Iguazu Falls

If you're more a visual person than a reader, there is a 16 minute narrated video of this trip on youtube.

We left home about 10:00 AM on Friday and arrived in Buenos Aires at 9:30 AM on Saturday. (Buenos Aires is 4 hours ahead of Denver). The pickup at the airport was smooth, Monica was waiting for us to take us into the city to the domestic airport. We asked if we could drop off our big bags at our future hotel, so that we wouldn’t have to lug them (and pay for them) to Iguazu. We arrived in Iguazu at about 4:30 PM and again we had someone there to take us to our hotel, the Melia Iguazu. We spent the big bucks, the hotel is in the park, and from the lobby you can see the Falls.

View from hotel lobby

After a great night’s sleep, we had breakfast, and headed off to do two of the three major trails. We had this trail mostly to ourselves, because most of the tourists hadn’t arrived at the park yet. The upper trail is at the top of many of the smaller falls: Dos Hermanas (the twin falls), Chico, Bossetti, Gpque, and Mbigua. The main river splits into numerous portions which meander to the basalt cliffs, providing these many falls. They have a lot of variety in how they reach the lower river, some are just tiny ribbons of water, others have numerous falls. The end of the upper trail reaches the main river and here you have the spectacular San Martin Falls. This is the primary falls we can see from our hotel. 

Mary and John at Iguazu Falls

After heading back through the rain forest, we caught a train to take us to the next trail. The crowds had arrived. The trail was crowded with people. Here we walked almost half a mile across the river to get a view of the Devil’s Throat. The volume of water coming down is tremendous, it reminded me of Horseshoe Falls at Niagara Falls, though much more of a bend and slide, rather than a straight down falls. The power of the falls was quite impressive here. After returning, Mary was done in and she had blisters on her feet to prove it.

After a quick rest, I decided to take the lower circuit trail. Since this one had steps, I wasn’t sure Mary could handle it. Here I could see the same falls that we had seen from the upper trail, but now you were near the base of the falls. I recognized many of the classic pictures of Iguazu falls, which are taken from this trail. And, I discovered that you could see almost the entire trail without having to take any stairs. Or for the cost of 10 stairs up and down you could see it all.

Coatis off the trail