6. South American birds

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Like I said before, travelling without plans is great, as long as you have enough time to do whatever takes your fancy along the way. Knowing your limits is frustrating. Countless places and activities get left behind with promises of coming back one day.


We only had one place which we were desperate to go to: Macchu Picchu in Peru. Which was why our pouring over the cheap tickets to Asunción, Paraguay, and Buenos Aires, Argentina came to nothing. Instead we decided to hang around in Foz before heading off in a vaguely Westerly direction.

We had been so impressed by the waterfalls the day before that we decided to go back and see them again. We got on the bus with that intention, but quickly changed our minds when we saw a sign to the local ‘Parque de Aves’. We hopped off, paid our money, had a brief conversation with an emu and then headed into the park for a day in the life of caged birds.

For some reason we always end up in zoos or bird parks, wherever we are in the world, home or abroad. Birds in cages is pretty much always a bad idea. What kind of sadistic person keeps a budgie? Thankfully this park had a decent number of large aviaries where proper flying was a possibility. But it also had its fair share of grisly little enclosures for huge macaws. I comforted my enjoyment with the knowledge that I would probably kill and eat any one of those birds, and that they were probably happier being in their cages than meeting that fate. Therefore I was doing them a favour, really.

Realisticly the only parts of the park which were worth visiting were the walk-in enclosures. Chasing little egg-shaped birds along a path and staring an evil-looking black bird in the eye for ten minutes were worth the entrance fee alone. There was quite a lot of that, too. Particularly memorable was the macaw section. Distracted by several of the birds hanging upside down from the ceiling we didn’t notice the approach of half a dozen more behind us. Wings clipped our heads and squawks shook our eyeballs. I felt a little bit strange, and then got strangled. Turning to see just what was going on put me face to face with the colourful face of a curious bird, tugging at the string around my neck. How we laughed. Soon, however, the heavy poultry on my back became a little worrying. It was very cross. It was also completely unwilling to go away. It tried to bite me, then Laura. Pushing it didn’t work, nor did jumping up and down or moving violently. Just when I was considering calling the police, the bird decided that it had urgent business to attend to and left us to hurry swiftly from the enclosure.

There’s a lot to be said for the park itself. It’s huge, with thousands of birds spread over a large area of tamed tropical rainforest. Apparently some of them have been rescued from illegal exporters; cut out of cardboard postal tubes. Some are clearly still quite angry about it. A toucan rejected my advances by ripping off pieces of bark from the branch it was perched on and throwing them in my face.

We lingered in Foz a couple more days. We took a day trip to experience the waterfalls from the Argentinean side, and cannot recommend doing so enough. The view is much closer to the action, intimate, and nerve-wracking. The waist-high barrier alone stands between you and a several hundred metre drop. The old, ‘broken in a flood’ walkway stands nearby like a bad joke.

For some reason we then decided to see the ‘largest hydro-electric dam in the world’. Perhaps if it had been switched on it would have been worth the journey.

Aside from that disappointment, the trip had a more interesting element.

We missed the stop for the dam, and rode the bus in a circle. In so doing we saw Foz outside of the urbanised centre. Buildings slowly became more and more dilapidated. Classy modern houses crumpled into lean-to shacks. Bizarrely, the two often co-existed adjacent to one another. Streets would contain one or two luxury bungalows with swimming pools and 4x4s parked outside, surrounded by run-down ‘houses’ occupied by grubby children, twisted metal and broken glass. The only common denominator was dog ownership.

How Brazil manages to shamelessly maintain this inequality remains a mystery to me these years later. From Rio to Foz, how can a man eat steak with a view of the starving? But then, so much of the world works on this basis. The fact that it was so visible in this case doesn’t make it any different from the UK dumping excess food in the sea whilst 24,000 people a day die of starvation. I often think that the paper and metal that causes this ignorance will surely be the downfall of civilisation entirely. The current of currency infatuation causes wars, and leads to crippling, deliberate, international debt. This view may be simplistic, but is that reason enough to sit on one’s hands? Does the homeless Palestinian or orphaned Afghani care about global economics? Sooner or later the vengeful victims will outnumber the peacemakers, and whose fault will it be? I felt dry and corrupt inside.

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