Goodbye Argentina

We got on the road from our truck stop around 10am with less than three hours to drive to get to the border. 

It wasn’t a bad spot to spend the night in the back, surprisingly quiet. The road started out crappy of course but the roadside showed a level of poverty we haven’t seen since Brazil. 

The road continued horribly patched.

The part that got freaky was the style of driving. Argentines have cornered the market on unskillful aggressive decision making on full display when we got stuck behind some very slow logging trucks and a line of trucks cars and buses behind them.

I was certain we were going to witness a pile up and hung back to give others a chance to pass if they felt like it, I wasn’t getting involved in the shoving to get ahead.

It all worked out and I got to sit back and in between avoiding pavement patches got to look around at impoverished northern Argentina.

I am a little tired of red mud in my life but here it was just like we’d seen across Brazil and it makes for a messy shoulder on the road.

Skies were gray but we had no rain and temperatures are near 70 so we are enjoying not being cold at last.

We had a chance to buy some tapioca cheese rings from a street vendor so we did. Pretty good too, and we had them for lunch with marmite and cheese.

And that road boy howdy.

The weird thing was the toll booths were fine despite rumors to the contrary they accepted our credit card no problem  and the corrupt cops also rumored on iOverlander were nowhere to be seen going north. They were checking cars going south but it all looked above board and normal. We have yet to meet corrupt cops reputedly found across Latin America. 

The final thirty miles were being replaced and happily there were no stripes so traffic could make it a free for all after the active paving zone. 

When we last left Paraguay we chose Friday night to fight traffic to the border with Brazil and this time we chose Saturday afternoon to get in line to leave Argentina. It took longer in line than to deal with the paperwork.

We were under observation. 

Weirdly enough immigration for both countries was carried out by the cheerful Argentine official who apparently got us out of his country and into  Paraguay in one seamless, stamp free operation. 

At the checkpoint the customs guy took our Temporary Import Permit for GANNET2 and we got on the bridge to Paraguay which was an epic traffic jam almost the entire length of the structure. Including vendors to keep the bored families fed. And don’t forget the windshield wiper salesmen! 

It’s a mighty structure across the great Paraná River which is second in volume only to the even mightier South American river already visited by GANNET2 and crew: the Amazon. 

Reminiscent of the Sunshine Skyway in Tampa Bay and there was no toll here which surprised me. It was dreamed up in 1973 and construction began in 1983 and the bridge opened in 1990. 

Of course I got a picture as we passed the midpoint.

On the Paraguayan side we had to stop to do a fresh Temporary Import Permit for GANNET2, a piece of artwork not required by locals in the Mercosur (Southern Market) countries. It took twenty minutes and basically required us to sit while he typed.

And then we were back in Paraguay a pleasant cool gray day compared to the burning heat of summer a few months ago.

 Founded in 1615 Encarnación is a city of a hundred and fifty thousand and is supposedly the tenth largest in the country. It’s undergone a process of renovation as a tourist center in this landlocked country. Posadas Argentina across the Paraná River: 

It’s famous for its beaches and its new waterfront promenade. 

The city is a bustling tourist center for Paraguayans but there are foreign communities here reportedly Poles and Ukrainians mostly, surprisingly enough. 

We got the distinct impression no one expects to see gringos here especially in winter. We smile and wave and say hi! And they reply cautiously with a suspicious glance. It feels like being back in Suriname where people wondered why we were there…

You can imagine the crowds here in summer baking on the river beaches. 

In winter on a Saturday afternoon there is plenty of room to park but we were on a mission. 

We had other plans to be revealed tomorrow, mosaics and sushi. 

Paraguay: we’re back.

Highway 14

Argentina Highway 14 up the Brazilian border 

 I didn’t really need reminding but Argentina’s infrastructure is crumbling. The president promised to fix spectacular rates of inflation and he did by laying off thousands of bureaucrats and canceling infrastructure projects. Consequently roads, the stuff we drive on, are in a woeful state of disrepair.

They patch the roads but it ends up an awful potato patch lumpy ride, and there is a ton of truck traffic that apparently melts the road in summer into ridges and valleys of asphalt.

