GET THEE TO...IGUAZU!

I knew I shouldn't have gone for the cheap seat!

Today we went to Iguazu Falls National Park. You can view the falls from both Argentina and Brazil but to visit the Brazilian side if you are a U.S. citizen, you must get a visa and it costs more $ than we wanted to pay, so we chose to stay on the Argentine side. As it was we spent 7 hours walking in the park which my feet thought was sufficient. I thought about getting my daughter to push me around in an off-road wheelchair (practice for the future) but I feared she might feel compelled to push me more than "off road" after spending so much time together and those falls aren't called "falls" for nothing.

Iguazu falls is listed in all those books about 1001 PLACES TO SEE BEFORE YOU DIE and unlike some of the other listings, (Bakersfield???), I wholeheartedly agree. If you aren't dead yet, GET THEE TO... IGUAZU! (I am thinking of writing bumper stickers as a sideline). As it is such a famous site, I am sure several bazillion good photos and essays have already been published extolling its glories, so I am only going to share a few personal experiences and some not professional photo attempts. (See below).

 Firstly even without the falls the park is extraordinarily stunning. Elevated paths wind through a rainforest populated with gigantic versions of all your houseplants (see previous post), large lumbering lizards including iguanas, huge irridescent butterflies, a cacophany of buzzing and biting insects and flocks of squalling birds who want to eat them. Basically the law of the jungle is bigger really is better. There are purported to be monkeys, jaguars, toucans and snakes, but we didn't spot any on our walk.

 

 

so many snakes they need their own lane

One of the most popular treks is along and over the Iguazuo river which flows into the falls. We saw river turtles and (again) HUGE catfish and the water, though brown, looked quite inviting in the intense jungle heat. One could almost imagine floating lazily along in an innertube singing something about the Suwannee River, except for that huge catfish and also what is that strange roaring sound coming from around the bend? Better sing a little louder.

The bend BEFORE the end...

We noticed that many of the tourists coming toward us seemed a little more bedraggled and wet than even the sauna like weather merited and when we turned the corner we found out why as the river literally fell away into a huge funnel; the falls known as La Garganta del Diablo (the Devil's throat). All I could think when I saw it was A: the devil must have one hell of a thirst (yes pun intended) and B: I sure am glad I rethought that innertube idea.

There is no way to describe the immensity of the falls nor do photos do it justice. Suffice it to say, it makes Niagra Falls look like a houseplant next to the real thing, and even just the mist from the falls is as soaking as a hard California rain, (thus the wet tourists we had seen). Many of the guide books recommended wearing swimsuits to view the falls and suddenly that idea seemed a lot less appalling than I had imagined.

After viewing the falls from this vantage point we opted to grab some lunch before hiking to the lower trail to catch a boat ride "under" the falls. Evidently we weren't the only ones hoping to grab some lunch. As soon as we sat down a gang of coatis swarmed the cafe tables and began to work the crowd. They moved in pairs, with one distracting the gullible diners by looking adorable and cuddly while the other one went for the goods.

Doubling up to strong arm the gringo

After an exciting lunch we began our hike on the lower trail. We were at the
"only slightly damp " stage from our soaking at the Devil's throat when the competition let loose and the skies fell and evidently even a swimsuit wasn't enough to cope with that amount of water as we noticed that many people had donned full length plastic raincoats over their swimwear. Possibly full scuba gear might've been called for but we trudged along in our pointless garments and tried to breathe underwater as best we could.

Why at this point we believed a boat ride under the falls was a good idea says a lot about the detrimental effects of water on the brain. Call us naive but we actually thought we couldn't get any wetter. Let's just say we're a little wiser now.

The tour boats can't actually get under the falls because of the currents and the natural whirlpools that form at the base which can suck whole boats full of tourists into the vortex, kind of bad for business. Instead they drive directly at the falls full speed ahead like suicidal pilots and then quickly turn the boat so all the passengers only get slightly drowned by gazillions of gallons of spray. Rachael and I tried desperately to keep our eyes open but it was impossible. It was also impossible to keep our mouths shut as we were laughing so hard about the absurd fact that we paid good money for this ride.
The boat pilots obligingly do this "drown the tourists" maneuver several times on each side of the boat so no one feels left out, which I thought was quite courteous of them. There is also a "professional" videographer on board with a camcorder in a thermos so if anyone wants to see how they look when they are drowning, clawing for air, it is available to buy after the boat ride. The ride lasts for 12 minutes which might sound short to you, but you try holding your breath underwater for that long...

