Journeys in the jungle

            Been a bit quiet around here lately, eh? I got back from Puerto Iguazú on Sunday and feel like I’ve been running non-stop! I’ll write about my last days with the kids at Fundación Cor in another entry, but just wanted to give everyone a quick update about my trip to Iguazú National Park and Iguazú Falls this past weekend.

            The park is located within the province of Misiones, which looks a little like it was tacked onto Argentina as an afterthought. It juts out eastward and borders Brazil and Paraguay more than it borders the rest of Argentina! The falls themselves are shared by both Brazil and Argentina; the bulk the actual falls are in Argentina, but the best views are on the Brazilian side (which I didn’t get to, since Americans need an extra pricey visa to visit Brazil and I didn’t have the time to wait for it). The park is thankfully very close to Puerto Iguazú, where I would be based for the weekend.

            If you look at a map of Argentina, you’ll notice that Misiones province is a long way north of Buenos Aires. The most popular way to travel long distances in Argentina is by booking a seat on what are known as omnibuses or micros, which remind me of double-decker Greyhound buses. They are way more comfortable than Greyhounds though; the seats fold down almost flat so you can sleep much better, they serve you dinner and often breakfast (since many trips are 12 hours or more), there’s always a movie after dinner. In some ways it’s like traveling on a plane, but even comfier than that! But no matter how comfy the seats are, 17 hours is a long time to be on a bus – especially considering this particular bus started the journey without toilet paper. Yuck!

            My first task after getting off the bus was to sort out where I was staying, and after that to figure out what I was going to do and when. I arrived in the afternoon on Wednesday and decided to spend all of Thursday in the park checking out the falls. I also booked an excursion for Friday afternoon to go hiking, zip-lining, and rappelling in the jungle nearby the park and another excursion to visit the Jesuit ruins in San Ignacio. I spent the rest of the afternoon and the evening walking around Puerto Iguazú checking out the town and the shops.

            The next day I was up bright and early to make sure I got to the park as close to opening time as I could. I definitely wasn’t the only person with that idea! When I got to the park there was already a line at the entrance, so I got in and booked it to the first trails. I hadn’t realized that the park was made up of so many little waterfalls, probably about 20 or so – I lost track after about 10. The first trail went up above the waterfalls and the second went past the same ones, but at the base. The wildlife and the plants were absolutely amazing. I have never seen so many butterflies, some not much bigger than a quarter and some as big as my hand! There are also a lot of cool animals in the park like coatis (they look like a raccoon mixed with an anteater), capuchin monkeys, and tons of birds, including toucans. After walking along both the upper and lower trails, I took a boat ride under the Salto San Martín and got ridiculously soaked. Thankfully we were given waterproof bags to put valuables in and I had the foresight to stash my shoes and socks inside.

            After doing my best to squeeze water out of my jeans, I headed back up through the park to a different trail I had read about that was supposed to have a lot of wildlife. I got about halfway down it and was starting to think that I had seen a lot of butterflies and a few tiger ants, but nothing like monkeys. And as if summoned, I saw a monkey swing across the trail! I stopped and looked around, and noticed that there were about ten of them in the trees – climbing and jumping through the brush, pulling bark off trees and just generally being cool little monkeys. I stood and marveled for a few minutes, until the monkeys started moving away and the mosquitoes were getting to be more than I could handle. As the monkeys disappeared, a family of four coatis came out of the brush and crossed the trail as well. On my way back up the trail, I met people coming from the trailhead who mentioned that they had seen one monkey further up the trail – I felt very lucky to have caught sight of all of the monkeys AND some coatis!

            My next stop was the biggest and most famous waterfall in the park, the Garganta del Diablo (The Devil’s Throat). There’s about a kilometer of walkways out to the falls and a platform is perched right over the top. It was simply amazing, I’ve been to Niagara Falls but I think this was even more impressive and beautiful. Even better, the weather had been overcast all morning but the sun decided to come out right as I started towards the Garganta del Diablo, so by the time I got there the sun was coming around to shine on the falls and make some pretty rainbows. Pictures don’t do this place justice, it really has to be seen to be believed. Definitely worth the long bus ride!

            I finished my day at the park with a quiet dinghy ride on the upper Iguazú river, where my guide, José, showed me snoozing crocodiles, tiny orchids, toucans, and warned me about an ant with a very painful bite that was crawling up my leg – according to José, the ant is known as “pica y corre” or “bites and runs” (guess what it’s known for doing). This was the last boat launch of the day and I was the only passenger, so it was a very peaceful way to close out my day at the park. I went back to town and treated myself to a really good dinner with a passion fruit mousse at the end.

