Now it has become closer. With their riotous character, South Americans are closer to us, and they are just as sentimental, and in economics things are about the same. There is another important aspect: North America in the person of the USA, Canada, and now also Mexico does not really favor our brother. For them, our tourist represents a potential headache: what if he stays? In the Far East — atypical pneumonia, "mask shows", in the Middle East — angry women in black headscarves threatening jihad. And here — mulatto women dancing the samba.
There are, of course, countries or individual megacities with a tarnished reputation. Tarnished with blood... For example, Colombia or Sao Paulo in Brazil, which are absolute world records holders in terms of the number of murders. But, to tell the truth, tourists rarely get caught in the crossfire. It is unprofitable for the mafia. The calmest and safest countries are Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, i.e. the south of South America. The sea, wonderful nature, exotic fruits — in short, all 33 pleasures.
After this effusive ode to South America, I will move on to specifics, namely our trip to two countries — Uruguay and Paraguay. There was also a visit to Brazil for almost a day, but it was done illegally, without presenting passports at the border. But everything in order.
A visa to Uruguay is issued at the consulate in Moscow within four to five days. To do this, you need to submit your foreign passport, a photocopy of your internal passport (first spread and page with registration), and two photographs. An invitation from Uruguay is formally not required, but the consulate checks the data about who is inviting you to the country, as indicated in the questionnaire. With a Paraguayan visa, things are somewhat more complicated. The nearest Paraguayan embassy to us, in Moscow, was closed in 2000 "for economic reasons". There is a certain "Paraguayan representative for tourism", but he does not show himself in any way and shows no signs of active public life.
Formally, to obtain a visa, you need to provide two color photographs, a foreign passport, air tickets, a credit card (or other proof of solvency), and a strange document called police record. As far as I understand, this is a certificate from the police that you have not been prosecuted or registered, and it must be legalized at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In short, complete nonsense. I did this: I scanned the passports and sent them, along with the ticket reservation, to Asuncion to an old German who agreed to show us Paraguay at a Godly price. He forwarded it all to the country's consulate in Montevideo (Uruguay), having agreed with the consul that three people would come to them in the morning of June 17. And so it happened. They did timidly ask us about credit cards, but since we lacked them, they dropped the question. A day later the visa was ready. It costs $45 per person, i.e. $3 more than the Uruguayan one.
We got to America by a roundabout route: on Air France to Sao Paulo, then on "Pluna" (Uruguayan airline) to Montevideo, from there via Buenos Aires to Asuncion on "TAM"; we returned on the same airline to Buenos Aires and "Alitalia" via Rome. I do not recommend this route because it is unjustifiably expensive, but if you use the Brazilian "Varig", you can fly to Montevideo for $1,300-1,350. When booking a round-trip itinerary with Asuncion included, it came to $1,480. You can simply fly to Buenos Aires and then take the "Buquebus" ferry to Montevideo or Colonia del Sacramento. Two and a half hours of sailing across La Plata (to Colonia — 45 min.). $110 round trip, three times a day. Road communication with Argentina is via a bridge over the Uruguay River at Fray Bentos and Paysandu, but then you will have to drive all day to Montevideo — Uruguay is small only by American standards. From Brazil via Rivera, you can enter Uruguay from the north, then on the way to Montevideo you will have the opportunity to visit the house of Carlos Gardel (the most famous tango singer of all time, a native of Uruguay) in Tacuarembo. By railway, you can no longer enter either Uruguay or Paraguay — the stations in Montevideo and Asuncion are closed, trains do not run. The era of steam locomotives ended here, but they never got to diesel locomotives...
You should go to any country without prejudice. Listen to other people's opinions, but rely on your own personal impressions. Discard stereotypes, otherwise you will constantly try to compare one country with another, which is, in general, a useless exercise. Personally, I prefer to learn everything empirically; before a trip, of course, I read about the country, but not much. First, the "technical" preparation itself takes a lot of time and effort, and second, surprises are always pleasant. I stopped comparing Uruguay and its capital to anything on the second day. America is generally incomparable to anything. Because it is eclecticism itself.
In general, by the density of the Russian population, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay occupy first place in South America. That is how it has been from the beginning. In Buenos Aires, the newspaper "Nasha Strana" is published; it was started by Ivan Solonevich (a very interesting emigrant publicist). It would be hard to find a more anti-Soviet newspaper in the entire New World. Now the newspaper is the mouthpiece of the Russian diaspora of all three countries. They also want to make a Russian-language radio — Voce de Rusia, they came up with a website, but the domain name sounds threatening — VOR. That is, interpret it as you wish. It is a pity that the .рф domain is not yet so popular in Latin America.
