Last year, Ed had promised me that for my birthday in November he would take me to see the Iguazu Falls which I had never seen and heard so much of. Despite the fact that it was my birthday month and that I had never seen Iguazu Falls, Ed and I couldn't wait to get away together once again. After our successful experience travelling to Punta del Este, we knew this following trip would be even better. This time around, the warm weather had settled in already and was welcoming us to the north of our country.
Misiones borders with Paraguay and Brazil, making it not only a triple frontier, but
also a richly cultured spot. Already when you're arriving to the northern tip of Misiones, you can sense something different about the place, the people, the attitudes, the languages. Most road signs and billboards begin to slowly change from Spanish to Spanish, English and Portugese as you moved further up north, making you realize you where entering an international tourist zone....and so the excitement began.
Before we actually reached Puerto Iguazu on the northern tip of the province, Ed and I endured a 12 hour bus ride from Buenos Aires to Misiones. We got to Posadas, the capital city of the province, which to us, coming from the big city of Buenos Aires seemed like a quiet rural town. We asked around for directions and eventually got to the hotel where we were supposed to pick up our rented car. Once the car arrived, we were pleasantly surprised when we were told they had given us a free upgrade on the car, so we paid the same price for a much better car. We had arrived less than 2 hours ago and already things were looking up.
Our plan was to drive from Posadas all the way to Puerto Iguazu which was a 6 hour drive if you didn't make any stops on the way, but we wanted to stop at every spot that was worth it. So the nice car rental people were nice enough to give us a tourist map (the ones with cute pictures of landmarks and tourist attractions along the roads) and explain to us what was worth seeing and what wasn't. A few minutes later, after all papers were signed and the credit card already put in use, we started our short road trip.
Misiones gets its name from the Jesuit missions that were built between the 17th and
18th centuries in these red lands. These were built together with Spanish priests from the Jesuit order (of San Ignacio de Loyola) and the local Guaraní aborigines to, of course, help civilize and evangelize the native people. So as you can already imagine, the province of Misiones holds the ruins to these missions, which unfortunately aren't as intact as they probably should be considering their relatively short antiquity. Turns out these missions were under attack alot by Brasilians which wanted the Guarani native peoples as slaves, and by Portuguese and Spanish authorities who finally put a stop to the Jesuit Christianization purpose in these lands. As has been seen throughout history, it always seemed preferable to dominate the weaker as opposed to giving them the tools to grow.
So on our way to Puerto Iguazu, we stopped at the 3 main reductions of the Jesuit
missions, all half eaten by the Misionic jungle. This of course made for a breath-taking sight. When we got to the fist set of ruins, Santa Ana, we were greeted by a nice tour guide who gave us a brief historical background and walked us around the museum where there were artifacts found by the Italian archeologists who had started the digs not too long ago, such as tools, pots, glass, etc. After the quick tour she left us to go explore the grounds. And by "grounds" she meant entering the thick forest where the vestiges of this strange relationship between Guaraníes and Jesuits were. I prayed we didn't get lost in there.....
The concern quickly disappeared as soon as I climbed the short set of original brick
steps which led to the opening in the forest where the ruins lay. It was amazing. The more you walked, the more loose man-made stones you began to notice along the way, and you started wandering what they were doing there and what could lay underneath. The tour guide had mentioned that this specific mission had been left as found, it hadn't been reconstructed as the other bigger mission we were to visit later that day. So as we slowly walked around, our imaginations couldn't help but soar: we began story-telling each other what this and that probably had been and why it ended up where it was.
The ground was soft and damp from a big storm the day before, but fortunately for us the sun was now shining strong and bright upon the old stones where the buildings once stood. To think this was once the beginning of the colonization of South America. We were walking on "sacred ground", if you will, remembering how only a few centuries ago we had gone from THAT to THIS. How, as all over America, the indigenous people were being taught how their gods were no longer valid, their way of dressing (practically nude)was unacceptable, their language was incomplete and their customs to be inferior.
