Iquazu

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Iquazu

Things are going pretty well here. They had Thursday and Friday off here for Easter and while I wanted very much to see what an Easter Mass would be like here, we ended up celebrating the resurrection of Christ by watching a Jean Claude Van Damme movie on a bus on the way back from Iquazu Falls. Iquazu is directly on the border of Argentina and Brazil, and while it may not be the most beautiful place that I have ever been (Grand Canyon and Leon Lanes are both pretty awe-inspiring) it is hard to imagine anything really toping Iquazu. There are probably 40 to 50 different waterfalls, some of which are cute and petite like Natalie Portman and some of which are massive and incredibly powerful like Winston Churchill. (we will try to send pictures either today or tomorrow.)

There is a lower falls where we were able to take this high power raft right up next to some of the smaller waterfalls and be absolutely surrounded by the water spray. Imagine going on the log ride at Adventure Land while on drugs, it is a little like that. (While we were on the boat I considered making a break for it and swimming the extra ten feet over to Brazil, just so I could say that I could tell you all that I had swam to Brazil this weekend, but I chickened out.)

While the lower falls are pretty unbelievable though it is the upper falls that really give Niagra a run for its money. The upper falls are called “the devils throat” and in order to get there you have to get on this sort of catwalk that stretches for maybe a kilometer or two over these tranquil rivers and streams and it leads you right up to this raging series of ginormous waterfalls. But before you get there if you go on a busy weekend like we did, you have to wait in line for about an hour. Unfortunatly there was a lot of people who were sort of cutting in front of people whenever they had the chance. At the end of the wait when we were like 20 feet away from being able take pictures and look directly down at the falls, me and the Argentine father with the grumpy kid behind me simaltaneously decided to declared war on the people who were trying to cut in line. I would start it off by trying to guilt people into going back in line, by saying in broken spanish “we wait, we all wait. but you, you can not wait?” and if that wouldn’t work the dad would try to scare the crap out of them by shouting POR FAVOR, POR FAVOR!!! and some other things that I didn’t understand. We sort of had an international good cop bad cop thing going on and I have to say we were getting pretty good at it, at the end of the wait I think we both had an expression on our face which made it clear that we were almost daring people to try and cut in front of us. We got ourselves so fired up that when we actually got to where we wanted to be I had to calm myself down and remember that we were there to enjoy this awe inspiring natural phenomenon, which of course it was.

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