Foz de Iguazu & Itaipu

My longest bus ride in Brazil I did end of January from Sao Paulo to the Foz de Iguazu - nearly 24hrs to one of the world biggest waterfalls located in the border of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. Caused by a nostalgic feeling I decided to cross the border to Argentina to discover the falls from there and of course recover some of my Spanish which I nearly used since 2 months. And I directly noticed that 2m month are are long time, so I mixed up my Portuguese and Spanish all the time - my brain was a mess. But by self-testing I noticed that a good argentinian ref wine helps a lot to recover my memory ;).

Since 2/3 of the Iguazu Nature Park are situated on the Argentian side, it was a early bird mission for me arriving in the park as first at 8 a.m. to avoid the inrush of tourist and the scorching heat. Brandmarked as a "Gringo" of course I had to pay 4 times more entry fee than the natives, but there you got a comfy paved trails through the park adapting to the flip-flop culture there as German adventurer fully dressed in their functional close like ;). What I forget instead to bring along was my huge thermo flask for my Mate Tee which every Argentinian carried along...as bigger as better!

But the waterfalls as itself were really breathtaking. Caused by the strong rainfalls of the months before the Iguazu river carried lot of water. Over 250 falls you can see in this area but one of the most impressive cararact for me was the Devil's Throat ("Garganta do Diabo" in Portuguese), a U-shaped, 82-meter-high, 150-meter-wide and 700-meter-long fall which drench you entirely. Apart from that you could observe some wild life like huge salamder and spiders and a kind of some really cute little striped bears who could climb up the trees and of course the best - finally I saw a Toucan from near with his big yellow beak which was still pending since my Amazonas visit.

The visit of the Iguazu Park on the Brazilian side in generally you can skip concerning the park itself (because with neary 30Euros entry fee pretty expensive), although the the overall view on the entire waterfall front was a jaw-dropping moment.

Better choice stopping at the Itaipu Power plant near to the Cuidad de Este in Paraguay instead. After China this is the 2nd largest operational hydroelectric power plant in the world in the frontier of Paraguay and Brazil. Because of it's dimension the over 7km long Dam was elected in 1994 as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. But the other side of the coin lies in the social impact that approximately 10,000 families living beside the Paraná River were displaced and in this more than 10years construction period several hundred of people died due to a lacking occupational safety. But of course, the promotional documental they should in the plant tells you anything about that.

But I have never seen in my life such big sluices draining an immense amount of water with such a power that create a huge cloud of condensing water in front of your eyes.

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