            Friday morning I went on a tour of an animal rehabilitation center, where I got to see lots of endangered and rare birds and other critters. We learned about the center’s work to rehabilitate animals that had been seized from the black market or surrendered by people who had kept them as pets and later realized their mistake. The center works to treat and breed animals to release into the wild when possible and takes care of animals that can’t be returned to the wild. It was really cool to see all of the animals so close and to learn about what they eat and how they live. It was also neat to see something that didn’t seem to be part of the “traditional” tourist experience in Iguazú. After the critters, I went zip-lining and rappelling, definitely testing my nervousness about heights! Again, it was great to be in the woods and nature, even if nature was filled with some pretty voracious mosquitoes.

            The next day I packed up and shipped out of Puerto Iguazú on a tour to the Jesuit ruins in San Ignacio. We also stopped at a mine along the way, where I got to see some enormous agates and geodes. The town of San Ignacio is about three hours south of Iguazú and on my way back to Buenos Aires, so I figured I would just stay there and get a bus to Posadas, where I could take a bus back to Buenos Aires later that evening. While waiting in the Posadas bus station, I happened to see a man get busted carrying what appeared to be 25 individually-wrapped kilos of cocaine, probably from Paraguay into Argentina. I was a little surprised that the bust was happening in a big glass-fronted border guard’s office where a crowd of onlookers had gathered and was taking pictures. When I got back to BA, my host mom was disappointed that I didn’t think to whip out my own camera and start snapping away – I told her I was a little nervous that I might get reprimanded and my camera confiscated with all of my pictures from the park. So sadly, I have no pictures of that interesting part of the journey, sorry!

            Well, that’s quite a lot of reading to get through! Once again, the plan will be to get one more entry out before I take off tomorrow evening for Mendoza. I still haven’t been able to put my pictures of the trip up on Facebook because their photo editing tool always loads them out of order, and I have no desire to reorganize 70+ photos! Maybe it’s time to switch to a different digital photo album tool, any suggestions for good ones?

            Hasta pronto!

Kids these days

Seeing as I have only one more week left with the kiddies at Cor, I'm starting to look back a little on what we've done together. And I have to say, it's a little frustrating. I haven't really been able to do what I had originally set out as my goals for working with the kids - cooking healthy meals, tutoring English or other homework. They weren't kidding when they told us there wasn't a lot of structure.

Although, today I did get to spend some quality time with one of the boys, F, who seems to always be struggling with one thing or another. It became pretty clear today that although he knows how to write his letters, he has very little sense of what they mean or how they come together to form words. On top of that, he's used to some of the older kids just giving him the answers when he's struggling, so it was tough to convince him that he could do his work on his own. So we made a compromise - F had to come up with 10 words that start with the letter "L" and write them out; I wasn't going to just give him the words or tell him how to spell them, but what I did instead was to give him clues (in Spanish of course, as best I could) about a few words that started with "L" (Ex. What's something that you drink every day, it comes from a cow, and it's white? Ans: Leche) and then helped him sound them out to get the right spelling. Spanish is an incredibly easy language to spell because almost all sounds have their own corresponding letter (this is a simplification, but more or less true); and so I was really worried by how much trouble F was having spelling simple words like "lobo" or "leche" or "luna". He even forgot which letters they started with - and the assignment was words starting with "L"! Keep in mind that F is about 8 years old. The point where I realized that he really had no idea what he was writing was when we got to the second part of the assignment, where he had to write sentences with four of the words. Once again, F expected me to give him the spelling of every word in the sentence letter by letter. So we had another long drawn-out struggle for him to sound out the words - the hardest part for him seemed to be the consonants. As we were finishing up the last sentence, I got distracted by another kid and A, one of the older girls, came over and finished F's sentence for him. But I let it go, because F had been such a trooper throughout the rest of the exercise.

In a lot of ways, this experience with F underscored the conflicting feelings I have that I am simultaneously having no impact and a huge one. While giving F a clue for luchar (to struggle), I grabbed him in a bear hug and asked him how he was going to escape. He could barely stop giggling to figure out the answer and after I let go, he snuggled up under my arm for the rest of the exercise. Several times before, we've had trouble with F being very willful and not listening to adults, or lashing out at other kids for bothering him or taking his things. Lukas was told by one of the cuidadoras (worryingly, the one who always works with the kids on their homework) that Ese chico no sabe nada, "That boy [F] knows nothing" - and she said this to Lukas right in front of F and the other kids. It seems like a lot of the kids at Cor are falling through the cracks at school; many have had to repeat grades, some seem like they might have learning disabilities that have not been addressed. So maybe taking them to the park is doing more than it seems at first glance. I just wish I could stick around longer to find out.

I've grown accustomed to her...space?

