Turned Around, Turn Turn Turn

Travel can be disorienting in many ways.  We've been told that some native Americans believe there is a certain amount of soul loss with air travel and with general anesthetics.  Veteran of both, Catbird sees the point.  Anyone who has stumbled off a plane, through the habitrail jetway, into the stifled air of a noisy airport three or four time-zones from home knows that sense of loss.  It's not at all unlike returning from chemical unconsciousness.   Like Blanche DuBois, at that point we are all definitely dependent on the kindness of strangers.


We were, therefore, grateful for the Porteno taxi drivers who were patient with our minimal Espanol, never stiffed us on a fare, and--get this: were safe and excellent drivers!   This cannot be said about all taxi drivers we've encountered, including some in Sweet Home Austin. Your driver might be clean, sober and competent, but the quality of your cab ride can also depend on the quality and quantity of the driver's drug of choice.  We prefer the driver in a heroin nod that we have to waken when the light turns green to the speed-freak who gives us Mr. Toad's wild ride.


Buenos Aires has a pretty straightforward layout (we are not fans of circular cities or of the arrondissements of Paris), and our map was helpful but it had a few flaws.  We walked 12 blocks out of our way (looking for a restaurant recommended for its grilled pizza) because the map showed the house numbers going up when, in fact they were going down.  The pizza was worth it, though!

But the biggest problem was that the map was oriented with West/Southwest at the top.   That pitched north at about 4 p.m. and it so messed with our little heads we finally just stopped talking about north and south and talked about 'turning left on the map.'


Outside Buenos Aires, when we arrived at the hotel in Puerto Iguazu, we were told we had just enough time to get to the Falls for a quick look before it closed.  An 80 peso cab ride proved that wrong.  

Our cab driver spoke no English and we know only a handful of words in Espanol, so when he offered (mostly through gesticulations) to take us for a spin around the countryside, the only words we truly understood were: prescious, beautiful, tourist, now, 2 hours, and 120 pesos.  We figured, what the hell, we had some time to fill anyway.

25 wooded and hilly (we really wanted to give the driver a course on downshifting on the uphill) minutes later we ended up at Mina de Wanda, a mine for semi-precious stones open to tourists.

Aha!  Precious stones!  They were cranky with our request for  an English-speaking guide, but were able to conjure one while my physicist and I cooled our heels in a room that felt like bus depot. (We still haven't figured out why they wouldn't let us wait in the gift shop.) 

Now, many of you know Catbird does NOT do basements, cellars, crawl spaces or caves of any kind, but she managed to do okay with these little mines,  probably because they were so open and shallow and we were never out of sight of the sky.  Still it felt like a brave move for the Catbird.  Maybe her claustrophobia has improved; on the other hand, maybe she was just disoriented from travel.