Iguazu
Another overnight bus journey sees us arrive in Puerto Iguazu to torrential rain (getting quite good at travelling by luxury bus though – the whiskey just before settling down to sleep helps a lot!).
Puerto Iguazu isn´t great, but as usual we are not there for the town. First stop – Brazil! The local bus stops for Argentine border proceedings, but we seem to skip Brazilian ones – just there illegally for the day – we just hoped they would let us out on our way back!
After a 10 minute bus journey through jungle we jumped off the bus to be met by lots of racoon-type creatures (later found out they are called coatis) and our first view of the falls – albeit the ones on the Argentine side. It doesn´t matter how many pictures you see of them, in real life they are impressive – and the first view of the Garganta del Diablo (Devils Throat) was breath taking. Prior to seeing that, we were wondering why we´d just spent 16 hours on a bus to see some water fall off a cliff!
You can´t actually see the water hitting the bottom of the garganta due to all the spray, but there are loads of birds and butterflies flying in and out of it. The number of butterflies were amazing (more so on the Argentine side the following day though). Argentina let us back into the country despite no Brazilian stamps and the next day we headed to the falls on their side. You can get closer to the falls on this side. First port of call was a complete drenching under San Martin falls – my sister had warned us about getting wet and so we´d changed into swimmers – I pity the people who had to walk around in soaking wet clothes for the day (although it was pretty warm so they probably dried out quickly). The rest of the day was spent walking around the boardwalks, admiring the falls and butterflies.
We tried to “get off the beaten track” a little by walking 40 mins to another fall which wasn´t part of the main set. Nick had a power shower, but we were slightly disappointed in that we didn´t see anyother wildlife apart from butterflies.
However, on exit we spotted a toucan flying past & headed out of the park feeling smug that we´d made the effort…little did we know that two toucans were flying around by the exit (much to our chagrin) – we decided they were pets & had been let out to keep the tourists happy!!
Tags: Argentina, Brazil, Iguazu, Travel
Jenni
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