San Ignacio Miní

When I went to pay for the room, they said they wanted US dollars and not reais. Odd because they were roughly at par at the time. Fortunately I had some. It just added to my impression of Foz do Iguaçu as a frontier town. Time to change countries. I hopped onto the cross-border bus over the Paraná River, got my passport stamped at the Argentine customs and caught the next bus into Puerto Iguazú. I realised that there was no record of my departure from Brazil. (In my 2009 trip I wondered if I would get asked about this on entry. I didn't.)

As Argentina doesn't observe daylight saving, I gained an hour in the crossing. My first impression of Argentina was that it was more mellow than Brazil. Brazilian countryside aspires to be urban, but Argentinian countryside is content to be rural. Distances are measured from Buenos Aires so everything is BA-centric (a third of the Argentine population live there). We passed pine plantations and trucks laden with logs. The hospedaje was just a stone's throw from the bus terminal. The humidity must have been 100% as the floors were damp. There I met a French couple who were photographer and teacher. They were sponsored by Kodak to make a photojournal. Later a Dutch couple arrived. He had just finished work in BA, she had joined him for a vacation.

I'm not really that keen on history but it was a long distance to Buenos Aires as this Misiones province of Argentina is like a finger of land sandwiched between Paraguay and Brazil, so I needed a place to break the journey. So I had picked San Ignacio Miní which has one of the best preserved ruins of a Jesuit mission, called a reduction. In the last third of the 18th century, the Jesuits were suppressed in Europe and its colonies, due to political intrigue, rather than theological controversy and thus ejected from this region of South America. It's a convoluted story too long to repeat here. Suffice it to say that the ruins are an archaeological glimpse of this period. The 1986 film The Mission draws upon this history. And the name has nothing to do with a diminutive British car.

There really wasn't all that much to see in the ruins of the mission. It looked poorly maintained. What must have been an impressive complex was now decrepit and lugubrious. A sad commentary on the works of man. It didn't help that I visited it just before sunset. (I read that it has since received funds for restoration and an interpretation centre has been constructed.)

There was no restaurant in town so I bought some tinned corned beef and potatoes for dinner in the hospedaje. In my shopping I suffered linguistic confusion switching from Portuguese to Spanish. After dinner we chatted about travel over beer and wine. The French were headed for the northwest of Argentina so she copied notes about Corrientes and Resistencia from my guide.

There were mosquitoes and ants in the rooms. The French woman hated ants. I sprayed the room with the insecticide provided by the owner and closed the doors for a while. That and the mosquito coil got us through the night.