On Sunday and Monday we took an overnight overland trip from Buenos Aires to Iguazu Falls. When we got the details of the trip a few days earlier, we learned that we would spend about four hours at the falls on the first day and would spend the entire second day getting back to the ship in Montevideo, Uruguay by plane, ferry, and bus. I said at the time that if I had known that it would be so much travel time for so little falls time, I would not have booked the trip. Thank goodness I didn’t know as missing this trip would have been a huge mistake

The first thing I learned is that I have been mispronouncing Iguazu all my life. I had always pronounced it I gua zoo’ but the correct pronunciation is Ig wah’ sue. During normal water levels, there are 275 distinct waterfalls. Since the water levels are higher right now, there are fewer falls but more volume of water flowing over them. The falls are about 269 feet high and 1.67 miles wide. Wikipedia calls them the largest waterfalls in the world. The falls are on the Iguazu River on the boundary of Argentina and Brazil. We were only on the Argentina side.

The falls are in the third national park in the Americas. The first was Yellowstone and the second was another national park in Argentina. We expected that we would be walking a trail along the top of the falls and another trail along the bottom of the falls. When we arrived, we were given the option to skip the walk at the bottom and to ride a boat along the base of the falls. This required walking down and back up 254 steps and going underneath the falls so everything you were wearing would be soaked. A our first thought was this would be too much, but we went with our second thought that this sounded like a lot of fun and would give us some of the panoramic view we would not get from the Argentina side. It was a good decision.

My pictures and my words cannot begin to show the majesty and beauty of the falls. At every new view point I would say, “This is absolutely spectacular!” And that is not a phrase I use very often. You really need to experience them to fully appreciate them. There are waterfalls all around you which is hard to convey in pictures. You also need to hear the noise and feel the power of them. The falls hitting the water below results in ever changing clouds of mist. We were very fortunate with the weather. It rained all morning and was raining when we landed at the airport at noon. By the time we finished lunch and started to the falls, the sky was beginning to clear. By later in the day, the sun was shining and creating rainbows in the mist.

I apologize for the length of this blog. This site was so special to me that I just didn’t know where to stop.