It’s a hard drive especially as the traffic up the border was heavy with trucks and impatient cats dodging between them to get ahead. Layne for some reason was hell bent on getting to Paraguay but I was tiring of fixating on asphalt and avoiding getting run off the road.

We spent Thursday night at a truck stop which offered free RV services to anyone that stops by, electricity, potable water, a toilet dump station and was it surprising the spots were all taken?

The photo I took the next morning shows a spot where our Brazilian friends finishing their vacation had survive night and were hurrying home. We parked Argentina style in a non parking spot to the side while a late arrival had parked in front of another RV…a popular spot for the night.

We left late and got on the road after ten, still shared how Argentina offers free stops for RVs. Back on that infernal road we got.

There were a ton of dead dogs on the shoulders probably pets abandoned and killed lacking street sense. Poverty in Argentina is rampant. We also saw many rusting hulks of abandoned automobiles.

A nice stretch of road there too, all too short unfortunately. Then we ran into a smokescreen reminiscent of the wildfires causing havoc all over the world.

It came, it went and there was no explanation. By now temperatures were in the mid 60s and we even got some sunshine, it felt completely different from the cold damp days in Uruguay. It feels like Spring even though it isn’t.

The countryside changed too, less orderly farms and fields and more marshy wilderness. 

I got fed up with the road after six hours not least because we had agreed to keep our days shorter for Rusty’s sake though he was keeping up just fine. We stopped to eat a sausage sandwich, a classic Argentine choripan photographed by Layne: 

While Rusty snoozed in the shade. By 4:30 we found a gas station with hot showers and overnight parking  so we stopped two hours shy of Paraguay. 

I walked Rusty and we came across a motorcycle and tent on the edge of the parking lot. It reminded me of my youth.

Aridtides the rider came by Timor’s tice his English and told me his story, a former truck driver who quit in a dispute with his boss. He wanted to stay on the road so he rides and looks for work as he goes. Argentina is a mess he said, we don’t plan for the future we only live for today because with a shrug.

President Milei is an attempt at change head after forty years of hopeless corruption. Hope springs eternal. I fed the gas station dogs much to Rusty’s irritation and I saw a guy collecting cans working at it. I gave him a five dollar bill as our supply of pesos is low. He looked at it like I’d offered him the holy grail and doffed his cap like a medieval serf. He couldn’t believe his eyes and backed away bowing and thanking me. It takes so little in a ruined economy. Oh Argentina.

Argentina

We had an uneventful border crossing from Salto in Uruguay to Concordia in Argentina yesterday so we are at last on the road.

The biggest hassle was finding the correct customs agent to take and and cancel our Uruguayan Temporary Import Permit (TIP) to make sure they registered GANNET2 had left the country on time, but eventually I found her and she languidly got our vehicle officially out of Uruguay, as you can see above…

We spent our last night in Uruguay free camping on the streets of Mercedes, a place familiar to us from a previous fly by, a quiet safe spot on the river front and a good place to sleep for free. Then it was time to drive four hours north to our chosen border crossing point, Salto, the northernmost bridge over the Uruguay River to Argentina.

The reason we went up the border on the Uruguayan side is three fold. One is the roads are far smoother than the badly maintained lumpy Argentine roads which in our experience are always a trial. Second there are reports on iOverlander of continuous police harassment at checkpoints.  We have all the required safety gear, reflective stripes on the van, a 110 kmh speed limiting sticker, a first aid kit, fire extinguishers, triangles, flares and a high visibility vest but the gendarmes apparently love to try to find a way to fine you on the spot. It sounds slanderous as we’ve yet to meet corrupt cops oddly enough, but we figured why not avoid them as long as possible. And finally Argentina apparently has the gall to extract tolls for these horrible roads from booths that only accept automatic  payments, a system we can’t access as we don’t have an Argentine ID number…so we stuck to the Uruguayan side as long as we could. The black line is the border.  

We picked up a hitchhiker at one point figuring he could use a ride on a cold day.

Marcelo was from Florianopolis, the tourist center in southern Brazil familiar to us where he works as a chef but he decided he wanted to see snow so he was hitch hiking to Ushuaia in winter. Then we saw a dude sitting by the side of the road selling empanadas so we bought three and had breakfast on the go.

