Iguazu Falls - The Biggest Waterfalls in the World!

The whole Iguazu gang in front of the "smaller" waterfalls (in the back is Emily and Alex, then in front from L to R is Dallas, Kasia, Amy, Me and Andrew)

Hey everyone! Sorry I haven't updated my blog in so long! I have been really busy so I will try to write a few entries today about what I've been up to for the last (I can't believe its going so fast) 2 months.

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The first weekend in May, a bunch of my friends and I decided to take a trip to Puerto Iguazu, home to the largest waterfalls in the world and a trip that I have wanted to take since I knew I was coming to Argentina. Unfortunately, my dad and I did not get to take this trip while he was here, so although I had a fabulous time I want him to know that I wish he would have been able to come too! Anyways, we left Thursday May 6th on an evening bus to Iguazu. The bus ride is at least 17 hours long (depending on how many stops we make), so my friends and I all gathered up homework and things to keep us occupied for the journey and hopped on the bus.

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The buses here for long distance travelling are amazingly comfortable. They have chairs that lean back really far with footrests and all the windows have thick curtains to keep out the early morning sun. We did some work, had an iffy dinner (provided by the bus company) and went to sleep. Early the next morning, we woke up and started planning our weekend. The forecast said it was going to be rainy pretty much all weekend, so we knew we wouldnt get fabulous views but it was still worth it to us.

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Andrew and Kasia had been talking about seeing these cool ruins a few hours outside of Puerto Iguazu (the town where Iguazu falls and the national park is located). As they were checking out these cool sights in our lonely planet book, they realized that the ruins are 5 hours outside of Puerto Iguazu, but that our bus would pass it on the way. We talked to the bus driver who told us that although it wasn't a usual stop on their route, they would pull over at the city where the ruins were located and we could hop off and go see them. Thus began an amazing adventure...

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As we approached the small city of San Ignacio (I think...), we collected our belongings and hopped off the bus. The bus drove away and we, a group of American students, were standing on the side of the road in a town in the middle of nowhere with backpacks and all of our stuff. We didn't really know what to do, and were struggling to trudge through the mud and rain with all our stuff when a man in a little white car pulled over to us. Turns out he was the "head of tourim" for the town and was really nice. He took us the bus company's kiosk where he offered to let us leave our stuff. Since we didn't know the town or this strange man, we agreed to leave our backpacks but took out anything of value and shoved it into the few purses that the girls had. He then led us to his "tourism hut" and gave us maps of the towns and coupons for cheap lunch in town. The journey was going well so far!

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We trudged through the rain a few miles, following the map, until we came to the hub of town that appeared to be brimming with tourist activity. There were shops everywhere selling all sorts of native products, and many of my friends sprung for llama sweaters, flutes, or artisan jewelry. We headed over to the ruins site, bought our entrance tickets and waited for our tour guide.

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The other tourists in our tour group all happened to speak english, so we chatted with them until the next tour "in english" was to start. There was a group from Norway, some Australians, and some other Americans. The guide did not speak english very well, but since no one else in the tour group spoke spanish (except our little group), we had to endure a very awkward tour. The explinations of everything might have been shakey, but the sights were amazing!

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The ruins were huge and absolutely amazing! There were over a thousand little two roomed houses where the Guarani (indigenous) people lived with their families. The picture to the left is of us standing in the ruins of what was their church. The people who ran the missions taught the Guarani people how to build these houses and how to sustain themselves, so there were also workshops and schools as well. Something really interesting about these ruins is that the men and the women were kept seperate almost at all times. The single women lived in the oposite area of the complex as the men, and even in the cemetaries there were areas for men, women, girls and boys. The ruins were really cool, and definitely worth the detour!

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After our tour of the ruins, we got to roam about on our own for a little bit and take more pictures, and then we headed back into the touristy part of town for some lunch. We had milanesas (breaded chicken or fish sandwich with fried egg) and french fries, and headed back to the edge of town to get our stuff and get going.

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The "head of tourism" told us that the same bus company that we had taken to get there passes by the town every half hour, and for a small fee (about $10) we could hop on another one whenever we were done. We timed our walk back perfectly so we could pick up our stuff from the bus kiosk (that had "siesta" until 3:00) and make the 3:30 bus that would be passing by, but upon arriving back to the bus kiosk we saw that the owners were not back and our stuff was locked inside. Realizing we should have known better than to count on the promptness of Argentines (who are always, always running late), we helplessly sat outside and watched as the 3:30 bus rolled by.

