Week Nine: Visit to Tigre

On Monday November 1st, Emily (other volunteer) and I got to travel to Tigre a city about one hour North of the city and we had quit an adventure!  Tigre is a delta region full of mazes of lush green islands separated by rivers and streams.  The area has an interesting feel to it.  To me, it felt like a mixture between the Florida everglades and a tropical jungle.  It has become a place where many Buenos Aires citizens escape to during the summer.  We took the train and then got tickets to take a boat to one of the many little islands.  We ended up going to the island of Tres Bocas.

So basically we had no idea where we were going when we got to the Island.  When we got off the boat a nice lady was standing there and she handed us a map of the island with a trail that circled the island.  She made it sound like it was a small trail that would not take a long time to complete.  Emily and I decided that we would walk around this path and then return to the city center.  Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into as you will see.

Old ships we passed on our boat trip to Tres Bocas

Man was the water brown!

The start of the path on the island, not many people were around.

We found this cute chapel and decided to eat our bag lunches on its porch

Saw lots of little streams like this one

This is the type of boat we traveled on

Example of one of the nice summer homes on the island that we passed on our path.

This is where the path started to get interesting.  We saw that the path turned into a nature trail of sorts and we were excited to see some nature.

This part of the trail was really like a hike, which we were not expecting.  And we could tell that not many people had been on it.  It was difficult to know what way to go because there were no trail markers.  At one point we had to cross one of the little water ways without a bridge! I found some trees we could use to cross!  Man was it fun!  Here is a picture of one of the many little man-made bridges we used on the trail.

View from the trail

View from the trail

The trail :)

So after feeling lost in the woods for a while, we found our way back to the residential area.  The map was really difficult to follow and we really had no idea how to get back to the boat dock.  We had also at this point been walking for 2 hours straight (a lot longer than we thought the trail would be haha).  We continued walking and many of the locals tried to give us directions and one local told us to keep going straight and not cross the bridge.  We ended up walking for another 1/2 hour before the pathway stopped altogether.  A man there told us that we should have crossed at the bridge...so we walked back and crossed the bridge finding the boat dock just around the corner of trees.

After our long but fun day at Tigre we decided to make empanadas

They turned out well (maybe a little dry but now we know) for our first try!

Overall it was a fun day and man did we sleep well that night!