PAMPAS-ASS TRAVELER PUTS ON AIRS, TAKES TO THE AIR, IN BUENOS AIRES

I hate to hang around when the party’s over. When it’s time to go home, then I do it. So I steal away in the middle of the night, from Vina del Mar climbing high into the Andes by midnight, straight up from the Chilean coast. Too bad there’s not much moonlight or it’d be a pretty sight I’m sure. As it is there’s not that much to see, a few snow-capped peaks and a rugged road a couple miles high I reckon. We finally hit the border crossing about three in the morning and there’s a line waiting of course. At least they’ve incorporated both countries’ formalities into one checkpoint Charlie, so we only have to do this once. I hate formalities. It all takes about an hour and soon we’re on our way again, off into the night and toward the pampas. But I’ll only go to Mendoza, stay a night, and then head off again to the Big City. Cop a crap first thing after an all night bus ride or you’ll pay for it later in traveler’s constipation, that poor second cousin to traveler’s diarrhea. This is a rule, like traveling light and not traveling with butter. Defy me at your peril. The things you should ‘hold in’ usually refer to your mouth. A good coffee usually works, but there are products on the market if the symptoms persist. Be careful what you ask for in Portuguese unless you want aspirin. Asi es idioma.

Mendoza is okay, a medium-size Argentine city with medium-size pretensions. After several weeks in Chile, I immediately recall why I prefer it to Argentina. It’s the difference between Europe and America, the Continent and the UK, rationalism and empiricism. For all its fancy restaurants, I’ve got nothing to eat. I must’ve lost ten pounds in Argentina and only partially gained it back in Chile. Hardie K’s diet tours anyone? Paris-loving Brits look aghast at me when I rag on Argentina’s food, or lack thereof, but listen to this: “If the stunningly boring national obsession of ham and cheese has left you with a yearning for more exotic food, with a little searching you can find international restaurants…”, and that’s from full-time ex-pats doing a travel ‘zine in Argentina, Dutch and Australian the principals, so I’m vindicated. And they’re being generous. It takes a LOT of searching to find something besides the asados and parilladas that the country is famous for and the pastas and pizzas that serve as filler for restaurant fare, starchy greasy stuff sufficing for fast food.

Still a little persistence pays off. If you can handle all-you-can-eat buffets (tenedor libre = ‘free fork’) and the long dark nod that usually follows, then Chinese is a decent option, though no cheaper than the US. A better option for me is take-out by the kilo, a decent $3 fix for about a half kilo (= 1 lb. for you Homies). I even found a veggie place doing the same, and even has brown rice, even cooked correctly. There IS a God. You just have to search. The veggie place still has steak knives, in case the tofu’s tough. Argentina DOES beat out Chile for coffee, Nescafe practically unheard of, and espresso prices cheap in places without seats. They saw me coming. The possible induces the probable. Don’t believe me? Order a double espresso in a cup with no lid, then attempt to walk down the street without spilling any. Someone will bump into you. I guarantee it, especially in Bs. As., where subways disgorge passengers onto streets planned for horses. Unless you’re a champion racing waiter, you’re in trouble.

They do that here for real, too, waiters walking down streets with a tray and two cups, rather than office workers having to deal with the indignity of refilling the water in a coffee maker in the office. It’s so romantic, so Latin, so inefficient, so ridiculous, an acquired taste for etiquette I suppose, cultivated over millennia. If they’d stop kissing each other, they might get some work done. But that would cut into the 3-4 hour siesta, mightn’t it? We don’t want that. So currency devaluations compete with inflation to see who wins, the Argentine economy slowly sliding downward by fits and starts.

Argentina’s got very few supermarkets, and they’re disappointing when you find them. The ones in Chile are great and frequently found, with lots of prepared dishes also, including salmon and seafood and variations on the chap suey theme. At least you can usually find a roast chicken in an Argentine Carrefour, so that helps relieve the ham-and-cheese syndrome. Paraguay doesn’t need supermarkets for that. Chickens line the streets roasting like heads at an Aztec sacrifice. I think it’s the national bird there. The fact that the French finally came in to Argentina with supermarkets speaks volumes. Chile has several of their own chains. And all the smaller non-chain ones in Argentina are run by Chinese, every one! Are these pampas-ass cowboys lame or what? Like southern Europeans they’d rather hang in bistros and buy groceries in kiosks, pure retail dahling.

