Iguazu Waterfalls

Having spent a couple of more days than we could actually afford in the mining hills of Brazil we decided to speed up our journey and sat on an overnight bus to Sao Paulo, from where we sat almost immediately on another night ride to the Argentine-Paraguay-Brazil border.

We arrived in the morning like papermashees to Foz do Iguazu, the Brazilian border town. After a warm welcome in our guesthouse by our host who seemed to step out from one of Pedro Almodovar's movies we headed to visit the Iguazu waterfalls. Luckily we passed by the bird park right next to the entrance of the national park and encountered the most lovely creatures of the sky we have ever imagined. There were parrots in all possible striking colors, some of which greeted us with a big 'hola' or 'ciao'. Than there were toucans, with their huge colorful beaks not at all afraid of humans, moreover sitting quite close to us every once in a while pinching us. And we saw butterflies from the jungle with hummingbirds flying around us, turtles chilling right next to crocodiles and other curious creatures of the Amazon.

But the real attraction were the continent's biggest waterfalls, which we approached both from the Brazilian side and from Argentina. On the Brazilian side we took an independent trip in the form of a lazy walk to the Garganta del Diablo, which is basically an iron catwalk from the shore over the river right to the edge where the water bed breaks and the water crashes down to the abyss. To be precise a multiple crashes, as the falls cover a vast area on both the Brazil and Argentina side. Besides the unbelievable energy with which the water explodes when landing in the deep you experience the most perfect permanent rainbows over the water clouds. The noise is so strong you have to shout on top of your voice to make yourself heard and of course you need not to hope to survive the experience without getting absolutely and totally wet just from the water in the air around the falls. We happened to see the falls at the nicest part of the day just before sunset and concluded the long day with an excellent dinner and a couple of cairpirinas, this time with strawberries, not lime, jummmm!

The next morning we decided to accept the lead of out host to the Argentinean side to see the falls from a different perspective, which for me was even more mesmerizing than the other side. We spent almost the whole day walking zig-zag in the park approaching the river from different points and visiting various individual falls and devil's throat from the other side.

We hardly finished the tour when we headed to our next destination with a 5 hour bus ride to cut our journey to Salta a bit shorter. So we arrived at 10 pm to San Ignacio, right next to Pousadas, which are famous of the biggest Jesuit-Guarani missionary 'reducciones' in South America.