            It sneaks up on you in bits and pieces, becoming accustomed to a place. The first time I rode a colectivo (city bus) here, I was so nervous about getting off at the right place and not being robbed on the way that I spent most of the journey standing near the door clinging to the handrail (in my defense, it was night time and I was on my way to meet friends at a place I’d never been before; but I know, kind of sad). Gradually, with the confidence-building of a few bus sojourns in the daytime, I was able to pry myself away from the handrail and sit/stand comfortably in the rest of the bus, with a fair amount of confidence in where I was going. Then came the day that I realized riding the bus was no longer a big deal. This realization was itself a big deal, naturally. I’m not at all ashamed to say that every time I get on a bus – especially if it’s a bus I’ve never ridden before – I get a little boost of confidence. “Look at me, world! I know where I’m going, yes I do! I’m on the bus, and I know where I’m going. Haha!” I’m not saying that announcement goes through my head every time I’m on a bus*, but you get the picture.

            There’s the language part of that too. Working with the kids at Cor has really helped my listening skills and my confidence with the language. I still do a lot of planning out in my head, but my fluency is improving noticeably. I get a lot of compliments on my speaking ability. I’m not sure if that’s just people being nice, or if they’re surprised that I can speak and understand anything at all, but it’s definitely encouraging. I don’t think my Spanish skills will be comparable to where my German skills were when I left Trier (I had Austrians mistaking me for German, boo-yah!), but they’re definitely head and shoulders above where they were when I arrived. Which is great news, considering I’ll be taking the MTTC Spanish certification exam in July. Eep!

            And then there was the realization that some of the things that had so irritated me after my first few weeks in Buenos Aires were no longer as much of an irritation, or had actually turned into a fun challenge. Take change, for example. Not Obama campaign change, jingly coin change. In the US, you never have a problem getting change. Even on a Sunday, most restaurants or businesses don’t even bat an eye when asked for change for a dollar, a five, a twenty even. And that’s when you haven’t even bought anything! Generally speaking, you are not made to feel uncomfortable if you’re the guy who pays for something costing $2.01 with a $20-bill. If anything, it’s viewed as more of a hassle for you, because now you’re the one who has to carry that pile of change around in your pocket. Poor you! You can probably tell by my tone that this is not the case in Argentina. Because of a mafia-controlled black market for the coins (really for the metal used to make them) and the fact that Argentina has to buy the metals to print coins from Chile (and long-standing animosity between the two means high prices), there are much fewer coins in circulation than there is demand for them. So the coins become more valuable than their actual face value and are thus hoarded by vendors and buyers alike. Everyone tells me it used to be much worse than it is now, but when I try to buy something for AR$3 using a AR$5 note and the man at the till refuses to sell it to me because he does not want to part with any of his coins, I call that situation pretty dang bad (this actually happened during my first month here). This drove me nuts. It seemed almost anywhere I went I was looked at as a pariah if I didn’t provide exact change, or if I forced someone to cough up a bit of coinage. It became especially annoying when I wanted to take the bus, because the buses only accept coins and fares are always between AR$1.10 and AR$1.30. I often found myself engaged in a frantic scavenger hunt through the kiosks, trying to find something to purchase that would force the shopkeeper to give me enough change so that I could get the bus back home. It sounds absurd, and it is; and for the first few months I raged and fumed and shook my fist at the crazy government who wouldn’t print more money, the crazy buses who insisted on coins instead of some sort of transit card, the shopkeepers with till full of greedily guarded peso coins. And then one day when I was downtown and had to start the scavenger hunt again, it suddenly became a game. It became something I had to put up with: my misplaced moral outrage would not make the bus driver take my folding money in payment, nor would it turn said folding money into coins. I had to find a way around it, and I managed to do so with a bit of a smile. And oh, how sweet that grapefruit soda tasted after I had paid for it with a fiver and gotten the long-searched-for peso coin in return. I’m sure I must have looked rather smug when I finally boarded the bus, because I certainly felt very smug.

            That’s not to say I don’t still get annoyed by some of the things which originally tripped my trigger – I don’t think I’m good enough at compartmentalizing to turn avoiding dog poo into a game – but they don’t seem to weigh on my mind as much.

            My impending return I think also contributes to that feeling of ambivalence. I have so much to look forward to: going back to work at Voices; babysitting for a friend’s little girls and for the girls I nannied two summers ago; dog-sitting for a friend; many, MANY weddings; upcoming student-teaching. Also, the manfriend, Will, was just offered a clerkship in Gaylord, MI, and will soon officially be gainfully employed! Huzzah! So much to be excited about.

            I’m hoping to squeeze one more entry in before the weekend (might even start tonight?) because Tuesday night I will be on a bus to Puerto Iguazú, gateway to the famous Iguazú Falls. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Google them now, because they’re a sight to behold. This will be my first journey in a micro, the swank long-distance buses that are so ubiquitous in Argentina, so I’m looking forward to that as well. Hasta pronto!

* I’m lying, it totally does! ;)