Iguazu Falls

The adventure continues... happily! Warm day today again, enjoying the sun twice as much, for all of you in the north and beginning of winter! Yes, warm and very sunny, start of a tan, sunburnt nose, all is good!

Starting to know things better here, looking for a placement and as everything, it is pretty disorganized and requires a lot of patience and networking... But slowly finding a way.

Last week Solène (coeur coeur coeur) and her friend Hannah came for a day in Buenos Aires, we went to a milonga (where they dance tango) in an amazing place, on the first floor in an old barn, redecorated and pretty underground. Once again, we were singled out rapidly, and asked why we came. There are blond argentine people in Buenos Aires, but still they always seem to see us from miles away.

Then trip to Iguazu, one of the biggest waterfalls in the world (highest one over 70m when the Niagara falls are just about 50!). First the Argentine side, first you walk in and there are souvenir shops, big roads, lots of people and a little train and it just feels like you're in Disneyland. But then it is like being in paradise, with untouched nature, thousands of different kind of butterflies. Believe me, everyone had told me there were loads of butterflies, and still when we got there I thought: "wow there are loads of butterflies!". They fly in circles above puddles and they look like leaves tourbillonant in the wind in autumn. And there are loads of weird animals, toucans, huge ants, MOSQUITOES, and little animals that look like raccoons -sort of- but with really pointy noses. They look cute, but then a stupid tourist tried to make one come closer, it did, but she had little bread loaves in a plastic bag , in another plastic bag and before she knew it, the coatie had bitten through the plastic bag and run away with the pack of bread loaves. Stupid tourists.
So the waterfalls, you get to walk over them, and under, the view is incredible, you get so close you're wet and you feel that's what life is about! Then there is "la garganta del Diablo" the devil's throat (popular name in Argentina for everything that is "re-barbaro" (very amazing). To get there, after taking a little train like in Disneyland, you have to walk about 6minutes to get to the veiw point. The whole time you walk over water, branches of the river that leads to the falls. I've never seen so much water, its like recovering half of Fontainebleau (not that I have any notion of time or space). And then, and then, you get to the top of the most powerful part of the falls. Its just crazy, difficult to imagine, even for me now!

After a long day spent there, exploring every bit and stopping to gasp every 20m, we got home to one of the best hostels, Hostel Inn, it has a huuuge swimming pool, nights of "as much as you can drink caipirinhas lots of people. There we met a young monsieur, 18, English, on his gap year, public school, i'm sure you can all picture him now, so funny so confident but not really, especially when the Israeli next to him (that had just finished his military service) told him that war wasn't funny so he shouldn't have joined the army, even if they paid half his studies. But he was funny, like English you know? haha

The next day, we took a taxi, so cheap that would take us to the brazilian side and back (1hour altogether for about 20 pounds between the three of us. As we got there, we saw a flash, and then a rumble, and very soon it was raining... pretty heavily for our little unprepared heads (except for Solene of course... she had one of those perfectly organized people's raincoats. I came to Argentina without a raincoat.) So we bought very sexy raincoats there and were very happy!
This side, with the rain and the wind wasn't so much like paradise anymore, more like a LOT of water! but the view was still splendid, and you get to see the falls from further, thats when you realise how biiiiiig they are. And there were school field trips there as well, so we had the chance to witness crazy brazilian youngsters running around in VERY short shorts and tops, drenched to the bone screaming and flirting as hard as they could.

All that made us want to stay in Brazil for longer, but we couldn't because we didn't have any local money, our taxi driver was waiting and we had to take a bus hooome. So we took a bus home, about 18hours, slept most of the way... exhaustion.