Returning after wandering by bus from Santiago through Argentina, Praguay, and Brazil for three and a half weeks, here are the beginnings of some thoughts transcribed from the journal I always keep on trips. There are many gaps, as I was too lazy to translate the days and thoughts I wrote in Spanish, and is as yet incomplete. But at least it's a sketch of the beginning which provides me a framework in which to post photos.
First a couple lessons garnered from the trip:
Carry sweatshirt on buses: it’s cold, especially when you have to wait through customs atop the Andes at 01.00.
Cities are most enchanting between 6 and 7 in the morning. Without people. This is Mendoza:
If you’ve spent considerable time in Chile, crossing the border from Chile to Argentina will make you feel short, even if you are the same height as the average Argentine. You note the difference. You will also feel flabby, as muscles that are non-existent or inverted in Chile are prevalent and perky in Mendoza.
Travel with toilet paper.
Schlepping a backpacker’s pack over my shoulders actually made me feel more comfortable as a tourist because my status is obvious: I have no chance of blending in as a local so my touristy behavior blends in with my roll on the streets. But I suppose I feel more comfortable being a backpacker than a tourist anyway. You’re not just sightseeing, but suffering as well, which allows you to commiserate.
According to Chris from Cincinnati, his neighborhood in Cincinnati is more dangerous than the “most dangerous” one in Buenos Aires where he now lives. He feels less threatened there in La Boca.
Arts audiences and performances seem to be of another level in Mendoza than in Santiago. Connoisseurs.
Don’t try to travel with 1 peso because when you miss your bus you can’t pay the fine to change your ticket to the night’s last bus which is leaving in 45 seconds.
Public buses are much older in Mendoza than in Santiago. Actually, Santiago seems to have incredibly clean modern transportation. It does, and it’s relatively cheap.
Don’t use 5-year-old Lonely Planets because they haven’t been updated in 5 years. They will tell you that wine tours are free, so when you hop on the wobbly bike to visit the vineyards you will spend a HOT dusty and especially DRY day. Drier when you are too cheap to pay for more than one of the 11 tours.
If you open a vineyard or chocolatería, you will inevitably have a fairy tale beautiful daughter who will trick unsuspecting bikers into paying for a tour.
Don’t write your diary in Spanish because it makes doing this more laborious and you will be unwilling to write many things.
You cannot gain native fluency in Arabic.
The time of day affects the physical studliness of a city’s people. Not a person, but studly:
When you have to do it, taking a “bath” with hand sanitizer is better than nothing. At least you can spend the night next to someone on a bus without constantly offending him.
Mendoza and Cordoba have many fewer MP3s and earphones dangling from the people’s ears. It seems about half in Santiago use them on buses, but I have only seen two in Argentina. Gears at a vineyard in Mendoza:
Cordoba, Argentina, maybe my favorite of the cities, maybe because I only stayed 10 hours:
"Disappeared" people:
The coolest university atmosphere I have felt, where everyone congregates on the continuous ascending staircase, tying geometric holed walls and classrooms together:
A very tempting offer:
When it really is that cold on the bus in the middle of the night and you can’t sleep, slowly slip the unused jacket from another the sleeping arm of your neighbor and use it. Don’t worry, he’ll understand in the morning. It’ll save a toe or two.
Sometimes there really aren’t bus tickets to where you want to go.
"3 frontiers": to the left, Paraguay. right, Brazil. Bottom, Argentina.
Sleeping in the grass at the bizarre swimming pool sanctuary in Colón, a river town with little activity and a dead snake in the road: I crash, exhausted after another overnight bus. It’s 9 in the morning and there is no one else here but the several people trimming hedges. It’s very green, though nothing else in this town is. I plop my backpack down next to me. As I lie halfway to sleep, ants crawl on me like phantom sweat droplets that periodically nip at you. Flies saddle my back like the picker birds that perch on cows’ heads in the pasture across the fence. The occasional spider races up my stomach and pauses twittling its pincers, deciding whether to follow northward the sunburn trail left by my lazy sun-blocking fingers.
Bizarre swimming pool complex:
The only friend I made in Colón:
On the bus between Colón and Concordia Argentina: I fall asleep on the bus as we roll through a marshy, sandy, oddly dry littoral region pursuing the Paraná river. Waking up, the countryside is surreal, blurred by the windows’ smudges and my grogginess. Trees sprout sporadically like super-inflated mutant mushrooms on an extensive green checkered plain. I awake again in red, red earth, dusty roads leading darker skinned people with rust stained feet and shoes. A teenage girl on the bus next to me follows my pen with her eyes trying to read what I’m writing. It’s very obvious. So I write that.
18 december.
I arrive at the bus station of Concordia, Argentina about 8PM and immediately interrogate the faces behind the glass of ticket offices for the next ticket to Puerto Iguazú. There are none for a week, but I can buy the last ticket to Posadas, which leaves at 4 in the morning, if I like, and I do, so I do. I wander out into the night around the terminal with my hulk on my back and enter a restaurant. 3 hours later, I leave still conversing with a seemingly intelligent and truthfully pessimistic middle-aged Uruguayan man. Everything is corrupt. It doesn’t matter if they’re left, right, independent, apathetic, communist – they’re all corrupt. They don’t apply the money they siphon from their people. He likes the US and wishes they would invest in more SA countries than Chile. Everything is shit, even though the Uruguayans are a cultivated people. Maybe that’s why? Our waiter, in his twenties, said the same. Don’t walk three blocks that way or you’ll get held. An expression of frustration. He says he’s been planning to expatriate, to move to Italy, the memory-coated land of his heritage from which his grandfather emigrated, for some unimaginable reason. How many people maintain that desire until it becomes but a hollow bitter desire for what’s not.
