Monday, March 30th 2015
We were jolted awake at 5AM by our neighbor on the bus, as we had arrived to the first city in which we had to change buses. Like zombies we grabbed our carry on bags, retrieved our checked bags and moved to the next bus. A little ways down the road, once fully awake, I realized I had left my water bottle on the floor of the other bus! It was a real nice mason jar with a special lid I'd ordered online just before the trip. I tired with no luck to get it back when we got to the terminal in Puerto Iguazú. :( They told me nothing was found on that bus. Oh well. I guess I buy a new one. I hope that someone finds my bottle and actually uses it! I hate to think about it being throw away.
We didn't arrive to Puerto Iguazú until almost 5. The ride took a little longer than it was supposed to. It was an especially boring ride, and after the second change of buses, the bus acted as a local city bus stopping everywhere and picking up every one. The highlight of the day was buying chipas from a vendor that boarded the bus! Chipas are a regional specialty in Paraguay, but since we are so close to the border, they have them here too. They look like bagels and have a similar texture, but they are made with part tapioca flour in addition to the regular flour. They are simple, but very delicious.
The hostel we are staying in is called Nomads. But we only booked one night online, planning to add nights when we got there, only they are all booked up! So we spent the evening visiting other hostels and reserving a spot. Most everything in town is going to be full for Easter week vacation. We managed to find space at Hostel Bambu, but the prices are going up because it's a holiday. :(
Puerto Iguazú is a really small town, and it is here only because of the nearby falls. Apparently 20 years ago, there was pretty much nothing here, and it has recently blown up. So it doesn't feel like a typical/traditional Argentine town. It doesn't have the usual grid pattern or central square or any nice parks at all! Just hotels, fancy restaurants and souvineers shops. And apart from visiting the falls, there is nothing to do here.
The falls themselves are very impressive. They have been on my list of places to visit ever since I first found out about there existence 10-12 years ago while watching the show the Amazing Race. I don't remember anything about the episode or what they, just that I wanted to go!
The falls split the Iguazú River into an upper and lower section. Each part of the river has its own fish species! The falls an river divide Argentina and Brazil. More than 2/3 of the falls are on the Argentinean side. There are approximately 275 distinct falls, they stretch for over 1.5 miles and reach heights of up to 270 feet, making them taller than Niagara Falls, and twice as wide with twice the flow of water! In the native Guaraní language Iguazú means "big water."
Tuesday, March 31st 2015
Last night I came up with this great idea. Our flight from Paraguay goes to Sao Paolo, Brazil, then from there it's direct to JFK, and I thought, why not just skip Paraguay and avoid the visa fee and go to Sao Paolo for the second flight instead! Brazil also requires a visa, and at $140, it's slightly less than the Paraguay one, and Brazil is some place we would be more likely to want to visit again and get some use out of the visa that is good for 10 years. Also, we want to see the Brazilian side of the falls. Iguazú falls is shared by Argentina and Brazil and each country has its own national park and trails offering different perspectives on the falls. We were both very excited by the thought of all of this! I looked into distances and bus tickets and it would be a 16 hour bus ride to Sao Paolo for only about $75. It was all sunshine and rainbows until Delta crushed our dreams when I called them this morning after breakfast! Apparently if you miss your first flight they cancel your connection. That part I knew, so that's why I called them. I wanted them to just remove the first leg of our flight from or reservation. I didn't expect to get any money back, but I never expected there to be any problem on their end. What do they care? They still get my money and perhaps more from the 2 empty to seats they can resell. Boy was I wrong! They consider the cancellation to be a reservation change which is handled with a $300 surcharge. Then they said I'd have to re buy the ticket from Sao Paolo, which has gone up significantly in price since I bought it, brining the total cost to "change" our flights to $1000!! I couldn't believe it. I didn't even know what to say. I of course said no, but that blew my mind.
So the day ended up being a boring day spent acquiring our Paraguayan visas. It was after 1 pm when we finally got them. We had to get passport style photos taken and they required us to show credit cards to prove that we had sufficient funds to not be delinquents in Paraguay. Usually they make people show proof of onward travel, but they didn't ask us for this. Once we had filled out all the paperwork and paid the $160 each, the guy helping us took our money, passports and paperwork and got up and left us sitting in his cubicle without saying a word. Over and hour later Jeff went and found him and asked if it was going to be much longer and he said probably an hour and we could leave and come back if we wanted! He could have said that to begin with! So we left and went back to our new hostel to make lunch.
