The Greater Guay

As a peremptory disclaimer, yes I realize this is a silly, sophomoric exercise.  Yes, I realize I haven't been in or near Paraguay for half a decade.  And yes I realize it's comparing apples and oranges. 

But I like oranges more than apples.  So...

Let's get ready to ruuuuuummmmmbbbbbllllleeeee!!!! 

Incoming score based on mate and beaches:  P1 - U1

We´ll start with the basics of human survival:
* Food (generalized) - Uruguay makes the chivitos, and Paraguay made me eat cow intestines.  In general I prefer the Paraguayan approach to food (simple stuff in large quantity) over the French-ish Uruguayan approach (lots of effort put into complex little morsels of food), but cow intestines are chock full of nast, and that overshadows everything else.  Point Uruguay.

* Water - I drank the tapwater all over Uruguay and was cool.  I avoided the tapwater at all costs in Paraguay and still got the sprints.  Point Uruguay. 

* Shetler - Shelter is shelter, and shelter is cheaper in Paraugay.  A lot cheaper.  Point Paraguay. 

In fact, everything is cheaper in Paraguay.  Bonus point Paraguay. 

* Beer - I don´t remember anything about Paraguayan beer, but there´s no way it could be worse than Uruguayan.  Plus, though it isn´t technically beer, Paraguayans make a liquor called caña, which is a bigger, burlier, blue-collar cousin of rum.  It´s not to be f***ed with.  Point Paraguay. 

That's P4-U3. 

Next category will be national character and associated symbols:

* Flag - 

Paraguay - Snooze
           

Uruguay -  Anthropomorphic sun for the win

Point Uruguay. 

* Money - Paraguay may have the bigger numbers (you call it inflation; I call it monetary virility), but Uruguay has, by far, better mustaches on its national heroes.  Look at this guy:

He's a poet.  They have a poet on their money.  And the back of this bill has a topless woman on it.  Point Uruguay. 

* National mythos - This is a tough one.  Uruguayans have a good story.  They were part of Argentina, but broke off under the leadership of the 33 Exiled Orientals (a most excellent name for a liberation army) and formed their own little cowboy state.  They're independent-minded, pragmatic, cool-headed, tough as leather.  They're lovers, not fighters, but they're also fighters so don't get any ideas.  They've built a country that works, and they're rightfully proud of it.

Then there's Paraguay.  Brooding, nationalistic little Paraguay.  In the mid-1800's they were ganged up upon by Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay in an event dubbed (for obvious reasons) the War of the Triple Alliance, and had the majority of their population exterminated in six years.  We're talking 80% eradication.  Genocide.  They were underpopulated until midway through the 20th century because of it, and they're still pissed today.  Just a few generations after that war, they got into it with Bolivia over a big expanse of arid nonsense called the Chaco in northern Paraguay.  They fought off the Bolivians, again losing incredible numbers of men.  Thing is, after all this fighting and a near brush with extermination , Paraguay today is still tenacious about holding onto its Paraguay-ness.  It makes almost all its own stuff - prior to MERCOSUR's birth in the early 1990's it hardly imported or exported anything.  It's poor as can be, but maintains a navy whose sole job is to patrol the two rivers that make up its borders with Argentina and Brazil.  Because screw those guys.  Most Paraguayans speak Spanish, but their primary language is Guarani (which, as an aside, often becomes an issue for foreigners who travel there expecting to practice Spanish and instead have to learn to say words like "Paraguay").  They don't look ethnomorphically European like most Argentines and Uruguayans, they look indio, and they're proud of it.  They're proud of having held on to their heritage despite the whole world whaling on them for 150 years.  They're tenacious.  Like that kitten in the motivational poster. 

And I dig that.

Point Paraguay.   

* Elapsed time since last military dictatorship - Paraguay: 21 years (Stroessner ousted in 1989); Uruguay: 26 years (Alvarez booted in 1984); Point Uruguay.

Updated scorecard: P5 - U6.

Next category - Infrastructure:

* Public Health - I could get into all sorts of UN-compiled statistics here, but really I'd just be pulling them all off Wikipedia and who knows how accurate or interesting any of it would be.  Instead I'll point out that Paraguay has Chagas disease.  Not much of it, but more than Uruguay, which claims to have none of it.  In Paraguay, if this beetle bites you or poops in your eye:

your life has just changed.  You now have Chagas, and Chagas is not something you wanted.  You'll get flu symptoms for a few days, then everything will be cool for a few years, and then there's something like a 30% chance that your heart, nerves and stomach will just all of a sudden stop working.  You will die a very, very undesirable death. 

The hell with that.

Point Uruguay. 

* Transportation - Paraguay's roads outside the capital are inexplicable.  Go build a cobblestone street, but make sure not to use any flat, smooth stones.  If you find two stones that seem to fit well together, make sure they don't end up adjacent.  If you would, actually, go out of your way to scavenge for the craggiest, lumpiest most awkward rocks you can find, and be sure to arrange them in the most preposterously ill-fitting manner possible.  Be devious - make sure all the sharpest points are facing up.  Now stuff easily erodible dirt in between all those rocks and strew about some broken glass and pieces of metal.  Well done.  The Paraguayan Ministry of Transportation admires your work and would like to talk to you about a career in public service. 

Uruguay, on the other hand, has roads that actually represent an improvement over the underlying dirt.  Point Uruguay. 

* Capital city - Paraguay has Asuncion, a big, yellowed sprawl of a city with a remarkably accessible sewage system.  Just step into the street.

That's not really fair - there's a lot to like about Asuncion if you see it in just the right light while you're in just the right mood.  But Montevideo has been named, time and time again, the safest, most livable city in all of Latin America.  Better than Buenos Aires, better than Havanna, better than Valparaiso (sorry Rizos).  Plus the name Montevideo makes me break out into an old Blockbuster Video jingle every time I hear it.  Point Uruguay. 

* Big national projects - Ever played Boggle?  Or seen the King of the Hill episode about Boggle?  It´s that game where a bunch of random letters get thrown out on a table and you have a few minutes to make as many words out of them as you can.  There are two different strategies.  One is to try to come up with a whole bunch of little 4-letter words and rack up points by tiny increments.  The other is to sit there staring quietly at the board until you find that one 12-letter word that nets you a barrel of points and also wows the crowd.  If you´re playing boggle in front of crowd.  

That´s what this category is like, cause while Uruguay clearly has the better roads, better ports, better water systems, better airports and better...pretty much everything, Paraguay has Itaipú dam, the second biggest hydroelectric juggernaut in the world.  They neglected everything else in their public infrastructure and put all their eggs in the dam basket.  And you know what?  It´s a good dam.  And I like 12-letter words.  Point Paraguay. 

Updated scorecard: P6 - U9.  Uruguay's trying to pull away, but who knows which Guay will carry the day after...the LIGHTNING ROUND!

Paraguay has Ciudad del Este, which is more or less a landlocked Singapore (minus the canings for spitting out your gum).  It's a free port, and 24 hours a day it's bustling full of illegal things being smuggled about by some of the most unsavory characters in South America.  Interesting (if dangerous) place.  Point! 

Uruguay has a city called 33 (Treinta y tres).  Where you from?  33.  That's goofy.  Point!

In Paraguay I saw a cow with one horn facing up and the other facing down.  Point!

Uruguay both hosted and won the first World Cup in 1930.  Point!

But the World Cup wasn't then what it is now.  This is the Argentinean goalie they had to beat to do it:

Point retracted. 

Paraguay has chipa:

The lovechild of a torrid affair between a piece of hardtack and a hunk of stale cornbread, chipa was reviled by most foreign visitors I knew.  But I loved the stuff, and I loved buying it on buses from women carrying enormous plates of it on their heads.  Warm and fresh, it's delicious.  A few hours old, it hardens into a formidable projectile.  Point! 

You can fit more than two Uruguays in Paraguay.  I'm from Texas.  Bigger is better.  Point! 

...whew.  

At the end of the lightning round our final score is.....

Paraguay 10 - Uruguay 10.  

A tie?  A TIE?  

A tie.  A dead-heat, photo-finish-verified, kissing-your-Guayan-sister tie.  

