April 10th: Resistencia in Northern Argentina

On 10th April 1976 I was in Resistencia in northern Argentina, being held in a police station.  I had decided to try to get from Iguassu up into the Andes in Bolivia for Easter, seeing Asuncion in Paraguay on the way.  It would have been too slow and difficult to go directly across the Chaco, but there was obviously a risk involved in going back into Argentina in the wake of the coup at the end of March.

I took a bus from Asuncion to the River Paraguay, got the ferry across into Argentina and a bus to Formosa through flat watery countryside.  In Formosa I changed buses and pulled into Resistencia in the late afternoon.  I checked into a hotel at the bus station and went back downstairs and immediately got arrested.  I was stopped by a man carrying one of those trays hanging from his neck selling lottery tickets or chewing gum, things of that sort.  They were rounding up people who seemed to be not local, but one of those they rounded up was a popular local coach driver.  The officer in charge appeared drunk.  I was taken to the police station and held in a room with others.  At first this included a young New Zealand couple I had met before; the woman was fairly distressed and I think they were soon allowed to go to a room on their own and I heard later that they had been released quickly.  I was taken upstairs for questioning but I had nothing to hide.  I was lucky that I had a book to read in my bag and I managed to get some sleep on the floor when I was given my turn of one of the communal sheets. 

In the morning, a Sunday morning, we were taken across the plaza for finger-printing; we spent much of this time standing or sitting in a small alley but the atmosphere was not threatening.  This was when I felt confident that nothing serious was afoot; the coach driver had waved at lots of his friends as were taken around town in our line and he just shrugged his shoulders and laughed and we all felt better.  We were driven back to the police station on the back of a Willys after midday.  In the afternoon I felt confident enough to write in my notebook: 

Been with the police now for 22 hours.  I'm writing with everyone around watching, making me slightly afraid that the self-styled bastard guarding us will take this book away and tear it up.  But I have something of a need to write.  There's about thirty people here, maybe half are around twenty and a couple are older and very responsive to any orders, "yes sir", certainly sir."  Radio playing, football match earlier, now English music, maybe Rod Stewart.

The bastard is smallish, well dressed like many of the cops, smart trousers and blazer jacket, key chain of course, aged 32 he said, carries his list of names and worries that we are all present here.  Moves between attempted jocularity and barking orders, he keeps us sweeping the floor, feet off the beds, he stood one guy in the corner for reading a discarded police paper, and two of the kids for looking at a photograph.  The girls herded upstairs were made to wash the six or so sheets we have.  The window from this room looks at the stairs, so when the girls come down everyone looks up their skirts, "Rico" they say.  Two guys seem to live here.  I don't know their exact status, cops surely, but they lie on the beds all the time.  I've been suspicious of informers.  It looks like we're heading for the second day, and my chances of making it somewhere interesting by Easter are receding.  The people here are decent by and large, poor for the most part, most had their documents in order as far as I know.

I was let out after almost exactly twenty-four hours and I suspect that was the maximum I could be held for.  I went back to the hotel and explained things to the landlady who had been concerned at my absence but was probably used to such goings on.  I went out into town and had a large gin and tonic, sitting outside with relief, not wanting to be in any sort of room. 

The next day I had to hang around waiting for a night bus across to Salta in the west, rather than trying to take a train from Corrientes across the river, which I thought might be more risky.  In fact I got stopped three more times by the police before I left; one policeman recognised me and tried to shake my hand in some sort of apology.  I spent much of the time in the huge square, reading and jotting this in my notebook, to make a contrast from the police station:

I'm in the town still, and in the great big plaza, where you can't see across to the other side, but can wander almost lost, without direction, amongst the palms and pea-trees and flowering bottle-brush trees.  It's a well-planned park and it is taken care of, a bit, but much of the grass has given way to dusty chaos.  I'm waiting for a student who said he'd like to talk but it looks like he won't show.

Plaza in Resistencia, 2006:  Picture by Fernando Pacullo, CC

It's definitely Argentina this town.  There's a flashy street called Tucuman but not too much of it, the style doesn't overwhelm.  The streets around the plaza are not for much, offices, little usual cafes, shuttered shops.  An old Mercedes bus drives around, and groups of old men sit in the dust, opposite rows of American taxis and beige buildings.  There are gypsies in the square, in their colourful clothes and platform shoes and scarlet kerchiefs, whistling and shouting, half-begging.  Shoeshine kids.  A pair of young lovers, tight clothes almost bursting as they snatch a furtive kiss.  But mostly just people, tired and grey, walking slowly, not doing much. 

