Today we leave Paraguay and go back to Argentina. The original plan had been to stay a night in
Posadas across the river, but the fact that it is booked out for Carnival (the
final night of which is tonight) and the fact that there doesn’t appear to be
much there has changed our plans. We
were going to Posadas to be a base for a visit to more Jesuit ruins, but now we
are going to go to a little town call San Ignacio, and hour north of Posadas,
where the Jesuit ruins actually are. The
best part of his plan is it gains us a day to use in Brazil.
The journey across the border is one of the strangest I’ve ever done. It is done by bus, but unlike other international buses we have booked which need passport details for booking, this is a local bus. And not only that, but it has a frequency greater than the DLR service that used to run outside my apartment in London. As we walk up to the main square from our hotel we see one going past, we missed by a minute or so, but then we only have to wait another minute for the next one. When we get to the Paraguayan border as we are the only people with passports, the locals all having ID cards, we have to get off to get them stamped. Our bus pulls off without us, but another is along in a few minutes to pick us up and continue across a very cool bridge to the Argentinean border, where again we have to get off, and wait for the next bus, which is actually there as we get out of customs.
Three buses to get us across the border, and then we end up in Posadas bus terminal. After a bit of organisation we sort out our tickets for the next two days, and we are off for the one hour trip up the road to San Ignacio. When we get there we discover that in the lunch time heat it is a small sleepy town, with nothing open for lunch, so all we can do is check into our hostel, and get ready to go see the ruins when it cools off a bit.
However before it does the heavens open and we get a downpour of biblical proportions which lasts for three hours. This has two effects, first it traps us in our hostel, and secondly when we do get out at 6pm, we find it is too dark to take photos of the ruins, and it is too wet for them to put on the sound and light show in the evening. This is a bit disappointing, so we go for a pizza in a nice place across the road, and this turns out to be one of the best pizzas I’ve had again. I think most of my top 5 pizzas ever have been on this trip.
The journey across the border is one of the strangest I’ve ever done. It is done by bus, but unlike other international buses we have booked which need passport details for booking, this is a local bus. And not only that, but it has a frequency greater than the DLR service that used to run outside my apartment in London. As we walk up to the main square from our hotel we see one going past, we missed by a minute or so, but then we only have to wait another minute for the next one. When we get to the Paraguayan border as we are the only people with passports, the locals all having ID cards, we have to get off to get them stamped. Our bus pulls off without us, but another is along in a few minutes to pick us up and continue across a very cool bridge to the Argentinean border, where again we have to get off, and wait for the next bus, which is actually there as we get out of customs.
Three buses to get us across the border, and then we end up in Posadas bus terminal. After a bit of organisation we sort out our tickets for the next two days, and we are off for the one hour trip up the road to San Ignacio. When we get there we discover that in the lunch time heat it is a small sleepy town, with nothing open for lunch, so all we can do is check into our hostel, and get ready to go see the ruins when it cools off a bit.
However before it does the heavens open and we get a downpour of biblical proportions which lasts for three hours. This has two effects, first it traps us in our hostel, and secondly when we do get out at 6pm, we find it is too dark to take photos of the ruins, and it is too wet for them to put on the sound and light show in the evening. This is a bit disappointing, so we go for a pizza in a nice place across the road, and this turns out to be one of the best pizzas I’ve had again. I think most of my top 5 pizzas ever have been on this trip.
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