salta

I have always been fond of Argentina so it was quite exciting to get there. Our tour guide managed to get my passport stamped but somehow forgot two others. Or was it the customs bloke? They were UK passports afterall! That created a bit of a headache for them.

So onto Salta. For two nights. Camping again in a site that was obviously built and possibly very popular in the 1920´s. Argentina´s hay day. Art Decor and all. A huge, unfilled swimming pool. Salta was billed as the activity stop of our tour. There isn´t much else to the place. There I did a little paragliding. Rather good but not as scary as I wanted. Some canopy. This involves attaching yourself to a metal wire that is stretched at a slight gradient over a ravine and sliding across. There were eight of these and some as long at 500m. Quite scary. Typically I got stuck some 150m from the end of that one and had to pull myself the remainder of the way while trying not to look down. If I fell, I would certainly die! Then I did some grade III rafting which was exciting at times but Grade I and Grade II must be really crap. I was quite proud of myself not to have fallen out until our damn instructor decided to capsize the raft for a laugh. Oh, and there were two random dogs running along the bank of the river throughout. In fairness, these activities were thoroughly enjoyable and cost a fraction of what they would have cost in Europe.

I enjoyed Salta but if truth be none, I am not enjoying so much my traveling company. It seems I am the only one up for a beer. Everyone seems to go to bed so early. I find some of them really boring too. I couldn´t even be bothered with the mind numbing small talk. Maybe it´s the camping, maybe it´s the getting up at 6am most mornings, maybe it´s the duties (cooking, cleaning, washing, putting up tents, packing them away). Or the gruesome schedule, or our crap tour guide, or the long bus journeys. It´s meant to be a holiday. But I will stick it out. Afterall it cost me enough and of course, there is Machu Picchu to look forward to.

Up at 5am for the next leg of the journey.

encarnacion

It was a long, dusty trip to Encarnacion. The purpose of going here was to visit Trinidad. Not the Island but the site of the old Jesuit ruins. It was back to camping and our site was in the middle of nowhere and guess what run by a suspiciously German Family. Aryans running around the place. Blonde hair being somewhat out of place in these parts. And they had an impressive collection of Mercedes trucks! Moreover, it was an extremely well run place. The clues are there!

That night there was another huge storm and I was fully expecting to be swept along with my tent in the torrent. But the drainage system held. That morning I awoke to the familar sound of a South American morning. We referred to it as ´Noahs Arc´. This being the phenoma perculiar to my experience of South America - a racket caused by a multitude of animals cooing, barking, grunting, hooting, honking, gobbling. It really is a proper racket. It seems like a whole battlion of animals had converged and let rip.

Another thing about South America is the random dog. There is ALWAYS a dog roaming about. If on your arrival at a given place, there is no dog to be seen, one is certain to appear if you stay at that given place for a little while. I wish to see whether this other animal phenoma holds true in the other South American countries I visit. I will report back on my findings as events unfold.

So the Jesuit ruins. Set atop a lush green hill, Trinidad is Paraguay's best-preserved Jesuit reducción, a settlement in which native populations were concentrated for religious instruction. It has been a Unesco world heritage site since 1993. It was quite a feat by the Jesuits. In return for offering the native people protection from Spanish slave grabbers, they educated them, converted them to Catholicism as you would expect (the natives still secretly held on to their beliefs) and thought them a trade. They buildings are very impressive and organised according to a master blue copy. In their day these were centres of considerable wealth and industry. Each settlement had thousands of residents and all administered by one Jesuit priest and his assistant. But the Spanards grew tired of their power and wealth. So they kicked the Jesuits out of the continent and the natives returned to their nomadic lifestyle. These buildings represent their only legacy.

On trying to leave the campsite, our truck got stuck in the mud. For some reason we were instructed to push while our driver hit the gas. How we were expected to make any impression on a 25 tonne truck is anyone guess. So we called up help from our German hosts. I was hoping he´d turn up in a Tiger Tank but instead he came along in his military-like Mercedes truck and with seamless efficency, pulled us free.

Next stop Argentina. Give ém back the Malvinas, I say.