Meanwhile Chile has ubiquitous pubs and non-pretentious eateries, with lots of local and regional home cooking. This includes Mom’s favorite pure’ de papas, good ol’ mashed ‘taters. And don’t even think about finding any food besides pastry items before noon in Argentina. It doesn’t exist, except in some laborer’s imagination. Is a croissant going to last him till noon? What’s worse, they call them facturas. You spend two years learning business Spanish and the word for ‘invoice’, then the Argentines have to call pastries ‘facturas’. There oughta’ be a law. Thank God for eggs. Anything graced by two eggs in Chile is a la pobre, ‘like the poor’, cheap extra protein. In Argentina it’s a caballo, ‘like a horse’, cheap extra protein.

It’s hot in Mendoza, in some act of reverse adiabasis. Temperatures are supposed to descend as you ascend, but not when you’re coming from a cool coastal fog. The west coast of South America is like its northern counterpart in that respect, staying cool far into the season while the east coast is starting to bake. I kick around town for a day and a half, find a wi-fi signal in the park, but an electrical outlet is another story. Public ones don’t exist, not even in Bs. As. International airport. Score another one for Chile. You can usually find a plug or two in the bus stations there. I hate hanging with nothing to do, but if I can crank the computer up, then I’m usually OK. I catch the night bus on to Buenos Aires. Valium would help. You think Kansas is boring? It’s got nothing on the pampas. They just go on and on, like your relatives and their travel stories, flat as a stale Coke and without the caffeine.

We finally get in to Buenos Aires, a major world megalopolis, for whatever that’s worth. At least it’s a Sunday so traffic’s light. Sunday’s always a good day to travel in these parts, since everything pretty much shuts down. Saturday’s not much better. You need to pack in supplies for the weekend here. Despite the inconvenience it’s nice. Monday’s why, raucous and regrettable. Downtown Bs. As. has a level of social organization that rivals an ant hill for order. If you judge a country by its drivers, then Argentina wouldn’t rate too high. They’re not alone. Watch your feet. Pedestrians aren’t much better. It’s a vicious cycle. What I can’t believe is that so many people seem to like the confusion, meeting with friends and chatting on sidewalks where three sets of shoulders couldn’t fit sideways. They seem to feed off the stress, like Matrix mugwumps getting a bio-electric buzz. So I go out to the suburbs to check out Chinatown. My cell phone still gets a signal in the subway. That’s scary. There ain’t much to Chinatown, a few restaurants, some tourist kitsch and a grocery store, but at least the ‘burbs are peaceful, compared to the core. A pack of ramen noodles cost a buck. I could probably find a niche here, but… naah. I got a flight to catch. Beam me up, Scotty.

WHEN YOU’RE FEELIN’ TOO PAMPA’D, THEN GO TO PATAGONIA

Patagonia = n X ½(500X1000)m, where n is nothingness and m is miles, all measurements approximate. Nothingness for me does not imply lack; nothingness implies infinity, and so does Patagonia with its many wonders, albeit most of them crinkled up against that stone massif called the Andes. Unfortunately it’s a long ride to get there. I don’t remember what year Paul Theroux came here, but I don’t think the ‘Old Patagonia Express’ exists any more. The train stations in Bs. As. seem pretty decrepit with trains going to no places I’ve ever heard of, local and regional only I think. The big problem now is a lack of coins to pay with, queues stretching around corners with people waiting patiently in line. It was all over the news down here; I’m sure it must’ve made CNN. The long distance trains I imagine have long since been replaced by buses, double deck affairs with meals and entertainment included (sometimes even cute hostesses). The food sucks of course. If you think airline food is bad, then you should try some bus food. Remember ‘chicken-fried’ steak (or did we only rate that privilege in Mississippi)? Milanesa is an Argentine favorite and usually makes it into the little foil-wrap containers that conceal what will eventually go into your mouth. It’s better that way. The breading on the ‘steak’ works to hide what’s really inside.

