Finally, a return to wordy form. Enjoy this immense update and imagine my sister wincing at my egregious offenses against concision.
This last weekend, I went to Iguazú Falls, set piece of the new Indiana Jones movie, Xth natural wonder of the world, and damn far away.
Yes, Iguazú is hardly a short trip on the Subte away. Iguazú National Park is located in a little itty-bitty piece of Argentina that pokes in Brazil, near as I can tell, to have Iguazú Falls be in Argentina. No, no, this trip helped me realize the gigantic nature of the country I live in. It also let me get out of Buenos Aires. Good.
I rode some 16 hours on gigantic, double-decker bus, referred to, interestingly, as a micro. I could be wrong about that, Argentine Spanish appears to have a robust vocabulary for referring to buses with at least three distinct names for buses that have distinct functions. Whatever.
This trip was punctuated with, first, a trip to Jesuit ruins in the region of Posados, capital city of aforementioned itty-bitty district of Misiones a land famous for its red earth and cross-pollination with the Guaraní culture and language.
They're rather large and hard to photograph, so work with me:
They date from the 1700's which is pretty old and pretty new by ruin standards here. It's a ruin, to be sure and several hundreds years old, yes, but it's not some pre-Columbian monolith that stands to frustrate Euro-centric notions of history.
Also, its a ruin because of a war, if I understood the guide correctly. So it's appearance of great age is slightly unmerited.
But, hopefully you can see the effect of this region's red earth, which I think is slightly responsible for the red coloration of these buildings.
Observe. Red. See?
My experience with the Jesuits comes primarily from the movie the Mission which I was required to watch in my high school spanish class. I used this to fill in the gaps that my Spanish left between me and our tour guide.
Jesuits came, worked with indigenous, organized them into self-sustaining communities whereas the damn Portugese just enslaved everybody. Eventually the royalty got tired of the competition and expelled them. Portuguese wanted more slaves and hence, ruins.
Not all of its red ruins, blue sky, desert-looking stuff. There are some extremely satisfying jungley bits. Don't get excited, though, its not actually jungle. Still sub-tropical. I'll get there someday.
We returned to the bus and headed onward. The next break we had was for lunch at an estancia, or ranch/farm. Here is a bad photo. This estancia was a huge 1000 acre venture that accept tourists for lunch occasionally. We hung out in a little compound type thing that was surrounded by good view and tea growing fields. There we ate choripan, essentially an Argentine bratwurst and drank fresh-squeezed orange juice and yerba mate.
For those not in the know, mate is the national drink of argentina and the Rio Plata. Throughout Argentina and especially Uruguay, the people run around with little fist-sized brown gourds with silver straws dug into a sodden mass of leaves and a boring and modern looking plastic thermos containing just below boiling water (don't boil the leaves!) to refill every once in a while. It contains no caffeine, the say, but instead contains matein, a stimulant and hunger-suppressant that has no side-effects.
Ah, but how does it taste? Awful, I'm sad to report. It comes from a tree and that's pretty much what I thought it tasted like. I'm sure coffee-drinkers can take the stuff, but I don't willingly subject myself to such bitterness willingly.
Also at the estancia, a trip to the secador, where they dry the harvested mate leaves.
We departed the merry enclave of mate and orange juice sipping and walked along the famous red dirt of the region. Along the way, we saw some delightfully Latin-American looking brightly -colored corrugated-steel tool sheds. There was even a dog sleeping outside one. Then a door opened and a little kid stepped out and I realized that these were actually the houses of workers who lived on the estancia. Whoops. South America. Poverty. Bad land-owner/worker relations. Got it.
Here's the secador. As you can see, it also employs a lot of corrugated steel in its construction. It's hot there.
The green stuff that guy is tramping over, that's the mate. The workers pitch it into this ditch with a conveying device at the bottom. It rides down the line and gets deposited in this spinning barrel that hurls it around and around a big fire in order to dry it.
Then it gets conveyed into another drying device and stored in burlap sacks until you want to drink it. It would tell you that its all good and sterile cause you boil it but, you can't boil the leaves! I guess those boots just add to the flavor.
Finally, after the estancia, we traveled and arrived at Puerto Iguazu, a sleepy little city outside of the park. This probably merited a longer visit on its own. Especially nice to wander around as the sun descends from its peak and all the tourists are at the park, but its still sweltering and dusty in that special south of the border way that every American imagines to exist.
Sadly, we were usually at the park during the peak season and at peak season, it looks like this:
Mucha gente.
The little orange thing in the distance is my guide's umbrella. We followed vaguely Disneyland style queues such as these to the mightiest fucking waterfall in all existence. La Garganta del Diablo. Or as I like to call it, my friends, the Throat of the Fucking Devil.
Lonely Planet quaintly describes it as "the experience of sailing off the edge of a flat earth imagined by early European sailors." 1,000,000 liters of water fall every second and something like half of that shoots back upward in the form of mist. Only a few meters below where they begin, the falls dance in and out of visibility as the mist waxes and wanes. The wind shifts and the cloud of vapor engulfs the puny man-things that wobble about on top of the catwalk, who yell for a reason I doubt they could explain.
My camera couldn't compete with this force of nature. I lacked the presence of mind and the dry bits of clothing to wipe off the lens. May my blurry and droplet-covered photos serve to enhance the indescribabilty of the falls:
Thankfully, we got to see the falls from the bottom and rim of the valley, so I was able to take some good pictures. I'll post those and call it day.
