We woke up to a perfect morning with blue sky but only 12 degrees – quite a change from 32 degrees the previous days. 😂

We made our breakfast and used the cereal with a kangaroo on it which we had bought in Brazil for the first time and the milk that says Tirol on it 😂. Check out was at 10:00am and we rode to the Jesuit ruins in town – a guy waved us over and showed us where to park and then charged us the municipal parking fee and told us that we can voluntarily pay him some extra. Then a little girl showed up begging for money and Andrew said we don’t have any – then she asked for food and we gave her our last biscuits. We then had to walk around the block to the entrance, pay for our ticket and then entered the grounds. There was a museum and then the large area of ruins of a Jesuit mission founded in 1610 and abandoned after the suppression of the society of Jesuits in 1768. The mission was destroyed in 1817 by the Luso-Brasilien and then the jungle took over. The ruins were discovered in 1897 but not restored until 1940. In 1984 the ruins were declared a world heritage site by UNESCO.

We walked around the enormous area and returned to our bikes after midday. We tipped the parking attendant and continued on Ruta 12. At the beginning we were on a divided road with two lanes for a little while and we passed two toll booths but did not have to pay and rode through the narrow lane on the right side which is for motorcycles. The vegetation changed to less of tropical forest to large pine and eucalyptus plantations, then to farmland and then to vast wetlands with lots of birds and standing water.

We stopped at a YPF petrol station in Ituzaingó where we fuelled up and had a late lunch. We met a Brazilian guy named Bruno riding on a Honda 500 who spoke Spanish and English and we had lunch together and took pictures with the YPF attendants as well and exchanged WhatsApp details. We only had another 70km to travel to our hotel right on the river Paraná in Itá Ibaté.

After we arrived, we got changed and walked down to the beach. We passed a Croatian coffee shop that was closed. On the beach, we enjoyed the sunset and watched boats return from fishing on the river. In the distance, the heat haze made it look like the trees were hovering above the surface of the water. On the way back, we stopped at a grocery store and bought some pastries that reminded me of the Austrian Schaumrollen that my Mum likes but they were filled with dulce de leche (caramel). We returned to our hotel room, worked on blogs and had dinner at the hotel restaurant at 8:00pm. We ate Pacú (Piaractus mesopotamicus) which is a local freshwater fish related to piranhas. It has white fatty meat without bones and does not taste muddy as the fish feeds on nuts, seeds and berries it catches. The owner of the restaurant wanted to practise her English and talked to us all evening. She told us how shocked they had been about Brazilian drivers on one of their holidays to Brazil 😂