Our first Argentinian experience was a truly authentic one - horse riding on a ranch! The ranch was set in beautiful countryside a little way out of a small town called El Dorado. We were fed empanadas (small pastries with different fillings) before we sat down to a wonderful lunch of Argentinian beef cooked on an indoor barbecue with salad followed by desert and coffee. We were all feeling sorry for the horses at that point as we ate quite a lot! We spent the afternoon trekking through some of the 600 hectares belonging to the ranch, some open fields, some woodland. The family farm Hereford cattle for beef and have pine plantations for producing wood for local timber yards. We could have stayed there for days it was so beautiful and peaceful. As if we hadn´t eaten enough, afternoon tea awaited us when we returned to the ranch! Most of us were a little saddle sore the next day.

We headed south that evening to San Ignacio. There are Jesuit ruins in this town that are now a protected world heritage site and we spent the next day looking around them. They are quite impressive now so they would have been even more so in their day. We head into Uruguay on an overnight bus tonight.