Oh, I almost forgot. I got up at 6:00 AM the next day to see the sunrise. Worth it:
This last weekend, I went to Iguazú Falls, set piece of the new Indiana Jones movie, Xth natural wonder of the world, and damn far away.
Yes, Iguazú is hardly a short trip on the Subte away. Iguazú National Park is located in a little itty-bitty piece of Argentina that pokes in Brazil, near as I can tell, to have Iguazú Falls be in Argentina. No, no, this trip helped me realize the gigantic nature of the country I live in. It also let me get out of Buenos Aires. Good.
I rode some 16 hours on gigantic, double-decker bus, referred to, interestingly, as a micro. I could be wrong about that, Argentine Spanish appears to have a robust vocabulary for referring to buses with at least three distinct names for buses that have distinct functions. Whatever.
This trip was punctuated with, first, a trip to Jesuit ruins in the region of Posados, capital city of aforementioned itty-bitty district of Misiones a land famous for its red earth and cross-pollination with the Guaraní culture and language.
They're rather large and hard to photograph, so work with me:
They date from the 1700's which is pretty old and pretty new by ruin standards here. It's a ruin, to be sure and several hundreds years old, yes, but it's not some pre-Columbian monolith that stands to frustrate Euro-centric notions of history.
Also, its a ruin because of a war, if I understood the guide correctly. So it's appearance of great age is slightly unmerited.
But, hopefully you can see the effect of this region's red earth, which I think is slightly responsible for the red coloration of these buildings.
Observe. Red. See?
My experience with the Jesuits comes primarily from the movie the Mission which I was required to watch in my high school spanish class. I used this to fill in the gaps that my Spanish left between me and our tour guide.
Jesuits came, worked with indigenous, organized them into self-sustaining communities whereas the damn Portugese just enslaved everybody. Eventually the royalty got tired of the competition and expelled them. Portuguese wanted more slaves and hence, ruins.
Not all of its red ruins, blue sky, desert-looking stuff. There are some extremely satisfying jungley bits. Don't get excited, though, its not actually jungle. Still sub-tropical. I'll get there someday.
We returned to the bus and headed onward. The next break we had was for lunch at an estancia, or ranch/farm. Here is a bad photo. This estancia was a huge 1000 acre venture that accept tourists for lunch occasionally. We hung out in a little compound type thing that was surrounded by good view and tea growing fields. There we ate choripan, essentially an Argentine bratwurst and drank fresh-squeezed orange juice and yerba mate.For those not in the know, mate is the national drink of argentina and the Rio Plata. Throughout Argentina and especially Uruguay, the people run around with little fist-sized brown gourds with silver straws dug into a sodden mass of leaves and a boring and modern looking plastic thermos containing just below boiling water (don't boil the leaves!) to refill every once in a while. It contains no caffeine, the say, but instead contains matein, a stimulant and hunger-suppressant that has no side-effects.
Ah, but how does it taste? Awful, I'm sad to report. It comes from a tree and that's pretty much what I thought it tasted like. I'm sure coffee-drinkers can take the stuff, but I don't willingly subject myself to such bitterness willingly.
Also at the estancia, a trip to the secador, where they dry the harvested mate leaves.
We departed the merry enclave of mate and orange juice sipping and walked along the famous red dirt of the region. Along the way, we saw some delightfully Latin-American looking brightly -colored corrugated-steel tool sheds. There was even a dog sleeping outside one. Then a door opened and a little kid stepped out and I realized that these were actually the houses of workers who lived on the estancia. Whoops. South America. Poverty. Bad land-owner/worker relations. Got it.
Here's the secador. As you can see, it also employs a lot of corrugated steel in its construction. It's hot there.
The green stuff that guy is tramping over, that's the mate. The workers pitch it into this ditch with a conveying device at the bottom. It rides down the line and gets deposited in this spinning barrel that hurls it around and around a big fire in order to dry it.
Then it gets conveyed into another drying device and stored in burlap sacks until you want to drink it. It would tell you that its all good and sterile cause you boil it but, you can't boil the leaves! I guess those boots just add to the flavor.
Finally, after the estancia, we traveled and arrived at Puerto Iguazu, a sleepy little city outside of the park. This probably merited a longer visit on its own. Especially nice to wander around as the sun descends from its peak and all the tourists are at the park, but its still sweltering and dusty in that special south of the border way that every American imagines to exist.
Sadly, we were usually at the park during the peak season and at peak season, it looks like this:
Mucha gente.
The little orange thing in the distance is my guide's umbrella. We followed vaguely Disneyland style queues such as these to the mightiest fucking waterfall in all existence. La Garganta del Diablo. Or as I like to call it, my friends, the Throat of the Fucking Devil.
Lonely Planet quaintly describes it as "the experience of sailing off the edge of a flat earth imagined by early European sailors." 1,000,000 liters of water fall every second and something like half of that shoots back upward in the form of mist. Only a few meters below where they begin, the falls dance in and out of visibility as the mist waxes and wanes. The wind shifts and the cloud of vapor engulfs the puny man-things that wobble about on top of the catwalk, who yell for a reason I doubt they could explain.
My camera couldn't compete with this force of nature. I lacked the presence of mind and the dry bits of clothing to wipe off the lens. May my blurry and droplet-covered photos serve to enhance the indescribabilty of the falls:
Thankfully, we got to see the falls from the bottom and rim of the valley, so I was able to take some good pictures. I'll post those and call it day.
Oh, I almost forgot. I got up at 6:00 AM the next day to see the sunrise. Worth it:
Comments
your boyfriends sister is hott.
Nathan, more pictures of stuff.
Visit a sex shop while you are down there, just for me. please.
k thnx.