Argentina - Puerto Iguazu

By Brent

After a brief stop in Buenos Aires, we jumped onto a bus for a short 17-hour ride up into the far northeastern reaches of Argentina. We pulled into the station at Puerto Iguazu and jumped onto a city bus that would take us to our home for the week.

The bus brought us to a small campsite Dana's host sister, Picha, had recommended called Camping Costa Ramon.

This is one of the first friends we met when we walked into the campground.

The couple who owned the place had a pet monkey named Moni, a parrot named Felipe, a doberman named Mirash, and a couple other small parrots who roamed free and we never met.

Occasionally, Felipe would greet you with "Hola!" but more often than not, you would just hear him screaming.

Whenever Mirash and Moni would play, Moni would try to hold onto Mirash's head. It works okay for him now, but when Mirash gets bigger, the monkey will be in trouble if he keeps doing that.

They also had a beautiful swimming pool that we sadly did not take advantage of. It would have been a great temperature, but we were too busy wandering around the other areas of the site to spend time sitting here.

For example, we spent several evenings relaxing on a patio with this view:

This is the Rio Parana, and the land on the other side belongs to Paraguay.

Later in the evenings, we were typically treated to a wonderful sunset over the river.

In the mornings, we got to see some of the wildlife that had come out at night, usually in the form of something large and slimy.

This guy was pretty easily the biggest snail I've ever seen. Later that morning, we found a giant slug, but we don't have a good picture of it. It looked like this snail had misplaced his shell.

At one point, a German couple came into camp driving this discrete vehicle. The owner apparently customized this thing with a 200L (~50gal) gas tank, GoPro mounting station on the hood, extra storage space, and who knows what else. Fully loaded, it weighs something like 3 tons - he knows that because he shipped it from Germany for this trip.

Unfortunately, neither Dana nor I remember their names, but the guy was a freelance videographer. He had a quadricopter that he used to shoot a video that we think will be uploaded to Camping Costa Ramon's website (google it and look for the video), and had already used it to get some incredible footage from Tierra del Fuego and their 1,000km drive to Iguazu.

Anyway, the real reason we came here wasn't to wander around the campsite - we wanted to look at the Brazil/Argentina/Paraguay border!

Paraguay is on the left behind the river, Brazil is on the right behind the river, and Argentina is in the foreground. Coolest part of the trip right here.

Since we were here anyway, we decided we might as well go look at some of the rapids upriver between Argentina and Brazil. Some of the friends we met during our travels had mentioned they were pretty.

Our first view of the rapids. They're on the bottom left side of this picture. I don't know why the person taking this picture thought we wanted the island in the background.

The river splits around this island, and this is EASILY the side with the least water. I can't even begin to describe how much water is coming off of this.

At one of the falls on the side of the main falls.

Dos Hermanas (Two Sisters) falls - considerably off to the side, but that means they're not incredibly busy (comparatively), so they seemed like a great spot for lunch (more on that later).

Dana enjoying the view on the upper trails.

On the upper trails, you can see the whole eastern set of falls.

Dana had also strongly suggested that we do a boat tour of the falls, and while I was skeptical it was going to be worth it. I went along and we got our tickets, picked up our dry sacks, and climbed into the boats.

On the first approach. We're headed up the larger part of the river, which we hadn't seen yet. I didn't realize it at this point, but we were going to ride the boat right under some of these small falls in a few minutes.

Swinging around to the part of the falls we'd walked along. Again, this is the small side of the falls.

After the first approaches on either side of the falls, you put your camera into your dry bag. Last time Dana was here, they took the boat under the huge falls on the left in this picture. This time, the water was WAY higher, and it would've sunk the boat. I approved of that decision.

This is where we had lunch. The stupid-looking animal you see is, in fact, stupid. Because people feed coatis (right in front of signs saying "DON'T FEED THE ANIMALS"), they think it's alright to get really close to people. While we were eating, eight coatis surrounded us, and one of them stole our bread.

After lunch, we took a train ride up to the trailhead to Garganta del Diablo ("Throat of the Devil"). To avoid walking in a group of a hundred ridiculously slow people, we killed some time eating chocolate and playing with butterflies.

When we felt the group would be dispersed, we headed out across the bridge system. This is what you see for a good 10 minutes as you walk across the bridges toward Garganta del Diablo.

Until suddenly:

Apparently when Dana was here before, the water pouring down was clear, and there was a lot less of it, so you could actually see almost to the bottom of this ring of waterfalls. This time, you could maybe see 30 feet down.

Any one of these falls could have been one of the top 10 biggest falls I've ever seen in person. It's just hard to fathom that one river can carry this much water. Such a crazy place. Definitely worth the trip.

This guy was hanging out near the bridge on the way back to the train out of the park. #comeatmebro

Before we left the park, we had to go down one more trail we'd heard about. We managed to see a capybara (at least that's what the pictures we saw later made us think).

We also saw this little guy:

Pretty sure if you used this night crawler as bait, it would bite the fish.

As an added bonus, while we were at the park, we ran into the girls who had come to Tracy's house in Pucon, Chile the day before we left (they're the ones who bought a dog in Peru). Apparently they'd stayed for a couple months, traveled through Patagonia a little bit, and had eventually worked their way to Buenos Aires and Iguazu.

We met for dinner after leaving the park and had found a recommendation that got us free drinks!

River's actually cute now! She's definitely grown up quite a bit since last time we saw her, and her fur isn't nearly as strange-looking as it was three months ago.

It was great seeing the girls again, and if everything works out, we'll be going to a futbol game with them in Buenos Aires soon! For now, it's off to Uruguay!