She’s (Hydro) Electric

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Day 14 & 15-19th and 20th September

Well it’s Sunday in Foz do Iguacu and to our shock and surprise everything is closed! Living in London and coming from Rio de Janeiro, we’re used to being able to do something every day. Not in this town! The only things that are open are the restaurants, and while I would love to spend all my life eating, I would be a) very sick and b) very fat so it’s not really an option. However we did go to my new favourite restaurant, ‘Buffalo Branco Churrascaria’ basically an all you can eat BBQ. Holy fillet mignon it was good, you get your rice, salad, potatoes, veg etc from the buffet and then waiters walk around the tables with all different types of barbequed meat. I had chicken, chicken wrapped in bacon, beef, beef wrapped in bacon, sausages, steak and pork, oh and BBQ pineapple. I was like a kid in a candy store!! They also did fish for Ellory so he was happy; however I think I also made him laugh because I was so excited about all the delicious food. Anyone that ever goes to Foz I can not recommend this place enough, it’s brilliant! Having a vegetarian husband means I don’t normally eat much meat so I must have eaten more in those 2 hours than I had in the previous 6 months. I felt kinda ill afterwards but I don’t regret a thing!

So day 14 was an enforced ‘quiet day’. Now I don’t mind these days when we choose to have them, being made to have them is a completely different story! It rained as well. Ah well. So apart from eating myself silly at the BBQ, we spent the day reading, on the internet and snoozing, oh, and making plans for the next 2 days. First on our list for the next day was the Itaipu Dam on the border of Brazil and Paraguay.

So that brings us to Monday and our 2 week anniversary of being on the road. We are slowly getting more and more confident about using buses and wandered off to the local bus station (Terminal Urbano) to get the bus to Itaipu. There was a sign outside the bus station that made both of us chuckle. It’s a ‘risk of accident’ sign and it was so far over to the ‘extreme’ side of the scale we couldn’t decide to be scared or laugh! So we found the right bus to Itaipu and jumped on.

Now we’ve been mistaken for Brazilians quite a few times since we’ve been in Brazil, however this time we must have had huge ‘gringo’ signs stapled to our foreheads. The visitor entrance to the Itaipu dam isn’t very clear and it actually looks like you’re crossing the border into Paraguay! I obviously looked a bit worried because a nice guy pointed out to me that it’s where we should be getting off. With my best ‘obrigada’ and a relieved smile we both got off the bus and wandered over to the entrance. There are many different tours you can do at Itaipu and we decided to do the ‘Panoramic tour’ which gives you an overview of the dam and the ‘Biologica Reserva’ which is the National Park linked to all the wildlife that had to be moved when the dam was built. Once we bought the tickets we nipped off to the snack shop to get Ellory a sandwich before the tours began. Maybe we’re cynical Londoners, but we are still very surprised how cheap the food is in these attractions. One tuna sandwich later we went into the auditorium to watch a film about Itaipu before the tour. Now neither one of us knew much about the dam before, except the fact that it’s pretty freaking big and Discovery Channel have a documentary on it which I’m pretty sure I saw many years ago when I was a green TC. It generates the hydroelectric power for 90% of Paraguay and 25% of Brazil and took over 20 years from when they first started to build it until it reached its full power producing capacity in 2008. Only the 3 gorges dam in China which I think is still under construction has more capacity to produce so much electricity. Everything is divided equally between Brazil and Paraguay, for example they employ an exact 50/50 split of Brazil/Paraguay nationals to run the dam. It also explains why it provides so much of Paraguay’s power compared to Brazil. Paraguay has a population of 6 million compared to Brazil’s 120 million, so the same amount of electricity for each side goes a lot further in Paraguay!! The film took us through how they built the dam and how they managed the huge job of moving all the plants and animals that otherwise would have been drowned when they created the reservoir for the dam.

Once the film was finished we were put on a bus to take us to the dam itself. It’s not very pretty to look at but it’s hard not to be impressed by the sheer size of the thing. The guide explained how only the middle section of the dam is made of concrete as that’s where the greatest pressure from the water is. The left hand side is the spillway to deal with any heavy rainfall (apparently it only has to be opened about 10% of the year to release the excess water) and the right hand side of the dam is made of rocks and clay. The bus took us up onto the top of the dam on this side and we could look out over the huge reservoir on the other side. We also, to our surprise, saw capybara! We hoped we would see these famous rodents at some point on our travels but not on top of the Itaipu dam! They’re pretty sweet and we got some good pictures of them grazing away.
After this we hopped back on the bus back to the visitor centre, it was only a short overview of the dam but we both found it interesting and were glad that we’d made the effort to see it. We’ve promised each other that as we may only do this backpacking malarkey once, we’ll damn well make sure we see as much as we can!! After a quick snack it was time for our second tour to the Nature Reserve.

Biologica Reserva is not a normal nature reserve; it is a huge jungle, housing all the displaced animals from the flooding of the reservoir. It also has an area that looks after all the animals that are injured or for some reason can’t live in the wild, and that is where we went. Ellory is not a big fan of animals in captivity, can’t say I like it too much myself, but the enclosures were big and we have seen many more animals already this way than we would have done out in the jungle so we have to put up with it I guess... We ended up getting a private tour as we were the only English speakers there, and it was really nice, the guide was really friendly and he showed us a lot of the trees and plants as well, including the camphor tree, which is the main ingredient in Vicks (really smells like it too!) and we ate some local berries, which looked and tasted a lot like blackberries but we’re not sure that’s what they actually are! We saw a lot of animals including birds, monkeys, an anteater, an ocelot and a jaguar. All in all in was another interesting tour and when we left Itaipu to head back to the hostel we felt we’d learnt a lot.

It took us ages to catch a bus back to the bus station as they were all full! However we managed it and got back to the hostel just as it was getting dark. A guy we’d met the previous day, Mark, was sitting outside having drink so we decided to join him. What was meant to be a civilised drink turned into drunken carnage, as the owner of the hostel, Luis, had found out we were on our honeymoon and gave us free drinks! Dangerous. However it was lots of fun and as well as chatting to Mark and making plans to meet in Buenos Aires we met a lovely Dutch couple and a guy from Rio. We love this aspect of the backpacking lifestyle and we are meeting lots of great people. Eventually we remembered that we had to be up very early the next day as we were going on a tour to Paraguay and headed up to bed (at 2am!, whoops.)
Love from
Liz xxx

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