Dear friends and family,
We sent our last email from
Concordia, where we re-entered Argentina. On January 30,
2013 newfound friends trailered us around the Rio Uruguay’s Salto Grande dam. Above
it we found ourselves on a reservoir with thick arms extending west into
Argentina and east into Uruguay. Continuing north, we cut from point to point,
camping in the many coves formed by tributary valleys. We stuck an anchor in
the beach or tied to a branch. One night we tied to a cattle fence sloping down
into the water and were visited by a curious herd.
The banks were low, the forest increasingly
tropical. Most of the trees were massed broad-leafs, but interspersed among
these were pines, palms, bamboo, and a species much taller than the others,
with delicate, wispy boughs and white bark. We also passed vast, regular
plantations of eucalyptus trees for making paper pulp. There were few houses,
but we sometimes passed swarthy fishermen standing shoulder-deep in the river, immobile
except for their heads, which slowly turned to watch as we passed. This posture
kept them cool while allowing them to cast their hooks further out into the
river. We gave them a wide berth to avoid catching their lines in our propeller.
Uruguay gave way to Brazil on the right bank, but we didn’t land for fear of angering the touchy Argentine officials. We stranded on a sandbar, and in cutting the motor heard the familiar cry of howler monkeys. In the distance stood the skyscrapers of Uruguaiana, a city in this southern appendage of Brazil.
After a long day of sailing or motoring we
welcomed a cool bath and a quiet evening under the southern stars. Yellow and
green fireflies flew about us. When we washed our dishes in the river, bending
over the gunwale to reach the whirling, semi-transparent water, hordes of minnows
fought for the scraps. They also bit us we when bathed, but their tiny jaws
never broke our skin.
Our little outboard motor developed a fuel
system problem, so we pulled into a creek mouth to fix it. “Damn, it’s a Prefectura!” said Ginny, noting a boat and
a little building with a radio antenna on the upper bank. But the usual hassles
did not occur. A lanky officer, off-duty in shorts and T-shirt, told us how boring
the work was. “Nothing happens here except sometimes the Brazilians cross over
with contraband fireworks,” he said. “For a month at a time we don’t see our
families.” He offered us ice, water, mate
tea, whatever he could help us with. We located the problem, a restrictive gas
filter, and left in the morning.
A week out from Concordia we reached Santo
Tomé, a small city where the Uruguay River passes within a hundred miles of the
Paraná. It had a boat ramp and good highway access, so here we looked for
transportation to the larger watercourse that would take us to Foz do Iguaçu,
where we planned to have George. No friendly fellow boaters materialized, but the
local Prefectura connected us with a chunky,
tattooed businessman with a trailer eager to earn $400.
Upon backing the trailer into the river we
found that Thurston didn’t fit because
its side posts were too close together. “No problem,” he said. He dashed home,
got a grinder, and cut the posts off. Once we had loaded Thurston Steve noted that the trailer’s tongue weight was dangerously
negative, but he drove off anyway. The hitch soon lifted off the ball, got
jerked forward by the safety chain, and smashed his trunk in. We shifted equipment
from stern to bow until the tongue weight was positive.
It was now midnight but he preferred to leave right away because there were fewer highway checkpoints at night. We stipulated only that he put us in the Paraná River upstream of the Yacyretá dam. He chain-smoked and drank beer while we dozed in the back seat. At 3:30 a.m. he backed us into a water body with suspiciously strong current for a reservoir. “Don’t worry, you’re above the dam,” he said, and drove off. We anchored in shallow water and fell asleep.
In the morning of February 11 we looked up
and saw the downstream face of the
huge Yacyretá dam shared by Paraguay and Argentina. Whether our driver’s
geography was mistaken or he had deceived us we never determined, but we
weren’t too worried because the dam has a lock. We were in a city called Ituzaingó.
We found our way to a large Prefectura
compound and surrendered ourselves to their smothering care. Data was entered
into books, papers were checked, an entry document was created. “To open the
lock requires written request forty-eight hours in advance,” they said. We got
that started.
A meeting was convened in the chief’s
office. Various officers gravely warned us how murderous the Paraguayan
smugglers are, how dangerous the lock is, how perilous the reservoir, how calm
weather can quickly change into a killer storm. “The waves come at you from all
directions at the same time! And you can’t go ashore because the coast is too
hazardous. No one boats up there!” Someone asked to see our certificates of boater
training. We had none, since such a requirement had never existed in Washington
State. We showed them the authorization already granted us by the Concordia Prefectura to navigate to Foz do Iguaçu,
and some magazines in which our articles had been published. “You can see that we’re
experienced sailors,” we argued.
“I am sorry,” said the chief, “but without
such proof of competence I cannot permit you to navigate the reservoir. But I
have a friend who might be able to give you a ride to Posadas, beyond the
reservoir. Good luck!”
A plump, young officer took us in a Prefectura vehicle to a company that gives
boat rides. “I have no trouble giving you a ride to Posadas. Just give me some
gas money,” said the manager. He hooked a Land Rover to a trailer, loaded us in
the car with him, and drove to the waterfront. “I didn’t want to tell you in
front of the Prefecto, but I can’t
take you all the way to Posadas. I’ll take you past the dam, to a ranch on the
lake.” He pulled Thurston out of the
water and drove us out of town, our second transport in three days.
