Last updated: July 2026
My name is Gustavo Nicolás Ledesma, though everyone calls me Gus. I was born in Posadas, Misiones, on the Paraná River. I'm twenty-nine and a Pisces.
I write this site myself. It isn't a newsroom or an agency: it's one person who has been obsessed with airplanes and travel since he was a kid, and who ended up building the guide he wishes he'd had.
A fourth-grade teacher
I was in fourth grade when my school took us to the Jesuit missions of San Ignacio. For a kid from Posadas that's close by, an hour down the road, but it was the first time I had ever seen anything like it: enormous ruins of red stone in the middle of the Misiones forest.
On the way back from that trip I got talking with my fourth-grade teacher, Gladis. I told her two things: that I loved traveling and that I loved languages. The second one wasn't a pose — I had started English at eight, in third grade, so by fourth grade I was already in my second year at the language institute.
She told me she had a nephew who worked as a tour guide at Iguazú Falls. That he spoke English, that he earned good tips, and that the tips came in dollars and euros. And then she said the sentence that set the course of my whole life:
You should study tourism.
I was eight years old. I had no idea what studying tourism even meant: I didn't know there were different degrees, different diplomas, universities that taught it. But it stuck with me and never left. By seventh grade I had made up my mind.
The school it never even occurred to me I could attend
Around that time I learned that a private school in Posadas had a tourism track. And I did nothing with that information, because it never even crossed my mind that it could be an option.
It wasn't just about money. It was simply outside my way of thinking. I come from a humble neighborhood and a humble family: my whole family went to public school, my cousins went to public school, I was at my neighborhood's public school. A private school wasn't on the map of things that could happen to me. I didn't even rule it out: I never got as far as considering it.
Why I didn't want to study in my own neighborhood
When seventh grade came it was time to pick a high school for real, and I had exactly one condition: not in my neighborhood.
The reason was very concrete. Three times a week, on English days, I took the bus from my neighborhood to downtown Posadas to get to the institute. An hour each way, as a little kid. I wanted to walk out of school and get there on foot, a few blocks and done. The problem was that downtown had very few public high schools.
The mistake that set everything right
My aunt took charge of the search. She asked around, compared, and took me to enroll at C.E.P. No. 4, right downtown. I didn't even question it: it was the option there was.
There was no room.
So she walked two more blocks — it was right there, on the other side of the block — and enrolled me at Colegio Provincial Superior No. 1 Martín de Moussy, which everyone in Posadas simply calls el Nacional. She came home and told us: there were no places at the first one, so I signed you up at this other one.
El Nacional didn't have the best reputation in town. But some time later I found out something that still strikes me as too much of a coincidence: it was the only public school in Posadas with a tourism track.
Think it through with me. All of primary school talking about tourism. A teacher who plants the idea in my head at age eight. A private school with a tourism track I knew I couldn't attend. A downtown public school with no places left. And ending up, by elimination and by two blocks, at exactly the one public school that had the track I wanted.
If there had been one free seat at C.E.P. No. 4, my life would be a different one.
The years of studying too much
I kept up English until the institute's sixth year, which I finished while in my fourth year of high school. I could have gone on, but I decided to stop: in my fifth year of high school I signed up for Italian. It sounds like a minor detail and it isn't, because that habit is what later saved me in Brazil.
When I started university I didn't enroll in one degree: I enrolled in two, and kept the Italian going. I had the Bachelor's in Tourism Monday through Friday, Italian twice a week, and the Technical Degree in Political Science and Government Administration on Saturdays from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon, straight through.
That left Sunday for the technical degree's coursework, and during the week I couldn't fall a single day behind in tourism. Which is exactly what happened: I fell behind and lost my social life. I lasted one semester. In the second half of the year I dropped the technical degree, stretched Italian to November and dropped that too.
In third year I learned that the Tour Guide program, though a different thing, shared a pile of subjects and credited you several. I signed up and took both in parallel. This time it worked, and for a reason that has nothing to do with schedules: I had two friends taking it with me. We finished the entire first year of the guide program.
Of the bachelor's I completed the coursework of all four years, in full. What I didn't do was the thesis workshop, which is in the fifth.
The first job
In first year I also started working, and it was in tourism from day one. A friend, Facundo, had a hostel in Posadas and offered my friend Marcela and me jobs as receptionists. It was half volunteering — it paid something, not much — but it was our first work experience in our own field.
That hostel explains everything that came after. When a few months later I went to Brazil alone to knock on hostel doors, I wasn't making anything up: I was offering the only thing I knew how to do.
The summer I went to Brazil with a thousand pesos
At the end of first year I went to Brazil alone with a one-way ticket and a thousand pesos. I got fired from a hostel for looking at the sun, a stranger gave me fifty reais when I had no money for food, I crashed a motorbike into a pickup truck three days after arriving, and I came home speaking Portuguese.
How I work
I don't copy from other blogs. Every guide is built by reading the official source and citing it, and every figure that can change carries the date I verified it. When a source doesn't confirm something, I say so instead of making it up.
Where I've been, I tell it in the first person. Where I haven't, I don't invent the experience.
If you spot an outdated figure or something that changed, write to me at contacto@viajacongus.com. I read everything.