We left off the last post before we left for Tucuman in our rental car. It was a relatively uneventful trip back south to another spanish influenced pronvincial capital city with a nice square and some cool architecture. This time we decided to stay in a hotel and it was pure bliss. We "splurged" on a $57/night room that included A/C, WiFi that actually worked, and a bathroom with true hot water. It even had little shampoos, but they came in plastic packets. I guess the bottles only come with $60+ rooms. Tucuman was mostly a resting/stopping off point after our extensive drives in the northwest. It was a good break and we got a few things done that needed either good internet or a big city. The latter being me getting a haircut. It was pretty interesting trying to explain in broken retard Spanish how I wanted my hair, but luckily we brough a picture with us basically showing what I wanted. That helped and she used only scissors and a dry straight edge to get the job done in 15 minutes flat. I was surprised, but I like it. I had it done in a fancy salon, complete with shampoo for only $8. Gotta love the exchange rate. Other than that Tucuman was a hot city, and it rained hard one night too. The food and especially service was great, though, compared to that of the smaller towns. We had one of the best steaks we've ever eaten there and the waiter even came back to the table to ask if everything was good
after he brough the food. That NEVER happens here.
We traveled for what was supposed to be 20 hours from Tucuman to Puerto Iguazu on an overnight bus. It left at 11:30am, but didn't get here until 12pm the following day making it a 24.5 hour ride. To start, the bus was about 45 minutes late so we spent a while waiting at the bus terminal. Our first meal consisted of loose ham and cheese, a ham and cheese sandwich, an additional smaller ham and cheese sandwich, and a piece of bread. I guess that was to make a ham a cheese sandwich if you wanted. I swear I'm going to vomit if I see ham again. Out of some kind of miracle our dinner did not contain ham, but cheese was definitely in there.
When we first boarded someone was sitting in our seats and apparently stole our blankets and pillows because we had none. We asked the attendant for some and he said he'd be right back. About an hour later we finally tracked him down as he was chatting with his buddies and he acted all irritated and finally gave us some. Not that blankets should be necessary at 11am, but when they are attempting to cryogenically transport you from Tucuman to Iguazu they are. The A/C must have been set to 45, and thats not celsius. Our bus stopped about 15 times to get gas, drop off random people at gas stations, stops at major terminals, to pick up dinner, and of course at each of these stops they turned on the lights and made announcements no matter if it was 3pm or 3am. Then at 4am once we finally were getting a little sleep the bus stopped at a terminal apparently about to break down and we had to switch to another bus. Luckily no one tried to steal our blankets this time. However, since we were originally scheduled to arrive at 8am we had no breakfast. Fine if you could sleep through it, but someone decided it was a great idea to blare music over the bus speakers at 7am like it was time to wake up or we were close to arriving. Only we were getting no food and we were still 5 hours away. They apparently realized they were morons about 2 hours later and we finally slept another few semi-restless hours until about 11am. All-in-all the bus ride from hell.
Worth it all just to see the Devil's Throat. Garganta del Diablo, the Devil's Throat, is the main cataract at Iguazu Falls, our reason for coming all the way up here to the intersection of the borders of Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. The Rio Iguazu drops off a basalt shelf over 80 meters high forming Iguazu Falls. Its actually 275 separate waterfalls spanning 1.7 miles of the river and has the highest volumetric flow per year of any waterfall in the world. Its
average flow is lower than Niagara Falls and Victoria Falls in Africa, but when the water is high (like it was today) it flows higher than both of those. Funny thing we found out is that Celilo Falls used to be higher volume until it was covered up by dam construction. Garganta del Diablo is the largest in the group at Iguazu, a 490 foot wide and 2300 foot long U-shaped waterfall.
We didn't make it over the Brazil side, 1 because you need a visa, and 2 it didn't really matter because the water was so intense the mist blocked most views of the falls. The Argentian side has walkways that go right out to the edge of a lot of the falls. It's absolutely incredible. It was a perfect day for viewing the falls today. The sun was shining and it apparently had been raining a lot in Brazil so the water was very high (the reason for the brown water in the pictures).
We did everything from get blasted by spray at the bottom of a large waterfall to hang over the edge of one of the largest waterfalls in the world. Very cool. Check out the videos to get an idea of the amount of water going over this thing.
Being back in the jungle there were a lot of animals roaming around, but since this place is highly touristed they were mostly there to eat the garbage I think.
We saw a tailless iguana eat a sucker, stick and all. The Coatimundis (cousins of the raccoon) learned how to pull the garbage bags up out of the sealed cans with their claws to get food out.
The butterflies were nice, though, and they were everywhere! I had what I called a Huskies butterfly (purple and gold) land on my hand and not come off until I walked into a blasting waterfall and it blew away. I think it was there to make me feel better that I had to miss watching the Huskies kick the crap out of WSU. Sorry to any Cougs reading this... wait no I'm not. Woohoo we finally won more than 2 games in the season!
To top everything off in a day of grand scales, we ordered a steak that was enormous. Named "baby beef" in the menu, it was anything but. A rib steak about the size of a sheet of paper and around two inches thick came to our table on a sort of portable heating tray with a lower tray filled with red hot coals from the wood fired grill. It was so great after a day of only eating an orange and a popsicle. It had to weigh 3 pounds and we ate all of it. I wish I had a picture. The pure de papas (mashed potatoes) were also awesome. I'm starting to get used to this Argentinian steak eating thing.
Tomorrow we fly down to the Patagonia to a town called El Calafate. There we plan to visit the Perito Moreno glacier, jump over to Chile for the Torres del Paine, then travel north for a stay at an Argentinian sheep ranch set on a blue-gray glaciar-fed lake in the Andes. I know this sounds funny and you probably hate us for it, but we need a break from the heat!
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