After the ride the sun re-emerged so we could have an enjoyable steam bath on our trudge back up the hillside, but no worries, when we caught the bus to get back to the hostel there was another downpour and the bus leaked onto all the seats so we could cool off again. Nature here is obliging like that. Truly it was a day to remember. Now I've got some wringing out to do so I''ll say ciao for now,
J

Iguazu Falls - Argentina / Brasil / Paraguay


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PUERTO DEL IGUAZU: WHERE HOUSE PLANTS ARE BORN

This week Rachael, Owen and I decided to take a break from bustling Buenos Aires and fly north to the border of Argentina and Brazil to check out Iguazu falls, or as they are known here, Las Cataratas del Iguazu.
Disembarking from the plane, the air was heavy with heat, the earth red and the rest of the universe every shade of green imaginable, including me because I was a little sick from the "delicious" airline Alfajores. We caught a cab into Puerto del Iguazu and checked into a sweet hostel; Timbo Posada, and then, as we weren't going to visit the falls until the following day, I decided to explore our suroundings.

The natives here are strange

Puerto del Iguazu is purported in all the guide books to be a one horse town, but I walked for hours and I never saw a single one so they must've been grazing elsewhere. What I did see was street after red cobblestoned street of old crumbling buildings engulfed in greenery. Puerto del Iguazu is situated in the tropical rainforest on the river Parana, across from Paraquay and Brazil. It is the closest town to Iquazu National Park where the falls are located, and so its economy is based on tourism, which translates into more hostels then homes on every block.

Its tough to be a skater in Puerto del Iguazu

Sidewalk

What happens when the gardener takes a day off

Even the "keep out" warnings are pretty

Rachael and Owen contemplate swimming to Paraguay...

...or they could just take a boat.

Our hostel is built around a jungley courtyard complete with a banana tree (and a bunch of bananas) a hammock and a small swimming pool which overflows each afternoon during the torrential rainstorms. There is a covered patio overlooking the courtyard where we lounge during the storms so we can watch without getting struck by lightning and each evening we are seranaded by a chorus ( ? ) of howler monkeys who must be nesting just beyond our yard.
There is also the incessant roar of the buzz saw bugs. I don't actually know what they are officially called but I am sure its something close to that. They are so loud we have to raise our voices to be heard above the sound of their machinery. They seem to have unionized with the huge carpenter ants and are either keeping the rainforest from encroaching further or are buiilding yet another hostel. The nights are lovely here if a little noisy.

Passage in the posada

Where bananas come from

 

BIG slug!

BIGGER spider!

Dinner guest

Brunch guest

Rachael and Owen noted that many of the indigenous plants seemed familiar, and we realized that here under the rainforest canopy the climate is probably exactly the same as any average North American bathroom in a household with teenage girls (think incessant showers, those of you who are childless). Basically this is where all of our houseplants are born, except we only get the runts of the litter up there in the north, as a philedrendon leaf here could easily gift wrap your SUV with room to spare (and probably would if you parked it overnight as everything grows at a rampant rate).

Leafy greens

Watching things grow from our hostel kitchen window

A common garden weed

Every evening we continue to hunt and gather, but since this is a tourist town the basic neccesities are a little more at hand. We could easily live off the fallen mangos and guavas and figs that litter the neighborhoods but there are also plenty of cafes and restaurants, all open late into the night with covered seating along the sidewalks so we stroll through the diners as we wander. Last night we passed through a parilla (a steak house) that was showing a nature show on a tv set up amidst the tables. I was enthralled to see a flock of vultures disembowling something unfortunate on the big screen. Talk about ambiance!

Well tomorrow we are going to try and get an early start so we can spend the day at Iquazu falls and since its already 2:00 a.m. I suppose I'd better blog off, so ciao for now,
J

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Iguazu Falls - Argentina / Brasil / Paraguay


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WALKING DEAD

Virtually every tourist guide to Buenos Aires in print mentions the city's cemeteries not simply because they house some of the country's most famous dead personages (Evita Duarte, Astor Piazolla, Carlos Gardel, to name a few you might recognize), but because of the spectacular architecture and statuary that adorn the sepulchers.
Since Rachael has to entertain a multitude of out of town guests, all eager to see everything mentioned in their guidebooks (think the Boardwalk and the redwoods, all you Santa Cruzans) she has created a special game to LIVEN up the requisite cemetery visits called Cemetery Bingo. Each participant fills out a 5x5 grid on a piece of paper choosing items from a predesignated list of things to be found in the cemetery. There are categories: people, dates, statues and plaques, and other, and the players must choose items from each list. The participants walk through the cemetery together and the first person to find the objects listed on his bingo card and cross off a column, row or 5 box diagonal achieves BINGO and is the winner and gets to feel important and superior.