In the end I got off the bus before Salta at Guemes, where I went north via Oran to the border crossing into Bolivia at Bermejo.  I thought it better to stick to the smaller towns and less travelled roads until I finally got out of Argentina.

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March 28th: Iguassu Falls

On March 28th 1976 I was at the Iguassu Falls in northern Argentina.

I decided to stay at the Iguassu Falls to see out the time after the recent army coup in peace and quiet.  To a large extent life seemed to be carrying on as normal, though I had not heard whether the frontiers had reopened.  I had visited the ruined mission at San Ignacio Mini and the only problem had been a hands up search on the way back to Posadas. 

Iguassu was quiet and idyllic with just a few tourists at the main falls on the Argentine side and some activity around the luxury hotel on the Brazilian side.  There was a cheap hostel, Hosteria Don Hippo, a ramshackle affair run by a large Pole with an Indian wife and an extensive family.  He did some food, but you could get beer and sandwiches at the midrange Argentine Hotel.  I took turns with others to get wine and picnic provisions from Puerto Iguassu.

On this day I walked down to the bottom part of the falls under San Martin where you could actually swim.  There was a little island for utter peace amongst the great roar of the falls.  On the trails there was wildlife, a snake with blue spots on the path, a party of 30 so coatis with long snouts and barred tails held out straight, a yellow-crested woodpecker and a lizard with a yellow collar.  The sun was pleasantly hot in the middle of the day, although the nights were cooler and sleeping was easy.

After a few days I met a friend who had crossed over from Brazil so I knew the border was open.  But still I lingered on enjoying this grand spectacle and simple living, an oasis in all the political trouble in the country.

The Iguassu Falls, 2005:  Picture by Sakke Wiik, CC

At The Iguassu Falls, 2005:  Picture by Sakke Wiik, CC

March 23rd: On A Train To Posadas In Northern Argentina

On March 23rd 1976 I was on a train to Posadas in Northern Argentina.

I had been staying with friends of friends in Buenos Aires.  They got a phone call the evening before which convinced them that the long expected coup against the government of Isabelita Peron was definitely coming this time.   They suggested I get on a train the next morning and get as far away from Buenos Aires as I could.  Meanwhile they went away to do what they could for themselves.

In the morning I got an early bus to the train station and had no difficulty buying a ticket to Posadas in the far north of the country; it was where I was planning on going anyway.  I had breakfast, put my backpack in the van and found a decent seat - the train was quite empty.  When we got to the Parana River the train was loaded onto a ferry and we spent five hours steaming upriver; I sat on deck but there was little to see.  The train continued on into the evening in the Entre Rios district, and there were plenty of birds to look at in the swampy pools beside the track.  I took dinner in the restaurant, dull food but there were people to talk to.  When I got back to my carriage they played martial music on the radio and people said that the coup had come.

We spent all night at the station in Concordia.  There was another train on the opposite platform, going the other way.  We were not allowed off the train and the doors were kept locked.  Military men in long black leather boots walked up and down crunching their heels into the gravel on the platform.  We moved off after it got light, and people in the carriage, an Argentine family and a Brazilian circus-worker, said the frontiers were closed.  All day we made long slow progress through the increasingly swampy country.  I read most of the time.  After it got dark, near the town of Santo Tome, we stopped again and the lights were turned out.  Soldiers got on and went through the carriage shining torches in the faces of the passengers.  I quickly took my Finnish hunting knife from my shoulder bag and hid it under the seat.  I was singled out and taken off the train into the open and my rucksack was found in the van.  I was pretty frightened as was everyone else on the train I think.  I was taken in front of a machine gun and bright lights as soldiers went through my stuff.  When they found my paracetamol, they shouted "drogas, drogas" and called the capitan.  He was a real SS type, with greying hair and dark glasses.  He shouted at me and went through my stuff again.  There was another person who had been searched before me and I saw him being loaded onto a truck.  However they couldn't find anything on me and eventually let me get back on the train.   

The train moved off and later there was another search but not so intimidating.  I caught the eye of the family at the other end of the carriage when they finally turned on the lights and we started a little laugh with relief.  They told me that they had not expected to see me again when I was taken off the train.  We got to Posadas at 1.30 in the morning, over twelve hours late, and I remembered to retrieve my knife.  I walked into town and was able to find a hotel, not too cheap and full of cockroaches - I was back in the tropics.

