Turista in Iguazu

So we got to our gaucho show, which turned out to be Opera Pampas, a song, dance & horse-riding survey of Argentina's history. Brief summary: there were native people who sang and danced, then the Spaniards came with their horses and gave them a really hard time and sang and danced, then settlers came and wiped them out and sang and danced, and now we're all happy, singing, dancing Argentinians - sort of a southern hemisphere Oklahoma!. I'm not doing it justice, though. It was very well done, and the horses were amazingly well behaved (as they would have to be for the sake of the barefoot dancers who followed).

The next day we left for Iguazu falls on a LAN flight, a small and seemingly very competent airline. They avoided having to give us headsets by playing soothing classical music quite loudly during takeoff and landing (how's Ave Maria for takeoff?) and showing Just For Laughs Gags during the flight. Just for Laughs is perfect for multilingual situations. The whole plane was laughing for much of it (interesting hearing cultural differences in humour, though) and we got off in a very good mood.

Unfortunately I began paying the price for inadequate hand-washing on Saturday's expedition. Remember, children, WASH YOUR HANDS! I was really reluctant to be out of sight of a washroom all that day and much of the rest; Ron caught up with me the next day. So we got to know our hotel in Puerto Iguazu very well. We were right up north in Missiones province, within sight of Paraguay and Brazil. The Iguazu river flows into the Parana just there, and about 20 km east up the Iguazu are the most amazing falls in the world. We got to see them for a much-too-short visit the next day - Tuesday - on our way back to the airport. Utterly stunning. When I can, I'll post some pictures to Flickr, but they won't begin to capture the full impact of this mass of water surging over a 2 km-wide wall of basalt. And the falls are relatively small this year, with northern Argentina/southern Brazil going through a record-breaking drought.

The drought was a blessing for us, though. We'd expected masses of mosquitos and had to get yellow fever shots to go there. I think I heard one mosquito. And the humidity was low enough (30-40%) that the 35-degree heat was not a problem. This is the year to see Iguazu, I think. But we're going to have to come back another year to see the parts we missed. Maybe then we'll experience tropical rainforest heat.

Back to Buenos Aires and a relatively quiet evening to recover from our illness. But Wednesday (yesterday) we were off and running again. First an excursion into the Parana delta, at the western end of the Rio Plata. Only 40 km or so away from BA, it's a labyrinth of streams and islands that's a summer refuge for many city-dwellers and permanent home for about 3000 people. We cruised past estates and modest homes on stilts, and even a church and a school that were accessible only by boat. I liked the floating supertiendas - supermarkets - that move from dock to dock. It would be a lovely place to live if you liked mosquito repellant (although there were none around at that time of day - we're living charmed lives on this trip).

We ended up in downtown BA, so we got ourselves to a nearby English-language used book store to replenish our stock of reading material - a day and a bit of tummy trouble meant we'd finished all our Christmas reading. Then home to rest up for the evening's show at Senor Tango.

Ron described the show far better than I could. Here's his report to Evan:

Wow! What a spectacle last night’s tango show was. We had vaguely imagined it would be an evening of flashy sexy dancing, and it was but with lots more. It started with four friendly table mates – a Brazilian couple a little younger than us, she being built about like me leading to merriment all round as we all wedged into a booth that wasn’t quite big enough, and another Brazilian woman and her teenage daughter. The daughter was the only one at the table who could really function in both languages so she had a busy time. Anyway we started off well and after a few bottles of good Argentinean wine (which turned out to be included in the price of the evening) we were all buddies.

The show itself when it finally began at 11:00 started with two horses (!) riding on to the stage as part of an enactment of a simplified Argentina creation myth (Once there were Indians, then we Spaniards came and vanquished them. And now here’s Argentina. That’s a surprising view, to these Canadian eyes, because the people here look a whole lot more mixed Spanish + native than Canadians look European + native, so I had though the myth was “we vanquished some of them and integrated the rest”).

There followed much dancing, singing, and orchestral interludes complete with random lighting and smoke effects (one admirable non-random lighting effect was to shine a bright spotlight on a guy ignoring the request not to take pictures, though he didn’t get the hint until an usher had a chat with him). The stage was cunningly arranged in three concentric circles that could turn independently, but I thought their main function was to call attention to the great skill of the women dancers who never once put a heel into one of the spaces between the circles. For most of the night the orchestra was a group of about 6 very capable, if loud, musicians of various ages. For the last half hour or so though, we got a whole new orchestra of old guys. Evidently they were well known, though we couldn’t follow the rapid Spanish introduction, and their leader was treated like a serious celebrity. They REALLY rocked. Four violins, four accordions, bass and keyboard. The distinctive sound was from the accordions as a percussion section playing very staccato ONE TWO THREE FOUR one two three four. It was wonderful.

The finale was a version of Don’t Cry for Me Argentina, complete with Argentine flag-coloured drapery flowing from the ceiling, and all of the dancers and singers and musicians playing loud, but disappointingly no horses. Everyone left smiling, probably the Argentineans to one of the bars that don’t get going until 2:00 am or so and us tourists happily home to our beds.

And now we're packing for the next stage of this adventure - a cruise around the southern tip of South America to Valparaiso, Chile. It will be good to settle into a comfy cabin, unpack all our stuff and spread out a bit. Further reports to follow.