Bonus Chapter: Iguassu Falls

I have recently fallen a little behind on posting to this blog. However I have now posted two new chapters and to make up for the delay here is a small bonus chapter.

The most stunning thing I have seen in all my travels is the Iguassu Falls that you read about in the last chapter. I have albums full of photographs of it. Here are just a few that give you a taster of this incredible sight.

Chapter 31

"Poor Niagara !"
Eleanor Roosevelt (at the Iguassu Falls)

Buenos Aires is a very large, very modern city and like all large modern cities it is divided into very distinct areas. La Boca - the original city port - in the South is a vibrant, colourful - and I'm told relatively unsafe - artists community. There are street performers and a market where artists set out their paintings on easels at the street sides. It was another mirror to the opening weeks of my trip. As I walked along comparing the wide variety of styles I couldn't help recalling my similar exploration of Union Square in San Francisco. There the variety of styles had been matched by the variety of subjects but here the subject range was rather slender. There were paintings by the hundred of tango dancers and of the street in which we were walking. If it seems an odd choice to specialise in paintings of the place in which you set out your stall it isn't really for Caminito is a remarkable pretty street. The buildings are bright patchwork quilts of crimson, emerald, sky blue and canary yellow. It's not just that adjacent buildings are different shades. An individual building will have an orange wall and a turquoise window frame, while adjacent is a section with a turquoise wall and a scarlet window and running around the outside is a wooden staircase in yellow and brown. The whole building being topped with a salmon pink roof. The tiny works of art for sale in the street seem to have been embedded in a much larger work of art.

If La Boca is a bohemian, primary coloured, artistic place other areas of the city differ markedly - although in fairness the Governor's residence, also known as Casa Rosado, is a startling shade of bright pink. The districts of Recoleta and Palermo, to the north of the centre form the exclusive expensive area of town. Here a house will cost anywhere between two and three million dollars, compared to $45,000 in La Boca or $65,000 in the more central area of Montserrat. The buildings are in their way as individual as those in La Boca but here the way to express individuality is by adding expensive and faintly ridiculous architectural features, columns which are structurally unnecessary, gothic arches, balconies that have been built around existing trees so that they grow up from the ground and through the balcony floor to shade the upper stories. In the heart of Recoleta is El Cementario - the cemetery. Even here a single grave will cost a minimum of $15,000 and could be as much as a million, although you might have to wait a long time to die because there is quite a waiting list to get in. When you are keeping company with such illustrious departed as Eva Peron it's hardly surprising that it's an upmarket necropolis. The elaborate and ornate tombs towered above me as I walked around the narrow alleyways of the cemetery, getting lost in its labyrinthine layout like a rat in a maze. Gothic marble statues and hideous stone gargoyles marked every corner and lurked on every roof and the afternoon sun striped the world into alternating bands of impossible white reflections and black shadows as dark as the grave itself.


The heart of the city though lies from San Nicolas to Montserrat. This is where all the official, buildings, hotels and shops are. A pedestrian area joins the broad central strip of the avenues 9 de Julio and Florida. It is lined with cinemas, shops, restaurants and bars. If it looks in places a little down market and lived in then that really adds to its charm. Here I sat in the open front of one of the restaurants and watched the world go by as I ate my Tenedor Libre - literally 'Free Fork' - which is a common way to tuck in in Argentina. It's a cheap fixed price buffet. For as little as four or five dollars you can make as many visits as you like to the buffet bar and it's stocked with every kind of vegetable, meat, fish and poultry you can imagine prepared into every dish you could want. It's possible to load up one plate with a nice healthy salad of lettuce and tomatoes and a second with a combination of lasagne, steak, roast chicken and sweet and sour pork if you choose to do so. Then you can do it again. And again. The limit is your capacity to eat it and still be capable of walking back for more.
As I ate a record shop over a block away was playing something through outdoor speakers at a volume that filled the street. I didn't know what it was but I knew that it was wonderful. An angelic soprano soared over a vaguely rock like backing of drums, strings and keyboards occasionally counterpointed by a male choir. It wasn't the kind of thing that I usually buy but almost everyone was entranced by it. When I'd finished eating, the music had reached the end and started again at the beginning. I went down and tried to find out what it was. Since I had learned my very basic Spanish months ago in Quito I had hardly used it but somehow I discovered that the artist was called Emma Shapplin and managed to buy a copy of the CD. It was selling well. Four people enquired about it as I stood in the shop listening to it play again. I read the sleeve notes and discovered that I was buying a CD by a French woman, singing in a mixture of medieval Italian and Catalan in a shop in Argentina, a Spanish speaking country. I felt conspicuously cosmopolitan.
Later talking to Vern about my purchase my enthusiasm for it was so great that it convinced him that he wanted a copy - no small feat given that I had nothing to play it on to demonstrate. We walked down to another Tenedor Libre for dinner and it was still playing. Inside there had been a large pile at lunch time. Now there were now only two remaining. I asked as well as I could how many they had sold. The salesman, the same kind of pimply teenager that you find behind record shop counters world-wide, shrugged.
"Today," he said "Thirty? Forty? Maybe fifty?"