No dice.  I won't have it.  

I hereby executively declare the greater Guay to be...

The United States of A-freakin'-merica.  USguAy!  USguAy!  USguAy!

Don't act so surprised.  We always win.  We're the Yankees. 

Point: Uruguay

Uruguay To-Do List Item 6: Go to Punta del Este, see somebody famous

This is Punta del Este, the nicest beach city in Uruguay:

Every summer it competes with destinations like Cancun and Ibiza for the international jet set´s patronage, summer here occuring between about November and February.  According to the Footprint Guide to South America, "anybody who´s anybody from Buenos Aires summers in Punta."  According to Lonely Planet, "as this book was going to press in early 2008 celebrity sightings included Ralph Lauren, football star Zinedine Zidane, and Metallica frontman James Hetfield " Shakira has a place near here. 

I got into Punta del Este today and spent the day walking around getting sunburned and looking for famous people.  There were none to be found.  Not that I probably would have recognized them even if they´d been here (what the hell does James Hetfield look like?), but I´m pretty sure all I saw were a bunch of aging Argentinean tourists catching the low-season prices. 

With the summer season having ended just about a month and a half ago, the city right now feels kind of like a dorm room the morning after an all night rager, or the way I´ve always imagined New Orleans must feel the week after Mardi Gras: torn up and exhausted.  Everybody´s just getting over the hangover enough to start picking up the pieces.  The beaches here are mostly deserted, and all the highrise apartments and 4-5 star hotels are starting their renovations for next year.  There´s construction going on everywhere.  All the restaurants and food stalls and souveneir shops are shuttered.  There are delapidated little stages and wind-torn promotional flags in front of all the hotels.  It feels like a big party happened here, but now it´s over. 

But here´s the nicest beach in landlocked Paraguay:

I´m not really a beach dude, but neither country has mountains so beaches are what we´ll have to go off of. 

Point Uruguay. 

Fat Bomb

This is a "chivitos":

Take a hamburger patty, top it with some bacon slices, top that with a slice of ham,top that with a fried egg, top that with a slice of cheese, and top all that that with lettuce and tomatoes.  Put that whole pile between mayo-smeared bread bookends and serve with fries.  You are now eating the national food of Uruguay. 

I don´t know that it´s actually the national food of Uruguay, but I think it should be, so as of this moment, and until Uruguay enlightens me to the contrary, I declare it so.  The chivitos has jumped into the upper pantheon of foods that I like but are bad for me.  In fact I think it takes second, bumping into third place the monte cristo sandwich:

The gold is still held by the Katz´ deli cheesecake shake:

which is a cheesecake turned into a milkshake. 

The combination of food like the chivitos and the ability for those who choose to live a manual labor-light lifestyle seems to have led to a phenomenon in Uruguay´s cities that I haven´t seen much before in Latin America: overweight people.  Not that everyone´s a pudge or anything, but it definitely isn´t uncommon walking down the street in Montevideo or Colonia or Salto to see a number of people who are a little soft around the midsection.  It´s a sign of relative prosperity I guess.  As is the fact that if you open one of Uruguay´s daily papers to the Opinion page you usually find articles opining on international affairs not involving Uruguay.  If being overweight and wanting to give out advice aren´t signs of a prosperous people, I don´t know what are. 

Point: Paraguay

This is mate (pron: MAH-tay):

It´s a kind of tea that you find in the southern half of South America - Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, and I assume probably Chile.  You fill up the gord-looking container with loose leaves, then stick in the metal straw, then pour in hot or ice-cold water depending on the temperature outside and suck it out.  The gord holds a couple ounces of water, and when you´re done, you fill it up again and pass it to the next person. 

At least that´s how you do it in Paraguay, which is where I learned to drink the stuff.  It turns out that every country down here has its own way of perparing and drinking mate, and that in the collective eyes of each nation, everybody else is doing it like idiots. 

Paraguayans drink mate pretty much as outlined above: pour in leaves, add boiling hot water, suck it out through a blistering metal straw.  Your lips and tongue will get used to being burnt.  Too hot for you?  Maybe you´d prefer a bottle of baby formula.  Paraguayan mate is the equivalent of Marlboro reds.  Not for the faint of heart. 

