March 9, 2019 – March 11, 2019

Iberá Provincial Reserve is a little visited, remote area located in the Argentinian province of Corrientes. The reserve is a mixture of swamps, bogs, lakes and lagoons, and, of course, the associated wildlife, and is about 13,000 square kilometres in size. We headed to the small town of Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, where we camped for the night before hiring a small panga to take us out into the waters of the reserve for a safari, Argentina style.

The first 40 or so kilometres of the road into Pellegrini was paved, and then the road turned to red sand, clay and gravel with a local reputation for slicing tire sidewalls if you get in ruts or it gets muddy. We were not sure what to expect, as we had read that the road was at times very challenging to drive there had been a lot of rain fortunately the last few days were fairly dry, we were lucky to find it mostly dry and in fair shape.

Having pulled to the side of the road for a “call of nature”, Derek looked down to see some very curious foot prints….we quickly determined that we were looking at the imprints left behind by a capybara, an animal native to South America and the largest rodent in the world.

As we drove further north, the fields started to become wetter, and we started seeing a lot of big white egrets and other water birds. Then we spotted our first capybaras!

We arrived to a beautiful campground, one of the nicest we have seen in Argentina, with clean bathrooms and showers and a little gazebo at each site with tables and a bbq grilling area….and with a resident family of capybara that hung around the camp all day. (Piper was not sure what to think of these large, strange animals) We made arrangements to go out in a boat the following morning, with a guide, to see what we could see.

I had read two different accounts of people visiting this region and seeing anaconda. The first was from someone who had done the boat tour and saw a 3 metre long yellow anaconda. The second was a blog post from a young British couple, who, while walking along the road just outside of town, spotted an anaconda in the ditch. I have an unreasonable fear of snakes…even small harmless garter snakes freak me out, and yet, I strangely hoped we would get to see one of these huge snakes at some point in our tour. Our guide assured us that they were there, but that they were very difficult to see. I wasn’t sure if this was good or bad news, both wanting to see one, and at the same time, not wanting to see one….from a healthy distance it would be cool, but meeting one on a midnight trip to the bathrooms, not so cool.

The anaconda proved to be just as elusive as our guide had said, and we packed up camp to continue north, having seen many wonderful creatures, but no big snake. As we continued on the dirt roads, we came across a young, local man, hitchhiking….there was very little traffic on this road and we decided that we would give the guy a lift. After several minutes of rearranging the truck in order to make space, we continued on with Mattias on board. We chatted with him, as best we could, his Spanish being very fast and difficult for us to understand. (In Argentina, words are pronounced differently than in the other countries we have visited. For example, the sentence “Como te llamas?”, which means, “What is your name?”, for most of the rest of South America has been pronounced “Co-mo tay ya-mas?” In Argentina they say “Co-mosh tay sha-mas”.)

Mattias worked for the forestry industry, where large groves of coniferous tress, planted in extremely straight lines, were tapped to collect the resin…we were not sure exactly what the resin was used for, and after asking Mattias three times to repeat his response to our question, we gave up trying to understand.

I told Mattias about my fear of snakes but of also how I had kind of hoped to see one, and asked if he ever saw anacondas. He said that he saw them all the time when he was in the country side. It was odd to me, as I had always thought anacondas living in the deep jungles of the amazon basin, not of them living along side ranchers and forestry workers.

Thirty or so kilometres later, we dropped Mattias off at an intersection in the middle of no where, no houses or other buildings in sight. I presume he was continuing on down the side road that crossed our path. Did he travel this long distance every day to go to work, and did he always have to rely on hitching a ride?

We had told Mattias that we had driven here from Canada. “Ahhh, Can-a-DA“, he said, which is the response we get almost every time we tell people here where we are from, they, strongly emphasizing the last syllable of our country’s name. We then told him we had been driving for more than 16 months, and had gone over 50,000 kilometres….to which he just nodded. We told him that we had driven all through Mexico, Central America, and several countries in South America. “Ah…”, he said, like we had just told him that we drove to the grocery store that day. Usually we get a bit more of a response when we tell people about our trip. Did he not appreciate the magnitude of our trip? Or was it completely uninteresting to him? Or, was our Spanish maybe as difficult for him to understand as his was for us? We don’t know, but we do imagine him reaching home and telling his family about getting a ride from the “gringos” in the big green truck from Can-a-DA.