We rumbled along twenty miles of red dirt
roads through pasture and forest, avoiding the highway for the same reason our
previous transporter had avoided travelling during the day. When we got to a
cluster of buildings on a big lake he backed the boat down a gentle bank. We
untied and climbed aboard. “When you pass Prefectura
stations stay at least a kilometer from shore so they can’t bother you,” he
advised.
As we motored out into this new reservoir
we wondered what about it so terrified the Ituzaingó Prefectos. It looked no different from the one we had navigated
near Concordia. After a couple hours we reached an island consisting of a
single huge sand dune, uninhabited and barren. We climbed to the top. Was this
a drug-smuggling base? Were we were being watched? Paraguay was visible to the
north. The “deadly” lake was like a mill pond, hot and airless.
Resuming our transit we stayed far from
shore until we had passed what looked like a Prefectura station, given its tall tower, then pulled into a cove
surrounded by open grazing land and rolling hills. We relaxed in the cockpit as
the air cooled and the sky turned purple and red. Doves cooed, cicadas whirred.
Ginny cooked vegetarian spaghetti. We had just started eating when we heard a
boat approach.
“Goddamn it, it’s Prefucktos!” Ginny swore. They pulled alongside, their twin
high-powered outboards idling. “I’m sorry,” they said. “This area is unsafe due
to cattle rustlers. We have orders to ask you to accompany us.”
They tossed us a line. We morosely finished
our meal as they towed us to the station we had passed. The senior officer came
out. “The Ituzaingó Prefectura is
unhappy with you,” he said. “They prohibited you from going out into the lake
and you went anyway. You’ll have to stay here until I get authorization from
Posadas.” We turned in with repressed anger. Our little cove had been protected
but here waves made sleep difficult.
In the morning they let us go after a few phone calls provided we report to headquarters when we reached Posadas. As we continued the reservoir narrowed and a current asserted itself. Posadas was our last large Argentine city, capital of the Province of Misiones, named for the Jesuit missions that claimed this region. Our Google Earth-derived shore outline was inaccurate; it turned out the dam had been raised higher after the satellite imagery was taken. The old yacht club was underwater. The new basin was unprotected and without docks, but the courtesy was great as in all Argentine yacht clubs. The club gave us a buoy to tie to, a canoe to get to the buoy and back, and rides into town for gas and laundry. The water was too rough to sleep so we set up our tent on land, the first time we’d done that since Colombia.
It was now mid-February, a month from Ginny’s due date. Steve read the chapter in our Where There Is No Doctor book pertaining to midwifery, just in case. The Prefectura continued to plague us in this final stretch. Armed vessels sometimes accompanied us. They said it was for our safety, but we concluded that they exaggerated the dangers to justify their overbearing control. Why do the Argentines put up with this? Why does Peronismo still govern the country decades after the death of those demagogues, Juan and Eva Peron? We camped where the Prefectos told us, or hid deep in swampy holes, among trees adapted to seasonally flooding like in the Amazon, pushing past floating logs and squeezing under spider-filled branches until no searchlight could reach us.
Butterflies swarmed wherever the sun
penetrated to a solid surface, be it Thurston
or a muddy bank. We had entered a rainy season, or simply a region that has no
dry season. The land became hills and tall basalt cliffs. Every few kilometers we
passed an indent in the shoreline at the base of which, maybe a hundred meters distant,
a stream fell off the cliff into the river. Waterfalls peeped out through the
forests that blanketed the canyon walls. Occasionally a red dirt road sloped
down to the river. Those on the Argentine side of such a road might feature a
house or two, a boat or two, but on the matching Paraguayan side the steep,
diagonally sloping track would be lined with wall-to-wall wooden shops, those
on the downhill side perched on tall, precarious stilts. “Argentines go to the
other side to buy cheap clothes, shoes, etc.” we were told.
The river narrowed to as little as three hundred meters. The current increased, the banks became rocky. We retired the two-horse outboard and put the five-horse long-tail into service. It was too brutish for Ginny to steer for long. Taking advantage of the countercurrents in the many coves we still averaged seven kilometers per hour. In its middle the river flowed at a steady five knots, but the current along its margin was splintered into a myriad of whirls. Thurston spun this way and that as we negotiated from one patch of water to another, watching for rocks that didn’t quite reach the surface. We clung close to shore at the risk of hitting the sharp black boulders and outcroppings on the forty-five-degree bank. After a hard bump we felt under the floorboards to make sure we hadn’t sprung a leak.
We skirted around nets strung from the shore
out to an anchor, buoyed by a string of plastic pop bottles. The Paraguayans,
poorer than the Argentines, fished from wooden rowboats, and constantly snuck
over to the Argentine side for illegal purposes such as smuggling and tree
poaching. Ferrymen rowed passengers across, dropping them off at trails leading
up the 500-foot-tall banks. This was a feat given the current; in order to land
where they wanted they first had to row far upstream in the long-shore eddies,
then pull across while the current swept them back down.