I don't know who the group was that searched me.  I know that various paramilitary groups crawled out of the woodwork during the first day or two after the coup, but these people might just as easily have been the military, and the capitan just a particularly nasty example.  They were suspicious of foreigners, perhaps going back to the Chilean coup four and a half years before.  Most travellers had been searched and some had been briefly detained in the weeks before the coup, so my treatment was perhaps normal.  Of course we know now that more than 10,000 people were killed in the Dirty War that followed, perhaps many more.  Any threat against people like me was insignificant.  My friends meanwhile in Buenos Aires were OK, although I was concerned for them and it was a few months before they surfaced.

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March 5th: Calafate in Southern Argentina

On March 5th 1976 I was at Calafate in southern Argentina.

The day before I was up at 5am to catch the bus from Rio Gallegos and slept most of the way until Esperanza and the breakfast stop.  There was not much to see but endless sheep-grazing.  For a long way we gradually rose through a wide valley.  In the middle a man in poor clothes carrying a bag got off the bus; there was nothing in any direction I could see, sheep, rabbits, geese, some courser-type birds - I could not imagine where he was going.  Then we went into a snowstorm and a snow-covered road and great excitement from some tourists who had not seen snow before.

At Calafate the next day I took a taxi out to the Perito Moreno Glacier, famous as a glacier which was still expanding.  We drove fast through bleak, dusty Patagonia with no trees until we reached the park boundary.  By the side of Lago Argentino it became pretty, trees green and spread out, some streams crossed by wooden slot planks.  There was a huge piece of blue ice floating on the water.  At the glacier I went down to the water edge, listening to the creaks and rumbles.  One great convulsion led to the calving of a number of icebergs like the one I had seen earlier.  I walked over the edge of the peninsula to the other side and sat a while just admiring and even touched the huge creaking mass of ice.  On the way back in the taxi we passed Punta Bandera and I saw a whole flock of black-necked swans on a pool and one solitary flamingo. 

The following day I walked down to the bay in search of flamingoes and watched a handful for a while.  Then I walked to the far end of the bay in the brisk wind and saw a larger flock of a hundred or more flamingoes and a distant flock of swans.  There were thousands of ducks, plovers and hawks, and a sheep stuck in the mud.

I left by the plane from the gravel airstrip.  We flew past Lake Viedma and then banked sharply round the sheer face of a huge mountain, which I took to be Mount Fitzroy, the most famous of these Patagonian mountains.

Perito Morena Glacier, 2007:  Picture by Matt Riggott, CC

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February 23rd: Ushuaia in Southern Argentina

On February 23rd 1976 I was in Ushuaia in Tierra Del Fuego in Southern Argentina.

By The Glacier, 2008:  Picture by Zhu, CC

I took an afternoon walk with a friend to the glacier up behind the town.  We found a nice spot for a picnic by the river soon after the waterfall.  Walking up the hill, we were asked for documents by police while they held rifles on us.  It was a strange place to be stopped but they allowed us to go on.  Gradually we got up to the tree-line and then the first ice: I could see the ice snaking up the mountain, shining turquoise on the glacier above the scree.  But it was getting pretty late and the weather was turning to hail and sleet.  There were lovely views back down to the Beagle Channel.  We found beautiful cold water to drink and huge mosses which we walked over.  Two austral parrots flew over, which seemed so out of place.  The descent was quick but very cold with evening arriving.  Finally it began to rain properly and we staggered bedraggled into a cafe for hot chocolate submarinos.

Ushuaia was very much on the tourist circuit so it was quite a social place with a reasonable cheap hotel (the Castellar) and decent restaurants and cafes.  Overland routes were difficult so like most people I flew in and out, but the flights were always subject to delays due to bad weather.   A steamer left on a trip to Antarctica, but the prices were cheap for locals and prohibitive for foreigners.  Argentina wanted to keep active its claim to territory in Antarctica: all Argentinean maps showed a strip of Antarctica as part of the mother country, just as they showed the Malvinas and various disputed Chilean islets to the south.  A further oddness was the constant billing of Ushuaia as the southernmost town in the world when every evening you could look out south across the Beagle Channel and see the lights in Chile in the area of Puerto Willams.

