Week 19 – Chasing Waterfalls
The long-awaited trip to Iguazú Falls. When we missed the opportunity to go there in December, we arbitrarily chose a weekend at the end of February to fill the gap in our Argentinian explorations. However, with my unexpected trip to Moscow it became a bit more challenging: my flight back from Moscow landed at 9 pm and the flight to Iguazú took off at 5 am the very next morning. Just 3 hours sleep after a 24 hours flight did not let me recover, but the desire to see new things kept me going.
We were amongst the first group of people to enter Iguazú National Park. Acting on a friend’s tip we immediately got on the choo-choo train to Devil’s Throat to beat the crowds. It is an impressive site with huge amounts of water dropping down every second. It creates a mist that goes tens of meters high above the ground, creating rainbows. It also flies in your face, glasses and camera lens.
About 15 min after we got to the viewing platform, a big crowd caught up with us and never let go. We walked the Upper pathway then the Lower pathway and with each minute there was more and more people. Aside from the influx of people, there was no place to sit and admire the waterfalls. Everybody was moving through the passerelles snapping pictures of the falls and taking selfies, selfies, selfies. That randomly chosen weekend happened to be a long national holiday that brought even more people to this already popular attraction.
A little bit of research and planning would’ve helped us avoid the excessive crowds and enjoy this natural wonder more than we did.
This week in numbers:
25579 steps – we walked up and down, back and forth
3h – time I slept in three days
2.7 km – total width of the falls
82m – highest drop
1756 m3/s – average flow rate
