Iguazú Falls

We arrived in Puerto Iguazú around 9:30am and went in search of food and WiFi as we realized neither of us had downloaded the map of Puerto Iguazú for offline use. (If you have never used Google Maps in this way, check it out! It’s invaluable for traveling.) The cafe on the corner had counter service with tables outside and coupons for an hour of WiFi. We shared a potato tortilla and used our hour of WiFi to download the maps and research how to get to Iguazú falls. For once, Eric looked pretty perky after getting off a night bus.

We couldn’t check into our Airbnb until 12pm, so we sat at the cafe until 11am and then went in search of packed lunch ingredients at a nearby grocery store. Then we walked to our Airbnb and sat outside until Destino showed up to let us in. Since Iguazú National Park closes at 6pm, we were eager to get there as soon as possible. After dropping our bags, we headed back to the bus terminal to buy bus tickets to the park.

Río Uruguay runs buses to both the Argentinian and the Brazilian falls (cataratas). There is a great debate about which side of the falls is better. The falls themselves are located almost entirely on the Argentinian side which means the view from Brazil is spectacular. However, it seems there is effectively only one viewing point in Brazil. There’s no need to see the falls from multiple angles if you can pretty much see the whole thing at once. This makes the falls much more accessible from the Brazilian side; you don’t have to walk very far to see the view. On the Argentinian side, there are many more paths and viewing locations, so you can see the falls from different perspectives, although you may never get the one stunning view you’d see from Brazil.

For us, this debate was functionally irrelevant as Americans need visas to enter Brazil and we don’t have them. The cost of the visa was recently decreased from $160 to $44, and Brazil is considering eliminating it entirely later this year; for now, however, it wasn’t worth the extra money for a pretty view.

So we bought two round trip bus tickets for 520 pesos ($14) total and boarded the bus to Cataratas Argentina. The Rio Uruguay bus departs from Platform 11 every 20 minutes. We arrived in the park 20-30 minutes later and paid the entry fee of 700 pesos ($19) per person. If you get your ticket validated when you leave, you can come back the next day for half price. This is the same deal we got at Parque Nacional Las Glaciares in El Calafate.

We were in! We walked along the Sendero Verde (Green Trail) to get to the start of the Superior (Upper) and Inferior (Lower) trails. We elected to start with the Lower Trail and work our way up to the Upper Trail. The falls are stunning and the volume of water is incredible! As the name would suggest, the lower trail gives you a view of the falls from below with numerous lookout points along the way. The upper trail takes you to the top of many of the individual falls (Bossetti, Mbingu, San Martín, etc.), and the views there are also spectacular.

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In between the various trails are a few cafeterías that sell food. We were recommended to bring a lunch as the food there is quite expensive. The cafeterias are fun to walk through though because there are coatis everywhere. They know tourists come with food, so they run all over: under the benches, over the trash cans. Every now and again they steal a yummy snack from an inattentive tourist, and then they all fight over it with the baby coatis squeaking and trying to get a bite. When it happens to someone else it’s quite funny to watch, considerably less so when it’s your lunch. Luckily a coati only managed to snag an empty plastic bag from us and lost interest when there wasn’t any food in it.

At the end of the first day, we got our ticket validated at register 6 at the very end of the hallway for our second-day discount and then boarded the bus back to Puerto Iguazú.

On day two, we went back to the park, showed our tickets from the previous day and paid 700 pesos total to enter. The first thing on our agenda was to take the train from Cataratas station to Garganta del Diablo (Devil’s Throat) where you can see the power of Iguazú Falls. The walking path from the train to the lookout is quite long, and it feels like you must cross more than half the river before you get there. At Devil’s Throat, there is so much water, and it falls so fast it creates these large clouds of spray. It is really hard to describe the power and beauty of the waterfalls and do it justice.

We decided to walk back from Devil’s Throat instead of taking the train. It was 99 degrees but considerably less humid than yesterday. Nonetheless we were pretty hot and sticky by the time we made it back to the train station. We sat in the shade under a palm tree and played cribbage while drinking maté to cool off. We must have looked like we owned the park because people kept stopping to ask us which way various paths were (despite there being relatively obvious signs right next to us).

We’ve decided to play seasons of cribbage which run from Saturday to Friday, and we’ve devised a point system that Eric tracks. The winner of each season gets to pick the flavor of ice cream we get. Friday was the end of season 2 and Jess was trailing by 20 points, but she skunked Eric in the first round to pull ahead by 10. Her mistake was agreeing to play again because Eric won the second game and ended up 12 points ahead.

After cooling off in the shade, we decided to visit the Upper Trail again because we liked it so much the day before. For some reason, on Friday afternoon, the Upper Trail was completely empty. We didn’t see more than ten people at any point on the trail, and there were beautiful rainbows at every lookout. We were really pleased we had decided to do the trail a second time. Afterwards, we headed back to Puerto Iguazú for the evening.

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Some Flora and Fauna of Iguazú: