Brazil
Facts:-
Day 192 continued - Tuesday 17th January 2006 - Parque Nacional Iguaçu
We hopped off the bus in Foz de Iguaçu near the FozTur office and picked up various maps of the falls. Then we found a bakery for breakfast. However there were definitely some language difficulties (Spanish was hard enough but neither of us spoke a word of Portugese!). At one point solving these involved the staff wandering around making chicken noises! - fortunately Argentinian money was more easily understood (and accepted). However, the exchange rate we received was less than favourable, so we decided to try and find a cashpoint to get our own Reals.
This proved to be more difficult than we had expected. Eventually we found a supermarket with 6 cashpoint machines, but none of them would give us any cash! Fortunately, across the road was a Shell petrol station, where "banco 24"came up trumps - albeit at a price!
We took the 20-minute local bus journey to the Parque Nacional, which, as soon as we arrived, could be seen to be a very large place. We certainly needed the courtesy bus to get around the site. We decided to head straight for the Sendero Cataratas (waterfall trail) where we soon got our first glimpse of some of the 275 falls making up the Iguaçu falls. Our attention was distracted for a while by a coati looking around for food scraps just behind us.
A little further down the trail, whilst gazing at some enourmous falls, Nikki spotted a well camouflaged monitor lizard, just a couple of feet from us! It was at least a metre long and much more interested in retrieving a piece of bread than us, so we got a couple of good photos before we remembered that we were here to look at the falls!
We walked further and as we turned a corner we realised that the falls we had been looking at were only babies. We now had our first view of the "Devil's Throat", which must have been several hundred times the size of the other (quite impressive) falls!
Multiple mini view points and photo opportunties later, we headed out on a walkway over the water and got a bit wet from the spray (even though we were still hundreds of meters from the Devil's Throat itself. The spray was quite refreshing though, as otherwise the heat was scorching. Our next view point was from the top of a small tower by the closest fall to the Brazilian river bank, which was accessed by a small glass elevator.
By now we were hungry, so spent some of our Reals on lunch overlooking the river right at the top of the falls. There we were disturbed regulalry by hoards of coatis, looking for easy meals. A couple of them even climbed right onto out table - one of them made a good effort at finishing off nikki's Diet Coke!
We retraced our steps the same way, watching a huge thunder storm brewing across the river in Argentina. This time we got really wet on the walkway - the wind had picked up and changed direction before catching the bus back to the main entrance (we had planned to do another short walk through the forest, but missed the stop - Nikki was mapo girl!). From there we caught another bus back to the turning for the Argentinian border crossing.
We walked a short way, before being picked up by a bus heading back to Puerto Iguazú
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