December 5, 2010

During the night we had a visitor in our hotel room. It was the tooth fairy who had snatched the tooth Iseline lost last night and replaced it with some money. It must have been the local fairy, since she left pesos. Iseline was worried last night, she was unsure if the fairy would find us when we stayed in a hotel room. Luckily the fairy seems to search for teeth in hotel rooms also. Here is Iseline last night once she managed to remove the tooth. She had been moving it back and forth all day.

For once, we had a rainy day. We had done everything we wanted to do in Salta, except meet with Jose, and decided to use the day for an intensive home schooling session.

Salta is well known for its beautiful mountains, and we did a guided tour of them last time we were here. This is indeed a beautiful part of the Andes and you can easily drive up to over 4000 meters (13000 feet) altitude. Some of the mountainsides have layers with minerals of many different colors, one of them is known as the mountain with 7 colors. However, Hélène and I had already seen these mountains and we sensed that the children had seen enough rocks for a while. Before arriving we had decided to have a calm stay in Salta, focused on visiting our friends.

Mirta told us last night that she was not sure if Jose had to work during the evening today or not. We had agreed to call her around 5, the time he would probably be home, to find out if it was possible to see him. We were busy with schooling and I used the opportunity to finish off some of my blog entries from the Amazon. Time flied and it was first at 5:30 that I gave Mirta a call. Jose was at home, but he would have to leave again at 6:30!

We hadn´t seen the man for almost 15 years and here we were wasting valuable time in a hotel room. We hurried down to the street and tried to get a taxi in the rain. Of course, when you really need one, it takes a long time to get one.

It was already 6pm by the time we closed in on their neighborhood. The taxi driver did not know exactly where it was and started to ask people in the street. We could not remember exactly how to get there and for once i was unable to get a GPS fix on my iPhone with the GPS application for Brazil. We were losing valuable time. In the end the driver dropped us off at what we thought was the right place. As soon as he took off, we realized we were in the wrong street, after all! Luckily Hélène recognized a street crossing a bit further up the street. We were just 2 blocks away and ran the last part.

At 6:10 we rang their doorbell and sheepishly explained what had happened.

They served us maté, the excellent infusion from the Yerba Maté plant they drink all the time here. What a delight to see Jose again. He was the same positive, smiling man we had last seen so long ago.

He apologized for having to work all weekend, He worked a lot and didn´t get to see his family too much. I understood completely. Adrian took a picture of us:

Jose went way over the time he should have left, to be able to have time with us. We got around an hour together and managed to cover many subjects. Finally, when he wanted to hurry to work with a taxi, instead of the bus he normally takes, he couldn´t get one because waiting times were too long to get one to come to their house. He decided to take the bus closer to town and get a taxi there. We had a pretty bad conscience when he hurried out the house.

Once he was gone we parked the kids with their iPod games on the couch and got to talk more thoroughly with Mirta. She had been a fantastic hostess so far, but had been so busy, and we had always had the kids to look after, that we really hadn´t had a good occasion to speak just the three of us. We could talk more deeply about many things now, such as their current life and what they felt about the situation in Argentina. Mirta was not very optimistic on behalf of the country. She felt many things were going in the wrong direction in terms of the economy, the education system and the infrastructure. She also told us there had been challenging times for the family. The most important for them was their three daughters and their education, and that is why Jose had to work so much. Herself, she was using parts of her spare time to take university courses in law. Courses she had wanted to take for many years and now was finally taking. In two years she would get a degree and hopefully be able to get a better paid job.

It was another emotional moment to say good bye to Mirta. We were very happy we had managed to come to Salta and get to see the family again. They are all on Facebook and we now have good chances to stay more updated about each other during the next 15 years than we have for the last 15.

It´s amazing how the world has become one large chatting village in the last 15 years. When we were in South America last time, it was still during the epoch where you were expected to stay out of touch with friends and family when you were on vacation, and especially on a trip to a different continent.

I remember the irritation when my sister demanded that we had to call her once a week. She was very nervous about our safety and wanted to know that we were all right. For us it was a pain in the neck to have to do those weekly phone calls. We had to always  find a place where we could place an international phone call. Usually it meant having lots of coins and calling from a pay phone which swallowed the coins faster than a baby bird swallows worms.

At the end of our trip we stayed with a friend in Rio De Janeiro. We told him that I had to call my sister and gave him the context. He rolled his eyes and together we came up with the idea of pulling a little practical joke on my sister. He would make the call and pretend he was calling from the police and that we had been arrested. At the time it seemed like a very good idea.

What we didn´t know was the headlines that had been made in Norwegian papers about the recent flooding in Rio. When we arrived it had been raining cats and dogs and people mentioned it hadn´t rained that much in a long time, and that was it. It turned out that the rain had creatd a mud slide in one of the poor areas of Rio and had killed 9 people. This story was all over the Norwegian papers and my sister had been worried sick for 3 days that we might be among the casualties.

We found a pay phone. It was even a coinless one, where we could pay a guy after finishing the call. I could hear my sister answer on the other end, and I quickly realized that our Brazilian friend had a very good talent for acting. Instead of his normal perfect English he was speaking with a heavy Brazilian accent. He said “Hello, this is sergeant Paulo da Silva calling from the Copacabana police. We have arrested two tourists on the beach for selling drugs. They have given me this number to call to check their identity. Do you know them, do you trust them?” He was amazingly good and just went on and on while my sister more or less shouted in desperation that she wanted to talk to us. Once he had worn my sister out and said he would make an exception and let her have a few words with us he handed the phone to me. It was dawning on me that we might be going too far, but it hadn´t sunk in yet. I said “Hi sister” with the weakest most desperate voice I could make. She shouted very rapidly: “Eirik, how are you, what happened, what have you done, where are you, are you OK, what can i do?” I think the depth of the desperation in her voice made me realize it was time to tell her the truth. I said in a normal and happy voice: “We were just kidding, that was our Brazilian friend”. Short silence. Then, with a voice close to that of the witch in Snow White: “Eirik, don´t you ever do that to me again!” and then she hung up. We were a bit ashamed when we paid for the call and left. I thought about calling her back, but realized that wouldn´t have solved anything. It is still hard for my sister to talk about this incident.

We had dinner at a restaurant and I found the water pipes in the restrooms, and the way they had been fitted, rather interesting:

At least you have excellent access to the main tap. To flush you had to reach inside this cavity in the wall and pull a thin plastic lever upwards. You can see it if you look closely:

The restaurant was actually very good. 🙂

Our 3 days in Salta were over. Tomorrow we will fly to Iguassu and some of the world´s coolest water falls.

Eirik

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