The Esteros del Iberá or Iberá Wetlands are a national reserve in the north-east of Argentina. They cover about 16,000 square kilometers. That´s about one quarter the area of Ireland, but most of the Argentinians we met have never heard of the place. It´s a big country and hard to get around.
To get there we had to fly to the little town of Posadas, and then drive for five hours over mostly dirt roads in a 4WD to the much littler town of Carlos Pellegrini, where 500 people live in the center of the reserve. A man from C.P. swore that the roads are left unsealed in order to deter visitors, particularly hunters. Ecotourism isn´t supposed to be easy.
Summer and I spent two days in Iberá, touring the marshes in a motorboat. The water is no more than six or seven feet deep and everywhere there are dense mats made up of aquatic plants, knitted together. Animals as big as deer graze on them, swimming gracefully from one to the next. In some places wind-blown soil has been trapped between the plants and the result is an island dense enough to bear the weight of a person. It looks like land, but wobbles underfoot like a trampoline.
The main attractions are the birds; 300 different species live in this little reserve. (There are about 800 species of birds living in the whole of the United States.) We saw dozens: herons, storks, humming-birds, kingfishers, vultures, cormorants, woodpeckers, cardinals, woodrails, southern screamers. All stayed a little too far away for a poor photographer like me. Less wary of us were the black caimans and the capybaras, the world´s largest rodents. The one above looked as if he weighed about 40 kilos.
And then there were the spiders.
In the reeds along the water´s edge we often saw great nests of spiders, hundreds of young wrapped in a sac of web. In other places, larger, adolescent spiders had built a web several feet wide, so that each had a few square inches of space. Teenagers always want their own room.
On the second day Summer spotted a pampas deer, a stag, six points for those who like to shoot them. Our guide Marco gunned the engine and took the boat right into the reeds for a closer look, but the stag bolted when we ran aground.
I turned around to look at Summer and she said simply "you are covered in spiders."
I looked down. We had run into one of the larger webs. My coat and hands were coated in web, and there were spiders everywhere. Strung out along their lines of silk, the bright red patches on their black abdomens blinking into view as they span around, they looked like Christmas lights, scary little Christmas lights that crawl off your tree.
For a moment I thought about jumping off the boat. But I knew that the spiders were not dangerous, while the dark marsh water was cold and home to black caimans, yellow anacondas, and several species of piranha, so instead I began to brush the webs off my coat. About fifty spiders fell into the bottom of the boat and started marching towards Summer.
Summer loves animals. Really. She has swum with sharks; she adores bats; she once owned a pet rat; she can even tolerate snakes. But she cannot bear spiders. To her credit, she stayed calm while I spent the next fifteen minutes bailing spiders out of the boat. (Marco was too busy driving and laughing.) Every time I thought I was done another one popped up, bearing down on Summer.
I quite like spiders. Had she been standing at the front of the boat, this would have been much less funny.
