ARGENTINA: Welcome to Mesopotamia

In January 2015, Daniel Tunnard and his wife left Buenos Aires after 16 years to move to the small town of Concepción del Uruguay in Entre Ríos, Argentina, build a house and start a family. This is the story of everything that went wrong.

The Uruguay, the river that puts half the ‘potay’ in Mesopotamia and the Uruguay in Concepción del Uruguay (and, if you like, the ram in the ramma-damma-ding-dong) starts in Brazil where the Canoas joins the Pelotas (Balls!), descending via the three Argentine provinces of Misiones, Corrientes and Entre Ríos that make up what is known as Argentine Mesopotamia to the west, and Brazil and Uruguay to the east, as far as the port of Zárate in the province of Buenos Aires, where it joins the many fingers of the Paraná delta and becomes the Río de la Plata, then shortly after the Atlantic, for the Río de la Plata is too broad to last for long before people start suspecting it might be the sea. If you look at a map of the Uruguay, you’ll see that for much of its length there are various long, thin islands in the middle of the river, and it is here that decent Concepción folk go in their boats to get away from the tranquility of small town life and enter a vortex of intense tranquility.

Seventeen days after moving to Concepción I finally make it out onto the river. I was too busy to go earlier, which is kind of an illegal thing to say or think in Concepción, but since it’s the fourth day of a four-day weekend in which I’ve also worked three days, I feel my Anglican work ethic can take the morning off and kick back with these lazy Catholics.

We go to the Yacht Club (pronounced ‘Shat Cloo’), co-founded by Josefina’s grandfather, and the place where we got married, so every time I see the rounded, concertina-shaped side of the club my heart smiles a little. Very few people get married at the Yacht Club, partly because there are several custom-built reception type places out in the country, and partly because the Shat Cloo is a little grim inside and has dripping toilets, and it takes someone like Josefina with three months on her hands to hand-make all the decorations and make it look like something else, all of which makes it even more special as we don’t have to share our memories with other strange memory interlopers.

We pass the wharf named after Josefina’s dad and get into a speedboat named after, yeah, Josefina’s dad, the Papa Justino (his ashes lie in the river). We move slowly past the hundred something yachts and catamarans moored along the jetty until we get to the statue of Stella Maris, who I thought was Concepción’s patron saint but it turns out it’s the Immaculate Conception; my new adopted hometown is watched over by a magical sex act. We round old Stella at speed and head out on to the River Uruguay, a wide green expanse stretching a thousand metres across, all the way to Uruguay, in fact. (You can’t get out of your boat in Uruguay and sunbathe there, as a gaucho will come along on his horse and shoot you. Trust me on this one.) We reach Isla Cambacuá, one of those large islands you’ll see on your map of the River Uruguay, where we drop anchor and wade through the knee-depth, warm, clear water, deckchairs and bags held aloft, to the beach.

And it really is a beach, not some silted up effort with mud, grass, and pebbles, but a clean, sandy beach, as good as any you’ll find on the Argentine Atlantic (there are even people who will travel from the province of Buenos Aires to visit these beaches; this seems a little excessive.) A well-built, well-tanned man in sunglasses comes over on his quad bike and charges us $20 each for sitting on the beach and using the island’s sanitary facilities, which are clean and well-maintained, to the extent that the thought once briefly crossed our minds to get married here. It was a brief crossing. Then he goes off to tell the owners of the world’s friskiest Golden Retriever to put their dog on a leash. My mum would love it here. Well-tanned men and dogs under control.

Alcira, Cristina, and Graciela, the Golden Girls, the single sexagenarian socialites, sit in their bathing suits on their deckchairs in the sun and light up their fags, Alcira and Graciela Marlboro full strength, Cristina Pall Mall. Lung and skin cancer are of absolutely no concern to these people. I sit under the parasol and pour the mate. Although I’m more tanned than I’ve been for as long as I can remember, this is still very much your archetypal lorry driver tan, the product of much time spent wandering around in the midday sun while clothed, rather than sunbathing or doing heavy manual labour topless. Let the record state that I have never done heavy manual labour topless.