He was bundled up against the cold but as we drove north we noticed it getting warmer which was surprising as we hadn’t come a huge distance.  The countryside reminded me of north central Florida with scrub palms suddenly dotting the scrubby unkempt fields.

Marcelo told us a bit of his life as I drove and we ate ground beef empanadas and it’s the usual story of one member of the family eager to travel and see the world while his father a factory worker and his younger brother following in Dad’s footsteps in the factory think he’s mad. His mom works as a school lunch lady and out of this family of normal suburban values sprang Marcelo the odd man out. Note the palms: 

By the time we drew level with Paysandú it was time to cut the story telling and find a spot to drop Marcelo off. His plan was to find a truck going west to Cordoba in Argentina and the last we saw of him was among the border crossing trucks at the weigh station. 

We turned back to Uruguay and the final 90 minutes north to the dam at Salto that generates 50 percent of the country’s electricity from the flow of the Uruguay River. “Represa” means dam. 

The two countries have consolidated their frontier controls on the Argentine side of the river so the old Uruguayan border post is closed and abandoned with one wobbly sign pointing to Argentina. 

Then you cross the dam which sends electricity to both countries.

And then after all this high tech excitement come the border controls. The southern countries of South America, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Brazil have formed a trading union called Mercosur (Mercosul in Portuguese) which roughly translates as Southern Market and through this pact they have reduced border controls to try to encourage trade. Consequently when a gringo shows up at the border we tend to gum the works up as they have to write out a Temporary Import Permit for our vehicle instead of just waving us through  like they do the locals. 

You get in line and wait for a green arrow when you arrive at the front. We waited just a few minutes.

We told the lady in the booth we were going to Paraguay so instead of the eight months they often give at this border we got 90 days and we drove into Aduana (customs). “Nice dog!” he said as he reached in to pet Rusty sitting in front of Layne on the floor and that was the last time anyone referred to our dog; his papers sat unseen in our folder. 

After we got the van checked out of Uruguay we were free to go, no inspection of the fridge and no confiscation of fruits and vegetables. We had cleared out most of that stuff but you never know how they will react at these crossings. Paraguay is usually pretty easy going so we won’t worry about them confiscating agricultural products when we cross that border. The first order of business was to buy gas. 

But first we had to say hello to what passes for highways in Argentina, a patchwork quilt of asphalt. The good news is that gas is $5:44 a gallon for regular instead of $8:83 in Uruguay which was why we were running on empty. 

And after that because we had preemptively unloaded the fridge we set our sights on a supermarket in Concordia.

We parked next to a Brazilian RV on the street as the height restriction kept us out of the parking lot where the civilized shoppers park their sedans. Love you Argentina! 

The old boy has come alive traveling again and I’m slightly amazed. He eats like a horse, sleeps soundly and is walking and exploring more than he ever did while we were stationary. Layne went shopping and I took the oversized bunny to explore around the Carrefour shopping center. He wanted to check out the parking lot after we walked around the block and we passed one of my favorite small cars, a long discontinued Ford Ka sold in Europe and South America and I think it’s cute, like an egg on wheels.

And then we met the occupants of the Brazilian RV, the parents of triplets two of whom were on display. They are from a small town in the hills that we visited when we were in the German part of Santa Catarina State so we could talk (in English) with at least a little fluency of their home town. Dad inherited a cigar factory where they hand roll cigars as they used to in Key West and Ybor City, and they were on a weeks vacation driving around. Like Marcelo they wanted to see cold weather possibly snow in the mountains before returning to tropical Brazil where we would go if we hadn’t used up our time in Brazil for this year. 

It was starting to get dark and we had to cut things short as we were all heading to a truck stop with free facilities for motor homes, electricity, potable water, a dump station, laid out for anyone’s use. We love you Argentina. 

We stopped at a roadside stand to check out the local stuff, that is to say Layne went shopping but was very restrained and cane back with a single jar of delicious black Greek olives, a type we haven’t seen in a while. A short hop to the truck stop ended the days journey with an early night and much snoring.

We dined on bread and a particularly spicy Gouda both of which survived the crossing from Uruguay. As expensive as it was I will miss funky orderly Uruguay and its rather shy population of three and a half million. We plan to pay another visit in the fall next year to enjoy the beaches as we start our journey north back to the States.