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Finally, the owners returned and we got our stuff, safe and sound, and walked back to the bus stop to wait for the next bus. Although we had to wait in the rain for about another hour, we were all in good spirits and so happy to have taken the adventure to see the ruins. Once the bus arrived, though, we had other problems. The bus driver took our 40 pesos ($10) and told us to find a seat up on the second level, but upon climbing the stairs to the top level we realized that the bus was completely full. We were pretty sure that this meant we would be standing for the next 5 hours...

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Thankfully, people slowly started getting off and by about 2 hours in all 7 of us had found seats. We all took naps, and arrived in Puerto Iguazu around 9pm. Not knowing where our hostel was located, we hopped in cabs and told them the address. We asked the cab driver how much it was going to cost and he replied that it would only be about $2 (8 pesos), great! After the cab driver made 2 u-turns, we realized we were probably lost. Turns out that our hostel was on the same street as the bus stop, and the cab driver just couldn't find the exact address, so we paid him the 8 pesos and got out and walked the one block from the bus stop to the hostel, another small adventure for the weekend!

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The hostel we stayed at had been recomended by friends on our program who had already gone to Iguazu, so we knew it would be nice. It had a pool and a cool area with swings and hammocks outside, and we settled into our hostel rooms (that had their own bathrooms, a big deal for hostels!), and got ready for dinner at a nearby restaraunt where Viviana, the owner of the hostel, had suggested and given us vouchers for.

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The restaurant, named TaTas (haha) was really good and treated us to complimentary champagne since we came on Viviana's recommendation. We were pretty tired, so although we wanted to check out the town, we called it a night pretty early and got ready for the next day when we were going to go to the National Park and see the falls.

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Viviana set us up the next morning by buying our passes to "La Gran Adventura" (the Great Adventure) over the phone, so once we took the bus to the national park, we paid our entrance fee (really expensive for Americans, grr!) we walked right down the path to start the treck. On our walk through the park to get to the sight of the jungle treck, we found ourselves face to face with the infamous coatis (ko-ah-tees). Coatis are extremely common in Iguazu, and they look like raccoons with an ant eater nose (right). They are pretty timid, but like any animal in a national park, coatis know that humans usually carry food, and they are pretty ferocious trying to get it. They ran after my friend Dallas (who strangely wasn't carrying any food) and came close to all of us, so we snapped a few pictures and continued on our way.

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The first part of "La Gran Aventura" was an hour long cruise through the park. We got onto a big open air jungle cruiser and started to cruise through the jungle. Our tour guide was really great, pointing out certain plants and animals indigenous to Iguazu and telling us the history of the park. At one point, the tour guide thought it would be a good idea to stop and show us this huge spider web hanging between the trees. Unfortunately for us, they stopped when the spider web was directly over our heads and the big spider was sitting there. It was really, really scary! But, while we were stopped looking at the spider web, the driver spotted a troup of capuchin monkeys high up in the trees! Ever since my primate behavioral ecology class I have been dying to see a monkey in its natural habitat, and although I didn't get any great pictures (they were too high up in the trees) it was a really exciting sight!

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After the jungle cruise, we headed down toward the water for the second and most exciting part of "La Gran Aventura". We changed into our waterproof gear and loaded all of our stuff into giant waterproof bags and boarded the boat that we would take all the way up to the falls. We were so excited, and after a few minutes of cruising up the river, the trees cleared and we got our first shot at the falls. They were absolutely gorgeous! There are no words to explain how amazing they are, and pictures hardly show it (see right). We got to take pictures from afar of both the small falls (in the picture on the right) and the larger falls, called "la garganta del diablo" or "the devils throat". Because of the recent rain, we couldn't get that close to the big falls, but we still got some gorgeous shots and the rain even cleared up and the sun shown through! It was so magnificent, one of the coolest things I have ever seen in my whole life!

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After taking pictures of both sets of falls, we were told to put our cameras into the waterproof bags and get ready for our "shower". We put our stuff away and held on tight as the boat went up to, and under, both sets of falls! None of us could see anything since the water was pounding so hard, and we were all laughing so hard we could hardly breathe! It was so cool, and there was a guy with a waterproof camera taking a video of the whole thing! Emerging soaking wet, we docked by the falls and all grabbed our stuff and got off. We signed up to buy the video (we bought one video and copied it amongst ourselves) and started our hike up the mountain to get back to the top.

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On the way up, we noticed an amazing picture-worthy sight at Salta Bosetti (Bosetti falls), but since we were soaking wet and cold we decided to come back once we changed. To the left is the picture of us by Salta Bosetti after we had changed back into our warm clothes (from L to R: Andrew, Dallas, Kasia, Emily, Amy, Me and Alex). The falls were so beautiful from below, and although we had to treck up the mountain twice (once after we had gone up and changed), it was worth it to take this cute picture! Up the mountain again, we started our adventure along the top of the waterfalls, on overlooks that the park built so we could walk across the entire set of falls and see it from almost every possible angle.

