|
In Search of El Dorado
...And another feisty pescado in Argentina's Ibera Wetlands
good.
Originally Published in Outside Traveler December, 2004
© Steven Rinella
MARCELO CABRERA, MY GUIDE, couldn't
understand why I would come all the way to the Iberá wetlands, a
remote subtropical region of northern Argentina, just to catch a
piranha. Instead of chasing nasty little fish known for devouring
livestock, visitors to Iberá usually want to explore the
5,000-square-mile complex of swamps (roughly the size of Connecticut)
that brings to mind the Florida Everglades of a couple centuries ago;
they want to fly-fish for dorado, a large, golden-colored,
aristocratic fish known locally as the river tiger; they want to feel
the bizarre sensation of walking on the so-called floating land; and
they want to experience the stunning variety of wildlife, including
caimans, marsh deer, wolves, freshwater rays, huge snakes, monkeys and
big cats, 350 species of birds, and more types of fish than you could
order in a Tokyo sushi joint. I promised Marcelo that I would like to
do all that stuff, too, but I only had a couple of days—hardly enough
time to experience the full glory of this wilderness. It seemed to me
that since piranhas would reportedly eat anything living in the
wetlands, they were the distilled essence of the place. This reasoning
probably came across as a little shaky to Marcelo, but as we stood in
the skiff and sized each other up—two skinny guys in cutoff shorts—I
felt as though we reached a compromise of sorts. Marcelo made a vague
gesture with his hand, suggesting that we might look for a piranha
sometime later in the day.
The brevity of my stay was the fault of a common misconception about
Argentina: Like most people, when I thought of Argentina, I thought of
the Andes and the arid grasslands of the south. So I spent a couple of
weeks down in Patagonia, fishing for brown trout in a mountainous
region of streams and ski lodges similar to those near my home in
Montana. I worried that I'd developed a personality disorder that
inspires a person to travel extremely long distances to do the same
things he does at home.
My friend Jay Nichols, an old roommate with whom I was traveling, felt
the same way. Fortunately, we ran into an Argentinian named Martin
Kambourian, who was collecting trout-fishing footage for his TV show,
produced in Buenos Aires. Martin spent a day lazily recording Jay and
me toying with the local trout, which he viewed with all the
excitement of netting sardines, all the while telling tales of
adventure about the Iberá wetlands. He talked about giant dorado and
snapping caimans and frogs the size of our heads. He was insulted that
we'd come to Argentina and weren't planning to go there. He offered to
make some calls.
The next thing I knew we were flying north to Buenos Aires, where we
would board a bus for a nine-hour trip farther north. A guy from
Estancia El Dorado, Carlos Sanchez, would pick us up in the town of
Mercedes, one of the gateways to the Iberá wetlands.
Mercedes is a dingy town of squat concrete buildings and lush
courtyards. Carlos was waiting there, as promised. He looked to be in
his mid-thirties, and his clean white shirt contrasted with the muddy
pickup into which he tossed our bags. "My first business is selling
cows," he said, which I took as a sort of introduction. "My second
business is catching the dorado on the fly." It was then that I
realized we weren't heading to some posh dude ranch decorated to look
like a cattle operation.
When Carlos told us that his estancia was in Mercedes, he was speaking
in a roundabout way. We drove more than an hour on a dirt road covered
in knee-deep water for miles at a time. The Sanchez family has been
raising cattle on the Iberá wetlands since 1923, and Estancia El
Dorado is one of two ranch outposts they maintain in the backcountry.
The estancia is a collection of small white buildings on the edge of a
forest. The ranch's gauchos, South America's badass breed of cowboys,
live in neatly organized shacks next to the main house, which includes
the guest quarters. When we drove up, a freshly slaughtered lamb hung
from a post outside, and a knife was stuck into a nearby stump. A
large lagoon stretched away from the front yard. The Corrientes River,
which forms the backbone of the wetlands, flowed in the distance. I
could see the wakes of fish swimming in the lagoon, and some children
were chasing them with child-size harpoons. Jay and I threw our bags
into a small, clean room with two single beds, then ate a lunch of
lamb prepared by the estancia's chef. Moments later I was standing in
the bow of a 15-foot skiff explaining to Marcelo that, yes, I would
like to catch a piranha.
Jay and Carlos motored downstream in another skiff as Marcelo and I
motored up. I could see great distances from the boat, because the
banks of the river were barely high enough to contain the water. The
boat's wake rolled over the riverbanks like a spilled drink. We passed
birds perched on pieces of free-floating land, which illustrate one of
the defining features of Iberá: Much of the "land" in and around the
wetlands isn't land at all.
Huge, intertwined mats of floating water hyacinths capture organic
particles deposited by the wind and water, forming soils that permit
the growth of plants and trees. These have evolved into floating
coasts, called hydrophytic forests. Currents can break the forests
apart and set smaller pieces adrift. The tenuous nature of the land
itself helped protect the heart of the wetlands from European
settlement for hundreds of years, and in 1983 legal protection was
given with the formation of the Iberá Reserve by the government of the
province of Corrientes. A handful of lodges offer guided boat tours,
horseback riding, and birdwatching and fishing trips, but Iberá
remains a paradise for swamp rats who like their wetlands wild.
Marcelo killed the engine next to a deep pool, and I began casting out
a fly that looked like a wet hamster. On about my tenth cast, I felt a
powerful jolt. A dorado kicked up a large swirl of water, then
launched its torpedo-shaped body completely out of the water in a blur
of gold, red, and black. It shook its head about six times and landed
backside-down. To make sure its teeth didn't ribbon my fingers,
Marcelo popped it free with needle-nosed pliers when I got it to the
boat. (Dorado are catch-and-release in the Iberá wetlands.) The fish
weighed about eight pounds, but its compatriots in these parts can hit
up to 22 pounds. After I caught four more, my forearm was played out.
"Now," Marcelo said, "other fish." We quickly caught a few tarihira,
which look and fight like souped-up walleyes. We also caught some boga,
a shadlike fish that Marcelo tossed into the cooler for dinner. He
seemed to have forgotten about piranha, so I started whining again.
"If I don't get a piranha now," I explained, "it will never happen."
Jay and I would share a boat the next day, and I figured he would have
his own ideas about what we should do. (Actually, day two would
involve dorado, piranha, biting ants, a sunburn, vanishing frogs, and
a delicious piranha dinner, but how could I know?)
Marcelo motored upstream and then stopped near an ankle-deep marsh.
Hundreds of sabalo, which look like carp, were cruising for food in
the shallow water, their dorsal and tail fins sticking out above the
surface. A flock of herons came flying over, so low their long white
wings rippled the water. The sabalo herded ahead of the birds in a
great arc, like crumbs being blown off a table. As the fish poured
back into the river, something attacked them from beneath in an
eruption of splashing water. Wakes sped away, and bits of weeds
floated up to the surface amid swirls of muck. I pasted out a cast.
Things then happened in a confused way. I was hooked onto something
like an electric paint mixer, which turned out to be a two-pound
piranha. The fish was having trouble on both ends: I was reeling it
in, and a gang of other piranhas was attacking it from behind. I
yanked it into the boat and then noticed blood on my foot. I wiped the
top of my foot clean but couldn't find the cut. I checked the bottom.
Nothing. Then I looked at the piranha and realized where all the blood
was coming from: Its rear half had been eaten off. Marcelo gave me a
look that said, Well, there you have it. Then he cranked the boat back
to life and began puttering down the winding river path that would
lead us home.
|
