I don’t want to bury the lead, so I’ll start with this: Iguazú is much, much, much more enjoyable from the Argentinian side. If you want to visit both sides of the falls, do what we did and go to Brazil first.
The Brazil side is impressive too, but if you go there after visiting Argentina you will be disappointed. The Argentinian side feels much more like a national park and less like Disneyland. There are more trails, more overlooks, and much more contact with nature (not just the legions of coati trying to steal your food).
Fair warning – There are a lot of videos in this post. Email subscribers click here or miss the full show.
You’ll also notice that I’m spelling it Iguazú, not Iguaçu. Spanish, baby! I never imagined what a relief it would be to return to a Spanish speaking country, if only for a few days. Though they do share many words, Portuguese has much less in common with Spanish than I thought it would. Lea can pick out a little bit here and there, but I’m completely at a loss. Foz do Iguaçu did have many more Spanish and English speakers than the other parts of Brazil we’ve been to so far, but communication in Puerto Iguazú (the town on the Argentinian side) was so much simpler.
Uncharitable thought for the day: To the untrained ear, Portuguese sounds like Ewoks speaking French.
Also – skipping ahead again – from Puerto Iguazú you can see Paraguay! We decided not to enter Paraguay since it would cost us $160 USD each for the visas, but two kilometers from our hotel was an overlook where you could see three countries at once. Here it is:
Anyway, last week I left you hanging with the question of whether or not, since we were in Brazil for Carnaval, we would get to experience any Carnaval-related activities. Well – yes, but…
Being a native of Louisiana, I had my own set of expectations about how Mardi Gras should properly be carried out. I had visions of parades, beads, costumes, floats, loud music, and festive Krewes marching down the street. I projected these cultural expectations onto Brazilian Carnaval and while some of them were met, most were not. Looking at the schedule of events in Foz do Iguaçu, there had been a parade on Saturday that we’d missed. There were other activities on Monday and Tuesday which we decided to seek out once we were done with the Brazilian falls experience.
From what we saw, Carnaval in Brazil is centered less on parades and more around the “block party.” The event we found on Monday night was a family-friendly neighborhood party with a band, food trucks, and big inflatable bouncy things for kids to play on. We hung around for a while to see if anything else would happen, such as people promenading in fabulous costumes, but it was not to be. Instead, we did have some excellent shawarma from a restaurant called Bin Ladin. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that Bin Ladin is just a common Arabic surname. Whatever the case, the food was good and inexpensive.
On Fat Tuesday itself, we went hunting for what looked to be the main Carnaval event in the city. The location was simply given as a street name downtown so I assumed this would be the parade we were after. It was not. The event was supposed to begin at 3:00 and last the rest of the day, but we headed to the street in question and, after much walking around, found that one long city block had been cordoned off with a bandstand at one end and entry gates at the other. People were arriving with chairs and coolers, vendors were setting up on the sidewalks, and children were running around spraying each other with silly string. Lea and I picked a patch of sidewalk and settled down to see if anything would happen.
It didn’t.
Apparently, 3:00 p.m. was the setup time for the street, nothing more. Other events were listed as beginning at 6:00 and 7:00 so we went back to our hotel. When we returned later, we discovered that Carnaval in Foz is one massive block party with alcohol, thick crowds, and a band playing loud music. We entered at one end of the block and pushed our way through to the other while randomly taking pictures over the heads of crowd. Many people were dressed up in what looked like neighborhood uniforms – one whole crowd with Superman t-shirts, another with yellow tutus. Compressing all of Foz’s revelers into one city block created the equivalent of the Bourbon Street Crawl minus the throwing of beads.
Lea and I made it from one end to the other, paused to catch our breath, then went to a Brazilian steak house and stuffed ourselves silly with meat. And that was it for our Carnaval experience in Iguaçu.
The next day we crossed the border, found our hotel in Puerto Iguazú, left clothes at a laundry, located the bus terminal, grocery store, an honest-to-God Mexican restaurant, stood in line at the Post Office to mail our last few Argentinian postcards, and got rained on a little. While our days in Foz had been hot and dry, the forecast for Puerto Iguazú promised to be hot and damp. That was fine. We had dry bags and ponchos, and were ready for whatever the rain gods had to offer. As before, we planned to spend two days at the national park – the first to see as much of the falls as possible and the second to hike a nature trail that promised the chance to view more wildlife than on the beaten path.
