The Pioneers Road on 4×4 vehicles

Highlights:

• Ancient Iguazu Falls trail
  Reach the Iguazu Falls following an old forest paththat was used many years ago when no paved roads existed.
• Iguazu Falls
  This show of Nature is considered one of the New 7 Natural Wonders of the World and depending on the amount of water in the river, there can be observed between 160 and 260 falls.
• Flora and Fauna of the rainforest
  Here you can learn about the peculiar sound made by the Tiger Ant when it gets angry, see the curious camouflage of the Hamadryas butterfly that makes it disappear from a tree bark, -if you are lucky, smell the characteristic smell left by a herd of peccaries in order to limit its territory and touch the softness of a thick layer of moss on tree bark.

Description:

This trail is closed to private vehicles due to safety reasons. Therefore we have the privilege of travel through it all in absolute solitude. The old “Forest Rangers Station” is still present among  the lianas, surrounded by citrus and banana trees. This station is a mute witness of a past surely filled with adventures that the forest is trying to throw a blanket of silence on. Right there        our 4×4 truck stops to start walking. A few steps ahead we see a wild old “Yerba Mate*” tree (its botanical name: Ilex paraguariensis) where the “Tiger” ant amazes us with its colossal size. We continue our tour to listen to the guide telling the curious development of the lianas and we see    why the “Tarzan” tale is a little bit exaggerated. Some miles ahead we will recognize, due to its color contrast with the characteristic red soil of the region, the “Ñahú”, a clay used by the native guaraní tribe to model jars. The tree ferns also speak about the past, but of a more distant one, the past when the dinosaurs walked the Earth. This trail also knows about woods and jangadas: immense rafts made of colossal trunks uprooted from the forest as the only means of taking this valuable fruit of the earth to the Port of Campana near Buenos Aires. It was more an epic than a journey. Hereafter “el abra del Vasco” (literally the “clearing of the Basque”), a wound that the forest is still trying to heal that reveals the times previous to the Park creation. It is hard to believe that this peaceful and quiet place once knew the coming and going of noisy oxcarts and the deaf hammering of the axes. Years went by and barely could we find traces of that past written by men who seemed to be fearless of the dangers of the forest. We continue the tour as we are closer and closer to our goal. Then, finally an old sign hidden in the thicket announces, as in the olden days, the proximity of the Iguazú Waterfalls as a reward of what surely was a long and dangerous journey.