(Argentina)...I have just spent three wonderful weeks in Argentina, meeting some of the most gracious people I have encountered while travelling. I will no doubt write several posts on this trip, so I will not here pencil down a day-by-day account, but rather snippets of what I remember. The hottest place I visited was Paso de a Patría, which stands on the banks of the Río Paraná, opposite the mysterious nation of Paraguay, in the provinces of Corrientes. It was from here that the Triple Alliance, comprising the forces of the countries of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, sent out their gunboats and troops to defeat bankrupt Paraguay, who for some strange reason thought it could defeat little Uruguay when that country decided to align itself with two other counties that make up at least four-fifths of the land mass of the whole continent. The beach here is small and unimposing, hardly the place from which to launch a major assault.
 The town specialises in a type of fish called pejerrey, as well as the huge dorado, but September is in the wrong time of year in which to consume these fish fresh, so I had to make do eating them in premade empanadas, small fried savories that seem to be the lunchtime staple of much of Argentina. The city of Corrientes, the province's capital, is a beautiful town, also on the banks of the same river but farther into Argentina. Graham Greene (http://members.tripod.com/~greeneland/) set his novel The Honorary Consul here, one of the reasons I wanted to stop off on the way to the Argentine northwest here rather than in the nearby city of Resistencia in the neighbouring provinve of Chaco. The noun Chaco also refers to a type of arid plain that extends into most of western Paraguay and is apparently home to insular Germanic people and farmer Mennonites.
The novel centers around a character called Eduardo, who is Paraguayan on his mother's side, English on his father's. He has sympathies with Paraguayan rebels trying to overthrow the Paraguayan dictactor Alberto Stroessner, who in the text is holidaying in Argentina, playing golf, but who in real life had just died a few weeks before my travels, in exile in Brazil. The rebels hatch a plan to kidnap the American ambassador to Argentina, thinking that Stroessner would not want a diplomatic crisis involving both his own people and his main foreign backer, but they mistakenly kidnap the British Honourary Consul instead, who has a posting with almost no power or influence attached to it.
Roaming the bright streets of Corrientes, I could imagine the story come to live. Very few people were out on the streets on this Sunday morning. The photograph above of a political candidate looking weary and peeling off the wall appealed to me in the contact of my musings. I must read the biography of Graham Greene, although I seem to remember there being some criticism of later parts of this multi-volume work, as some said that most of those later works seem to be about the biographer, not the biographee.
In the evening, I took a bus — these buses, sleek affairs with seats that recline almost to beds, are the main way Argentines get around, certainly as plane travel is expensive and requires nearly always having to make a connection in Buenos Aires; bands of luggage porters work each bus terminal, and one must tip them a peso or two to insure your bags make it to the same place you do; El Veloz del Norte was the best of the bus companies in the humble opinion — to Salta, that is, from sea level in Corrientes to 2,300 metres above.
It became dark as soon as we passed Resistencia, but I do remember waking up as we stopped in a Chaco town called Pampa del Infierno, or, translated into English, Grasslands of Hell. Make you want to stop for a couple of weeks to soak in the atmosphere. My first search for information about this no-dount wonderful stop-off revealed the someone was searching for news about an uncle called Harald Gastel, who was born in Munich, Germany, in 1906, according to the post, but who was last heard of in Pampa del Infierno. His journey from one to the other must make a story every bit as entertaining as the fiction of Greene.