We took a bus to the most famous of the cemeteries, Cematario de Recoleta. It resembles a small city (minus a couple of amenities like the ubiquitous Starbucks), with the mausoleums laid out in rows of narrow streets. Many of the tombs are larger than my daughter's apartment, which I guess makes sense since they are housing entire extended families.
We wandered down the lanes searching for objects on our Bingo cards, things like: a cow statue, the Mason evil eye, an open tomb, a live cat (there are many), "knockers bigger then your hand" (there are a few, depending on exactly how you translate that), person wearing glasses, etc.

Bingo!

Some of the tombs are in disrepair, but all of them are ornate and covered with more cherubs than you could shake a harp at. There isn't alot of greenery but the streets are so narrow as to cast some nice shadows, which was a welcome relief from the intense sun beating us Norteños down.
Owen won Bingo, though we never did find Evita's tomb despite the directions in my guidebook (and the helpful angel pointing the way).

Thataway!

We gave those directions to some other foreigners who were also searching for it (although not playing Bingo) and we never saw them again, so I suspect that the directions are some kind of tourist trap (literally) and probably those poor turistas are tied up in a tomb somewhere minus their wallets and passports, and the guidebook publisher is licking his fingers and counting out his hefty cut of the profits.

 A very big angel lords it over Rachael

We continued our cemetery tour the following day, this time taking the subway to Cemetario de la Chacarita. If the Cemetario de Recoleta is a small city, Chacarita is a metropolis. It is a sprawling 230 acres and the largest cemetary in the country. Here the streets are more like boulevards. Again the tombs are immense marble edifices carved in a multitude of Gothic architectural designs. There are also a surprising number of Egyptian style tombs so I guess Argentina didn't miss out on that King Tut fad in the 1980s, although I have to say these did look much older.

There is a HUGE ornate cathedral, with a stained glass rotunda, in the center of the grounds, but alas it was closed the day we visited. Inside we could see birds flying near the ceiling, their calls creating eerie echoes through the closed grillwork.

One of the most famous mausoleums in this cemetery is that of Carlos Gardel, the father of tango. It is marked by a larger than life statue (unless he was one gigantic dude) that supposedly is always holding a lit cigarette put there by an adoring fan. Since everyone in Argentina is required to smoke, and when in Rome, or, well in this case when in B.A., I wanted a puff too, I insisted that we locate his tomb so I could pay homage and bum a smoke. After wandering for two hours, and asking various guards for directions, alas again... when we finally located Gardel's statue, his cigarette had burned down to a butt and was no good to me.

In front of Gardel, modeling 'neckulator' that Stuart gave me for my flight.

However, if you are ever in the neighborhood and craving a ciggybutt, I noted the address for you: corner of Calle 6 & 33. Not that that will be any help because this appeared to be the only street sign in the entire cemetery.
Buena suerte,
J
P.S. For any of you who want the official Cemetery Bingo instructions (spanish or english versions available send your request to nuitzangaro @gmail.com.)

Don't look now but I see a Zombie.

Zombie or Tango?

Siesta Time.

La Chacarita Cemetery


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NEW KID ON THE BLOCK

Still a little disoriented

I realize that although I have been here for a week, I haven't really told you much about this amazing city. I know you can read all the touristy stuff in guidebooks and see photos much better then mine (see above), so this post will be more a tiny sliver of some of my immediate observations. First however this disclaimer: coming to a country where you don't speak the language or know the culture, is very much like being the new kid in Jr. High school. You know something is going on but you don't have a clue what. Also you suspect that you are wearing all the wrong styles and you know for certain that you are going to be the last person picked for the kickball team in the unlikely event that suddenly there is a call to choose up sides. In other words, you are NOT the new popular kid on the block, and your narrative might be a little skewed.
Fortunately, unlike Jr. High, the Porteños, despite their reputation, have been most welcoming and friendly, despite my deer-in-the-headlights stare every time they speak Spanish in my direction.
Rachael and Owen's apartment is on the 9th floor in the Amalgro district, a mostly middle class
neighborhood situated in what was once the city's flower market, and there are open air flower shops on almost all of the corners and nearby streets. Since they seem to be open 24 hrs a day, this is an excellent neighborhood in which to argue with your sweetheart, as an inexpensive bouquet is only footsteps away. It is important, however, to watch exactly where you take those footsteps, as greywater from the flower stalls tends to seep under the loose paving stones and a misstep can give you a refreshing but filthy footbath and if you track THAT back into the apartment it will be back to the streets for another bouquet!

