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| Looking over the edge of a waterfall. |
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| Viewing platform on the other side of a waterfall. |
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| Down through the trees. |
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| Mist rising from a waterfall. |
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| More mist across the vastness of just one section of the falls. |
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| Another view over the edge of a waterfall. |
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| Trees cling to small islands in the torrential waterfalls. |
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| Through the greenery. |
Finally, the narrative catches up with the photographs. Thanks for bearing with me. You should already have had a good taste of Iguazu Falls from the last two posts, but in case anyone needs a quick summary, here it is:
- More green
- Significantly fewer penguins.
What you can't immediately tell from the photographs is how hot and humid it was. The latter should be obvious given the combination of heat and waterfalls, but coming from Antarctica via a rainy Buenos Aires really doesn't prepare you for it.
That said, I had packed in anticipation of exactly this sort of weather. The problem is that there's only so much you can do about it. With the cold, you can keep adding layers until you get blown into the sea like a human hamster ball, but in the heat the sweat is relentless. It laughs at your antiperspirant like King Kong swatting at an aeroplane, a minor obstacle on the way to reclassifying your entire body as liquid. Then there's the chafing. I won't go into the specifics of that, but I will say it's reminiscent of the rise of social media in that parts of myself that had previously been unaware of each other suddenly became very angry about everything.
Our visit to Iguazu Falls was divided into two. The photos in this post and the next couple were taken on the Argentinian side, because the falls are so vast that they stretch into Brazil. The town of Iguazu itself similarly sprawls across borders, including a third – Paraguay. We would eventually cross the border to see the falls from the Brazilian side, but for the time being we were still in Argentina. In Buenos Aires we had stayed in the same hotel going out and coming back. It was a nice hotel, and especially nice after sharing a cabin for a fortnight. The hotel we arrived at in Iguazu however was definitely a step up. It's the difference between a city hotel and a resort hotel. Out in the countryside there is simply more space available. This brought with it a welcome change of pace. We made a trip into Iguazu itself in the evening, but there wasn't the pressure to get out and do things that a city often urges.
We were staying in the Mercure Hotel Iru, one of a number of chain hotels that have grown from poorly maintained back roads that are also home to people essentially living in fields. There is, as there is with any encroachment of modern civilisation on existing populations, a touch of dystopia to it. This was heightened when I discovered, during an ill-judged foray in the afternoon heat, that the hotel next door had been abandoned. I photographed its collapsing sign but was reluctant to investigate further.
Inside the hotel, everything was much as you would expect. It was clean and spacious. Architecturally it does that thing where the inside of the building becomes the outside without ever passing through a door. This is not unusual in warm climates, but coming from England I always find it unsettling. Here things are either indoors or outdoors, with the modern exception of some pub smoking areas, which occupy a peculiar suburb of legality. In the case of the hotel, the inside led to an inner courtyard containing an outdoor pool, which I admired from the coolness of my air-conditioned room.
As mentioned earlier, we got a taxi into Iguazu itself in the evening. The part of town we visited was mostly a few shabby-looking streets lined with shops and bars. They predominantly catered for tourists, but there were local shops too. I bought some scary-looking cold & flu pills for the dregs of my lurghi. We attempted to buy bottled water from a supermarket but were thwarted by insufficient pesos. The wider acceptance of dollars and cards in Buenos Aires had made us complacent. In the end we went for ice cream and I made a hash of ordering that too. I needed to up my tourist game but it was getting late and it was already dark outside. We somehow caught a taxi back to the hotel by saying its name and hoping we understood the reply. We were reasonably familiar with the route to the hotel in daylight from arriving there and going to the falls. It was down a backroad off a large paved highway. However the taxi did not take that route. Instead it meandered through a series of increasingly remote and pitch black roads. Neither of us said it, but we wondered whether he was actually taking us where we wanted to go. We're English though, so on the whole it would be better to be murdered in the middle of nowhere than make a fuss. I checked our location with Google Maps on my phone. We did seem to be heading in the general direction of our hotel even if the route was eccentric. So it was a great relief when the hotel's street-side sign hoved in view, even if it was on the opposite side of the road from the one we were expecting. The taxi driver's chosen route had brought us around from the opposite end of the road. There was presumably method to his madness, possibly to charge a higher fare although I don't recall whether the final fare exceeded the fare we'd agreed, partly because my Spanish really wasn't up to the job.
Tomorrow we would be crossing the border into Brazil. I was glad to return to the air-conditioned convenience of the hotel. There are still plenty of photos from the Argentinian side to see however, so next time I'll give some more detail about the falls themselves.
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