I am experimenting with making this webpage easier to download. Images are mostly reduced to 1920pixels long axis and I am using 70% jpg compression to further reduce the size. I will also split the trip into a few pages so that the pages are faster to load. I discovered than while aboard the ship, looking any many of our webpages was very slow – despite the Starlink aboard. Loading is fast at home, but apparently not in many places around the world.

Map of our driving route

Rationale for our route

The rationale for this route is roughly as follows. We had never been to the province of Misiones, in the far northeast of the country. This is part of the “Mata Atlantica”, a floristic region that is distinct from the Amazonian biome and yet separate from the moist forests along the Andean foothills that we had visited multiple times in the past. The Mata Atlantica extends along the coast from extreme northeast Brazil, eventually becoming broader and extending inland to eastern Paraguay and extreme northeastern Argentina. The best preserved forests of the Mata Atlantica in Argentina were in Misiones, and much of the surrounding Paraguayan and Brazilian forests have been deforested over the past 40 years.

While the best remaining tracts of forest lie near the Iguazu Falls area in Argentina and Brazil, driving there would have added several hundred extra miles and it wasn’t clear that the additional costs and access would have been better. We decided to visit the forest reserves just beyond the town of Soberbio, along the Brazilian border instead.

Deciding to visit Misiones also allowed us to visit the Parque Nacional los Palmares, a place we had visited some 30 years earlier. Our experience then was in winter – it was cold and the road being dirt was not really suitable for our vehicle. In recent years on international travels we have usually opted for 4-wheel drive vehicles with substantial cargo space. these are substantially more expensive, but we travel with much equipment and the high clearance and 4×4 capability with low range – though rarely needed, gives us peace of mind in pulling off the road, or crossing shallow streams or muddy stretches. With low-clearance vehicles you have to turn around (can be a very long detour) or risk getting stuck.

The main drawback to our plan tio visit Misiones was that it forced us to drive across the trans-Chaco highway. The Chaco is a flat, relatively uninteresting landscape with short trees and now with lots of agricultural development. Not very exciting 400 mile drive. And we discovered, the road conditions were as bad as we remembered from many years earlier. Frequent potholes, fractured roads (where concrete) and undulating, truck -beaten, surfaces where it was asphalt. Traffic was not heavy, but the entire route required careful driving to avoid potholes and bad pavement stretches. The entire trans-Chaco highway is one lane in each direction, with few dedicated passing lanes. Not great for slow trucks and fast cars.

We had hoped the drive back across the Chaco from Cordoba to Buenos Aires was going to be much better – it was 2 lanes each way and looked OK on Google Street view. Unfortunately, maintenance has decreased during the past two years due to national austerity measures and many segments of this 400 mile drive were in questionable condition. We discovered this situation in some respects was similar to that seen on major highways in Germany. There trucks much stay to a 80 or 90km/hr speed limit while other vehicles can go 130 km/hr (probably more in Germany). Thus, the right lane has lots of slow trucks (80km/hr is about 50 mph) and the fast lane has cars wanting to go the speed limit of 130 km/hr (about 80 mph). Now add the factor that the right lane was nearly always in worse condition (due to the heavy trucks) than the left lane. So we tried to stay in the fast lane as often as possible – all the while looking in the rear-view mirror to see if very fast cars were approaching (since we were driving near 100km/hr). So our drive on this freeway was a near constant back-and-forth changing lanes to minimize the pummeling of the bad right lane. Hardly a relaxed freeway drive. Ah, forgot to mention that this wasn’t strictly a freeway for much of it – it was a toll road – but the tolls were very low – usually 1-2 dollars for long stretches. Clearly not enough to maintain the highways (and in fact we almost never saw roads being repaved in our nearly 4000 miles of driving).

This map shows our route compared with all of Argentina:

A few photos

At one of our last stops for the night we were able to get very close to Burrowing Owls in a community park, One photo is shown below. This is the same species as found in North America.

Some butterflies we saw along roadside “licks” along the dirt road leaving Ecoportal de Piedra. Road was good for wildlife viewing because it was lightly traveled and recent rain had reduced dust on plants and from vehicles. Normally I (Mike) don’t have patience for chasing buterflies to photograph them, but most of these were on rocks on the road cuts and were obviously attracted to seeps that had something they liked. There were dozens to hundreds in some areas. I used a 300mm lens for most photos, that is relatively close-focusing (to about 4 ft) since most butterflies are skittish.

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