Uruguay is called the South American Switzerland, but this concerns not so much nature and standard of living (not that high, especially after the recent economic crisis), but the general atmosphere of quiet, well-fed well-being, which no crisis can destroy. In terms of environmental cleanliness, Uruguay ranks sixth in the world (right after Switzerland), although in nature it resembles rather southern Russia or Ukraine. Only the cows are more portly... In terms of 'ethnic purity', Uruguay probably ranks first in South America. The Charrúa Indians were displaced or destroyed, and blacks from Africa were hardly imported, since there were never any plantations here. The country was settled by Galicians from northwestern Spain, which is why dialectal features slip into colloquial speech. And Brazilian influence has always been strong.
At Montevideo airport we were met by a prominent representative of the Russian diaspora - former sailor Nikolai Golubey, who fled a Russian cruise ship in 1992 and became naturalized in Uruguay. He was hired by the Uruguayan Ministry of Tourism as a translator. Just in case. He immediately stunned us with a story about how just a couple of years ago charter flights from Moscow used to fly here with shopping tourists buying cheap leather and fur coats. To be honest, I had never heard anything about charters from Moscow to Montevideo. Maybe it's just a terminology confusion? Not a charter, but a block of seats on a regular flight? Still strange. One thing is to recoup a plane ticket to Turkey or Greece for $180, another thing is a ticket for $1,000...
Even on approach to landing it became clear that Montevideo is a big city. And no wonder - half of Uruguay lives in it. While driving from Carrasco airport to the hotel, we were once again convinced of its impressive size. What does the city resemble? Let's say: it's a little bit Lisbon, a little bit Paris, a little bit Naples, a bit of Madrid. Moreover, all these cities in Montevideo alternate from one house to the next.
Uruguay's capital is a city of the Art Nouveau era. Even the skyscrapers in the port area (Ciudad Vieja) were built in the 20s-30s of the last century. It is a city of tango and the first Fords to roll off the assembly line. Don't think me overly sentimental, but this is a city in the style of nostalgie, in which houses seem to share with each other memories of a long-gone golden age. It has no wide avenues with endless, round-the-clock streams of cars. There is no wild nightlife, but it has its own carnival, though not on the same scale as in Brazil. Residents go to bed early; at nine o'clock the streets empty, and the shops close.
Among the sights, the first chronologically is the fortress (Fortaleza Gral. Artigas) on Mount Montevideo, which gave its name to the city, visible across the bay about a mile and a half from its walls. Inside the fortress there is a small military museum. From the city walls, a gate from the 18th century remains, leading to Independence Square with the inevitable equestrian statue of General Artigas in the center. This brave general became Uruguay's Bolívar. From 1811 to 1814 he led the country's struggle for independence from Spain. Also very fine is Palacio Salvo, perhaps the most beautiful edifice in Montevideo.
Near the port is the station building, which after its construction never actually became a station, but was adapted for other urgent needs of society, namely, for mass food consumption. In Mercado del Puerto, something like a meat extravaganza is arranged: eateries vying with each other to offer grilled meat (churrasco). We were there twice, we liked the place that much. You can eat your fill here for about $5, and although this is considered an expensive tourist spot (in a regular bar lunch would cost half as much), for such a meal this money is not a pity. In Switzerland, for that amount you can only drink a mug of beer. Closer to evening, antique dealers set up their stalls and artists their easels near the Mercado.
Montevideo also has the Estadio Centenario, on whose field the first FIFA World Cup was held in 1930. The Uruguayans then beat the Argentines. Among the classic cultural institutions, the city has several art museums (featuring Francisco Goya among the well-known painters), including the Torres García Museum - dedicated to the Uruguayan abstractionist, whose artworks adorn the local peso notes ($1 equals 26 pesos). Some museum exhibits run briskly through the streets - we have seen nowhere else such a number of old cars from the 20s-30s, and in working condition. The Carrasco district is also a kind of open-air museum. In the 20s of the last century, immigrants from Germany built mansions here, so now you can't tell whether you are in South America or Bavaria. It must be said that the Germans knew where to settle: right here begins a strip of wide white- or gold-sand beaches stretching east to Maldonado and Punta del Este. This is the so-called Golden Coast, which has made Uruguay one of the best South American resorts. In summer (when it is winter in our latitudes) half of Argentina flocks here: Uruguay is further north, so it is warmer here, and it's a stone's throw from Buenos Aires.
Of course, it is silly to go to sea resorts in winter, but you can get a general impression, even though people walk around in knit caps and winter jackets. When we settled in Punta del Este, once at the hotel I watched a competition of Uruguayan fashion models on TV that had taken place at the resort last summer. It was impressive. Both the models and Punta del Este. So lively, so crowded - you couldn't drop an apple. Personally, I did not expect this from Uruguay. I thought there were only cows and shepherds here...