So what’s a health-food person to do down south? As always, smile and say ‘cheese’. I’m getting really tired of cheese but I haven’t eaten much for the last ten years in Asia so I can endure I suppose. The real demon is ham-and-cheese. It’s evil. I’m starting to think of these as ham-and-cheese republics it’s so ubiquitous. It’s a plot I’m sure, and a bad one, characters wanted, a conspiracy of some sort, kill our souls with ham and clog our intestines with cheese, round us up into colonoscopy camps. I’m not joking, not much anyway. For lunch on the bus we had two sandwiches, one on square loaf bread with the edges neatly trimmed and one on a hamburger bun, both- you guessed it- with ham and cheese in the center. It’s enough to make you go on a fast, or go on a slow, conserving energy to conserve calories so as not to bore yourself with eating. At least the 36-hour bus ride to Rio Gallegos is actually on schedule, not like a certain train running between Bamako and Dakar that arrives a day late, and then dumps you on the side of the tracks at 5am, that smell of compost your own, but fortunately there’s always a hotel-cum-whorehouse still open working the night shift as long as you don’t mind paying for a night that’s already gone and best forgotten.

It’s probably better that way, that the food’s no good, since the bus has no crappers anyway, recycling bathrooms advised for use with ‘liquids only’. So what if you’ve got the runs? Interpret liberally. The coffee is no better of course, though sometimes instant is preferable to a bad brew. Don’t waste time looking for a bus with latte’. Then there’s the ubiquitous orange drink. As Seinfeld might say, “what’s the deal with a fizzy orange drink? Does it taste orange? Do they put in any real orange flavor? If you closed your eyes could you tell the difference between an orange drink and a green drink? Does a green drink taste like something green?” I’ve had the red drink in Thailand and I couldn’t tell you what it tastes like. What’s the taste of red?

As our time capsule continues into the night, God only knows what changes are occurring while we feign sleep and wish for dreams to come. A few stops occur with people shuffling in and out, but nothing very notable. When the morning comes we’re heading due west toward Bariloche before heading south again. By now we’re heading into the heart of Patagonia and the population is thinning rapidly, only to almost peter out totally long before the 50^th parallel where Rio Gallegos lies. Comodoro Rivadavia is the only town of note for almost a thousand miles. The land is so flat and the vistas so broad that Nevada would fit right in, literally lost in the vastness. Then below the 50^th parallel things change again, Patagonia morphing into Tierra del Fuego. The terrain becomes a little more broken up, but the main characteristic is the wind. Winds blow at gale force it seems like all the time, so there’s no need to give them names as if they’re special or something. The emptiness otherwise makes a blank slate for tourism; you don’t have to be bothered with the detritus of culture impinging on your package tour. I’m being facetious, trying to chisel the rough edges of my personality into multiple smooth faces and facets.

After checking in at Rio Gallegos and buying an onward ticket to Chile in advance, I go up to El Calafate for a couple days to watch a glacier make babies. The glacier is nice and the town not so bad, but the most fun was the skewered English on the bus up there. Thought Chinese had a monopoly on that? Listen to this: “Prohibited the gown to be extracted,” meaning “don’t take off your clothes on the bus” (Europeans, remember?). Anyway the wind’s not so bad there and if the sun’s out, then it’s downright nice. Rio Gallegos is another story. Perched along the coast the wind blows with a vengeance that stops buses in their tracks and makes me think twice before using the pedestrian overpasses. Otherwise it’s like a time warp, inspired from Fifties’ America it seems, certainly not typically Latino, though quite a few northern Quechua-types make it down for the work. What’s a little cold to them? South from there it only gets worse. That’s the bad thing about my obsession with geographical extremes and Arctic circles- the weather sucks bad. Why can’t I just put on a fake Hawaiian shirt and content myself with the tropics instead like normal people?