When I showed up in Argentina after working in Paraguay and made mate in a hostel, I passed it to one of the hostel workers, and she spit it out with a gasp asking why I had done it wrong and used such hot water.  Argentineans set the gord and straw up the same way, but use reasonable temperature water.  Marlboro lights.  They also have more available brand variety in their mate leaves, as unlike Paraguay they actually trade with their neighbors, so you can intersperse your Marlboro lights with the occasional Camel light, Spirit light and Kool. 

But Uruguay is a whole new bucket of BS.  I tried making mate outside a bus station here the other day, and was promptly stopped, sat down and given a stern talking to by a passing pair of old men, as I was doing it entirely wrong and was clearly in need of tutelage.  Setting up a mate gord here is a serious process.  You pour in the leaves, cover the gord with your hand and slant the leaves, you pour in cold water over half the leaves and let it sit for a minute, then you pour in hot (but not too hot) water over the same half and let it sit for a minute, then you push the still-dry leaves up to make a ledge along one side of the gord, then you cover the end of the straw with your hand...

By the time they were done I didn´t want mate anymore, and I have no doubt that if I carried my newfound Uruguayan mate-making knowlege into Paraguay tomorrow I´d be sat down by two men at a bus station and told I was doing it like a fool.  Then they´d notice how tepid my water was and call me a prettyboy. 

Uruguayan mate is like rolling your own smokes.  With filters.  And crumbly, old, dry tobacco leaves that won´t stay in the paper.  It´s difficult, it´s complicated, and in the end its no better than buying prerolled smokes. 

For my money, Paraguayans do mate right: simple and painful, with a minimum of mucking around.  In the battle for the title of Greatest Guay, this one goes to Paraguay. 

As an aside, it´s not a coincidence that I use cigarettes as an analogy for different mate styles.  I submit that mate is the perfect quit-smoking aid for the person who isn´t addicted to nicotine, but smokes because they need something to do with their hands and an excuse to stop working every few minutes.  Folks down here drink mate pretty much exactly the same way we smoke up in the States: every hour or so you take a break from work, step outside for a couple minutes and pass around the gord.  It´s highly caffeinated, so you get a decent buzz, but aside from the caffeine I´ve never heard anything to intimate drinking the stuff is bad for you in any way.  It works for me: every time I feel like I could use a cigarette down here I just pull out my gord and thermos of hot water and go to town. 

In the States, there might also be the added benefit that a mate gord with inserted straw looks, to someone who doesn´t know what it is, pretty illicit.  It doesn´t look like a cup of tea, it looks like something out of a 1920´s San Francisco opium den.  If you´re outside smoking a cig, there´s a decent chance some doof is going to come up and ask to bum one.  If you´re outside sucking on what looks like an opium pipe...you´re going to get some personal space.  And if someone DOES come up and ask for a hit off what they think is an opium pipe, well they were probably someone you would have wanted to meet anyway. 

Candy from Babies

Today I´m going to write about why I haven´t been writing. 

A few months ago I read a book called, "Do Travel Writers go to Hell?" which relates the purportedly true, alcohol- and drug-riddled story of how Lonely Planet´s 2005 Brazil guide got written.  In between the graphic depictions of ecstacy-fueled sex in fishing boats, the book put forward what I think is a pretty true theory nugget about travel.  Traveling (at least as backpackers like the author and I and most of you do it), the author submits, isn´t really about seeing interesting stuff abroad, or meeting people with different cultural backgrounds, or learning about history and geography; those are all secondary purposes.  The real beauty of traveling is that you get cast so far out of our own element that your mind is shocked into a  hyperawareness of the present.  Travel so overloads you with new stimuli that your mind resets.  The cobwebs that routine and familiarity have spun get swept out, and you suddenly find you have the ability to start thinking clearly about all kinds of other aspects of your life.  Being dumped into a foreign land with foreign-looking people speaking foreign-sounding languages, he argues, is one of the only experiences overwhelming enough to give members of our information-overlaoded, sensory-dulled generation that kind of a mental reset. 

