Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Waterfalls

I arrived in Iguazu past 12 and as soon as I got off the overnight bus I was overwhelmed with the humidity. The bus had the AC going full blast and luckily I had a long sleeve shirt to keep me worm, but I did have a huge head ache and felt like I had a brain freeze from the cold air.

The main attraction in Iguazu are the cataratas—the waterfalls. So my plan for the following day was simple: get up early in the morning and head out to see the waterfalls in the national park, which was an all day event. While having breakfast I met Eunice, from Catalunia and Roni from Israel. They were also traveling alone, so we decided to spend the day together. Eunice was studying in Chile for a year and was doing some traveling during her summer vacation (South America has reversed seasons so many people have summer vacays during US winter time) while Roni took some time off and was traveling for 4 months in Chile, Argentina and Brazil.

We spent almost 8 hours at the park looking at waterfalls and walking every trail we could find on the map. The waterfalls were breathtaking and powerful. The national park also contained beautiful birds, massive butterflies and rodents resembling raccoons. These rodents were not scared nor were they ashamed to beg for food or try to get in your bag.

Roni’s primary love in the national park were the butterflies. I think it triggered some childhood memory, because that’s all he talked about--how beautiful they were and how much he loved them. He didn’t have his own camera because he lost it in Chile, but every time he saw a butterfly, he instructed Eunice (she had a really fancy SLR camera) to take a picture of it. Or, he would borrow her camera and chase the butterflies to get the perfect shot. It was quite a site.

At the end of the day, we returned to the host absolutely exhausted. Roni insisted on making dinner for all of us…. I didn’t put up a fight. While he was cooking, Eunice and I were drinking beer and downloading all of our pictures from the day. I had close to 60 photos while Eunice had almost 300. As we were looking through all of our pictures, we realized that it was nothing but rodents, waterfalls along with tons and tons and tons of pictures of insects and butterflies. We hardly had any photos of us, but plenty ideal shots fit for a nature magazine or National Geographic.

Lesson learned—more pic of people and less of water and bugs.

5 comments:

  1. Nice juliya! I went just around the same time last year.. in december actually but close enough. it was beautiful. did you go to the arg side or brazil side? -Bree

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  2. Jaja... buena lección... ¡voy a tenerla en cuenta! :)

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  3. Hey Bree, I did go on the brazilian side as well, just a lil slow to update the blog... i'm on an island with awesome beaches.... so i have diff priorities right now....

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  4. Get your a$$ off the beach and update your blog! I'm assuming it stopped raining?

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