I had taken the organised coach and walking tour of the city to save time because I wanted to spend one of my days on a trip across the River Plate to Colonia del Sacramento in Uruguay. In part this was to clock up another couple of stamps in my passport but it was also because I had heard that Colonia was a splendid little town, relaxed, beautiful and calm. I organised my ticket with Busquebus to include the ferry, lunch and a walking tour. The ferry was enormous, bigger than many hotels, and the journey smooth and comfortable. The lunch, was slow and poor quality but then came the walking tour and I discovered that Colonia was actually even nicer than advertised. The Barrio Historico, surrounded by city walls that may have been reconstructed but look original, has narrow unevenly cobbled streets and low plastered stone buildings interspersed with trees with baroquely twisted trunks and branches bending under the weight of thousands of purple blooms. It's a small enclave of carefully maintained history away from the modern city which is on the other side of the city wall. There is a delightful whitewashed lighthouse and a twin towered church - the Iglesia Matriz, the oldest church in Uruguay. The tree lined streets open onto compact but pretty courtyards. I tried a walk in the modern part of town but though still pretty and low key, compared to the Barrio Historico it was rather ordinary so I returned to one of the many cafe bars, one decorated rather strangely with prints by twentieth century American artists - Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Edward Hopper were three I recognised. I sat outside drinking a couple of cold beers and reflecting that I could happily do this forever.
Sadly though the afternoon wore on and the shadows lengthened and it was soon time to return to the ferry and back to the skyscraper filled shoreline of Buenos Aires and tomorrow it would be time to be on our way north again - to Iguazu falls.

It was almost nine months now since I had started the trip and I was all too aware that time was running out. In less than two weeks I would be back at home. One of the first things I had seen, and it felt like a lifetime ago, was Niagara Falls. I'd been very impressed but Niagara pales into a poor spectacle compared with Iguazu. It's hard to believe that you can spend several days looking at a waterfall without it getting boring but at Iguazu we did just that. Weeks later, when started to sort out the films of the trip I realised for the first time that I had taken three complete rolls at Iguazu. I always take out any duplicates and near duplicates, remove any that aren't interesting or are badly composed or improperly focused and generally ruthlessly prune them down until I'm left with less than half of the pictures I originally took and those are the ones that I put into albums and keep. With my photographs of Iguazu it was almost impossible to do that. Certainly I had a few which were similar enough to others to remove but it's virtually impossible to take a bad picture of the place no matter what kind of camera you have or how poor a photographer you might be.
We saw it from every angle. Like Niagara, Iguazu - or Iguaçu to give it it's Brazilian spelling - is on the border of two countries and can be seen from either. We were intending to see it from both. We started on the Argentine side. Here we took a boat across the river to the series of walkways which lead across for a close up look at the section called the Devil's Throat. The water was a muddy brown, not clear and sparkling like Niagara, but the falls thundered and roared powerfully and although it was unbelievably crowded with tourists all pushing and jostling to get a better angle for their pictures it was still an incredible sight. Nevertheless I was only half serious when I said to Vern,who was videoing both it and us for posterity, that it was much better than Niagara - whether on the Canadian or American side. It was not until we took a walk down below the rim and in among the whole series of cataracts and torrents that I realised just how right I had been. As you follow the walkways round you begin to get a sense of how mighty it all is. I rounded a corner and between the trees saw a long curving row of parallel falls, perhaps a mile wide, billions of gallons streaming endlessly down. The view was framed by the dark bottle green fronds of the palms and was as magnificent a spectacle as any in the trip. The path continued until finally it terminated in another viewing platform just yards from the first of the falls. Here the air was filled with water. To even approach it was to be soaked in seconds. Standing this close, watching the torrent was an unbelievable experience but there was more to come.
I descended a series of rocky steps to the river which was unexpectedly calm and tranquil. There a ferry took me across to the island of San Martin which nestles in amongst the falls. Here, on a narrow strip of beach people were sunning themselves and swimming. Behind the beach though a steep series of steps takes you to the top of the island. I climbed up them to the path that circles it. Everywhere there were signs warning that it was inadvisable to leave the path as the island was populated by venomous snakes. I walked around, the island. The path wandered in and out of the trees and back to the rocky shoreline. There were more magnificent views of the falls, this time from below, looking up at the cascade and for all the noise and fury there was a peculiar air of peacefulness about the place. Perhaps it was the relative absence of tourists or perhaps it was the combination of the rocks and the trees timelessly standing at the base of the such a powerful image as the tumbling water but it felt tranquil and restful just to be there.
The following day, on the Brazilian side of the falls I took a helicopter ride to see them in their full glory from the air. Only this way, flying above them does the real scale become clear. Down on the paths and walkways the sheer power of them is close and personal but from the air the Devil's Throat is a great gaping wound in the Earth. The whole span of the falls is a series of vast arcs where hundreds of individual waterfalls tumble down in gigantic steps in a torrent unlike anything I had ever seen before. The flight managed to feel simultaneously much longer than its actual fifteen minutes and yet much too short. Even the sad knowledge that this was to be the last of the great natural wonders of my journey couldn't dampen the elation I felt at such a glorious sight. As the helicopter touched down and the next customers came running across to take their turn I knew already that when anyone asked me what was the most impressive thing I had seen on my trip I wouldn't have to think about the answer. It was Iguazu. There was really no competition.