I didn´t explain that nearly as well as the author did, but I have to catch a bus in a few minutes so I don´t have time to rethink and rewrite it.  You get the idea though, right?

Anyway, to make a long story short, I haven´t been posting much on the blog because Uruguay has been shockingly easy to travel around.  There have been two little snafus: my bag getting temporarily lost by the airline (but it showed up) and the group I was walking around Montevideo with getting mugged (but nobody got hurt and we didn´t lose anything).  Those incidents aside, traveling around here has been smooth-to-a-fault. See, Uruguay works.  The buses run on time, the electricity doesn´t go out at random intervals, the hotels are affordable and have space, the public parks have free WiFi, the whole country has universal 911.  It isn´t a rich country, but it´s an eminently functional one, and a surprisingly easy one to navigate.  And damn it, after Madagascar that just makes the place kind of mundane.  Within two weeks of getting into Madagascar I´d been almost killed by lightning, sickened by contaminated pork, and chased by feral dogs through the streets of the capital.  Here I am almost two weeks into Uruguay, and the worst I can say is that some scared street kid tried to snatch my friend´s purse. 

This place is just too easy to give me the mental shock that I was hoping for: the thing that makes travel worthwhile for me.  It isn´t just that traveling lets me see new stuff and meet new people and eat new food; it´s that while I´m traveling, and for a brief, wonderful hangover period afterwards, I´m able to gain some perspective on life and make weighty decisions on a clear mind. 

That isn´t happening here.  Add it to the fact that the Uruguayan landscape is flat and agricultural, and the food made up mostly of pasta and beef, and what I basically have on my hands is a vacation in Spanish-speaking Nebraska.  The place just isn´t as quirky as I thought it might be.  Being the tiny, undervisited cousin of the nearby Argentinian and Brazilian giants might, I thought, have given Uruguay a few odd traits.  You know, the kind of thing that little brothers and sisters develop to steal attention away from their older siblings.  But not really.  The place just works.  It´s not rich, it´s not poor.  It´s very middle class, very pragmatic in its layout and civil functions, and very, very navigable. 

So what, exactly, am I to write about?  The cities and monuments I´m seeing?  The food I´m eating?  That stuff´s not interesting to read.  You have to be here to care about that stuff. 

But I´ll come up with something.  Just give me time.

In the mean time, I´ll be mailing off postcards tomorrow.

Slow Boat

Losing your luggage is sort of a mixed bag.  Yes, you´ve lost a lot of stuff that you won´t ever get compensated for, but you also realize just how little stuff you really need to get by on the road.  Outerwear doesn´t really get that dirty, and when it does it still has a few days in it before it gets too smelly, and even then it still has a few more days in it until it gets too smelly to bother anyone but you.  Toothbrushes, toothpaste and soap are easy to find, beards (even pubescent patchy ones) are natural.  Reading material can always be found, and nobody really wears sunscreen anyway.  You know those old images of hobos traveling around with just a bandana full of crap tied to a stick?  It seems way more plausible to me now than it did a week ago.

The other big boon is that, if you want, you can replace your wardrobe with locally bought garb.  Ask me if I´m wearing Argentinean flag underwear right now.


Truth be told I´d started to get used to the idea of not having my pack with me for the next few weeks, but its all moot now.  Last night a United truck pulled up to my hostel door and re-United me with my long lost beloved, whether I wanted her back or not.  This morning, coffee in hand and pack on back, I made for the docks and a date with the Slow Boat.

The Slow Boat is the cheapest way to get from Buenos Aires to Uruguay, taking three hours to cross the Rio de la Plata.  How can a boat take three hours to cross a river?  Because it´s not really a river; it looks like this: 

It´s a bay.  If you considered it a river it´d be the widest one in the world by a factor of "shut up it´s a bay."  Its water is brackish.  And "Rio de la Plata" means "river of silver" but neither is the water silver nor have I read that there was ever silver in or along the river.  The water is Mississippi brown because most every major south American river, carrying a continent´s worth of silt and muck, eventually drains into it.  In order to keep the shipping lanes open for Buenos Aires and Montevideo they´re constantly dredging the thing. It has its name because the colonists who named it thought there was a magical Silver Mountain Range further inland.  Who told them that?  Probably local tribes who were hoping they would go away.  They stayed. 

