Searching for Piranhas in Argentina

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Outside Traveler 2004

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In Search of El Dorado
...And another feisty pescado in Argentina's Ibera Wetlands

By Steven Rinella


	(Illustration by Jason Holley)

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.

ACCESS + RESOURCES

CLICK HERE to find out how to get to Argentina's Iberá Wetlands.

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.

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Correspondent Steven Rinella wrote about shark hunting in July 2001.

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