A Weekend at the Zú

As most of Latin America practices Catholicism, Easter is a pretty big deal down here. Therefore, at the university we get a long weekend to celebrate or go home to see family. For study abroad kids, this means taking off to travel somewhere and "aprovechar," or take advantage of, the extra time. A wide variety of Argentine provinces were visited by the CC-CS students over the holiday weekend, but my friends and I chose the province of Misiones, home of red dirt, tropical forests, and Iguazú Falls, a very large ring of waterfalls that stretches across the border with Brasil. So, Wednesday morning we prepared ourselves mentally and physically (aka by buying lots of snacks) for the 22 hour bus ride and started the journey off to Jurassic Park incarnate.

Funnily enough, we didn't quite make it there on time because our bus "se rompió," or broke down, for two hours in what we thought was the middle of nowhere Misiones. When I woke up it was still dark outside, and I groggily thought it suspicious that the air conditioning had turned off. Before even opening my eyes, I heard the woman behind me saying, "se rompió, que bárbaro," which basically means, "It broke down, what shit!" Upon hearing this I said a few choice words in English, still without opening my eyes, and promptly rolled over and went back to sleep. Two hours later I woke up to a beautiful sunrise and the realization that we had not in fact had any type of mechanical problems, we simply ran out of gas and were waiting for a little man in a pickup truck to come manually pump some into our tank. We then proceeded to drive 5 MINUTES to another bus station. Such is Argentina.

When we finally got to Puerto Iguazú, we discovered that our hostel was basically Cancun Spring Break MTV style, so we threw on our suits and hopped in the pool for the rest of the afternoon to wash away the filth of what turned out to be a 26 hour bus ride. The hostel had a great kitchen so we cooked every day, which saved us a TON of money in the long run. Saturday, our last night, we went out for an asado to splurge, and Olivia got the waiter's email (brownie points Liv, brownie points). Darío, our friend from Buenos Aires who met us in the Zú, told the waiter that she was leaving the next day, to which he responded, "Yes, but she might come back!" Again, such is Argentina.

So back to the actual falls. We luckily used our student ID and residency cards to get ourselves some mad discounts on tickets to the parque, which also saved us a ton of money. The nice people who took our tickets told us we could get them stamped for a discount the next day, which we did, and he remembered us when we came back to him. This was the Friday before Easter, which is THE busiest day in Parque Nacional de Iguazú. That means that this man had seen over 12,000 people at the ticket line that day, a very large portion of them foreigners, and yet managed to remember who we were and where we were studying. This is one thing I love about Argentina. They're so centered around relationships that they always remember you, always greet you by name, always make you feel extra welcome. This has been a huge reason why I feel so at home here I think.

We walked in and started out our hike to the falls, and were instantly reminded of several scenes from both Jurassic Park and the Land Before Time (Janie, I was expecting Petri and Ducky to jump out at me the whole time, or on a more unfortunate level, the T-Rex who ate that dude off the toilet in Jurassic Park, which if you recall I saw for the first time on your surround-sound tv at the age of 5 and had nightmares for like a week). The contrast between the red dirt and the incredibly lush, green tropical foliage is amazing. And then there are the falls. The jungle itself is impressive, but the falls are something else entirely. You cannot fathom how much water pours down them every second, or the power they have. We walked right up to one at a lookout point and got absolutely drenched from the mist. Here's a photo of part of the falls (yes, there is more. We didn't even see the Brazilian side).



Ridiculous, right? And then there's La Garganta del Diablo, or Devil's Throat, which I'm not even going to put a picture up of because pictures just can't do it justice. It's a HUGE fall, just this complete gurgling madness, and you can't see the bottom because there's so much mist. You can see the mist that it produces from the other side of the park, and it looks like smoke coming up. For those of you who have been, these falls put Niagra to shame.

All in all, Iguazú was one of our best trips so far. The scenery alone was so completely incredible, but as always with our crew there was tons of laughter and fun times as well. I would say that I think the next few weekends will be pretty quiet, but knowing Córdoba I'll have some other grand adventure to tell you all about in roughly 3 days. As much fun as I'm having down here, know that I'm missing you all and that I'm sending more love than there is water in Iguazú Falls, Brasilian side included. <3 Besito a todos.