Finally I crossed the border. What difference can a line drawn on the map make? It surprises me sometimes. They’re not always as startling as the border at TJ, but that’s to be expected. Still the one here delineates more than the one up by Vancouver. There are no more ubiquitous meat grills or cups of mate’ with the silver straw extruding into almost everyone’s mouth. Chile seems more down-to-earth and less pretentious. There are small little restaurants and bars that seem like interesting cheap places. At least the Chilean border guards didn’t charge me the $131 visa ‘reciprocity’ charge that I’ve been dreading and scheming against for months. Even though it’s on and in all the books, apparently they only hit you up for it at Santiago International Airpost upon direct entry to the country. If you slime your way through the land border, then apparently you avoid the charge. That’s cool, almost making up for the humiliation of spacing out my entry card in Uruguay and having to buy my way past the immigration point.

The weather’s cool too, as you might expect this far south, cool and rainy, but I eventually find the hotel I’ve reserved and exchange some money at the same rate I passed on at the border, but what the hey… all’s well that ends well, right? So now I sit in my room in Punta Arenas with the wind howling outside my window, rain falling intermittently, and temperatures on their way down to freezing tonight if not already there yet. This is the price I pay for my policy of experimentation. If it’s any consolation, weather would be very similar many places back at the same latitude in Canada if not yet Stateside. That’s because it’s mid-spring here and mid-Autumn there, pretty similar. Scary movies play on every channel. Finally I realize why. It’s Halloween. Boo!

The next morning dawns clear and bright. An hour later it’s snowing; so much for my summer vacation. Life at the extremes can be unpredictable. It could affect your way of life I suppose. It gives new appreciation for the accomplishments of Magellan and his crew who traversed these straits some five hundred years ago while circumcising the globe. They had some problems here if I remember correctly. They found more booty in the Philippines I imagine until Ferdinand met his match and his maker. So the search is on to not only seek out Chile but to figure out my next move. There’s no road north except back through Argentina, so this could be tricky. If I can’t find a cheap flight north to Puerto Montt, then I continue (even further) south to Ushuaia where I can get a flight back to Buenos Aires for not too expensive, then go catch the film festival at Mar del Plata, leaving Chile with hardly a penetration. Unfortunately it’s Saturday, so the city’s pretty quiet. It’s a holiday, too, All Saints Day (Halloween, remember?) so everybody’s out at the cemeteries and flowers are selling briskly at impromptu markets. So maybe it doesn’t freeze hard enough to kill them? They say the prettiest flowers grow in the nastiest weather.

“I can’t believe this,” the travel agent says. “It’s like a miracle. I’ve never seen a price so low to Puerto Montt. Usually they’re more than twice this. It must be a special promotion.”

It’s a holiday of course, so she can’t write out the $50 ticket till Monday, but things are looking up. I was hoping for a $100 ticket, still far better than the expensive LAN flight or the even more expensive ferry through the fjords, which doubled from last year. Then the ATM spits out the equivalent of $300 without even coaxing, far better than the paltry $100-200 you’re limited to in Argentina, all with per-use charges. Is my luck changing? I could use it after the Uruguay exit snafu and the ATM snafu and others that not only threaten my street-cred as a master traveler, but my own sense of self-esteem. But mostly I’m hungry. I haven’t had a decent meal in a week, surviving on bread and cheese. It’s time to check out the supermarkets. Other tourists go to museums and spectacles. I go to supermarkets.

There’s lots of salsa picante on display, the local aji, so that’s good, none of that in Argentina. There’s even roast chicken, so I can get off the cheese diet. The breads and pastries look OK, some even called kuchen, so that’s exotic, given my heritage. There are even avocadoes, black Hass, at a good price. I’m getting really hungry now. Then my eye catches something that looks almost like a gaeng khieow wan (sweet green curry) from Thailand, full of things red and green swimming in it. They call it chap suey de pollo. If nothing else this adds a new paragraph to my chapter on culinary DNA that refers to the dissemination and evolution of the sweet-and-sour-like ‘cap cai’ of Indonesia to the meat-and-gravy-like ‘chop suey’ of America, all propagated by pragmatic Chinese eager to please and willing to adapt. Turns out it’s the best ‘chop suey’ I’ve ever had, cheap too. It even tastes green. Chile’s looking better all the time. It feels good to be back on the Pacific Rim. Could this be love? We’ll see; the night’s still young. But first I’ve got more important things to do, like vote. I’ll fax it in from here.

