We enjoyed the lavish breakfast this morning and checked out by 10:30am and were on the road before 11:00am.

We had 245km to ride and it was going to be a hot day with heavy rain forecast for over night starting from 7:00pm. We hoped to have a good run and arrive at the hostel in San Ignacio before the rain.

We rode through sections of the Iguazu National Park and followed Ruta 12 all day. Another single lane road but with lots of sections with a slow lane to allow passing of slow trucks. We were only on the road for about 30 minutes when we saw traffic ahead of us completely stopped – no traffic was coming the other way and we assumed we were stopped due to an accident similar to what we had encountered on our way to Concepción. We passed a long queue of cars and trucks on the oncoming traffic lane until we reached the front of the queue – there were two police motorcycles parked and the road was blocked by locals who were having a protest about not having power provided to their village – we were stopped in an area without shade it was noon and about 31 degrees with 99% humidity – tropical sweltering weather – every so often the protesters let a car through from the other side. This was quite ridiculous and there were lots of police arriving who did nothing – there were lots of negotiations and some angry confrontations and then a priest arrived and negotiated – we approached a woman protester and asked if we could go through and she said a lot of things we did not understand but she did say in an hour we could go through. There were 3 other local motorcyclists who were also waiting with us. We asked the police if we could go and they just shook their head and said we have to wait. A woman and her daughter had walked up and said this is common and could last all day 😳 we told her that we had far to travel and had a hotel booked – she did not like our chances of making it – then there was some clapping, some hugging, more negotiations and eventually one of the police motorcycles rode up and told us to follow him. They cleared the blockade on our side of the road and we got a motorcycle escort past all the waiting cars in the opposite direction and then were waved passed the police motorcycle- never a boring day on the roads here in South America 😂-we decided to continue riding to stay ahead of all the piled up traffic behind us – we stopped briefly for petrol after 140km and continued on without a rest break to stay ahead of the storm and the traffic. We stopped one more time to fuel up and had a short break to rehydrate. A guy waited outside near our bikes and gave us his sticker and badge and we gave him our sticker and we had a short chat – so good to be back in a Spanish speaking country 😉👍

We continued to San Ignacio and found our hotel – the very friendly host Eduardo showed us to our undercover parking spot and showed us the room (he upgraded us from the hostel to the hotel) and the kitchen and eating area. He also told us about the ruins of a Jesuit mission and a light show which would be on at 8:00 pm in the evening.

We cooled down in the room and got changed and walked to the place where the ruins are and the light show was supposed to be on but it was all dark and we did not know where to buy tickets and we were hungry – so we decided to go eat pizza and then find where we could buy tickets for the light show.

We had just sat down when the thunder and rain started. We finished our pizza and ordered dessert hoping that the rain would pass or get lighter for us to walk the 6 blocks back to our hotel without getting drenched – we had our rain coats with us but the rain and wind were so heavy that we would have been saturated wet after just walking one block. We asked the lady of the pizza shop if she could call us a taxi and she asked us to wait. She then got her son to drive us home in his brand new blue Ute – what a great service and the son told us about the bad corruption in the country and that they don’t have anything like long service leave.

Our host Eduardo welcomed us back and was sorry that the light show was cancelled and we thanked him for being able to have the motorbikes parked under cover. We worked on the blogs for a while and dried our clothes in the air conditioned room over night.