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Other entries in Carlos Pellegrini

Ibera Wetlands

Since we woke at 3:30am to get an crappy old truck-bus conversion thing I decided to simply paste in Anne{s last email.

The last few days we have been in Carlos Pellegrini which a small town, pop. around 800 or so which is inside Reserve del Ibera. It is an awsome wetland further along the Parana River with an abundance of
waterbirds, capybara (large wombat looking creatures with longer legs and a lust for wetland vegetation), howler monkeys, deer, cayman (small(ish) crocodiles) and lots more animals. In only one boat trip around one of the lakes in the wetland we saw most of the animals I´ve just mentioned and we continued to see more, especially birds for the rest of the three days we spent there. It is a beautiful landscape of flat land covered in either long or short grasses that stretch to the horizon and are either punctuated with palm tree stands or small hardy trees that are very old but quite small mostly and have very twisted and gnarled trunks and branches.

We also managaed to squeeze in a couple of horse rides and I even
managed to stay on my horse when it got up to a canter on a couple of
occasions. The first time I had no idea what was coming next and thought I must have hit a secret eject button and I spent the next couple of seconds screaming applicably. The gaucho (Argentinian) cowboy who was taking us for the ride and the others in the group including Luke found this pretty hilarious and laughed, applicably! Second & third time weren´t so bad when I had an incling of what was about to happen.

The highlight of our trip was catching up with a friend of another good friend of ours who owns and manages a lodge in the park. We couldn´t afford to stay in her lodge but we did go on a tour with her to visit a family who live on one of the farms inside the park (most of the land in the park is privately owned and is farming land, which is pretty different to what we think of as reserve, but it seems that having the reserve does help preserve the environment somewhat, mostly through hunting restrictions but land use is still an issue). This visit to the family was amazing. We spent most of our time talking, drinking mate tea (a strong tea made of a local plant that is shared with visitors before any business is discussed and is sucked through a metal straw with an inbuilt strainer at the bottom end to stop the heaps of dried vegetation in the cup from being eaten. Each person finishes the hot water they have been poured and then passes it back to the host who then refills and passes it to the next person. Crikey I´m not sure what you´ll think if you haven´t actually seen this but hopefully if you have it will make sense to you at least. Anyway, we had a great time in this extremely
remote home that can only be reached by foot or horse and really gave us a chance to appreciate the sun, the earth, taking time to pause and a very different culture.

Well, that is a sample of life for Luke and Anne right now. We have
also spent quite a bit of our time on busses, some less truck-like than others and in towns eating lots and of course sampling other local brews and of course torturing very understanding locals with our attempts at Spanish. I can feel a few more lessons in the air!

Photos / videos of "Ibera Wetlands":