Punta del Este in the east closes the row of Uruguayan resorts (Atlántida, Piriápolis, etc.), which can be driven through in a couple of hours. Further lies Cabo Polonio, but that is more for eco-tourism lovers: sea birds, sea lions, whales. Natalia Oreiro likes to come here. To bask, so to speak, on a rookery. Further north, toward the Brazilian border, are the Santa Teresa and San Miguel national parks (deer, capybaras, flamingos, rhea ostriches), as well as the Portuguese fortresses of the same name that for a long time guarded these no-man's lands.
Not far from Punta del Este, on a high cliff above the sea, stands an unusual house of an interesting artist - Casapueblo. Even from a distance, you notice that its architecture is somehow strange, fantastic, not local. Carlos Páez Vilaró lives here. In the 50s and 60s, he traveled through almost all of Central and West Africa, fell in love with it, exalted African folk art, elevating it to the rank of the pinnacle of world art. Admittedly, there is some overkill in such idealization of African civilization; we are inevitably too different, and despite the presence of small groups of Rastafarians in our cities, they still look absurd (well, if you want to smoke marijuana - that's understandable, but why pretend to be a Black person with a Caucasoid face?).
Vilaró's work is a symbiosis of African and naive Creole art, a kind of ethno-naivism. The funniest thing is that I decided that the artist had already died, because the film about him was shown as if in the past tense. While walking through the museum's halls, I noticed that some paintings were painted in 2002. So why did I bury him? And if he is alive, then he is somewhere here, since one part of the house is a museum, another is a workshop and private quarters, and the third is given over to a hotel. The whole house is built in the style of adobe palaces and mosques of Mali and Cameroon, though whitewashed in the Andalusian manner. The owner turned out to be at home, in his workshop, and we were escorted to him. He kindly posed, showed his works, gave an interview. It's interesting - a living Uruguayan classic, and also a traveler, probably the most famous in Uruguay. Then he invited us into his home, filled, piled, and hung with art objects - 'trophies' brought from Africa, Oceania, and Asia. The artist's wife, Anetta, came out to see what the guests were doing there. The old man has good taste: like his previous wives, Anetta is a real beauty, an elegant blue-eyed blonde, about 30-35 years old. In short, an amazing house and amazing are its inhabitants!
A good half of this, actually quite large, house is occupied by a stylish hotel, which is rented by Argentines. There are both apartments and standard hotel rooms. In the off-season, you can rent a room for about $50, but in December-January prices double, which is quite understandable - the height of the swimming season. We also visited two other places - the Medellín polo club and the La Paz estancia. Of course, livestock farming brings Uruguay more money than tourism, but many estancias still open guest houses for those who love to be in nature, to breathe in the forgotten smells of agriculture, to dream while watching gauchos drive a white, plump herd of cows at early dawn. At the same time, many estancias, sometimes with a century-and-a-half history, retain the appearance of an old estate, so for those feeling nostalgic, the way is here.
Nostalgia, in turn, led Uruguayans to turn Colonia del Sacramento into a museum city, founded by the Portuguese in 1680 and repeatedly changing hands. That is why Portuguese and Spanish houses stand side by side here. The old cobblestone streets have preserved their appearance almost untouched since the times of fierce confrontation between the Spanish and the Portuguese. Uruguayans are very proud of Colonia; it is the only colonial city recognized as a monument of world significance, although, to tell the truth, it does not make much of an impression. You can climb the lighthouse and view the area from above, but it's better not to do so, because the view of the rooftops is ugly. The town is small; you can walk around it in an hour. There are small museums - Portuguese and Spanish, several little restaurants, and near the cathedral a café where tables are set up inside old cars. There are souvenir shops, but Uruguayan souvenirs themselves are rather unexpressive. In short, we decided to postpone mass souvenir purchases until Paraguay, where there are more and they are about one and a half times cheaper.
Our route through Uruguay was quite simple: Montevideo, Punta del Este, back through Montevideo to Colonia, then to the La Paz estancia on the border of the Río Negro and Paysandú departments, from there a trip to San Javier and return to Montevideo. From Montevideo to Colonia is almost three hours by car, from Colonia to Javier another three. The interior regions of Uruguay are not as interesting as the coastal ones. The towns are small, poor, touched by the wing of the passing default, and even before it, apparently, they did not prosper. So, in order not to spoil your impression of Uruguay, I advise not to go far from the coast. We kept our way to the Uruguay River to meet Russian settlers who have been living on its banks for three generations.
