No Mercy for the master race in Misssiones Province

Corrientes? Well there is a reason that Graham Greene set his novel the Honourary Consel here: his novels are about alienation, loss of faith and an abrupt change of circumstance. Well I was alienated from, and lost my faith in my Lonely planet guide for suggesting I stop here. Unfortunately there was no abrupt change of circumstances, so I created one and got out of there asap. Posanda ditto, except to say the bridge across to Paraguay revealed some rather good Japanese restuarants. Why is there great sushi 1500 miles inland and why did so many Japanese immigrate to Paraguay?

On to Iguazu falls and, well the only word to describe them is, incredible: 3km of falls in a dense jungle, with all sorts of weird wildlife. So other worldly was this that I was looking for dinosaurs, thankfully I didn´t find any. As in so many previous instances I have magnificent photographs but can´t share them with you due to my technical incompetence.

The falls themself straddle the Argentine Brazil border and getting to see both sides of them means crossing two borders andtravelling about thirty miles either side of a river about a 100 yards in width and paying to get into tweo different national parks. So much for Mercosur.

As I had to cross into Brazil I thought I would visit the Itiapu dam, currently the biggest hydroelectric works on the planet. As you would expect with such an introduction, it is absolutely massive. Its like something out of Star Wars: it supplies 90% of Paraguay´s electricity and 20% of Brazils´. As an example of public works it would have Albert Speer creaming himself.

So now that I have introduced the National Socialists, why do I think there is no mercy for the master race in Missiones province? Well, from Corrientes to Iguazu,  I have never seen so many blonde, blue eyed beggars in my life. Anybody wanting to enter the nature nurture debate would do well to visit here. There were schools of these young predators each watched by, and I love the irony, a Tuetonic Fagan. Their  heritage reflected in the names that dominate hereabouts: Schmidt, Kreutzfeld, Schumaker etc, etc. If Adolf had been alive he´d have a hard job persuading Jesse Owen to allow for circumstance before judging  them. Needless to say they approached me for money, and in the great Scottish tradition of generosity I told them to fuck off.

A propos of nothing, I have noticed in the bookshops in every country I have been in, that a best seller in Latino Americo is a book by somone called Craig Russell: " A Besom de Glasgow". Now initially I thought Besom might have met Tits and thought if knowing tits from Glasgow can make you money round here then I know scores of them. But no, it turns out the novel is about Glasgow in the fifities and was titled a Glasgow Kiss in English. Ah well. So near yet so far.

Next post is Ciduad del Este in Paraguay a town which can only bhe described as the free market gone mental.