I curse you, Mr.Manilow (with respect, of course)

Whilst strolling the black and white paving that runs the sweep of Copacabana beach I was pondering two things on and off. The first was whether Clinton's sobs would hurt or improve her chances of becoming the first ever female president of the 'most powerful nation in the world'. Or would it make no difference at all. I read an editorial that suggested that 'tears only work in relationships, not on campaign trails' and I am inclined to disagree, on the basis that I have avoided at least two speeding fines with a few forced tears and a few superbly executed sniffs.

But not wanting to debate semantics, and do take the point that unless your audience actually gives more than a tuppence about you, your plight or your feelings, it is unlikely, in the extreme, that you are going to appeal to them. This is a fundamental truth of life and why crying doesn't work on campaign trails and sometimes it doesn't work in relationships either. Simply put, the people who you seduce will forgive you and love you and those who could not care if you fell into a manhole and were carried away by a tide of sewage- won't. Regardless of what you do.

Which brings me to my second, somewhat incongruous thought, which is that having arrived in Copacabana I hadn't stopped playing that song in my head. Thanks Barry.

Of Nazis and Armadillos

Paraguay. A trusted source confirms that it is known for 2 things, armadillos (of the giant variety) and sheltering Nazi war criminals. It should therefore come as no suprise that my time spent there ranks easily as one of the worst experiences of my life. Not that I have anything against armadillos.

I spent most of my time in Ciudad del Este, a town on the border with Brazil. CdE is the economic powerhouse of the country and produces 60% of the GDP of Paraguay, according to the Lonely Planet. The words pisspot, ramshackle and eyesore can easily be applied to a description of it, I fear (but only in passing) for the rest of Paraguay.

The one attraction that CdE does boast, is the Itaipu dam. It is the biggest dam in the world and according to government sponsored propaganda, supplies 80% of Paraguay's electricity and 25% of Brazil's and is therefore a 'good thing'. The dam is hailed as an awesome feat of engineering, mostly by engineers, and contains enough steel to construct 380 Eiffel Towers. Mysteriously, no mention is made of the magnificent (that is, puts Niagra and Iguazu to shame) set of falls that were drowned in the making of the dam nor is there a whisper about the displacement of people from the area that is now covered by a monsterous man-made lake. Another fact that is omitted is that the bill for the dam upon completion in the early 1980's, was an outrageous 250bn USD, and that a sizeable portion of that sum was stuffed into the pockets of corrupt beauracrats.

The tour of the dam is 'free', presumably the G have realised that people are not willing to pay at the point of use for it's spin (and they are probably right).

My advice is that if you find yourself in Paraguay for any reason, leave as soon as you can. That is, assuming you can get the migration officials to actually stamp your passport in the same 24 hour period you arrive at the passport window. I am not saying that they are incompetent, but I left the office dusting cobwebs from clothes.

And I didn't actually see any armadillos or Nazis, more's the pity.

Argentina and Montevideo

I am always relieved when I find out that the bus that is going to be home for the next 13 hours has a toilet aboard. Not all of them do, and the ones that don´t send me into a mild panic.

You see, I seem to have been fitted with a cheap Taiwanese bladder, and the longest period of time that can elapse between pit stops is roughly 2 hours. Buses in some countries in South America (Ecuador, Bolivia, you know who you are) don´t come with WC´s aboard, and you have to talk nicely to the driver to let you out so that you can find a shrub tall enough to duck behind, also preferably one that isn´t near a cactus (I am still picking spines out of my bottom, and I left Bolivia months ago).

To be fair, the buses in Argentina are probably more comfortable than your average first class BA seat and all of them have WC´s aboard. In fact I am, or at least I was very impressed with Argentina (and obviously relieved to be here). The food is great...one can eat steak 3 times a day and then for pudding too, all washed down with vino tinto, and if you get a bit peckish you could have a small lomito to keep the wolves at bay until the next lomo!

The accomodation is generally of a good standard and people speak English as a second language. A very narrow minded consideration for liking a place, but I speak English and it suits me fine if other people do too.

