Since I began writing for guidebooks in the late 1980s, I
have focused on the area known as the Southern Cone for its shape on the map of
South America. It includes Argentina,
Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, parts
of Brazil and the Falkland
Islands, but I’ve always retained an interest in the rest of the continent and
other parts of the Americas. Though my experience in the Caribbean is limited
to Trinidad, I
have traveled in every South American country except Venezuela, and in every
Central American except Belize
(which unfortunately refused my Argentine wife entry for lack of a visa) and Panama (though I have changed
planes there en route to South America).
In the course of my professional life, I’ve worked mostly
with print media, and I still feel most comfortable with traditional
guidebooks. That said, I’ve produced my own apps to Argentina and Chile (please
refer to the ads in the sidebar) and, in the course of maintaining my interests
in the rest of the region, I’ve tried to keep up with other developments in the
field. Today I’ll bring one of those to your attention.
Fish Amazon
Nearly four decades ago, I first visited the Amazon Basin on
a backpack trip through Ecuador,
when I rode a dugout canoe down the Río Napo. Since then I’ve been briefly to
the Brazilian Amazon, but do not fancy myself an expert on the area, nor am I a
fisherman (though fly-fishing is important in the lakes district of Argentine
and Chilean Patagonia, and a few other areas in those countries), but I do eat
fish.
Once, in response to charges that he was not a musician, a
rock critic asked rhetorically whether “You gotta play guitar to know how to
buy records?” While I may not be a fisherman, I like to eat fish and, for that
reason, I enjoyed looking through Larry Larsen’s Fish
Amazon (link goes to iTunes; also available in Android
version), since his knowledge of natural history seems to match his love of
fishing. From my point of view, I also found it useful because many of the same
fish species inhabit the River Plate drainage,
where they can be found on the grills of restaurants along the Paraná and Uruguay rivers in
Argentina and Uruguay.
According to Larsen, in an email he sent me recently, “The peacock bass (tucunare) are very small in
the Paraná but the suribim (“shovelnose catfish,” pictured above, photo under Creative
Commons license) and piranha are very large (30 pounds and much more, and four
to five pounds, respectively). Payara, jacunda, trieda, red-tail catfish, pacú (“pigfish”) and the others are in there in relatively large sizes as well.” I
don’t know all of these species by their Portuguese common names, but I am
familiar with the surubí (as it’s called in Spanish) and pacú.
Not so long ago, the Buenos Aires restaurant
Jangada specialized in grilled river fish but, unfortunately, it has closed.
Close to my apartment in Palermo, though, diners can still sample pacú and
occasional other options at Nemo, which serves
mostly seafood. Visitors to the city of Santa Fe, however,
will find a much wider selection at El
Quincho de Chiquito, which specializes in products of the Paraná.
While I don’t fish myself, two locations along the Paraná
come highly recommended for those who wish to test its sediment-laden waters.
One of those is Paso
de la Patria, about 35 km east of the provincial capital of Corrientes, and the other is
Goya, about 220 km
south of Corrientes.
