Well, this feels different. I’m starting an entry less than a month after I finished my previous one. It’s strange to be writing about two weeks of travel, but I guess it means that this post doesn’t have to be, as Bassett so kindly put it, “the next Great American Fucking Novel.”
I only wound up staying in Buenos Aires for three days. Down here it’s creeping towards summertime, and I knew that a lot of the places I wanted to visit in Northern Argentina would be ridiculously hot if I didn’t get a move-on. The time I did have in the city was fun, although I didn’t fall head-over-heels for the place like I thought I would. The weather didn’t help (it was actually cool and rainy for most of my time there), but I think the critical factor was time. I only got a chance to explore two of the city’s numerous neighborhoods, I didn’t experience a weekend night out on the town, and while I found some cool people at my hostel to hang out with, I didn’t get to know a single local. Don’t get me wrong, the city amazed me in a lot of ways: the cool mixture of colonial and modern architecture, the delicious steak, the Avenida 9 de Julio, with eight lanes of traffic on each side of a huge, central pedestrian area; but I just didn’t have the time to develop a personal connection to the place, and I didn’t have a Daniel/Anita/John Dillingham waiting for me to show me the ropes.
From Buenos Aires I took a bus to Rosario, Argentina’s third-largest city and the birthplace of both Argentina’s flag and Che Guevara. I spent the better part of my first day in Rosario walking along the river and hanging out at the artificial beach with two law students from Buenos Aires and a guy from San Diego. The water wasn’t exactly appetizing as far as swimming goes, but we had a tasty meal and a few beers and couldn’t help but notice that Rosario’s reputation for having the most beautiful women in the country was...well deserved.
That night, about fifteen other law students from Buenos Aires arrived at the hostel to join the two guys I hung out with at the beach. I joined them all for a night out, and got a pretty good taste of Argentinian nightlife which has a slightly different schedule than what I’m used to, to say the least. Everyone woke up from their afternoon nap around 8:30pm, followed by some pre-dinner drinks (Fernet Branca and Coca Cola…disgusting). Dinner happened around 11:30pm (about ten pizzas) and was followed by some post-dinner drinking (more Fernet and beer). Then (around 2:30am) we went out. The club was just starting to fill up when we arrived, and by around 4:00am it was packed. We stayed until the place closed, and walked out into daylight. It was a good time thanks to the company of the law students but to be honest, the music was TERRIBLE.
After missing one bus thanks to my first encounter with food poisoning (if you’re ever in Rosario, do not have the arroz con pollo at Café Naranjo), I spent an extra night in Rosario recovering and set off for Puerto Iguazú on Monday. The bus ride was eighteen hours long, and took me right to the northeastern corner of Argentina, where the country shares a three-way border with Paraguay and Brazil. It was a long ride up just to see a big waterfall, but it was definitely worth it.
Just before it joins the Río Paraná, the Iguazú River (which defines the border between Argentina and Brazil) hits a series of natural barriers that stretch its width to around two kilometers. The basalt plateau over which northern parts of the river flow then abruptly ends, and the entire river drops as much as 180 feet all along the edge of this cliff. Las Cataratas de Iguazú, as the Argentines call them, are easily the single most amazing part of the natural world that I have ever seen. I was fortunate enough to arrive just after several large rainstorms hit areas of Brazil that feed the Río Iguaçú (as it’s called on the Brazilian side), so the water level was high and the falls were thunderous. Like the other amazing things I’ve seen on my trip so far, words won’t do justice to the way I felt when I saw the falls, and pictures will probably only provide a taste of the overall experience of seeing that much water fall that far in the middle of a subtropical rainforest. All I can say is I’m so glad I made the eighteen-hour detour on my way from Rosario to Salta, and if you ever find yourself in Argentina, you should definitely do the same.
I decided to break up the twenty-two hour ride from Puerto Iguazú to Salta by stopping in a small town called Resistencia. It seemed like a good idea at the time, since Resistencia lies almost exactly half way between the two towns, and the Lonely Planet bills it as an interesting mix of rugged frontier town and artistic haven (the town is littered with over five hundred sculptures by local artists). However I arrived on Halloween night only to find that there were exactly zero other independent travelers in town. This usually is not much of a problem (see Tunisia), but I had really been looking forward to finding a cool gringo Halloween party somewhere, and that was not in the cards in Resistencia (nor was any real nightlife to speak of). It was also way too hot. The town sits on the edge of El Chaco, which is an enormous expanse of arid, uninhabitable, thorny scrubland. The temperature during the day stayed above one hundred degrees, and not even the locals ventured outside. This made my attempts to walk around and see some of the statues pretty much futile (while the sun was shining anyway). So there it is, I really have enjoyed almost every place I’ve been in one way or another, but not Resistencia. It just kind of sucked.
Fortunately, Salta was a solid improvement. An overnight bus got me to my hostel at around eight in the morning, and since my room wouldn’t be ready until the afternoon, I mustered up the energy to go for a little hike. A quick ride on a public bus took me to the suburban town of San Lorenzo, and from there I found my way to a small nature reserve. The entrance fee to the reserve got me a map and a nice hike through some temperate forest (which was strangely infested with cows…only in Argentina) and up to a viewpoint where I could see the huge, dry valley that the Salteños call home. After Resistencia, it was literally a breath of fresh air, although it wasn’t exactly cool out. Temperatures around noon in Salta still hit about ninety-five degrees.
Aside from meeting some cool/hilarious travelers, the highlight of the rest of my time in Salta was definitely an all-day excursion to the small town of Cafayate that I booked through my hostel. The minibus picked us up at seven in the morning, and most of the following twelve hours was spent on the road. The town of Cafayate itself was nothing to write home about, and we got a couple of relatively lame winery tours along the way; but what made the trip spectacular was the scenery. I had absolutely no idea that this kind of countryside existed in Argentina. Barren desert, huge red and yellow rock formations, vast plains with massive mountains rising up behind them…I haven’t spent any time in the southwestern U.S. so I can’t make a direct comparison, but this was pretty gorgeous stuff.
Adding to the memorable quality of the trip was a fifty year-old Swiss woman named Catherine. She had come out to the bar with us the night before (leaving her husband and daughter at home), danced her ass off, refused to leave at three in the morning when we all went home, and finally got back to the hostel just in time to depart for the trip. She remained raucously drunk until about eleven o’clock, making dirty jokes in Spanish with a heavy French accent while the guide was trying to teach us some geology, and then passed out on her husband’s shoulder practically mid-sentence on the way to lunch. Classic.
Last night I left Salta, taking another epically long bus trip (eighteen hours this time) to Mendoza. Despite the length, the ride wasn’t that bad. The bus was almost empty, so I stretched my tall self across four seats and slept like a baby. We crossed more desert than I ever thought existed anywhere in South America, but now that I’m in Mendoza (which is still in the desert, but is fed by massive irrigation canals that utilize runoff from the Andes), green is everywhere. The central park (two steps from my hostel’s front door) is huge, and the larger streets seem to have more trees than buildings. Tonight I have my second all-you-can-eat asado (barbeque) in three nights, and tomorrow I’m going on a bicycle tour of the province’s wineries. Life’s tough.
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