more Jesuits and more water
About a week ago we finally left Buenos Aires for the north of the country. It took us 12 hours by bus to get to the far north of Argentina, just below the Paraguayan border.
When we arrived early in the morning it immediatly felt tropical, very hot and very humid, so we really felt we had gone to a completely different area of South-America again.
The first couple of days we stayed in Posadas, the biggest city here, with about 300.000 people. It was a good place to spent the Easter days there, as in all of the smaller towns and villages all shops and restaurants are closed, when there is a Christian celabration. We had experienced this before when we spent Chrismas in a smaller city in Uruguay and couldn´t find anything to eat, as all of the restaurants and supermarkets were closed.
Posadas is a very lively city, with very good cheaper and more very chique restaurants (where we had dinner) a good and cheap hotel (where we stayed in) and a very new, fancy, long, trendy boulevard. This boulevard is very lively at night (but not at Easter night of course) and from there you have good view at Paraguay, just across the river. Since also the icecreams are much cheaper here in the north (as everything else), we had a very good time here.
Shortly after Easter we decided to go an hour further east and to spent a night in the little town San Ignacio which is famous for its Jesuit ruïns – one of the 30 villages the Jesuits had created in this area which they lived together with the local aboriginals, the Guaruani people.
This town seemed not only to be very famous for its (very impressive) ruïns, but it also is a very cosy place to stay, as it is located in the middle of the subtropical jungle. In fact, we liked this town and its subtropical envronment so much, that we ended up staying there three days and nights. In those three days we visisted the ruïns by day, by night (they are very nicely lit in the night), and we did a very nice kayaking tour.
This tour was just the two of us with a young guide (who had been everywhere around in the country) and it did not only include a couple of hours of kayaking along the Paraguayan border. This guy also took us tio an hour of safari-driving by jeep trough the jungle and another hour of hiking. A thing we learned from him was that the border between Argentina and Paraguay is marked by the deepest point in the river between these countries. The same principle is applied to the border with Chili, but there it is the highest point in the mountains that marks the border (we just published some of these border-pictures on our Flickr-webpage).
After the hiking-safari-kayaking we left San Ignacio the next day for a 5-hour bus ride to one of the major highlights of our trip, which, as are a lot of the things we have seen and done untill now, is something with water again; The Iquazu Falls.
These are the biggest waterfalls in the world, and according to many, also the most impressive. We agree.
Martine will tell some more about the Iquazu Falls, as she is the waterfall specialist between us…
Jannis.
Tags: Travel, Tag Index
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