So much falling water

We arrived in Iguazu Falls early the next morning and checked into our hostel (which conveniently was directly across the road from the bus station - lucky since the weight of my snowboard bag, travel pack and backpack were starting to take their toll!).

After eating breakfast (again, sweet sugared cornflakes, and toast with dulce de leche)....wait, let me digress......

Food observation - Argentines are huge meat eaters - apparently they eat 70 kg of beef a year (compared to the US who eat 40 kg per capita per annum). However they don't like spice. Their food is relatively bland (Scotty Maughan is going to love it) - no real chilli / heat or spice is added. When in restaurants, there is salt on the table but not even pepper. However what they lack in spice, they make up for in sweet!!! In BA, panaderias (bakeries) are on every street corner with a delectible array of sweet cakes and pastries. Breakfast consists of either fruit loops or sugared cornflakes, toast / croissants and jam or dulce de leche (dulce de leche is basically sweetened condensed milk) and SWEET, strong coffee. It's a novelty for the first couple of days, but I was quickly starting to crave vegemite.

Anyway, once we had dumped our bags and filled our bellies with sugar, we set off on one hell of an adventure....

Iguazu Falls are some of the most awe-inspiring waterfalls in the world. They are on the Argentinean / Brazilian border and you can view the falls from both sides - Brazil gives much better panoramic views, but in Argentina you can take boardwalks actually on top of the falls and get fantastic close-up experiences. It was a gorgeous sunny day so we decided to try and go to Brazil. “Try” because Australians need visas to enter Brazil. Visas which we didn't have. It was a bit of a last minute decision to come to Iguazau Falls - we were always planning to head straight up to Las Lenas. However they hadn't really had any snow, and the opening day had been pushed back a couple of weeks. Hence, we hadn't planned on getting a Brazilian visa. Some countries let you get visas at the border crossing, however from previous experience, we knew Brazil was pretty strict and the last time Ali was in Brazil, she had to arrange my visa well in advance. However we had read that if you wanted to visit the falls, you could try and talk you way through the border crossing by just saying you were visiting for one day. It sounded dodgy but we thought, why not try?!

So, we jumped on a local bus to the border, and got our passports stamped leaving Argentina. We travelled for about 5 min through no-mans land (I have never understood the bit of land between border crossings - surely one country must own it?) and I must admit, my heart was pumping.

We were the only gringos on this local bus, and in the end the whole affair was an anti-climax. Because it was a local bus and not a tourist bus, it got waived through without a second glance and we were in Brazil! Crazy.

A couple more bus changes were in order to actually get there, but once we arrived, words cannot describe Iguazu Falls (or Cataratas Iguassu as it's known in Brazil). Basically from the Brasilian side you just walk along a pathway winding along the side of a cliff for about 1.5kms. As you wind your way along each corner seems to give an even more breathtaking view of the falls opposite in Paraguay and Argentina. The result was that we spent about 30 minutes taking photos at the first corner just being blown away at how amazing the view was and then walked another 100m round the corner and realised that what we had been looking at were only some minor side waterfalls and that the real deal was about 100 times bigger and more impressive. I'm not even going to waste words on trying to describe it but suffice to say it was awe inspiring and we now have about 30,000 photos of waterfalls from various orientations.

Only other thing of note is that there are these cool coati animals running around everywhere, followed closely by hordes of tourists trying to photograph them...very amusing, but similar in some respects to Quokkas on Rotnest Island... the first one or two is a novelty, then you realise there are about 15million of them and they start to lose their lustre... still damned cute though!
Possibly the highlight of the day was a very impressive lunch looking out over the top of the main waterfalls, knocking back a couple of bottles of Argentine Malbec and watching large breasted Brasilian ladies chase Coati's away from the restaurant tables..

So with the Brasilian side of the falls out of the way the next day we headed to the Argentine side. This side involved a lot more walking and a hell of a lot more getting wet.. its pretty cool to be stqanding on a platform literally hanging over the edge of the largest volume of falling water on the planet, while just next to you are the twisted wreckage of a previous platform that got ripped out in a recent flood event..

Once again muchos photos ensued and by around 2pm we were pretty much waterfalled out... which was lucky cause we had to race back to town and grab our bags for another 20hr bus ride to Cordoba.

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