Last written pictures of a four-night five-day trip, without maps, with awakened instinct, with open windows, without structures, within a spell, without a clue, careless and joyful, willing and able.
Wire-haired street dog and me, he with a face that says ‘take me with you patron’, me with a smile that says ‘I’ll take you out of this pueblo‘.
Two minutes later, dog and human disputing the idea.
Me giving a mean-eyed look, to a dumb New Yorker (I love NY), who’s throwing a coin into the Iguazú Fall, as if he was in La Fontana di Trevi (if each of the one million visitors to the falls acted as stupid as this non-velvet underground fellow, we would be able to buy lots of books for poor schools or fill the pickets of a non-velvet underground deputy, by putting a net in the velvet underwater and bringing it up once a year).
Waiter reminding me after dinner that breakfast at the ‘anrique’ hotel in the lost city of El Dorado, Misiones, was from 7am to 10am. Writer of this column arriving for breakfast at twenty past ten.
Orange plastic boat for 20 passengers, lucky and opportunistic columnist, on it, alone, just rower and me, 30 minutes of peace, clear water, dark bottom, monkeys, turtles and alligators, the Disney Falls people disappeared, vanished, the sound of ripples hitting softly ‘my’ boat, peace on water!
Erratic chat with the chef at Puerto Valle, midnight, everyone else asleep, convincing him about how snakes are always aware somehow of their presence to humans before they are stood on.
Asking the editor of this paper by phone to postpone my deadline for this column.
I must say that the two most visited destinations in this country, Iguazú and Calafate, are by far not of my fancy. What is the problem? PEOPLE! Both of them have catwalks, to see the beauty, which actually is super beautiful, but, and I am not a social-phobic person, people here really spoil the party, thousands, hundreds, millions a year, is like watching ‘Gone with the Wind’ surrounded by monkeys, and you being one of them.
Yes, walking on ice or getting fresh in a speedboat under the fall is a unique sensation, but man, this is not experience, this is not communion. And then we have to add the people behind the scenes, the absolutely dramatic people who run hotels, prices for popular non-stylish excursions, ridiculous costs for transfers, for beds, for food, for matches.
Yes, you should know both of them, but try not to go during Argentina’s holidays, try to go in low season, there’s always a way to act differently, but honestly, that water and that ice look like a lion in its cage in a central zoo of any capital city in the world… they look dead, spoilt, sad.
Am I exaggerating? YES. But honestly it is very like this. Go, yes, but once, and then go to the surrounding areas: Moconá, Andrecity, El Soberbio, experience Ciudad del Este (Paraguay) and Foz do Iguazu (Brazil) – you have the chance to see three Latin American cultures in one or two days; or when south in the glaciers, go to El Chalten, or across to the Atlantic or the Pacific – you are close to both.
It is possible that age makes man want to be further away from its relative human kind fellows, it’s possible that selfish characters such as mine want all the cake for themselves, but honestly for the third time in this column, there are times when I wish I was living in another past century, and maybe end up being eaten by cannibals, but after a three-hour non-stop cross-legged yoga experience facing the falls on my own, without Blackberrys, i-phones or aspirin or planes or jetlag… and absolutely (and in this part I have goosebumps) without people!
…and my favourite song writer once said in a song ‘power to the people‘.
Next time I shall write about Malbecdoza.