Cataratas

For a word with the letter "a" four times in it, it has surprisingly little to do with crossword puzzles.

On sunday night, during Rachel and Christa´s visit to Buenos Aires, we piled onto a giant double decker bus with outrageously comfortable seats (and no "fasten seatbelt sign") for the eighteen hour trip to the small border-town of Puerto Iguazú, in the small state of Misiones which lies in the heart of jungle. The province is surrounded on two sides by Brazil, and on one side by Paraguay.

We struggled our way through the worse-than-awful meal served to us (this was a creation we couldn´t even guess at what was trying to be accomplished) and watched a bootleg copy of Ocean´s Thirteen in English, with subtitles in Spanish. We took our Advil PM´s and conked out until (for me) 9:00 AM the next morning.

Breakfast wasn´t much better (with 4 different starches and pre-sweetened coffee) and we arrived in the small, red-dust covered town in our little air conditioned, bubble-world of a luxury bus. We checked in at our hotel (a quaint place next to the bus station) I had a mate before we headed to the bus station to catch "El Practico" that goes to the national park, about thirty minutes away.

After stopping into the visitor´s center for a map, we rushed to get on the little train that carts you through parts of the park, so you can get closer to the falls. The train doesn´t actually go to the waterfalls, but it takes you to the trailheads where you can walk a short distance to find lots and lots of falling water. I was constantly snapping photos (unfortunately, it is very hard for me to get them online, but I will try) and every little bug, bird, or unusual natural feature had its photo taken by me, and probably the hundred or so tourists behind and in front of us.

The first trail we went on (the "Inferior") took us down to the bottom of the basin, below the falls to see some of them (these falls are not all in one place, but spread among many little falls in addition to the record-setting Garganta del Diablo) where we were pursued by a great number of screaming school children all clutching their mates and thermoses and following their field trip leader.

At the bottom of the little mountain, we took the public ferry (a less than two-minute, yet life-jacket-mandatory, little dinghy ride) to the island in between many little water falls. We swam in the small designated area, our toes constantly nibbled by little fish, and we chatted lightly about caimanes, a small, maybe three-foot-long crocodile that supposedly flourishes in these parts (we never saw one). We hiked up the steep stairs on the island and saw a couple viewpoints, a "trash" bird (not actually called that, but we found it eating out of a trash can) before the island had to close.

We walked to the superior trail where Mom and I saw, from the top of each of the falls, beautiful dropoff points that betrayed none of the danger, white foam, and distance to the bottom that awaited a hapless Guaraní boatman. The light, at 5:00 PM, was perfect.

Back in Puerto Iguazú, Mom and I went on a walk (Rachel wanted to read), where Mom saw the Southern Cross for the first time and we heard dogs barking in Brazil. We had trouble understanding them...

We ate at a restaurant with a parrilla, called Proa, and had some memorable steak, and some not-so-memorable flan, but the owner came to our table afterward, asked if we liked our meal and brought us three glasses of champagne on the house because he heard it was my birthday (we fudged the day a little).

We went to bed in our little hotel (for a while we were convinced we were the only guests) through till the morning.