On February 22 we turned right into the Rio
Iguazu (Spanish spelling), which entered at ninety degrees from the east. Its
canyon walls, like those of the Paraná, were heavily forested, too steep to see
the cities above: Puerto Iguazu on the Argentina side and Foz do (Mouth of the)
Iguaçu on the northern, or Brazilian side. Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, lay on
the west bank of the Paraná. Each country had a prominent monument marking its corner
of the Triple Frontier.
Puerto Iguazu was the smallest of the
three. Its waterfront consisted of a flat spot with a road down to it, a few
boats and government buildings. After paying homage to the Prefectos we walked up and got our bearings. Busy streets ran at
all angles. It was a tourist town, a base for people going to see the Argentine
side of the Iguaçu Falls, ten miles upriver. We took the first of several bus rides
across the bridge into Brazil.
Crossing over for the day required minimal
paperwork. Our first priority was to find a place to live aboard Thurston until Ginny’s mom, sister, and
sister’s boyfriend came. A sewage outlet just upstream spoiled our mooring in
Puerto Iguazu. Due to cliffs Foz do Iguaçu has almost no waterfront access, but
directly across from our current tie-up was a sand terminal. A steel boat
sucked up sand from somewhere up the Iguaçu River then slurried it up to a
de-watering enclosure, where a front-end loader hefted it onto trucks for
construction purposes. There was a boat ramp, an office, and a minor Policia Federal post. No one objected to
us tying up there.
With this assurance we went through the Argentine
exit procedures. The Prefectos invented
a new twist: they called ahead to the Brazilian authorities to see if they
would grant us entry, failing which, presumably, they would not let us go. This
was ridiculous because no bureaucrat would think of answering such a question
unless we were standing in front of them with our papers. “Someone will call you
back,” they said. But we had a trick up our sleeve. Knowing they would pull
some stunt like that we had left our clothes at a laundromat and in reality we
weren’t ready to go yet! By the afternoon our clothes were done and the Prefectos, giving up on their attempt at
international relations, granted us a flowery new clearance paper, the last in
a sheaf that we aren’t very sentimental about, but which we respect for its
sheer absurdity.
We then rowed the two hundred or so meters to
the sand terminal and started work on that side. After taking buses to the Capitania Fluvial and the Policia Federal headquarters we discovered
that all we had to do was go to the international bridge and get our passports
stamped. No customs document, no capitania
papers, no equipment checks, nothing! Steve always had a soft spot for
Argentina, due to the hospitality of the kind people we met there and of course because it was cheap, but Ginny was ecstatic to be back in
Brazil where supplies of coffee, chocolate, mangos and wilderness are seemingly infinite.
Our next priority was to find a place for
us, Lois, Carley, and Matt to stay from March 14 to April 17. Lois would be
paying, so we tried to fill her specifications: three bedrooms, kitchen, air
conditioning, close to downtown, at a good price. After scouring the city’s
real estate offices, classified ads, and web sites we concluded that such a
place did not exist, but Lois graciously lowered her expectations a bit, and a
place was reserved.
We have been at the Foz sand terminal a
week now. The dredger is usually off someplace sucking up sand. Periodically they
return and pump it up to the terminal. Twice a week they load it onto dumptrucks.
A couple of tourist outfitters and police boats use the ramp. There is a
watchman at night, and three cute little dogs that no longer bark at us.
Otherwise hardly anyone comes here. It’s quiet compared to the Argentine side,
where carnival music plays until dawn.
We are next to the ramp, one anchor out in
the river and another up on the bank, bow to shore. The river raises and lowers
as much as two meters a day in a pattern we have not yet discerned, due to variable
rains in the Iguaçu basin and greater or lesser releases from the Itaipu Dam, a
few miles up the Paraná. We have to keep adjusting the anchor lines
accordingly.
From the sand terminal a road leads along a
cliff face then up over a steep hill. On the other side the city starts, first
a scattered poor neighborhood, then a wide arterial leading downtown. It’s a
city of 250,000, of recent construction, the result of a boom when the dam was
built and the immense tourist draw of the Iguaçu Falls. Ciudad del Este,
meanwhile, is a famous duty-free zone and smuggling center. Over there the
canyon faces are lined with garbage tossed down from the slum homes along the
brink of the cliff.
Steve has bought a used bicycle. Ginny tried one and decided against it. Her body isn’t as balanced or agile as it once was, so she is learning bus routes. We have found a good private hospital and paid a deposit. We don’t need to go there again until Ginny enters labor, which could be any day now. Ginny now sleeps in the wide end of the cabin, by the big open hatch, where it is cooler and easier to get in and out. Still the hot nights, back pains and inevitable worries of a mother-to-be keep her awake most of the time. She stays positive however, knowing she’ll have to learn to live without sleep sooner or later.
See our new Rio Uruguay
photos at: https://picasaweb.google.com/ginnygoon/RioUruguay
and photos from this
portion of the Rio Parana at: https://picasaweb.google.com/ginnygoon/RioParanaPart2
Lots of love,
Steve & Ginny