After the visa was all taken care of we took a walk to the edge of town to a view point along the river. It is called the 3 nations view, in which you can stand in Argentina and look over into Brazil and Paraguay. There is an obelisk marking the spot and its painted in the Argentine flag colors. Brazil and Paraguay each have a similar obelisk painted with their countries colors. It wasn't much of a view, but it was something to do.
The rest of the day we just hung around the hostel. One bright spot in our day was finding out from the owner of our hostel that we could visit the Brazilian side of the falls without a visa if we paid a taxi to take us over there, wait for us and bring us back. The taxi could drive right through customs without stopping! It sounded kind of crazy, but apparently is common practice.
Wednesday, April 1st 2015
Our hostel has the best breakfast we have had so far on our trip!! Rice and beans!! Potatoes pancakes, apples, fresh squeezed orange juice, homemade bread, cookies, two kinds of cake, jam, butter, milk, coffee and tea! Most places are just bakery bread and jam, so this was quite a welcome change!
We visited the Brazilian side of the falls by taxi today. It was foggy when we work up so we decided to wait until the fog burned off to leave. While we were waitng we found out there was another American in the hostel in the same boat as us concerning the visa, so we decided to share a taxi. She was traveling with a Norwegian friend who didn't require a visa. But the 4 of us splitting the taxi brought the price down to about what it would cost to take the bus, so that was nice.
It was about a 30 minute ride each way and cost a total of 400 pesos ($32US). On the way we stopped at the Argentinean customs for an exit stamp, but just like we were promised, we drove right past the Brazilian customs no problem! We arranged for the taxi to leave us for about 3 hours.
The Brazilian park cost 53 Brazilian reals per person to enter ($17US). They must make a lot of money! After you buy your ticket you take a open air double decker bus ride down a jungle road. After about 15 minutes you reach the only trail and get off the bus and walk shoulder to shoulder with a million other people to several view points.
Most of the falls are on the Argentina side, so this is a nice over view, but because there is only one trail, you must seriously compete with other to get a good view and take photos! To make matters worse there are tons of idiots with selfie sticks, walking around with their phones suspended in the air and people stop everywhere for group photos! In some cases you must wait in line to gain access to viewing areas! I swear some people were probably so focused on fighting their way through the crowds to get pictures that they only saw the falls though their camera screens.
The views got better as we went along until finally we reached a platform that goes out over the river and looks down into the "Throat of the Devil." This is where the waterfalls are most concentrated and they form a horseshoe shape. So much water is falling from so many places and with so much speed here, that it is a mess of mist and rainbows. You get soaked and you can hardly see, but it's amazing.
The trail is short, I think it was just over a mile. When you get to the end you are at a high point with amazing views looking down into the falls. From here you get back on the bus and go back and go back to the entrance. That concluded our day at the falls. We had great fun watching all the crazy people. I couldn't help myself and took a number of pictures of the people. (: We also saw lots of coatis, which I also took many photos of! These are relatives of the racoon and they have become habituated to humans here. They are everywhere! Always looking for food! They are quite daring. We saw one rip open someone's plastic shopping bag that was hanging down near the ground!
On the ride back we were stamped back in at Argentine customs, but never got any stamps from Brazil. I guess we spent the day in no mans land! Today was a great introduction to the falls. We heard it was best to go to the Brazilian side first and the Argentina side second. Brazil provides the overview, Argentina gets you in close to individual falls.
The rest of our day was spent back at our hostel. As the day wore on spots began to show up on my arms, bed bug bites! For some reason they take all day to show up, so when I woke up I didn't know there was any problem. But I can now see them clearly. On my elbows the bites are so densely clustered that only a mass of red is visible, and not individual bites. I am itchy and look like a mutant. The dorm we are sleeping in has 16 beds and one other person had a bad reaction like me, a japanese guy, who actually got them worse than me! The bites are all over his face and neck! He ended up going to the hospital and getting antibiotics and cream to treat the bites. They moved him to another dorm room. I didn't want to have to say anything to the hostel, but in the end we decided it was bed they knew. Luckily the big holiday rush hasn't hit the hostel yet and they were able to move everyone out of that dorm room to get some deep cleaning in before everyone arrives tomorrow. Unfortunately, I don't think their methods will work, they are just spraying raid on everything!