THE OTHER GOLDEN TRIANGLE

So the guy at the Paraguayan consulate in Corrientes says only the consulate in Clorinda, directly across the border from Asuncion, can give visas for a land entry, so it’ll have to wait another day, which is Friday, last day before a 3-day weekend. The only bus is at 8am and I’ve already booked a room anyway, so there is no choice really. The city bus I’m on runs over a motorcyclist caught on the inside track on a right turn, but other than that, there’s no real excitement, just the usual starchy food. Corrientes has nothing much to commend it so that’s when my laptop ol’ Betsy comes in handy for diversion. Only problem is there’s no wi-fi here and this is new Betsy, barely a month old, so I don’t have the encyclopedia nor much of the music yet. But I do have some. This is when that old 60’s Khmer stuff comes in handy. God only knows what they’re thinking in the next room.

Well the quickie two-hour jaunt up to Clorinda becomes a six-hour jaunt, so by the time we pull in, I’m stressing. One quick look around probably leads me to think I wouldn’t really care to overnight in Clorinda either. If that’s not bad enough, the skies are getting pretty uncooperative, the rain’s light hot licks quickly turning into determined drenching sheets. At least the Consulate is cooperative and soon I’m marching off with a proud new visa in my passport. Thorough that I am, I even looked at it before leaving. I should have looked harder. When I got to the Paraguayan side of the border, I wonder why they’re passing my passport around. “Typical Latino bullshit,” I figure. Well, yes, that’s right and wrong. Typical bullshit, but not on the immigration officer’s part. It seems the consul hand-wrote a typographical error, validating my visa today and expiring it yesterday. Huh? Do they want me to time travel?

Well sometimes a five-spot and a telephone call can back-fill the logic that was lacking in the first place, so soon I’m on my way again. If they’d made me go back to correct the visa, of course the logic may have worked out differently and I might have continued on back to Argentina instead. I DID stand on Paraguayan soil after all, so that counts for the country count. Everything counts. Of course if they hassle me on the way out or back in to Argentina, then I may wish I had re-booted. Welcome to Mexico. It would have been just as well, since Asuncion seems to have little of import. Mall culture hasn’t really caught on here yet, about like Phnom Penh. Supermarkets take your small items for purchase and lock them in a bag which can only be opened by the cashier. It kept me from even considering stealing a roll of toothpaste. Wages are higher than Asia, though, almost $350 per month minimum, according to the sign posted on the wall. That’s higher than the AVERAGE wage in Thailand, far above the minimum. So why do they have labor protests here and Thailand has none?

The big thrill is looking at all the chickens roasting on spits, that and people tossing coins down slot machines, hmmm…. Beef takes a back seat here I guess. Maybe P.J. O’Rourke was right the first time. Maybe there is nothing here. Some fine wining and dining always helps, I guess. We’ll see. There’s still time, so on to Ciudad del Este and the falls of Iguazu’. It’s a bit hot already here anyway, barely getting down to 20c at night if at all (that’s high for a low, Homes; trust me). Where’s my spare suitcase full of logic anyway, the old-fashioned Aristotelian kind? The Boolean stuff won’t work here. This world ain’t digital. The coffee sucks real bad, too. Maybe that’s why everybody drinks yerba mate, through a silver filtered straw. It’s not bad, seemingly with some laxative properties. You need it after all that starch and grease… there, I’m relaxed now.

