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Published: November 5th 2006
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Here I am in the main street of Buenos Aries. We had a massive thunderstorm last night and it is still raining.It is still warm though so we are wandering around in T -shirts and shorts in the rain!
The last few days were spent in Foz De Iguassu,on the Brazilian -Arentina border. The youth hostel was one of the best I have ever stayed in. It was out of town in the country side,and part of a campsite so had beautiful landscaped gardens and a swimming bar with a bar playing Samba music -very tropical.
We spent two days exploring Iguassu Falls. On the first day we did the Brazilian side. We arrived on the bus to be greeted by little strange little chipmonk-like creatures with ringed tails.They were almost attracting more attention from tourists than the Falls themselves!
Iguassu Falls are HUGE. It is not just one little waterfall, but a series of huge falls going down a deep gorge. The spray could be seen rising high above the forest cover. It was as if it were raining, as the mist settled on the trees and fell onto us in big drops - quite refreshing seeing as
it was boiling hot! At certain points you could walk over the tops of the falls and the spray was so intense that you ended up totally soaked to the bone! I must have taken a million photographs!
The next day we did the Falls from the Argentinean side(the falls and river form the borders of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay). Instead of a grand overview as before, you could get closer to the falls, and so again it was a case of getting soaked to the skin! There was a group of about 8 of us from the hostel, and we decided to go for a walk in the forest afterwards. After 3kms. We came across a waterfall plunge pool where we couldn’t resist a swim. The only problem was we had no clue what was in the water... alligators piranha ect? It was too tempting so we went in anyway, and we are fine so far....
On the way back we heard some rustling deep in the trees. A bit worrying considering that there are puma in the forests. It turned out to be a family of monkeys. They climbed right over us, high above our heads,
and one of them left a little message on Ursular’s shoulder! It was so amazing to see monkeys living in the wild like that -much better than any zoo!
After a further two days at the hostel sitting by the pool and basically doing nothing but swim and work on our tans, we made another gruelling long haul bus trip. It took 20 hours from Iguassu to reach Buenos Aries. At the border they made everyone on the bus take our bags off and they wanted to search everyone. Great- being backpackers I was sure they would give us a full on thorough search. It wasn’t that I had anything to hide but basically, I didn’t think that I would ever get everything packed in again if they rummaged through it all!I was the first to have my backpack searched. She opened the top to be met with a damp musty smelling beach towel - nice! To my relief, that was enough for her and she just asked “ropss?” (clothes) and I just said “si si” and she waved us all through. When I got to the Hostel in Buenos Aries and unpacked some things, I realised that some
oregano we’d bought had split and I had flakes of it all over a compartment of my bag - thank God they didn’t check as it would have looked VERY dodgy!
I looks as if the rain has stopped and the sun has come out - hooray! I will write again soon from another exotic (but hopefully sunny) location!
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