Surreal

With a day of bus riding, Wilson celebrated his birthday in style. We had planned to catch up with Hannes, a guy we met in Cordoba, at Iguazu so we quickly legged it there to meet him only to find he couldn´t make it. Once we arrived in Iguazu we went out for "parillada" (argentine barbeque) and wine at a fancy restaurant in town. The meat fest was delicious and included all the usual goodies like steaks, blood sausage and intenstines as well as a few unidentified parts that we thought may well be cow anus.

Iguazu is located in the most northern point of Argentina, wedged in between the borders of Paraguay and Brazil. Its famous entirely for the enormous waterfalls. After spending a day relaxing by the pool at our hostel, we got up early hell bent on exploring the trails and tracks around the falls.

Our day turned out to be remarkably surreal in many ways. We were regretting our sunny day by the pool as the dark clouds were increasingly ominous but we hoped that it would clear up. All hopes were dashed shortly after our arrival at the falls park by multiple rolls of deep booming thunder. The good thing about this was though that the weather was keeping the crowds away and for a short time in morning we made the most of exploring the complex with barely another soul in sight. The place felt deserted but it meant that the birds were out in numbers and we saw a wild Toucan up close.

The falls were absolutely astounding. The huge volume of crashing water is spread across hundreds of falls dropping onto plateaus or pounding straight down the 60m drop. Despite the grey clouds I went crazy taking panoramic shots to try and capture the beautiful scenes. As the rain began to spit down we took the boat over to the island between the two main sections of falls only to find the island was chock full of birds of prey. There were dozens in almost every tree eyeing us up and wondering if we were going to die soon and become their lunch. Very spooky.

It was shortly after this that the inevitable happened and the heavens opened completely and let loose an intense tropical downpour. We were almost blasted into the river as we headed along the catwalk towards the enormous Garganta del Diablo and when we arrived we could barely differentiate clouds from waterfall spray. Many of the other tourists wihtout jackets, bought matching white plastic rain ponchos and it seemed as though the place had been invaded by laboratory scientists. The last bizarre thing that happened this day was, as we were soaked and freezing and on our way home to the hostel, we ran into some guys we know from uni, Dave and Spud. After a massive double take we found out they were travelling with four other kiwis around latin america and would also be heading to Canada afterwards... coincidence huh? This encounter also doubled the number of other New Zealanders we have seen on our trip.

The next day we went back to the falls to see what it was like when we weren´t facing a waterblaster. The weather was fantastic and accordingly the tourist hordes were back in full force. The worst thing about guided tours is that all these people who would normally move around to different parts of the park at different paces are all stuck in one place at one time and we got stuck right in the middle of three of them! The guide always walks around with a coloured umbrella and everyone in their party has a little name tag with their guides name, so there were all these old men walking around with name badges saying "Shirley". It was pretty much tourist hell while we were stuck there.

But we managed to get away from the rude, pushing, thronging crowds and found some cracking views of the waterfalls. On the complex of boardwalks it was possible to get really close to the falls and feel the spray and watch the birds flying in and out of the cliffs.