Blogs from Foz do Iguaçu, Paraná, Brazil, South America - page 20

Second Stop: Iguazu Falls, Brazil. Highlights: Stayed at a 4 star resort and learned a valuable lesson: Never book tours through your hotel in South America! They sold us on some insanely expensive package that included a personal driver/escort...I felt like a senior citizen. If you´re imagining us being in some remote part of Brazil and hiking through deep forest, stop right there. They had a nice ticket station, trails, uniformed men in jeeps and even a tour train to take us up to the falls. I thought I was at Disneyland. Took an awesome boat tour up the river channel against the current to view the falls and even got under parts of the falls. Awesome! ... read more

Next stop was Iguazu Falls, which started with another full day of traveling. Foz do Iguacu is a really cool small town in southern Brazil on the boarder of Argentina and Paraguay. Like Cusco, it is another really touristy city and another place where we had only budgeted a couple days. However, this worked out since two days of viewing the falls was more than enough. It was recommended that you view the falls from both the Argentina and Brazil sides. In all, there are more than 275 waterfalls and some of the larger ones are up to 270 ft high. The first day we viewed the Argentina side which was cool because you get right up next to many of the falls and you also get a great view from the top of the largest ... read more

Hugh wanted a separate entry for the Brazilian side of the falls so that we get the whole of Brazil coloured in on our trip map! (H - well we did actually make it Brazil (if only for part of a day) and have the passport stamps to prove it!) We had arranged with the taxi driver from the airport to be taken to the Brazilian side of the falls which turned out to save a lot of time and was very valuable for getting through the border. Unfortunately it was a grey morning...even more unfortunately it started to rain later in the morning and of course H's waterproofs were somewhere lost in the great airline luggage black hole so he ended up acquiring a particularly fetching white plastic mac to keep himself dry. It seems ... read more

Hi Our last day in Foz. We woke up and headed to a really nice bird park. They have a lot of different species of birds and stuff, everything from butterflies to eagles. They are in big bird houses, and some of them you can even enter and walk among the birds. Parrots in all colours and sizes, really curious and funny (and for some, a little scary). It took all of Rosa's courage to enter the macaw house, those very intelligent parrots are great entertainment! One even managed to sneak up behind Rosa and scare her (see photos). It is sad to know that some of the species have been driven to near-extinction by forest clearing and illegal hunting/capturing. I cannot in any way understand why someone would want to buy those animals on the ... read more