The fun in Ushuaia was walking and the birdlife, a bit like walking in northern Scotland or Norway perhaps, but different of course.  You could see geese and ducks and owls and so on anywhere near the front.  On my first day I headed east along the bay for my first sight of giant petrels and dolphin gulls, the black and white cormorants and black oyster-catchers, the kelp and upland geese; there were probably small albatrosses as well but I couldn't be sure.  The scenery was good: there was open grassland inland with windswept trees and I could walk across beaches and over rocks.

Another day I hitched a lift out to the Parque Nacional at Lapataria Bay where there is a more extensive inland area in front of the mountains.  I walked inland along the trail but the lake which is the focus was very quiet in the middle of the day.  So I walked back a different way to Lapataria Bay, past rivers and lakes all turquoise blue, under mountains, very pretty but not much wildlife to be seen except for hawks.  

The National Park:  Picture by Serge Ouachée, CC

Ushuaia, 2008:  Picture by Marko Tefani, CC

February 14th: Peulla in the Chilean Lake District

On February 14th 1976 I was in Peulla in south central Chile.  I was on my way from Puerto Varas across the Andes to Bariloche in Argentina.

There was very little in Peulla, just a hotel and some houses owned by the tourism company.  There was a road to Argentina but not back into Chile: there was only a water link across Lake Todos Los Santos to the road from Puerto Varas.  It was as quiet a place as you could imagine and it had seemed wrong to pass straight through even if it meant spending  a few nights there, until I could find transport on.  A bus went to and fro from Argentina two or three times a week and that was really the only transport onwards.  I was put up in one of the wooden company houses by a middle-aged couple, who supplemented their income in this way, although there were few tourists at this time.  The señor told me he had worked for the company for 18 years and also had a house in Puerto Montt; he gave me a little photo of Volcan Osorno, and discussed whether there would be a coup in Argentina.  The señora gave me good simple food three times a day, but on Sunday cooked a splendid roast pork for lunch.

You could not walk far away from the lake, as there were no obvious trails.  There was a famous waterfall and open grassy areas beyond where I sat and read, surrounded by wild flowers, fuchsias everywhere and cane-grass.  On paths there were foxgloves, of yellow and pink and blue, and thistles, daisies and all sorts of yellow things; there were large insects, red-bellied horse-flies and grey horse-flies, blue and yellow dragonflies and huge rich-brown bees.  At the lake I could sit on an old stone jetty and admire the snow-topped mountains, volcanoes mostly, the rocky wooded hills rising steeply with occasional pastures, but houses very rare.  Everyone went to the quay to meet two boats coming in but only 3 or 4 passengers got off.

The journey from Puerto Varas was unusual.  There was no normal bus service along this road, only a tourist coach owned by the company which took paying passengers as well.  There was a young woman to give us loudspeaker commentary, telling us that there was a wheat-field on the right or that the lake was so many square kilometres, and there was a young man to help the women to clamber down the two steps off the coach to the ground.  The route started along Lake Llaquihue with fine views of the perfect cone of Volcan Osorno, which Charles Darwin saw erupting from the coast on the night of 18th January 1835.  Later we stopped at the Saltos de Petrohue, very pretty in a wild wooded valley and with clear water in the waterfall; we made a good long stop for people to take photographs.  Finally we crossed Lake Todos Los Santos by boat and came to Peulla.

After a few days the bus arrived from Argentina, and I was able to continue.  We crossed the pass to Puerto Frias, an outstanding trip.  The vegetation kept thick all the way, even at the top of the pass.  It was a little road at first by a river then over the winding pass through the temperate rain-forest with views of the white peak of Tronador.  In the thick trees one type of creeper had red flowers, there was moss with red flowers, red fuchsias, and then ferns and creepers and wild flowers and cane.  On the Argentine side, Lago Frias was small and emerald  coloured like Todos Los Santos, but the banks were even steeper.  Further on, Lake Nahual Huapi was turquoise and large, steep sided and deeply wooded, but getting less wooded as we reached Bariloche.

In Bariloche there was a general strike and this  made finding a hotel difficult.  It brought me back to the political situation there.  I'd already spent a couple of weeks in Argentina, so I was used to the politics there: hyperinflation, police checks on public transport, people arrested and groups of youths strutting ominously on the streets.

Peulla:  Picture by Luciana Carpinelli, CC

Lake Todos Los Santos, Picture by Andrew Dennes, CC

The picture given to me at Peulla

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