either join one of the convents we'd visited or move on. The convents wouldn't have us, so move on we did, albeit with a heavy heart.

Our next stop was Potosi, the highest city in the world at 4090 meters. There we visited a Carmelite convent and watched 'Enemy of the State'. The main attraction in Potosi are the silver mines, which are still operational and still squalid. Since neither of us had any interest in paying a miner to exlode some dynamite, we swiftly moved on to our next stop, Uyuni.

Uyuni is a real fucking dump. It has all the charm of a post-apocalyptic town: empty streets, stray dogs, and inhospitable climate. All the tourist money flowing through on its way to the Salt Flats seems to have no bearing here. We kept wondering where it all goes.

But not withstanding all of the above, the Salt Flats were definitely worth the effort, just like everyone had told us. Just look at all the fun we had.

... and we´re back

The internet in Bolivia took me back to that ´90s pastime of growing glossy eyed in front of the computer while a webpage loads. But I crossed the border into Argentina so I can get back to blogging. Here are two updates I've been meaning to post for a while now

Things I do differently here

The interesting thing about traveling is that certain things that I´d never do at home become quick habits. For one, I´m speaking Spanish a lot, and occasionally thinking in Spanish too. Today I did yoga in Spanish. I also drink a ton of fresh squeezed orange juice because it´s cheap and abundant. This is where the list of objectively positive things ends. I´m consuming a ridiculous amount of meat, potatoes, and rice - usually all three in one meal. I´m also eating a ton of sweets - chocolates, candy, but mostly cheap packaged cookies that are essential on a long bus ride. I´m catching up on shitty American sitcoms from the last 10 years whenever a TV is around. All of this I do with relish.

Cast of characters

One of my favorite parts of being a backpacker is meeting other backpackers, so I wanted to give you a taste of a few people I've spent time with along the way.
- A 29 year old Japanese man who's been traveling around the world for the past 3 years. He's heading back to Japan next month to get married to a girl he met in Ecuador and knocked up in Rio
- A British couple fresh out of college who are taking a year to travel around the world. Unlike a lot of other British kids here, they were unabashed about having money at their disposal
- An American kid who took a year off from med school in Boston to volunteer at an NGO in Nicaragua
- A lot of Irish couples traveling for a year or two because the economy's bad
- A lot of Australians traveling for a year or two because everyone does it
- A lot of Israelis fresh out of the army doing the Israeli circuit
- For the past two weeks, I've been traveling with an American girl from New York and California who'd been working at Google in London before decisively quitting and taking off to travel. She's doing a Kiva fellowship in Asia starting in July. We have a lot to talk about. And if you want to learn about what I've been eating recently, check out her food blog here.

I will update you on my itinerary soon, I promise! All I can say right now is that my happiness levels have been spiking lately. I'm recently arrived in Buenos Aires, and I'm going out to explore.

Much love
M

Sugar High

I wrote a poem about Sucre:

This city
makes me giddy
with its white washed walls,
juice stalls,

uniformed school girls
in twos and threes,

flower beds´ intricate symmetries,

a saltena for breakfast, alfajor for a snack -
wait for me, Sucre, I´m coming back.