All this was great until we landed in Montevideo. There are 2 major contributors to the wealth of Uruguay, one is cattle farming, the other is middle class Argentinian holiday makers, who regard the coast as their playground in the summer months.

This results in 2 things. One: The steak is fabulous and far surpassed anything the Argentinians had on offer. We truly did eat the side of a cow in 3 days, easy. And two: The Montividians ( I have looked this up.) speak English, are charming and know how to party; most days started with a couple of Nurofen...

Daylight savings etc

Something weird happened to us when we left Bolivia, all those months ago. Our jeep trek through the salt flats from Uyuni in Bolivia to San Pedro de Atacama took us in a westerly direction. The funny thing is, is that when we got on the bus for San Pedro, the driver instructed us to set our watches an hour ahead. Bizarre. Okay, so not as strange as seeing Elvis land a shuttle on Mars maybe, or even as weird as those cats with no fur, but weird enough all the same. TC is not bothered by this as he insists it is all to do with daylight savings, Chile has it and Bolivia does not.

Speaking of daylight savings, all my fretting over New Year´s Eve was in vain. As it usually is. I decided I was changing my life and not going to worry about things like booking tables etc. So we set out to find a table at 9.00pm on NYE, sans table booking. I wasn´t worried. This was my new life and somehow things would work out. But by the time 10.00pm came and went and we were still trudging about Buenos Aires looking for a wretched table, I began to have serious doubts about the sanity of changing life long habits...

It was around this point,when faith was at it´s lowest and the prospects were bleak that TC found a restuarant that had a table free, and was serving steak on a set menu.

We settled in and ordered a second bottle of Malbec (running around looking for a restuarant is thirsty work), and then a most surprising thing happened- at what we thought was 11.00pm. They handed us a glass of bubbly wine and wished us a happy new year. We thought it was a ploy to get us to leave, but everyone else in the place was also celebrating NY and therefore it seemed like too elaborate a ruse....it really was midnight. We had been an hour out of sync with the world for goodness knows how long.

Wine and whining

Currently, I am sitting in Buenos Aires trying to come up with a cunning plan for New Year´s eve. Oh the pressure of it all, she says slapping her hand against her forehead, in dramatic fashion.

Anyway, we left Chile last week, and got the overnight bus to Mendoza. I was quite excited about being in Argentina. I thought I would be drinking Malbec until it came out of my nose. However, our first attempt at doing some wine tasting was an unequivocal disaster and nearly got us killed.

We hired some contraptions that could only loosely be described as bicycles, in Mendoza, with the grand plan of riding out to the wine farms and tasting some wine. The fact that the bikes were coming apart didn´t bother me so much (this is South America, after all) as they bothered TC who kept muttering about ball bearings or head bearings or both, probably. Anyway, we decided to proceed with the bikes, such as they were, onto a 3 lane highway with exit and entrance ramps every 200 metres (or so it seemed).

After nearly being struck down and ground into the tarmac by a petrol tanker, your correspondent had had enough... I think I probably had a hissy fit at this stage too. Well, so would you if your life had nearly been extinguished by a crazed Argentinian truck driver.
So we took some back roads out to Maipu, where the wine is made, avoiding high speed traffic, tankers and other agents of death.

At our first stop, we were told that the tour began at 3pm and could we please return at that time. It dawned on us then that we would not be able to taste any wine without first being tortured with a wine tour. That, it appears is the modus operandi and there is no deviation. Whatsoever.

Given that we had to return the bikes that evening, we would have to leave for Mendoza at 3pm and since every single bodega was closed for siesta... we tasted no wine.

Our second attempt was marginally more rewarding. This time we booked a package tour. 2 wineries and an olive farm. The experience was as tragic as it sounds, and we were subjected to tedious explanations of how to get wine from grapes.

But we did stand a better chance against the highway traffic in a tour bus than we did on those bikes and a tour bus seat is easier on the bottom too.

