Corrientes
Trip Start
Oct 14, 2005
1
65
71
Trip End
??? ??, 2006
Corrientes,
Argentina
Tuesday, May 2, 2006
Another confusing border crossing later, dogs, x-ray machines, missing passports, and no departure cards, all conducted in Spanish, and I´m back in the land Che*.
We get off the overnight bus in Corrientes, which turns out to be an all day stop over as the next bus to Salta is at 8, again an overnight bus, a good way to travel, if you can sleep on them, unfortunately I am not the best sleeper, having adapted to sleeping in dorms with snorers, and wrigglers, sleep talkers, and the odd shagger, I am still unable to sleep on a moving vehicule for any longer than 30 minutes at a time. Corrientes turned out to be a wonderfully picturesque town, the border with Paraguay defined by the Río Paraná, it was a brilliant sunny day perfect to explore the towns old fashioned streets, with many murals and works of art, little pedestrian streets with fountains and statues as well as a couple of large parks to play a bit of football in. Predictions for England Vs Sweden, the more aggressive tactics will be the undoing of either teams and negative tactics seemed to be the way to success in a game of one shoe football (not as I originally thought playing football with one shoe, but a great game when only 3 players and a football, each player has a shoe to defend as a goal, and the player must hit someone else´s shoe to score, concede 5 goals and you are out, last man standing wins).
Corrientes is a town seemingly dominated by school kids, with boys uniforms of long white jackets making them look like scientists who had shrunk themselves. As our brief but very enjoyable stay in Corrientes came to a close, we attracted a group of mini scientists with our football. These were kids from a private school in Corrientes, where they were studying English, and gave us an escort to the bus stop we needed, to get the collectivo to the Terminal. We happily chatted about football and the world cup, and no mention was made of Maradona. Bidding farewell to our helpful little friends, I realised that the people of Argentina were exceptionally friendly, except in Buenos Aires, I guess it is big/capital city complex, my liking of large cities has still not improved, but I was getting a much better feeling about South America, after being largely unimpressed by the cities of Santiago, Mendoza, and Buenos Aires, the number of other tourists around was also decreasing, I wonder if that was also a factor...
I was still pondering on such matters when we boarded our second consecutive overnight bus, my third in 4 nights, the other night being in Puerto Iguazu, where I did not get to bed until 6:30am...
*Che Guevara being the most famous Che, but it wasn´t his name, rather Che is a nickname by other Spanish speaking Latin American countries for people from Argentina, due to their pronunciation of ´Y´ and ´LL´ sounds, having done my first Spanish classes in Buenos Aires it is also the accent I have picked up, and will have to shake off soon as I head to Bolivia, although apparently Spanish women find it very sexy, so maybe I won´t lose it all together...
