Again, sorry for the lack of an update yesterday; I’ll blame it on the fact that we were had to cross two borders and took a bus from Ciudad del Este to Encarnacion for most of the day, and I just didn’t feel like writing by the end of it.
In fact, I think I can do most of yesterday in the form of bullet points. Here’s how it went:
* Woke up, packed, and checked out of the hotel by ten;
* Did a bit of shopping in Puerto Iguazu before heading to the bus terminal;
* Got on bus to take us back to Paraguay, which was full so we had to stand;
* Bus smelled strongly of onions and one of the passengers kept whistling the Argentine national soccer team’s fight song;
* Brazilian border patrol guard was EXTREMELY interested in a large package in the luggage area near where Em and I were standing and cut it open, only to find packages of cookies inside;
*Arrived back in Paraguay and our bus drove off while we were getting our passports stamped;
* Hired a taxi to take us the rest of the way to the terminal and bought tickets to Encarnacion;
* Spent five plus hours on the bus listening to iPod, staring at soybeans and cows, and playing peek-a-boo with the baby in front of me;
* Arrived in Encarnacion, found hostel, ordered a pizza (v. traditional Paraguayan fare), watched the Joss Whedon version of Much Ado About Nothing on Em’s computer, and crashed.*
Today, we took a day trip out to the Jesuit ruins a little to the north of the city. We hired a taxi for the day, which meant that we didn’t get on a single bus all day, which is kind of magical.
The city of Encarnacion is on the rio Parana– which I’m pretty sure feeds into the rio de la Plata– making it one of the oldest cities in this region, because the river is broad and navigable and good for trade. Because of the relative ease of traveling up the river, the earliest Jesuit missions began being constructed in Paraguay in the early to middle seventeenth century. We visited two of them today, one in the village of Trinidad, and one in the village of Jesus.
Emily doing an impression of an enthusiastic pillar.
Jesus is the larger structure, but to my mind, Trinidad was more interesting. While most of the structures have collapsed, the outer walls and arched doorways remain on several of the buildings– including the dormitory areas for the indigenous people the Jesuits were attempting to convert, the church itself, the school building, and a few other out buildings. The ruins stand on the top of a hill, and with the wind blowing through the trees it was easy to see why the priests would have chosen that location– especially if one tried to add dense jungle to the deforested hills, and imagine the baking heat of a Paraguayan summer. Of course you’d build where you could feel the wind on your face. And the fact that it was the high posing and visible for a long way off couldn’t hurt either.
View through a doorway at the ruins in Trinidad.
Ruins are odd things, if you’re interested in history. There’s something beautiful about the decayed and broken down bones of old buildings– I think that the visible effects of weather and neglect make it easier for me to see the way time passes over a place. I mean, I can look at the ruins at Jesus and see that the sacistry is unfinished, which makes sense: by the middle of the eighteenth century when the construction of the church was abandoned, Spain was already pretty much broke and losing colonies the way the Braves lose playoff games, and there was also some drama with the Hapsburgs which made things complicated and expensive, which meant that the mission to bring God to the natives (leaving aside the whole bit about how indigenous people had their own beliefs which deserved more respect and consideration than they were granted) had to go on the back burner.** And then there was Napoleon in Spain, and Buenas Aires did its we’re just going to act like we’re independent now, okay? thing, and there were the Provincias Unidas del rio de la Plata, and then San Martin and Bolivar and full independence, and then Paraguay tried to fight a war against Argentina AND Brazil AND Uruguay because they wanted a coastline and something like eighty percent of their young male population died, and then, really, who had time or the money or the heart to finish a massive church in the middle of a jungle? And so things fell apart, and time passed, and people took the stones from the priests’ dormitory to build their houses, because they were there and the priests weren’t.
Decorative niche.
It is, of course, extremely cool to be able to visit old sites that have been meticulously preserved through the years– Notre Dame, maybe, or the Catedral Gotica in Barcelona are good examples– because it reminds us of the ties that bind us to the past. That there are things that stay the same. That people, at heart, are essentially the same as we were hundred or thousands of years ago. But I think I like ruins better, because they tell me that things can– and do– change.
Remnants of the mission.
__
* It was good, but I still like the 1990s version with Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson better, even if it does have Keanu Reeves. Thompson’s Beatrice is flawless.
** There was always drama with the Hapsburgs. The Hapsburgs existed to make European history slightly less boring to people like me, I think. This particular drama was over the Austrian succession, or at least the stuff that led up to the Seven Years’ War.
A History of Adventure 