Cupid's Helper

Another wonderful reason to live in this neighborhood is that the scent from the flower markets tends to offset the scent of the huge heaps of garbage that line the streets until the garbage collecting horse-drawn (or sometimes people-drawn) carts come by to take it away. It is high summer here, hot and humid, so the piles of trash can get pretty stenchious, but they are also a treasure trove of potential reusables for anyone stout of heart (or maybe stout of nose) who is feeling brave and creative. Rachael and Owen have managed to craft some excellent furniture from reclaimed trash.

Think of the possibilities!

Of course Buenos Aires is so much more then flowers and garbage heaps. The streets are lined with huge Sycamore and Magnolia trees which each seem to host an entire community of parrots who fly back and forth in great flocks and squabble with the pigeons.
(Rachael's cat, Ofelia, would probably love to gobble them up but she is confined to the sink at the moment).

Ofelia in repose.

Each day Rachael and Owen show me a new neighborhood, as like in any big city, Buenos Aires is made up of a multitude of barrios, but besides sightseeing we spend much time hunting and gathering. Shopping here is a daily exercise that requires visiting various specialty shops for particular groceries. We go to the carniceria a few blocks away for fresh meat, then to the fiambreria for yummy cheese, on to the farmacia for personal items (and a couple of gallons of perfume to smell as delicious as the porteños), to the verdureria for some veggies, don't forget to pick up the drycleaning at the tintoreria and a couple of nails from the ferreteria to build something from that cool thing we just harvested from the trash pile on the way, and then on to the chino (any of many chinese supermarkets around the city) for everything else.
If we are really craving something exotic, like say geoduck, we can jump on a bus or subway and make our way to china town. I found an excellent can of something actually called "My caffe latte" that was easily on a par with Starbucks, and I had a choice off all kinds of other wonders but since I am literate in neither chinese nor spanish and the pictures on the labels were more scary then appetizing, I declined to do much shopping there.
Also, since every thing we purchase has to be hauled home and then up 9 flights of stairs, it is easy to curb impulse shopping.

Why you don't shop at Costco in Bueno Aires.

Anyway, they say a picture is worth a thousand words and I have already used up that quota so here's a smidge of what I am seeing so you can see for yourselves.
Ciao for now,
J

 The Argentines go to great lengths to get good reception . . . 

. . . or should I say heights?

. . . and a parrot in a pear tree.

Homburg con hombre

Uh-oh, which stop is mine?

FELIZ AÑO NUEVO

Hola Amigos,
Last night was New Year's eve but since Porteños stay up all night EVERY night, waiting around until midnight to celebrate was no big deal. Fireworks are legal here and so a few days ago, Rachael and I visited one of the many fireworks shops and ordered up our arsenal.
I wanted to purchase some BOOMBULADOS (mostly because of the excellent name, since I have no idea what they actually did, although it does seem obvious) but we ended up opting for more sparkly things with less bomba effect. Rachael's favorites are avejas (stinging bees) which, if they work properly, fly up buzzing into the air after you light them and possibly sting you. If they don't work properly they whirl around buzzing in circles on the ground where they are also likely to sting you. Great fun!
At any rate, come midnight on New Year's eve we didn't really need any more excitement because evidently the rest of the population of Buenos Aires DID buy the BOOMBULADOS in some kind of mass attempt to blow up the entire city.
We watched along with some neighbors from the rooftop of Rachael's apartment building where we added our own pyrotechnics to the fray. The wind was howling but the night sky was clear after a broiling day of half-hearted thunder storms, and the smell of a million asados (that's spanish for bbq) wafted through the air along with tiny burning hot air balloons called Globos.

Valentín does New Years on a Buenos Aires roof top, the best place to set things on fire.

Buenos Aires skyline BEFORE the burning Globos fell to earth.

Rachael and Owen, a couple of New Years' fire bugs.

Truly it was an arsonists dream and a fine way to celebrate the beginning of a new year.
Feliz Año Nuevo por todo el mundo!
Ciao,
J