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After stopping for a quick lunch and chasing off the coatis that wanted lunch too, we walked along the top of the "smaller falls". We walked and took tons of pictures and observed the amazing view. It was shocking to see how much water pours out of the falls every second, and how far down it really goes! I took a million pictures of the treck on top of the falls, so I will be happy to show you all when I get home but there's just not room on here! After seeing all of the "small falls" from above, we took a little train (it was adorable) to the "big falls" on the other side of the park. Once we arrived at the enterance of "la Garganta del Diablo", we started the long treck along these man made bridges to the mouth of the waterfall. The walk was soooo long and was amazing how long the bridges were! It was a little freaky walking over all those bridges, but we made it to the falls without problems.

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The picture on the right is from "la Garganta del Diablo", which is pretty aptly named because it definitely did look like we were looking down the throat of a giant beast! The pictures I took do no justice to how big and magnificent these falls were, they were truly breathtaking. Like I said before, we were so lucky that the rain let up and the sun came out so we could really enjoy the experience. Just look at that rainbow! Iguazu falls were so cool, and I will never see anything like it again in my entire life.

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The only thing left to do in the park was to go see the falls from the Brazil side (the park shares boarders with Paraguay and Brazil), but since Brazil is not open to American tourists without a pricey visa and Emily had forgotten her passport all together, we decided to head out early and take a nap before exploring the city for the night. We all showered (our second shower of the day?) and headed out to another restaurant that Viviana recommended. Of course, we were showered with complimentary champagne and appetizers again, and enjoyed another delicious dinner. Viviana also gave us vouchers for free drinks at many of the bars in town, so we headed out for a night of fun.

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If the extremely short cab ride/walk from our bus station to our hostel didn't tip us off as to how small Puerto Iguazu is, this night certainly did. We walked into the "nightlife" part of town, which again was only a few blocks from our hostel, and were showered in free "capirinhas" a strange drink with floating limes in it. The boys really liked the capirinhas and downed all of our free ones, while the girls opted out and bought our own drinks. We had a fun night out at the towns 3 bars (yeah, really small...) and went home.

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The next day we headed to "Tres Fronteras", or "three fronteirs" where you can see Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay all in one place. We walked for about 20 minutes to get there, and although our friends told us you could go swimming in the river that belonged to all three countries so that you were "three places at once", we couldn't really find it nor did any of us want to go swimming in the brown, murky water. Instead, we wantered around the small shops and look out points and took a few pictures (see right, Emily, Amy, me and Kasia in front of the flags from the three countries). There honestly wasn't much to see, so we headed back to the hostel and packed up to get on our bus home.

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We checked out and thanked Viviana for everything and headed to the local bakery to pick up dinner to take on the bus (just in case we were left with the same gross meal as last time...). We got on the bus around 4:00pm, and got ready for another 17 hours of homework and chatting. I worked on a presentation for my Literature class (more to come in my next post) and we watched the strange movies the bus offered (an italian movie with spanish subtitles). Dinner was not the same as last time, but surprizingly much worse, some type of grey hot dish with really bad meat - definitely the worst food I have had in this country, but I guess what can you expect from bus food?

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We started realizing that the bus ride home seemed to have much more stops than the ride there, and a few times Argentine police would get on an take a look around the bus. At one point there was a drug sniffing dog and my friend Emily was asked to take her blanket off her bag and show what was in it. We found out later that the 'tres fronteras' is a place where a lot of drug trafficking happens, and the drug lords try to bring drugs into the city. Because of this, the ride home was much longer, and although we were supposed to get in around 9am we didnt get in until around noon. We were all so tired from our long trip but so happy to have done it!

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Iguazu falls were absolutely amazing, so beyond word or pictures. We were so lucky to have such good luck with our side-adventure to the ruins, and we were blessed with good weather and good people like Viviana to show us a good time! The other people at the hostel were really nice as well. There was a man named Richard who was a doctor and quit to travel the world (he was a little odd...), a nice boy from Saint Louis Park that went to Madison, and a really cool group of students from Ireland. It was my first time staying in a hostel and it was very nice, a lot more comfortable and safe than I would have guessed! This was definitely the trip of a life time and I will never forget it!

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I will try to add another update today about other stuff going on here in Argentina, and also about my trip to Chile last weekend. Love and miss you all!