Day One
We got up really early. Rain was forecast for the afternoon, so instead of bringing my tripod and backpack full of camera gear, we simply brought a drybag, two ponchos, my Canon Rebel T3 with its standard lens, my wide-angle screw-on attachment, and Lea’s ever-trusty waterproof Olympus. The bus to the park was a longer ride than in Brazil, but the crowd to buy tickets and get into the park was nonexistent. The Argentinian side opens earlier than its Brazilian counterpart and we were there on a regular weekday, not a national holiday.
Instead of buses to take you farther into the park, Iguazú offers a very slow-moving train. There are two stops: the first for the trails and the second for the viewing platform over the Devil’s Throat. On this side most people opt for going to the Devil’s Throat first, so we got off at the stop for the trails. This was the right decision. We had the trails almost completely to ourselves. For the first hour or more there were only a handful of other hikers – until the big tour groups finally returned from the Throat platform and met up with us.
There are two sets of trails to view the falls – Upper and Lower. The lower trail is longer and more strenuous but also offers better views of more of the falls. The upper trail takes you along the top of the falls, so all you really see is water rolling over the cliff. The lower trail is – well, breathtaking is too small a word. You can see the full magnitude of Iguazú and can get right up to some of the falls to experience their power first hand.
Photo and video dump commences:
You can watch a giant flock of birds swirling in the updrafts in this video:
After hiking the lower and upper trails it was easy to hop on the train and take it the rest of the way to the Devil’s Throat platform. To be clear, it doesn’t drop you off at the platform itself. It stops at the last nugget of dry land, from which you have to walk a kilometer along a raised walkway over the slow-moving Iguazú River. Along this route there are several stops for you to put on your ponchos and anything important into your dry bag. The fact that everyone you pass on their way back is soaking wet lets you know that this will be important.
While hiking along the metal bridge across the wide expanse of water, we started to hear thunder. It’s always been my hope that if I were to be struck by lightning I’d have just enough advance warning to shout “Shazam!” before it struck and possibly gain superpowers. Doubting that would actually happen we picked up the pace.
On the Brazil side, you can see the giant cascade at the head of the Devil’s Throat from afar on a tightly packed observation platform while craning your neck around a Japanese lady with an enormous blue hat. On the Argentinian side you are literally hanging right over the thundering void. See for yourself:
My glasses were useless without windshield wipers. Thankfully you don’t need your eyes to feel the power of the fall. Hanging there in space above it is like standing in the middle of a thunderhead. We inched our way around the platform, soaking in every sensation, then scurried back across the walkway to the train, inched the slow way back to the park entrance, and splurged on the park’s magnificent buffet.
We made it to the bus before the rain clouds exploded, but not to the bus station. Though only three blocks from our hotel, we were trapped and had to wait it out under the station’s overhang for an hour while this happened:
Day Two
The rain forecast was still in effect, so we returned to the park early (50% discount if you validated your tickets the day before), skipped the train to the usual tourist spots, and walked out of the park entrance complex in search of the nature trail. I’d switched my wide-angle lens for my telephoto, but otherwise we were geared up the same as the day before. It was at least a kilometer along an access road just to reach the trail head, and from there more than three kilometers to another fall. The ground was muddy and puddled from the day before and we crept along slowly so as not to disturb any wildlife along the way.
We spotted a medium-big cat hurrying across the trail and a Rodent Of Unusual Size but didn’t manage to photograph either. Mostly what we encountered were insects, birds (from a great distance), and the giant scary-ass spiders that cover the entire area with their huge webs, many of which are just above head-height.
The main thing we were after were the monkeys that were supposed to live in this area, but two kilometers in there had still been no sign. Our joints were tired from the past week’s excessive hiking and we were afraid of getting deluged on again, so at the 2km post we turned and headed back.
Soon though, something up in the trees started shaking water out of the higher branches. We looked up and there they were: spread through the trees around us were what must have been a whole troop of monkeys. They were in the highest reaches of the branches nibbling on leaves and whatever else they found, just at the edge of my telephoto’s range and ridiculously hard to focus on even when they weren’t jumping from tree to tree. Every now and then I swear one of them noticed me and stopped to check me out, probably because of the sound of my shutter. From over a hundred photos blurrier than Bigfoot, I did manage to catch a few of them pausing for a moment to reflect on their little monkey lives.
That wrapped our time at Iguazú Falls. We ended the night with pizza and hot dogs from the restaurant next to our hotel. The next day brought a 4:00 a.m. alarm clock for a 6:00 a.m. taxi across the border and a 12:45 flight to Río de Janeiro. We were tired but quite happy from our experience at the falls, but a little disappointed that we’d missed the full experience of Carnaval.
But had we? On my calendar Carnaval was over, but Río had a surprise in store. Next week, faithful readers. Same Bat-Time, Same Bat-Station.