At 5am, after 5 rigid hours of spine against metal bus terminal seat, the bus arrives and we’re off. I remember passing through various interesting terrains during this stretch. More of the pampas with mushroom palm trees whose leaves droop like willows to form dandelion spheres. Then kilometer after kilometer of groves of pines, planted for lumber in a colonial-city-like grid. The earth becomes iron oxide red, not orange like New Mexico, but deep rich clay red. A town is all red and its paved road, which we whiz over, bleeds into the dirt roads that branch from it. The green of thickening trees and brush is intense against the fish gill red earth. A TV screen onboard shows a terrible movie – almost no words, just what communicates facilely across languages by means of cross-cultural testosterone: killing and explosions and fast cars. We halt for an hour on the freeway and everyone unloads to watch from under a shade tree the accident on the pavement ahead. I step over a suspiciously smelly stream from the bathroom that puddles by the door. We arrive at 4.30 and it’s hot. When I awake on the next bus, we are in full jungle.
Red earth land:
20 december
At Iguazú Falls. I end up going alone because instead of insuring that I catch the bus on which my new French friends are going, I buy a lunch for later. We run into each other at the end of the day and catch the bus back together. I do a short hike, which it appears more people do not do, for I am rewarded by swimming solo beneath the 30-meter cascade at the end:
At the falls themselves, the water tints yellow as it tosses itself over the cliff, a bit like sewage. In the morning, the majority of the tourists are Brazilians and Argentines, French and German, and there is nearly no English to be heard. But after about 2 in the afternoon they arrive in droves, with their new one-piece trekking suits and squeaky rubber trekking boots and elephant trunk telephoto Nikons (in place of the mate thermoses that the Argentines grip like oxygen masks on a sinking ship), eagerly snapping their lenses at the coati (ubiquitous raccoon-like creatures) and making pseudo-scientific knowledgeable assertions about their phylogeny. The Brazilians are loud and pose for glamour shots hoping the others will turn their lenses on them as well. The waterfalls are a general excuse for contraposto. 
After tiring of several hours of cascading beauty, I descend the stairs to water lever where I pause to ask a guy selling amusement park priced bottles of water if the falls still appear beautiful to him. We end up drinking teredé (cold maté tea – as I discover, he has no shortage of “free” water) together for the next couple hours, and I see the falls from another perspective. He really likes Americans too and is supposed to come to the hostel on his moto tonight, but never arrives. Spend the evening chatting with my French friends, two really pretty girls from Israel, and an entertaining English teacher from Cyprus.
24 december
La pieza en la casa en Capietá, Paraguay de la antigua familia anfitrión de Felix (Felix):
My toes slip over the edge of my sandal and into the creeping puddle on the bus floor. The back sweat from the man in white shorts soaks through my t-shirt from the fabric seat he previously occupied. At least I now have a seat. I was sold a ticket “in a seat” but stood in the isle for the first three hours. Everyone time I asked it was, “You’ll have a seat right away” and then busily back to some other pressing task. I wouldn’t have fealt good taking a seat anyway with so many young women with babies and creviced faced elders on their feet. Someone shared their beer with the bus floor and it mingles with sweat fumes. Outside, cows graze the radius of the rope tethering them to trees. A pig, a house, chickens. Termite-like iron red mounds pimple the fields as high as fence posts. The bus halts, no wait, o yes it does, and ambulant venders rush to the windows and sing to the passengers, “Coke, agua, chipa” as coordinated and rehearsed as the cicadas coaxing the night as the sun falls, as it does so rapidly here. The young powerful-lipped guaraní boy on his father’s lap behind me pulls my curls gently with his slight fingers each time he coughs. The wind swoops in and billows the bus’ stained red curtains. It’s not really that different. But it can be if you tell it that way.
“It’s a camera”, I respond to the boy’s question as we stand in the sweaty cement room waiting for my bus to come. He is twelve, in blue school boy slacks that drape over his chicken legs like spaghetti over chop sticks, supporting a macaroni torso and broom stick arms. He works with his father selling bus tickets in one of the many unlit streetside stall-like rooms in Commercial San Alfonso (that’s a guess now). Felix argues with the boy’s father who, we realize after an hour of waiting, has sold us a pass on a bus that doesn’t exist. We forgot to mention we are friends of Tommy Alonso, who he knows. He evades us, saying the next one will come in two hours. But I’ve got to cross the country and catch a bus in Brazil pronto. He gives me a seat on the next crappy bus, which leaves me standing for 3 hours. From inside the concrete box room, you see the street and racing venders through the silhouette of a 7 by 3 foot door with wooden shutters dangling like loose teeth. Plumes of black barrel by, spewing from the sooty anal cavities of buses many times repaired, but not updated. The bright yellows and reds and blues of children’s clothes flap patriotically from lines bookended with improvised knots. There are no price tags. That’s not how you sell.
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