Thursday, April 2nd 2015
Today we visited the Argentinean side of the falls. We shared a taxi with the same girls as yesterday, but we only paid to go one way. We planned to take the bus back, not knowing how long we would want to spend there.
There are 3 different trails on the Argentina side, the upper falls, lower falls and the Garganta del Diablo (throat of the devil). There are also a couple food courts, and train to take lazy people from trail to trail, raft rides, boat rides and 4WD rides. It's a lot like going to an amusement park, and the least like a national park of any park we have been to. On the bright side, there is much more room for people to spread out, so it doesn't feel as crazy as the Brazilian side did. There are just as many crazy people though, so the people watching is excellent.
We walked all of the trails today, avoiding the train. We also did the raft ride, boat ride and 4WD ride in an attempt to get rid of pesos. The raft ride was just a float down a small section of the river above the falls that is dotted with small islands. It was rather boring, as was the 4WD ride. The motor boat ride into the falls was amazing though! We blasted through rapids and right up to the base of the falls. We got absolutely drenched. There was so much water coming from every direction that we could barely open our eyes!
We ended up spending most of the day at the falls. Around 5 we took the bus back to the hostel and made dinner. We haven't been out to eat here yet, as we've been trying to finish up foods I've been carrying around, like lentils, rice and popcorn. Tonight we decided we would go out. We went to a place that is listed on Happy Cow as vegan friendly, meaning it is a normal non vegetarian restaurant that has veggie options. We had corn empanadas, as well as spinach and onion ones. These are savory stuffed half moon pasty things. They are very good and it's hard to find vegan ones! We also each got a fresh juice and we shared a big salad and stir fry veggies. It was a nice enough meal.
The hostel will be full tonight, so we had to move back into the dreaded bed bug dorm. I didn't get any bites last night, but they had us in a private room that is booked up for the rest of the weekend. :(
Friday, April 3rd 2015
The park had an offer to come back to the park a second day for half off, and we had nothing better to do today, considering there is nothing else to do in town, so we went back to the falls. We rode the bus each way. Round trip is costs 100 pesos, or about $8. The Argentine entrance ticket costs 260 pesos, and at our blue dollar rate, that's about $21, so not too much more than the Brazilian side, but for all the unlucky tourists not getting the blue dollar rate, it's quite expensive, at $31 per person!
There was one jungle hike that we didn't do yesterday so we decided we could come back and do that today and maybe go back to some of the falls viewing areas too. The trail is called the Macuco trail and goes a little over an hour each way to an isolated waterfall called Arrechea falls. The waterfall wasn't feebly impressive, but the jungle walk was nice. We got to listen to the sounds of the jungle, birds and insects. We also saw lots of monkeys and a few capybaras. The trail was probably the only non crowded area in the park today, so that was another plus.
After the hike we went back to the entrance area and ate a snack and sat and watched the steady stream of people entering the park. Watching the people was quite entertaining. We had wanted to go back to see the falls, but with the number of vacationers here, we couldn't bring ourselves to do it and took the bus back to town. The park was definitely busier today than yesterday. We wish that we had planned in advance for Easter week and been here at a different time, but we didn't even think about it when we booked our flights home.
After several hours lounging in the hostel, we went out to one of the fanciest restaurants in town, Aqva, and had a farewell to Argentina dinner feast. Jeff had his first real steak of the trip, as he actually still likes meat. I've completely lost any desire to eat it, so I had yucca gnocchi with mushroom and tomato sauce! Menus here are weird. You choose your type of pasta and sauce from separate columns on the menu each has its own price, so it would be easy to order just plain pasta, not realizing the sauce costs extra! We also had beer and wine and an appetizer sampler platter of regional corn and yucca specialties. It was a very nice meal and even though we were already stuffed, we went out for tropical fruit sorbets afterward. The meal sorbet and good tip cost about $50, probably still far cheaper than an equivalent meal in the US, and we still have a lot of pesos left!
<This is my bed bug proof sleeping attire!>
