I woke up at around 2am one morning, stirred by the sudden silence of the fans in our room and the sweat running profusely off my body.
Flicking on the light revealed the problem immediately. The bulb emitted a dull yellow glow, just enough to illuminate the immediate wall around it that it was resting against. We were in the middle of a serious brown-out (see note).
After enjoying some wonderful holidays down the southern part of Argentina, it was a big shock to return to Corrientes and discover how incredibly hot it was. The days were approaching 40 degrees Celcius and humidity was close to 100%. It was asphixiatingly hot, and the nights provided little relief.
Each night, to get any reasonable sleep, we needed our fans pointed directly at us on full speed. Even this was hardly sufficient to keep away the sweat, but it worked just enough. That was, until we lost electricity. Now the idea of sleep was almost impossible.
Chris went out to sleep in his hammock, willing to face the barrage of mosquitoes for somewhere cooler. Pedro decided that it was cooler to sleep on the roof (photo). I stayed up for a while, unplugging anything that could fry, and chatting with everyone else that was also up too. It was was virtually the entire staff.
Eventually sleep seemed more important than sweat, and so I climbed back into bed and counted falling beads of sweat until I drifted off to sleep. Another hot night. Life in Corrientes.
NOTE: A
BROWN-OUT, for those not in the know, is like a black-out except there is a little bit of electricity still flowing. What this means is that anything still plugged into the power can actually fry and melt and die very rapidly. The reasons for this I will not venture into right here, but needless to say that we all quickly unplugged our struggling fans.