Tundering waterfalls

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Puerto Iguazu and Iguazu National Park - 15th and 16th of June, 2009.

Our border crossing was painless (though we never got an exit stamp for Paraguay) and in less that thirty minutes, quickly detouring through Brazil, we were in Argentina.

With a world famous tourist attraction just down the road, Puerto Iguazu gets a lot of tourists and has all sorts of accommodation. But we, very blindly, didn´t notice any hostels when bus arrived at the terminal and wandered across the road to a hotel instead. We´ve stayed in a mixture of places on this trip, some good and some bad. Mostly I´ve tended not to notice whether somewhere was good or bad - I just like the sheets to be clean! In fact, soon after Fiona arrived in South America, we stayed in a place in Huancachino and she thought it was a pretty dire. I remember thinking ´Richard and I have stayed in worse´. And we´ve stayed in a lot worse and a lot better since. But nothing tops how good our hotel room in Puerto was. It was beautiful, modern, clean and massive. I think it could be described as a suite, though since I´ve never stayed in one of those I couldn´t be sure. In fact, we´ve often stayed in rooms which were smaller than our ensuite was in Puerto. At $40 it wasn´t cheap but I think we deserved to stay one nice place on this whole trip!

Our next day was spent exploring Iguazu Falls National Park. As the local bus drove along the road to Iguazu, I spotted a toucan and throughout the day we saw many other animals and birds. Even though the falls had slightly less water than usual, they really were amazing. I wanted to go on one of the boat trips to get nearer to the various falls but because of the water level in the river, the boat didn´t go any closer than some of the hikes did so we cancelled our trip. Instead we spent the day walking through jungle, complete with monkeys including a mother and her baby, through forests where coati were and hiking up and around a small island viewing the smaller waterfalls. Although we had seen it in the distance, we saved the best for last and finally made our way by train to the devil´s throat. While many of the waterfalls we had seen throughout the day were delicate, the devil´s throat was anything but. We could hear it long before we could see it and as we walked towards it, we could see the spray rising from it. It was spectacular - the noise was immense, the water pounded down towards the river which we couldn´t see and the spray downed us. Iguazu really has to be seen to be believed.

We returned to Puerto that evening, grabbed some food and quickly hopped on our fancy bus to Buenas Aires, complete with champagne. Buses in Argentina really are amazing!

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