Iguazú Falls
Trip Start
Sep 05, 2006
1
17
33
Trip End
Sep 04, 2007
Puerto Iguazú,
Argentina
Sunday, January 7, 2007
After a 16 hour bus ride squished next to an older Argentinian man who didn´t know the meaning of personal space, I arrived in Puerto Iguazú at about 10:30 in the morning. Iguazú Falls is shared by both Argentina and Brasil. One side of the river is Brasilian and one side Argentinian. I unfortunately don´t have a Brasilian visa so I only saw the Argentinian side (which everyone says is better anyway...).
By midday I was on a bus to ´las cataratas de Iguazú´ to see the ¨Devil´s Throat¨ as it is known in English, a giant waterfall that draws from multiple rivers coming together with a deafening roar and a midst that sprays for I´d say a good 50 meters up from the bottom
amazing
. I hiked around and took pictures from every route possible. The most fascinating part was realizing that I was in the jungle. The real, live jungle, a climate and landscape that I had never before experienced. The earth was red, there were banana trees everywhere, the heat was almost unbearable and there were strange lizards at every turn. Funky little jungle wombats called coatis played with each other and started fights with the 3 foot long lizards. Ants 2 inches long carried dead rhino beetles on their backs while exotic birds flew from the tree tops. While I was sad that I didn´t see any Toucans, I did get to see an amazing variety of butterflies that were absolutely stunning.
I swam in the Iguazú River below the waterfall where I got bit by dozens of little fish. Like a little girl, they sent me yelping and running out of the water. I was too chicken to even go back in for a photo. The fish were maybe an inch or two long but I didn´t want to be eaten alive by baby pirannhas...
While I only got to see Brasil from the other side of the river I am really excited to go further into the jungle and see what the deep green thickets are hiding.
