Escape to Iguazú(I)

I haven't explained anything about trips for a while..because we haven't visited anything new, that's true..but well, let's explain the latest one...

After working weekends,  we get days off to select afterwards. I usually take them as soon as possible,  but sometimes 2 or 3 accumulate.

Recently I've done this on purpose, so last week I took Tuesday to Thursday as days off, so we could travel to Iguazú on monday night.

Everybody who works here in Rio has traveled or plans to travel to Iguazú. It is a popular destination, and agencies offer packages to get there and sleep, but I didn't really do any research about what is in there, apart from knowing it had big waterfalls. It was also a natural border (the river) between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil.

We spent one night in the Brazilian side, and two nights in the Argentinian side. Each side has a natural park that you need to pay to enter, and some other stuff to do around.

So, on Monday night we took a 2-hour flight to Foz de Iguazu. The Brazilian hotel was pretty good, with nice enough rooms and nice breakfast, apart from an awesome pool that we didn't have time to use but looked nice. We slept there and on tuesday we grabbed the bus that goes there(if you are not careful you will get scammed with price of transportation ).

This day was all gray and cloudy, and forecast warned about rain and storms. Far away we could see some big black stormy clouds coming our way, but well, nothing we could do about it.

The Brazilian park had another bus to bring you close to the waterfall areas. We stopped in the middle of the way and walked around the forest. First thing we saw was a warning about Quatis. We didn't know what animal was that, but got the point of not trying to feed them. We reached the first observation post, and yes, I can see why it is a popular destination.

The waterfalls are massive, and really really big. There's lots of green around it (not equatorial jungle, but more like tropical,  still pretty dense and green and humid), and there is lots and lots and lots of waterfalls. From that side, you can see them from far away and it is impressive the ammount of water that they're moving,  and the spray they create. You could literally see the water making "clouds" right there, many tiny little drops floating up towards you or towards the sky. This together with the green of the forest gives an amazing view.

On the next open area, we found Quatis.

Quatis are a type of mammal that is probably related to Raccoons. They move similarly, and act similarly. The ones in this area have adapted quite well to humans,  and are totally shameless, trying to check your bags and making puppy eyes for food. We were shooing them away from our son (who of course was very happy to see them and wanted to touch them, but was so excited it would have resulted in him hitting them), that was in the stroller, but they kept checking it and trying to grab our bags. In the end, while opening one pocket of the stroller they saw a bag of dried apples, and one of them jumped on it and stole the whole bag.

It was actually very funny, because it was not something that would be bad for them (just dried apples) nor anything we needed, but we could see that, while cute, they were shameless and problematic...

We continued our walk and found some stairs. This was very annoying, because we had the stroller with us,and previously there was no indication about them. We even passed areas that had ramps next to some steps, as if this was the norm in all the park. So we had to move through stairs several times during the day...

We passed several nice observation points, and in one of them we saw that the storm clouds we noticed during the morning were moving quite fast. They looked really awesome, as if they were unfolding, and they seemed to have a very liquid texture. There was especially dark sections moving at different speed than the rest...and for a bit we enjoyed the show without realizing their movement.

Then we saw that they were moving towards us at high speed and we had an "oh crap" moment.

We covered ourselves and the stroller with raincoats, and just managed to get ready before it started to pour water in top of us, right after the beautiful clouds passed us overhead...

This put an end to the visit, and we just run through paths and stairs to the restaurant area, which had pretty good views from far away of the top of the waterfalls and one of the main sections called the devil's gorge...

We could also see the Argentinian side from there, and there were platforms on top of the river and next to the waterfalls. It looked curious, we needed to check that next day...

We managed to eat, the rain calmed down, and we went out of the natural park to visit a bird park next to it.

This park was like a zoo, but bird-based and taking advantage of the nature around it. It claimed to be a place to rescue birds, and it is true more cages were rather big, but it is still a zoo, and a touristic one...

Anyway, I don't know if they trained the birds in there, but most of then were very sociable,  with some of them jumping towards us when they saw us. Our son was extremely happy about it and keep making happy noises.

And then we went to one of the cages, since the path entered some of them and let you be around the birds. These were big caged areas, and it was nice to see them close. However, our son was eating a chicken stick at that moment...I thought they would tell us we could not do that,  but nobody said anything...

Anyway, we were in this really big cage, and we saw some pretty big birds walking around, and some tucans. I really like tucans, and we had seen some free ones in Rio, but it was still nice to see different types around.

Then, several things happened. First, we were being followed by a number of walking birds, and we noticed that they were looking at our son's food. We shooed them away, but then a small tucan, for whatever reason, started to harass my wife trying to touch her toes, until it actually bit her a bit.

While trying to send the little tucan away, I turned around to see a big black walking bird stealing the chicken finger from our son (he maybe got scared for a sec but he was also happy that the birds were that close), and ran away followed by other big birds, who started stealing the food from one another....

It was very chaotic for a moment...and apart from the little tucan's attack, what the other birds did was funny but worrying...

After that we passed other cages, but we made sure to not have food around us...

In one of them we also found another tucan(a big one this time), this one apparently sociable and very cute, just sitting in a railing of a bridge that crossed the stream. We took pictures of it, and some people even caressed it...it seemed not to mind, although if some person was too annoying it just took some steps away, indicating that it was enough..I could not resist a gentle tap with one finger, and it just looked at me^^.

After the last tucan, and considering this one had a beak twice as big, my wife just looked at it from a distance, while taking pictures...

During the visit it started to rain again, which was annoying. Most birds at least had a place to cover themselves, but the rest of the visit happened much quicker after this. I will only mention that there was a big cage you could enter that had butterflies and hummingbirds, and it was quite impressive, especially the butterflies, big as my hand....but then they showed you the caterpillars, and they were also that big^^'.

We finished the visit quite wet, and returned to the city to grab a taxi to the Argentinian border, really hoping the hotel in there would also be nice and wanting to eat and take a warm shower after the wet rainy day...

I'll explain the other two days in another post.