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Published: October 21st 2011
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The very posh fast ferry from Colonia gets us back to Buenos Aires in time for lunch. We spend the afternoon stocking up on various supplies before our strike out into the Argentine provinces. We grab a quick but delicious dinner of Mexican
tacos (real ones, not Old El Paso...) in Palermo before hopping on the
Subte, Buenos Aires' answer to the Underground, to Retiro bus station.
Retiro makes Victoria Coach Station look like a village bus stop. In a country as large as Argentina, and where flying is out of reach of most people, bus travel is
the way to get from A to B - even when B is very, very far from A, as often is the case here...It's a massive three-storey structure with dozens of bays lined up the middle floor, with buses going pretty much everywhere you can think of, including some rather far flung places. Rio de Janeiro, for instance, is well over 2,500km away but there is a bus going there. Ticket offices line the top floor, dozens of companies covering every possible route and every possible destination. We are heading a measly 700km away to the city of Mercedes in Corrientes Province,
which occupies the southern half of the large finger of Argentina wedged between Brazil and Paraguay.
Bus travel in Argentina is a serious affair indeed. Given the length of the journeys involved (Mercedes is but 9 hours away, but some cities in Southern Argentina might be 24 or more hours away) quite a lot of effort goes into making them tolerable, or even comfortable. It's all down to the class of seat you book. At the bottom of the pile, as the name elegantly suggests is
común - certainly not to be considered, and indeed not even offered, for journeys of more than a few hours. Next up is
semi-cama (or 'half-bed'😉 which is pretty much an airline-type economy seat which reclines a bit but not really than much.
Ejecutivo comes next, reclining nearly all the way with a leg rest as an added bonus. The crème de la crème of bus travel, however, is
cama, where the seat flattens out to a horizontal bed, no less. To me, the thought of dozens of people supine on beds in a bus, hurtling down the highway, seems outlandish and more than a little alarming, but here it's pretty much standard
fare for the really long-distance trips down to Patagonia and the like. Many buses are equipped with personal entertainment systems, just like in long-haul aircraft, and bus-hostesses pass by with drinks and meals at regular intervals. It all sounds very civilised (although this comfort does come at a price - an ejecutivo service from Buenos Aires to Rio Gallegos in Patagonia will set you back about 130 pounds, which I suppose doesn't seem too crazy for a 38-hour journey).
We've opted for an ejecutivo bus to Mercedes, since our journey is overnight and a few hours' sleep would be helpful...The bags are carefully tagged and stored in the hold before we climb up to the top deck and get settled down. The seat does indeed recline
very far back - lovely. With pillow and a blanket the stage is set for a nice sleep while we smoothly glide up the motorway to Mercedes. Or that was the plan, anyway. There is no motorway to Mercedes, you see, and the most direct route is not asphalt all the way, or even most of it. We seem to spend most of the night on rutted tracks, going over inexplicable speed humps
in the middle of nowhere, and making an awful lot of sharp turns. Let's just say I've had better nights' sleep - here's hoping that future journeys (for there will be many) are a little better.
Still, we arrive in Mercedes bright and early the following morning having had a least a couple of hours' sleep - or at least a couple of hours of crazy dreams. Mercedes, we discover, is a bit of a
gaucho town where not much happens, and everything that
does happen concerns cattle. Here is a town where men walk about dressed as cowboys because they
are actually cowboys. It's really quite fascinating to watch people go by as we wait in the bus station for our onward ride. It isn't long before we're approached by a nice man who offers us a couple of seats in his 4x4 to a small town some 120 kilometres northeast of here, Colonia Pellegrini. This is the main settlement in the Iberá Wetlands, a sprawling area of lagoons and swamps second only to Brazil's might Pantanal in size. Supposedly home to a huge variety of animal life, Iberá also happens to be on the way to Iguazú,
so a visit seems very much called for.
The road north from Mercedes is yellow dust all the way - there's one bus per day and it takes about 4 hours, crawling on the rutted road through the heat. The 4x4 quickly shows itself to be a very worthwhile luxury. The man drops us outside our little
hospedaje - we quite clearly look like death warmed up as our host, a wonderful lady called Mabel, immediately insists on cooking us lunch. And lo!, there were vegetables. We've been a bit short of green things on our plates these past few days, and the sight of salad leaves quickly has us in raptures. Cabbage! Tomatoes! Praise be!
The highlight of our brief stay to Iberá - a native Guaraní word meaning 'Shining Water'😉 - is a two-hour trip in a small
lancha out on the Iberá Lagoon, a shallow, large body of water surrounded by huge expanses of boggy wetland. An absolute paradise for wildlife-watching. We are treated to fantastic, close-up looks at capybaras (
carpinchos in Spanish, the world's largest rodents and looking like guinea-pigs on steroids), caimans or
yacaré lying on banks with their mouths open in the
heat or floating in the water trying (with considerable success) to look like inconspicious logs, deer, and hundreds upon hundreds of birds. The diversity of animal (and indeed plant) life in this part of the world is truly stunning. A fabulous place to spend a day.
Getting out of Iberá is not so easy. Iguazú is north, but the road out of Colonia Pellegrini is tough (and completely impassable if it's rained) without any public transport of any kid at all. Cars can be chartered to do the trip up to Posadas, the next big town, but are prohibitively expensive - the only alternative is to return to Mercedes (two hours) and catch two more buses (two hours plus six hours) to Posadas. Yuck.
A wonderful stroke of luck, however, saw us share our boat trip on the Lagoon with a group of local school students on a field trip with their teachers. As the conversation turns to our trip and what on Earth we're doing in this far-flung part of Argentina, they make us an offer we can't refuse: to share their tiny minibus a rattle up the dirt road to their town, Santo Tome, which is
only a couple of hours away from Posadas. At a stroke we've saved at least five hours, and probably much more. The price we pay is to arrive in Posadas coated head to toe in a thick layer of yellow dust. With at least 15 people crowded in to the tiny bus (my seat being a plastic ice-chest) the windows have to be left open all the way, leaving clouds of fine dust to stream into the van for three solid hours. We looked a sorry sight indeed.
There a few showers I've enjoyed more than the one which awaited us in Posadas!
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Tamsin
non-member comment
yay!
Unsurprisingly I particularly liked this blog entry! The wetlands look gorgeous - totally amazing. Capybaras and caymens- brill. Thanks LOTS for the lovely brom pic too. Following your adventures closely. loads of love Tx