The Slow Boat, as opposed to the Fast Boat (which takes only one hour and is therefore I assume powered by pixiedust), is run by a company called Buquebus, and I assumed it was going to be a barge.  I figured it would be the South American version of the Staten Island Ferry.  Instead I got this:

It was a motherloving cruise ship, complete with reclining chairs, duty free shop, restaurant and video arcade.  Let me stress that this was the cheapest way to get across the river.  Luxury seats and the Fast Boat cost more, as did other boat companies. 

And that seems to pretty much be par for the Uruguay course as far as I can tell.  Uruguay, it turns out, is the nicest place you´ve never heard of.  I´ll see if I can drum up some empirical proof of this for another post, but anecdotally speaking I can tell you the feel of the place is remarkably European. As are the prices.  On the plus side, you can drink the water.

That is, I AM drinking the water.  Whether that turns out to be a good idea or not I will leave in the hands of the Fates and Uruguay´s water system engineers. 

Anyway, it was raining during my arrival today, so tomorrow will be the first full day of poking around this piece.  But I´m in.  Good as my word.

United We Fall

Buenos Aires is Spanish for "good air," but there isn´t much "good air" in Buenos Aires. At ground level it´s smoggy,muggy and smells like Detroit; higher up it´s full of airplanes run by a company that´s doing its best to make this trip difficult for me.

Everyone´s had airline-facilitated travel logistics nightmares, so I won´t get into this in too much detail, but here´s the story in concentrate. I was supposed to fly Houston to Chicago to Sao Paulo to Buenos Aires, from where I would get a ferry across the river to Uruguay. The flight from Houston to Chicago left two hours late, so I missed the flight to Sao Paulo and spent the night in Chicago O´Hare.

"Is this going to cause a problem with my checked pack," I asked.
"No," said United.

Next day while checking in for my flight I was offered a new itinerary in which I would skip Sao Paulo and instead go from Chicago to Washington DC to Buenos Aires, thus saving several hours.

"Sounds great, but will this cause a problem with my checked pack," I asked.
"No," said United.

In Washington DC, the plane bound for Buenos Aires wouldn´t tell the pilot what the altitude was, so we had to switch planes. We switched planes and flew to Buenos Aires.

Now I´m in Buenos Aires, albeit a day and change late, but my backpack could be in Chicago, Washington Dulles, Sao Paulo, or in the belly of a broken 767 in a hangar somewhere. The one place it definitely isn´t is here, and in exchange for my trouble United has offered me the grand sum of $50 to replace what was lost, which in Buenos Aires (the New York of South America) will go about as far as it would in the New York of North America.

But here´s the real nailgun to the nuts: it isn´t even $50 cash; it´s a promise of reimbursement provided I keep receipts and only buy "appropriate travel-related replacement goods." That means no beer, though I would argue it´s both a travel-related good and a necessity in this situation. They disagree. I asked.

So I spent this morning making an accounting of the belongings that will be getting me through the next month. Aside from that tenuous promise of $50, here´s what I´ve got:

• Boots, pair of socks, pair of black pants, pair of boxer briefs, red T-shirt
• Grey Jansport backpack
  
• Eyeglasses, eyeglasses case, eyeglasses cleaning cloth
• Toothbrush, toothpaste
• 3 pens (one blue, two black), Green highlighter
• Two notebooks (one pocket size, one book size)
• Half empty case of Icebreakers mints
• 40 oz. water bottle
• University of Chicago Spanish-English dictionary
• 250 Spanish vocabulary flashcards from high school
• Passport with yellow fever vaccination card
• Copy of defunct flight itinerary, Copy of health insurance card
• Wallet
  
• 2008 Lonely Planet guide to Uruguay
  
• National Geographic from Feb 2009

I´m going to wait in Buenos Aires for another 24 hours to see if my pack plays catchup. If by tomorrow afternoon it isn´t here, I´m taking my mints and I´m going to Uruguay. F*** it.