March 5, 2019 – March 9, 2019

The distance between real tourist attractions on the east cost of Argentina are large. We try to visit an interesting destination each day, but sometimes the distances are too great. We then, at least, try to find a nice spot to camp for the evening.

We headed towards San Antonio de Areco, an authentic gaucho village just a one hour drive west of Buenos Aires. We had read that you might see a gaucho, dressed in traditional clothes, riding his horse down the middle of the street, and that this was not done just for tourists, it was how the ranchers here still lived….a bit like when you see an authentic cowboy in Black Diamond, Alberta.

We camped for the night just out of town, then headed in the next day to walk around. We had a coffee and then walked some more.. In Argentina, most businesses close down for siesta in the afternoon…they usually close at 1pm and then reopen anywhere from 3 to 5 pm, so we could window shop, but other than that there was not much to do and the streets were pretty empty. We headed back to our truck. We had hoped to go for a nice dinner in town, but it was early in the day, really hot, and restaurants here do not typically open until 8 or 9 o’clock in the evening. What were we going to do for the rest of the day? We decided that we would pass on the nice restaurant and we jumped into the truck, turned on the air conditioner and drove on.

Our next camp was at the end of a long, sandy road along the Rio Paraná, the second longest river in South America at 4,880 kilometres…only the Amazon River is longer. The camp was a popular fishing camp and was a bit run down with a fair bit of garbage around, but we had driven for several hours that day and didn’t have time to really find anywhere else, so we set up. The area had been receiving abnormal amounts of rain lately, so the already huge river was swollen and there was a lot of water in the camping area. It rained overnight, and in the morning when we awoke we were pleased that we had not parked in a lower area of the campground where a small pond had formed near our truck.

We kept driving, spending a night in the parking lot of a gas station outside of the town of Mercedes, which turned out to be a really nice spot for the night. They had grilling stations, water, electricity and decent bathrooms, showers, wifi, a flock of parrots….and the cost: zero!

We were making our way towards Iberá Provincial Reserve…an area we had not known about until one to two weeks prior when researching things to do on the way to Iguazú Falls. We were excited by what we had read about the wetland reserve…potential sightings of capybara, caiman, exotic birds, and maybe even anaconda awaited us in this wetland reserve in a remote area of this huge country called Argentina.