Of course Ciudad del Este is no great shakes either, weird in kind of an Asian border-town sort of way, Chinese-inspired modern construction backing right up to the line that separates nations. But it’s Sunday, so no coolies trudging across the bridge with bundles strapped to backs. So I catch a cab in Paraguay to go through Brazil and on to Argentina. How many places can you do that? For those of you counting countries and too cheap to spring for a Brazil visa, this is a cheap way to cut corners, literally, without the formalities. In retrospect $50 for Paraguay visa and tip seems like a waste, but at least the hotel was cheap, so balanced out. Of course the hotel lady short-changed me while warning me about street thieves, oldest trick in the book. Last time that happened a Peruvian street artist replaced my good note with his counterfeit one while showing me how it’s done. Ouch!

Paraguay’s cheap like Peru and Bolivia, which means poor, and really Argentina’s not so dear outside B.A. Is there anything there worth hanging for? There is. Puerto Iguazu’ is a surrealistic little dream town where the three countries meet, maybe the other Golden Triangle in the Bizarro world of opposites. Something like a cross between Ensenada and Panajachel, it’s calm and beautiful and cheap by B.A. standards, but hardly overrun by backpackers or anything like that, though there are a few scraggly stragglers. The falls of course are to die for, certainly one of the ten great falls in the world if not all natural wonders included. The view of the cataracts themselves from garganta del Diablo is unbelievable, frothy and turbulent, aptly named for those suicidal among us, the walking wounded, future zombies, for whom the mid-air roulette wheels where water sublimes to vapor must represent some kind of witches’ brew of Kabbalistic digital speed dialing 01110100101010100101010 your bar code all or nothing millions of times per second to see whether you live or die, whether today or tomorrow. The Golden Gate is for wimps and wannabes.

For the rest of us it’s a view of God at work as light passes through a prism and light breaks up into an infinite number of possibilities, including life liberty and the pursuit of happy meals. This is the kind of place where you could meet your little brown-skinned third-world soul mate doppelganger, settle down, and pump out some little pot-bellied poopers till your pumper poops out… zzzzz… Huh? Did I say something? How long have I been dreaming? I gotta’ get outta’ here. Somewhere back there I found out there’s a jazz festival in B.A. in a few days. I’ve got work to do. Now where’s my suitcase full of spare logic?

BACK HOME IN THE LAND OF GOOD AIR

“Clear skies with unlimited visibility,” the pilot said as the plane descends for a landing in Buenos Aires. When’s the last time you heard that? I don’t think I have for, uh, most of my life, maybe since I was a child, and I’m from a rural state. So right away you know you’re in for something a little bit different here. I guess that’s how it got its name. Okay, so what B.A. gains is Santiago’s loss on the other side of that Cordillera in the smog department, so self-congratulatory pats on the back are probably not in order. But still the analogy holds. South America is the one continent that has yet to be ‘done’, or overdone that is, of those that are ‘doable’ of course, so that rules out Antarctica, and Australia is a single country no bigger than mainland US, so that doesn’t really count. But South America is big and beautiful and rich in resources and culture(s), and yet is still relatively under-populated, an empty continent, thick only around the edges, a half-baked pizza, the southern European counterpart to Uncle Sam’s predominantly northern European refugees. And so Buenos Aires patterns itself, an island of European civility in a sea of seeds and cattle, the biggest city in one of the world’s biggest countries, one of the few that could make some reasonable claim to self-sufficiency.

Of course that unlimited visibility is not without some testing by Bonairenses. The tradition of smoking is very much alive and well, thank you, with a passion and a vengeance. People don’t just smoke, they SMOKE, complete with nasty butts flicked to the floor as is the custom in the mother country of old, a world with many bars, and I don’t mean cell-phone signals. Oh sure, they put up signs and cordon off sections, but you know how that works. They put up ‘wi-fi’ signs everywhere too, in cafes especially, even when there is none. It’s just a fashion statement. All the US cafes have them, so it must be cool. The plate glass for cafes comes that way, pre-engraved, Visa and MC too, smokers’ section also. That’s a cruel hoax for us wi-fi users, all plugged in and no place to go. Where’s the consumer protection?

