I read in a guidebook that long bus rides in South America, could include a delicious meal of the ham and cheese trio. It was hardly wrong. When we first got on the bus to Iguazu, a grueling 20 hours away from Montevideo, our tour guides handed out plastic wrapped packets with a crustless wheat ham and cheese, a crustless triangle of white bread, ham and cheese, and of course a dulce de leche filled alfajor. Alfajors are like two dense sugar cookies with a hefty blob of carmelly goo in the middle, and sometimes dipped in chocolate. The Little Debbie company should look it up. This was our merienda or snack. a couple hours later, we received a larger packet with a ham and cheese roll, a ham cheese and bread roll, a cube of cheese, some icy milanesa chunks, a sweet cracker thing with cheese, a huge dulce de leche roll, and a packet of mayonnaise. The next morning, after that greasy, unfitful bus sleep, we got yet another packet with a medialuna and cheese, a medialuna and ham, and drum roll…..a dulce de leche something.

After finishing the breakfast with a medicinal swallow of instant coffee, we visited the home of Horacio Quiroga, a very famous Uruguayan writer who wrote sordid short stories influenced by Poe. On of his most famous is titled, The Decapitated Chicken, to give you an idea. He lived in isolation in the jungle overlooking the Parana river, and his entire family committed suicide. Everything in the home was made by his hands. There is something attractive and intriguing about that kind of self sufficiency, but I couldn’t dwell on those thoughts too deeply, because I kept being interrupted by, “You’ve got something on your bottom.” The afternoon before, I’d sat on an alfajor while attempting to put a Planet Earth DVD in and nerdify the whole bus. By the next day, the dulce de leche had turned into a paste of dust, sugar, and seat fuzz that wasn’t going anywhere.

In the afternoon, we stopped at the San Ignacio Jesuit mission. The crumbling sandstone walls used to house 4,500 Guarani and the Jesuit priests. Eventually, church, border, and country feuds left the missions in desolation and they were finally reclaimed and restored in the early 20th century.