Ruins and Wetlands!

Hi everyone, I'm back!  So, in April I got to take a trip to Utah to be present for my brother's college graduation!  It was great to see family (I had 5 cousins and cousin-in-laws graduate too, and between their parents and my aunts and uncles already in UT, I got to see so many relatives!).  It was also great to stomp around my old stomping grounds with my parents, see my sister's apartment, and especially to watch my brother graduate knowing how hard he's worked! 

Misiones and Esteros de Ibera

Well, this blog entry is to tell you a little about a less-well-known Argentina destination: the wetlands. (Check out the link to our pictures above).
We combined the trip with a little hop over the Paraguayan border to see 2 abandoned Jesuit missions.  If you've ever seen the movie The Mission, this was it!  The Jesuits built several missions in this area (Posadas, Argentina and Encarnacion, Paraguay) in the 1700's.  They taught the gospel to the locals, but the locals taught them too.  On the walls of the ruins, you can see a fascinating mixture of indigenous and Catholic motifs (our guides called it "mestizo" art).  In the 1760's, the Jesuits were expelled from this area.  The Spanish and Portuguese governments perceived them as a political threat (and felt they were harboring the natives, who they wanted to enslave).  The papacy also apparently thought that they were getting too sympathetic with the natives.  Now all that is left are the beautiful churches and homes built to teach and shelter the Guarani natives (and a province of Argentina called "Misiones").

We then headed southeast to Corrientes province to see the second largest wetlands in the world, the esteros de ibera.  Incredible.  We went on two boat rides through the wetlands and one "night walk."  We saw howler monkey parents and baby, armadillos, capybaras (which are much bigger than you would think, and they BARK!), some kind of large chinchilla, caimanes (smaller than alligators), 20 baby caimanes with their mom, a black, white, and red stork (that eats baby caimanes, though we didn't catch him in action), egrets, herons, chajas (really loud, scruffy grey birds), kingfishers, hawks, vultures, swallows, butterflies, lightning bugs, cardinals, woodpeckers, marsh deer, smaller deer, bats, and.......lots more animals I can't remember.

A couple trip highlights (besides the incredible safari-ing):

The Paraguayan border official took awhile trying to figure out our passports and visas (don't get a lot of gringos there), but when he finally did and stamped our passports, he gave us a thumbs up!  Then, 2 hours later as we were leaving Paraguay, he ran around to the other side of the street to tell the exit immigration official what to do, and gave another thumbs up!

Quotes from our taxi driver that took us to Paraguay:  "Brazilians retire at 40 and don't give their money to their kids; they buy Harleys."

"Oooooh, Paraguay."  when the signs to the ruins weren't there anymore.

"The reason they make their food spicy in Mexico is because they're poor, and your body stops wanting food after eating something spicy."  (They don't really like spicy food here, and we didn't try to convince him that Mexicans can eat A LOT of spicy food without a problem, and so can we :)