The food sucks; read: ‘too similar to American food’, at least pre-Chinese America. The Chinese don’t seem to have gotten here yet, not in any significant numbers at least, and the ones that have seem to run the inner-city ‘supermarkets’. If there were more, there’d be more Chinese restaurants, long established farther north and west as chifas, and long incorporated into the Peruvian national cuisine, not to mention the business culture, as common members of the Pacific Rim. That’s too bad. Looking for a Chinese restaurant is usually the first thing I do when I enter a new country or city. As it is the food, particularly fast food, is pretty boring, basically variations on starch starch and starch, with a little meat thrown in for flavor in the ubiquitous pizza, hamburgers, and ‘panchos’ (hot dogs) that line the walls of perception. At least they still have empanadas, so I can remember what continent I’m in. The more expensive meals seem to merely shift the meat: starch proportions upward. They have tango and tenors, too, singing and dancing for tips in the pedestrian malls, along with the obligatory hippies peddling their hippie accoutrements. There but for the grace of God…

But it’s a little cold this early in the October springtime, barely hitting 20C if at all (that’s pretty low for a high, Homie; trust me). People crowd the north-facing slopes (it’s the southern hemisphere, remember) at midday like turtles on logs to soak up what they can get for free. At least space heaters are not an unknown item in Argentina, so that helps. Still I’ve got four countries to see in six weeks, so maybe I should head on up to Paraguay where temps will soon be scorching souls and soles. By the time I get back B.A. will only be warmer as summer approaches (they give the running countdown on TV). Paraguay is the trip’s main wild card also, a place where the unexpected might happen. On paper of course it’s the nowhere country, nowhere nothing never no how, the only landlocked country in South America besides Bolivia. But Bolivia of course has some spectacular Andean culture. Does Paraguay have something comparable? They DO have the co-official state language of Guarani’, the only Amerindian language to have crossed over to its conquerors and survived to the present day. I better check it out. Best to play wild cards early in case they take wings. A new law is being proposed in Argentina also which would require visas for Americans. I should make tracks before that goes into effect.

So I do. Fortunately the B.A. bus station is conveniently located, so connections are easy. I like cities with central stations. I’ll just catch an overnighter north to Corrientes and get my visa there, continuing on to Asuncion or Iguazu, whichever works best, then circle back through the other. You’d think in this day and age, visa requirements would be decreasing, but that’s not necessarily so. Part of the problem is ‘reciprocity’, in which countries want to require visas of those countries which require visas of its own citizens, even to the point of charging exactly the same fee. This usually hits US travelers hardest, and then Canada and UK, as these are the strictest countries for entry and the most popular for illegal immigration, not coincidentally. I understand their point but they may be shooting themselves in the foot, as some travelers DO make decisions based on such considerations, like yours truly.

And then of course some of the consequences can be a bit bizarre. While my generally well-funded ex-pat buddies in Thailand sweat and scramble to deal with new toughened immigration requirements there, a little known fact is that citizens from several South American countries can get far more favorable terms of entry there than they, all for free, including those of Peru, one of this continent’s poorest countries. The irony of course is that there are few or no South American tourists there, nor vice versa any Thais here. Thais love to travel, and visas are a hassle, but still South America is hardly at the top of their list, not pretentious enough. In the case of Paraguay though, US citizens are almost alone in the visa requirement, but if I want to visit every country in the world, then that’s the deal. If it’s getting worse before it’s getting better, then I’ll have to hurry.

I get a front row seat on a double-decker bus and head off into the Argentine night. Any thought of missing the scenery is probably misplaced. Argentina rolls under the bus like Nebraska and her mother-in-law, just going on and on about nothing, vast plains dotted with towns and cows. It’s big and it’s beautiful, but in that subtle American way, vast and brooding. It resembles both the US and Mexico in fact, almost equally, Spanish in culture, American in agriculture. Occasionally you can even see a real live gaucho, like a European dandy compared to his US counterpart, but they look cool. I vaguely remember a river passing under us, so that must have been the Parana’ but I couldn’t swear to it. Bumps in the road become minor collisions in my semi-lucid dreams, but at least the Burmese didn’t attack. That’s only happens when I take sleeping pills.