There is barely a soul on this enormous beach. No one comes out on the river in the morning, says Alcira, which is why they do. It’ll be swarming come 6pm. Cristina says no other river city has the beaches that Concepción has. Really? Nah, she says. Concordia has a shitty beach. Paraná and Rosario, forget about it. Posadas, no beach you can really speak of. Colón, OK, Colón has a couple of beaches that cut the mustard, but not as many as Concepción. Josefina says she can’t count Concepción beaches like Banco Pelay and Paso Vera, which are shit heaps and you can’t go in the water because it’s contaminated. Cristina tells her to wash her mouth out. This is typical of Josefina, dragging Concepción through the dirt and bigging up Colón, just because Colón has fancy restaurants and a more pro-active attitude towards tourism, whereas Concepción’s style of tourism promotion is very much ‘Come to Concepción. Or not. Whatever. Fuck off to Colón, we don’t care. Plenty of people will come whether we do our job or not. There aren’t even enough hotels anyway. In fact, we’ve changed our minds. Don’t come to Concepción. We’re full up.’ I’m quoting verbatim the Summer 2015 campaign here. Verbatim, mind.

Carnaval comes to Concepción, or rather, Concepción produces Carnaval from within itself. Don’t be picturing a lot of shifty-looking traveller folk pulling up on the outskirts of town in knackered lorries and putting up a big tent. Concepción either has one of the best carnavales in the country or tries to give off the impression that it does while knowing full well that it can’t compete with Gualeguaychú down the road. (I feel obliged to write Carnaval in Spanish, with an incongruous ‘a’ in the middle, because a carnival, in England at least, is quite the different affair, kids dressed according to an annual theme parading around the town on decorated floats collecting money for a good cause, with nary a glimpse of naked breast or buttock.)

My wife and I care little for Carnaval, and if Carnaval doesn’t come to us, we certainly don’t go to Carnaval, what with its loud music and happy dancing people. Imagine our delight, then, when the neighbourhood murga association (people in stupid hats doing stupid dances) closes off our street (we live at Juan Perón 678, which is a hilarious address if you know your Argentine political TV) on the Friday night and spends three hours pumping out sometimes pleasant uplifting Carnaval tunes of a Brazilian ilk and more often loud whatever you kids call the music you dance to these days, much of it sung by Pitbull and his longstanding collaborator, Autotune, accompanied by a DJ who talks too much and too often and too loudly into his microphone, of which all I can make out is mufflemufflemuffle mufflemufflemuffle ¡CONCEPCIÓN DEL URUGUAY! He repeats ¡CONCEPCIÓN DEL URUGUAY! considerably, giving us all a great sense of place. But I look down from my balcony and the streets are lined with old dears sitting on plastic chairs and somehow talking over the racket, kids running in between the chairs and the people and the candy floss sellers, a glowing sense of community, and if you glance up the street you can see the various murga troupes, little kids and young teens in their spangled leotards (girls) or carrying big drums (boys), and I really don’t mind it all that much for ten minutes, as I reminisce about car journeys with my mum when we’d listen to Paul Simon’s ‘Rhythm of the Saints’ and mime along to the drum solo in the middle of ‘The Obvious Child’ and go tack-a-tack-a-tack-a-tack BUM BUM! Good old mum. She’d probably love Carnaval, as long as they put Pitbull on a leash.

On the last day of Carnaval, I wonder if, for the purposes of whatever it is I’m writing here, I should go to the Corsódromo, the custom-built 100-metre strip of concrete (custom built in as much as they paved the area outside the disused-then-used-again railway station, put up some lights and called it El Multiuso) where the main Carnaval event is held, at which, and I’ve never been so you’ll forgive my prejudice but these things seldom vary, women in skimpy spangled leotards and men in similar attire advance slowly down the concrete, dancing to the sound of Pitbull, while a man with far more self-esteem than is ever socially necessary repeats the name of his home town quite a lot. We give that a miss (my wife is a local and thus entitled to treat the whole business with characteristic scorn, while I have to feign some token semblance of open-mindedness) and instead inaugurate what is probably Concepción del Uruguay’s first ever Pancake Day, the first in a long list of English traditions I intend to introduce to my adopted home town, reaching a jingoistic climax in late May, when I take the last Monday of the month off for Whitsuntide.

Daniel Tunnard’s first book ‘Colectivaizeishon, el ingles que tomó todos los colectivos de Buenos Aires’ is available from Buenos Aires bookshops and mercadolibre.com.ar and as an e-book from Amazon and megustaleer.com.ar.