They arrived here exactly 90 years ago, also in winter, on a river steamer from Buenos Aires. Several dozen people with all their movable property, small children (of whom more than 20 died in the very first winter from the cold) from southern Russia and Little Russia. In essence, they are Protestants in Russian style, denying priesthood, rituals, icons, saints, etc. The settlers called their community New Israel. In 1913, the head of the Protestants, Vasily Lubkov, took part of the community to Uruguay, since the local government favored new immigrants if they were ready to engage in agriculture on vacant lands. They were allocated territory near the San Javier River, and the community members founded a settlement that grew into a small town.
Nowadays few people speak Russian here, but many bear Russian names and surnames, even though they speak only Spanish. On the street we came across a colorful character: a descendant of the first settlers, shabby-looking, almost toothless, clearly tipsy. Of Russian expressions he remembered only "Hey, lady, come here!" Many Russian words have been remodeled in the Spanish manner. The house where religious meetings are held, and where by the time of our arrival the elderly members of the community, among the few who speak Russian, had arranged a small exhibition of old photographs for us, is called "sabranya", and the intoxicating brew "la brazhka", i.e. used with an article. It was amusing and rather touching to hear all this, as well as to see new batches of old women arriving at the sabranya to greet the first television group from the historical homeland, which had come to film them.
They also performed their religious songs for us. They stood in a semicircle, opened a grubby little notebook, and began to sing. The melody seemed very familiar to me... Why, it's "The Cruiser 'Varyag'!" Then they led us to the Maxim Gorky Russian Culture House, but the old women warned us that the director of this establishment, Mikhail Roslik, was a very unreliable person... In general, they have a long-standing confrontation here: during the war, part of the Russian San Javier residents decided to help their first homeland, collected money for weapons of Victory. Then they wanted to "flirt" a little with the Soviet Union; for this purpose the club was named not after Pushkin but after the author of "Mother". The timeservers were disliked in the community, but later only a certain mutual animosity remained between a few old men living out their quite prosperous old age in San Javier.
By the way, the Old Believers moved here from Brazil. First from Manchuria to Brazil, then, already in the 1960s, to Uruguay. Here they are called "barbudos", that is, "bearded ones". They founded their own colony - Ofir, although the new Israelis claim that it was they who came up with Ofir, and the bearded ones merely used the name. It's not far to get to them from San Javier, about seven or eight kilometers, but the road is broken; in bad weather you might not get through in a minibus. The Old Believers themselves drive jeeps. However, if you think they live very well, you're mistaken. The only street of their settlement is mired in liquid mud; along the roadsides are the skeletons of broken machinery. In short, a "Red Bast Shoe" collective farm.
While we drive to the village headman, the residents hide in their houses. We pull up to the house of the headman, Ivan Lukin. In the cab of a tractor standing in a grove hides a girl of about 12, of heavenly beauty, in a Russian sarafan. A boy stands leaning against a birch tree, less handsome. He says that taking pictures with a still camera is allowed, but with a video camera is not. The master of the house generally says that we've come at a bad time. Today is Saturday, time to wash, but tomorrow, Sunday, after the service we can talk. And tomorrow we are already leaving. Our San Javier old women talked him into talking with us at least a little. We sat on the terrace for about half an hour, chatted about this and that. His wife, Vassa, brought pies and treated us. Delicious pies. While I was enjoying a pie, the master of the house asked how we had learned about them. I went and blurted out that I had read about them on the Internet. But really, I couldn't have known that they, in Uruguay, perhaps the most internetized country in the New World, don't respect the Internet at all. Already when we left the yard, I heard the master passionately arguing in Spanish to one of our old women that www is, in fact, 666. That interested me. Having already said goodbye, I asked him to tell me more about this arithmetic. I was especially interested in how it had all been calculated.
- Smart people have calculated everything. That's how it is, - said Ivan.
- They're cunning Yids. They thought it all up, - Vassa chimed in.
- If you've gotten onto the Internet, then that's it - you've been counted too. No one will escape! - Ivan threatened with his finger.
Putting a reverent expression on my face, I thanked him for enlightening me on this matter and, like someone who had received a summons to fiery Gehenna, bent over and climbed into the bus.
- And your bus is marked too! - added Ivan, pointing to the web address on a sticker from Uruguay's Ministry of Tourism, stuck on the rear window. That's it, we're done for...
But, oddly enough, we made it to Montevideo quite safely. Before leaving Uruguay, Ami warned us that Paraguay is not Uruguay. It's much worse. There you have to hold firmly onto your bags, video cameras, and still cameras. She lamented that we had spent so little time in Uruguay. But what can you do: when you look at the map and read old reports and essays about the country, it seems so small that everything in it can be covered with one hand, in one sitting. But that was not the case. We didn't even manage to go see a tango. Uruguay and Argentina just can't divide the laurels of the birthplace of tango. In fact, the optimal thing would be to take those laurels and divide them. In half. So that no one would be offended!