The New Adventures of Captain Sludge and the Sewage Sidekick

I have to be without doubt the most unlucky traveller that ever tramped the gringo trail. And that´s not some light bragging on my part. Can you believe that I have suffered a second bout of food poisoning in as many weeks... Yah no, neither could I and I can tell you in between feeling sorry for myself and projectile vomiting, I was praying, again, for another swift and merciful death. What is it with this continent and personal hygiene?

TC, who has returned to resume the trip after jacking in his job and London Life has taken to using hand sanitizer and is being religious in his application of it. I can´t say I blame him. For my part I am still brushing my teeth with bottled water, even though TC maintains that the tap water in Argentina, is potable and has not suffered any ill effects from it.

The result of this is that there is a lot of purchasing of bottled water and on top of buying coke and snacks for long bus rides, we are generating a veritable Aconcagua of non biodegrable garbage. This is obviously not doing my green credentials any good.

On top of this damage to my green reputation, I must fess up to being a litter bug. And in the worst possible way too. I dropped an Oreo packet in the Amazon river basin...yes, okay I can hear the oohs and ahhs and sharp intakes of breath from everyone (yeah, all three of you). I did try to retrieve it, but was concerned about falling into alligator infested water...(yeah I am also overly concerned with my own welfare). So you see, far from thinking up ways to save the damn planet I am actively contributing to its ever hastening demise.

I am still wracked with guilt and not sure what my penance should be for that crime...should I wash spilt oil from the plumes of 5 penguins? What if a pink dolphin died from choking on that packet? Surely no amount of penguin scrubbing could make up for it? hhhmmm....

On the other hand, TC did drop his sun glasses into the river too. Well, every super captain needs a side kick.

The thing that disturbs me is that we are the ecologically aware sort of traveller. We don´t fish under sized pirañas and we don´t hunt monkeys for sport and we don´t litter, well mostly anyway. All this does not bode well for the future of the rainforest and indeed the planet.

As I sip from my bottle of water I have to consider that, far from being Captain Planet I am indeed Captain Sludge (TC is the Sewage Sidekick), however if I don´t buy the bottled water I shall be known as Captain Sludge for reasons other than my destruction of the Earth.

Probably the worst beer in the World

Whenever I land somewhere new and different, that is, a place big enough to have a local football team and therefore brewery, I make it my business to sample the local cerveza.
Such was the case in Potosi, a town famous or maybe infamous for it´s silver and tin mines. Anyway, it has a local football league and hence a local beer. I can´t tell you how good the football is but I can tell you that the brew is awful, possibly the worst in the world, ever.

I am not kidding, this stuff is only marginally more drinkable than a glass of sweat squeezed from the socks of a thousand Bolivian silver miners. And if you doubt how bad that could be, I refer you to earlier posts on South American hygiene.

The rest of the Potosi experience was largely unmemorable, with the exception that I bought dynamite for the first (and let´s face it, probably last) time ever. You can literally buy dynamite off a market stall and go and blow something up. Which reminds me of a story another gringa told me about a couple of kids who blew their hostal room apart and got 3 months in police cells and a 1000 quid fine or maybe it was dollars, not sure, but it probably wasn´t true anyway... As it seems, the travelling breed are generally full of BS.

The northward migrating herd on the so-called gringo trail have been entirely useless as a source of information on my southward journey. Mostly I think they give you the version of events that they would have liked to have happen (in their super crazy imaginations), rather than the more boring reality. I met a few northward travellers in Peru, who had just passed through La Paz, and had apparently quite literally bathed in cocaine. If you believe all you hear. The reality is that as someone spending a very brief amount of time in La Paz, it is almost impossible to get hold of cocaine.

For a start you would have to know where to look and who to ask. It isn´t like trying to find a bell for a bicycle, there isn´t a yellow pages for coke dealers...or should that be a white pages. In either case, it isn´t all that easy, how do you know that the guy offering you coke at 10.00am outside the cash point isn´t working with the cops?

On a final note, if you have read Marching Powder (by Rusty Young) you´ll know exactly why you do NOT want to find yourself on the wrong side of a prison gate in Bolivia.

I don´t think I want to be on the wrong side of a prison gate anywhere.