The second set of ruins, Our Lady of Loreto, was only a 30 minute car drive away, and since the entrance ticket was good for all three main sites, we decided to stop there aswell. Only the person who was in charge of keeping the tickets safe (me) had somehow lost them in the forest...and we didn't realize this till we got to the second mission. Ed tried to convince the gatekeeper to sympathize with our poor fortune, but we ended up having to pay the entrance fee again....well I had to pay for them as punishment.
Again, the dense forest had eaten away at most of the ruins, and that was some sight to see. Everywhere we looked there were lizards, small and big, basking in the sun upon some hot missionary stone. I found it was fun to make a loud sudden noise and watch how they all scurried along away from sight. There were hundreds, so I was careful where I was stepping or sitting. We also noticed how some trees had actually grown into the stones or, in some cases, into part of walls and murals. The roots were all intertwined with the large bricks and boulders that were once part of an important buildings. The tour guide explained that these were special trees that grew anywhere, not necessarily on the ground, but on other trees, on walls or rocks. Ed found this fascinating and wanted to take pictures of every root. We came upon a pillar that, as the guide explained, was almost all eaten up by a tree. There was a small circular hole where you could put your hand in through the bark and touch the pillar. He said that every year the tree engulfed the pillar more and more, but prying the thick roots away would mean destroying the old historical pillar. So as beautiful and strange a sight as it was to see these trees becoming one with the ruins, it was also shifting and destroying what little was left. I became convinced as I further walked into the forest that it is better for nature to take over it's reign of these grounds than man.
The third and most important missionary site, San Ignacio, inscribed on the UNESCO's
World Heritage list, was reconstructed so obviously there much more to see physically, and less to leave up to the imagination. I must agree with a previous tour guide when she mentioned that San Ignacio was beautiful, but did not have the mysterious natural charm as the other two ruins. What I did appreciate the most was the reconstructed art work such as stone engravings on the site.
When we got there we were lucky enough to tag along with a tour group so as to catch all the important explanations. Certainly this mission was more important in size and grandeur than the other two. It had a large church with some of its original stone flooring, a huge courtyard where the town meetings were held with a nice sun clock in its center, a school, gardens, and of course the different types of residences for the people living there. Altogether, since this site was all the more tourist, I didn't get that strange feeling I had gotten in the other ruins, where I was walking on history, virtually untouched, where nature was claiming back its lands.
We left San Ignacio well into the afternoon. We still had a long drive ahead to Puerto Iguazu and still had lots to see. We certainly did not have the time, since it was already getting dark and we wanted to sleep that night in Puerto Iguazu itself.
Nevertheless, we made one more stop at a camping site where there were river rapids
running through it. There was one peculiarity to these rapids: the water was red. This was due to the fact that ALL soil in Misiones is a rich ferrous color due to the high concentration of iron it contains. I also found it's also very very hard to remove it from your clothes and shoes. My hiking shoes are still tainted red with Misiones dirt. The water churning the red soil in the river made an interesting sight. We wandered about the camping site for a while and after finding not much else to do expect take a few pictures, we started our way back. It was already getting dark.
We jumped in the car and started making our way to Iguazu as planned. As the light in the sky started fading, I'm glad we were on that highway at that moment, because we caught the most impressive sunset I had seen ever. We had to stop twice to take pictures because the display of different hues and tints shifted dramatically as the minutes passed. Witnessing natures´ polycromasia in all it's glory is no small circumstance, even if you think you've seen them all.
As the colors started fading into the deep black of the Misiones night, we raced as fast we could through the road to Puerto Iguazu. It had been a long day, we were tired, hungry, dirty, and all we wanted was a clean bed where we could cuddle together for a good night's sleep. The 12 hour-bus ride of the night before was definitely catching up with us.
In the car, I had promised Ed I would stay awake so as to keep him company while he was driving, as we were both really sleepy, but alas, I fell asleep more than once, and was ferociously woken up by the sound of: "What the....YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE MY CO-PILOT!!". After a few laughs, I continued to feel really sorry for Ed who was driving just as tired as I was, but I dozed off again. Thankfully, when we thought we weren't going to make it, we finally made it to Puerto Iguazu at around 10pm. We drove around for another couple of hours looking for a hotel, until we finally found a decently priced hostel with pool and all. Without much thinking about it, we booked our room for three nights and moved in. Tomorrow was going to be an amazing day....and it was.
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