Happy New Year!!

There was no better way to start 2023 than in the beautiful tropical location of Iguazú Falls, Argentina! We enjoyed the heat for the last few days before we head down to the most southern point of the country where it is around 50 degrees colder and rainy / snowy, in the middle of summer! I’m hoping the arctic blast Texas had before Christmas helped to prepare me for this next leg of the trip. Thankfully we won’t have a wind chill in the negatives!

It has been almost three years since Grant and I traveled abroad and we were definitely not prepared for the ~10 hour flight down to Buenos Aires. Sleep was hard to come by even with ZzzQuil and a glass of wine. I had to resort to creative means of sleeping in darkness and warmth:

When we finally made it to Buenos Aires, we were disappointed when we didn’t get that stamp on our passport. We were told by our driver in Iguazú that Argentina is now digital and no longer stamps passports. He also told us Uber in Argentina does not accept international credit cards so had to “cancel” our trip and we paid in cash (we learned from our next Uber driver this was not the case, but the first guy charged the correct price)! We powered through most of the 24 hours we had in the city, except a “short” nap before dinner, walking through the Recoleta Cemetery and downtown along the river.

We noticed a lot of Messi graffiti, murals, and jerseys everywhere we walked. He truly is a national hero of Argentina! If only our trip had been a week prior we could have enjoyed celebrating their World Cup win with millions of Argentinians!

Then it was off to Iguazú to enjoy the Loi Suites hotel that we originally booked for our honeymoon two years prior, but of course COVID. Thankfully, the hotel was nice enough to keep our reservations after pushing it twice. At the airport, we were picked up by our driver, Antonio, who only spoke Spanish and Portuguese. Thank goodness Grant has the ability to carry on a conversation in Spanish. He even made Antonio laugh quite a few times on our drives around Iguazú. Antonio helped us get from place to place all three days we were here and we got to learn a lot about Argentinian musical likes, politics/current events, the local Guarani tribe, etc. (at least through his eyes). Antonio played his own playlist each day via a pre-loaded USB thumb drive, which consisted primarily of 1970’s and 1980’s American/British music, and a lot of more modern “Keane,” though he had no idea what the lyrics meant. Elvis, he said, was too old for his liking, though Grant did point out some of his playlist had Elvis on it too! Grant left him with a list of 20 or so bands to look up after we leave. Through my 3 years of Spanish in school, I can understand about 75% of the conversations (unless they are speaking very fast) but don’t have enough confidence to speak it. Plus in a Texas accent it doesn’t sound right. Though Grant has decided to stay quiet in certain situations to force me to practice speaking Spanish.

The first day visiting the Iguazú Falls park, we started on the Argentinian side as there were more trails to explore than in Brazil. We learned that at peak rain season, Iguazu Falls drops over 3.5 million gallons of water per second across 275 different waterfalls. The power and immensity of the water there is truly amazing.

Grant and I enjoy taking photos (though we are very amateur photographers) and decided to split up the duties between our long zoom and short zoom. He also has become quite skilled using the filter to blur waterfalls – more photos are on our South America page. We ran into a couple of Americans throughout the day: a professor from University of Maryland on a speed trip through Argentina before heading to Costa Rica to teach, two friends (who were very well travelled) heading to Patagonia and Antarctica, along with two couples traveling through Chile, Argentina, and Brazil.

It was truly amazing to see the power of the waterfalls. The Devil’s Throat waterfall had actually washed away part of the trail two months prior so we were unable to stand atop that one. Grant was also disappointed because one of the trails we had thought about starting on closed due to guests seeing a puma. He wants to see a big cat so bad (maybe because he has secretly fallen in love with our cat, Callie). I keep telling him we’ll see plenty on our Africa leg of the trip. We also didn’t realize there were so many butterflies in the park, but after some trivia at the hotel we found out there’s almost 300 identified species of butterflies in Iguazú.

That evening was New Years Eve so we relaxed together at the hotel over some room service and listened to fireworks launching near and far most of the night. Our hotel overlooked the Iguazu river that separates Brazil and Argentina and we noticed the Brazil side was definitely partying harder than Argentina. Argentina was mostly hotels with travelers whereas Brazil appeared to be a more permanent community of neighbors having fun celebrating together with music and fireworks. Grant took this video overtop the river following a boat that was doing donuts throughout the evening, and you can see Brazil on the left while Argentina is on the right:

Day 2 of Iguazú Falls took us into Brazil, where we finally got that passport stamped! Getting into Brazil was pretty easy. Antonio took us to a small guard shack where we showed our passports and COVID vaccination cards (so far our first and only hint of COVID regulations, though it seemed they didn’t check too closely), told the lady we were entering for the day, then she sent us on our way. The trails on this side are shorter, but offer a better panoramic view of the falls which are just as, if not more, spectacular. Visitors also lined up on the overlooks to allow people to get selfies and photos without a crowd around. Although there were times where the crowds got a little rowdy, yelling “Fila!” (meaning “line” in Portuguese) if someone tried to cut the line. It was fun to compare how one country’s instance of a national park compared to another country’s instance of the same park. We felt the Brazil side capitalized more on the tourism in that they had people everywhere asking if you wanted your photo taken, had more points of sale throughout to buy snacks and souvenirs, and various other “for-purchase” activities. The Argentinian side still had souvenir shops and food options but in a much more centralized couple of locations. While in Brazil we had a tasty Coxhina (ko-sheen-ya) which was a chicken filled pastry, and noticed they had recycle bins dedicated to coconuts people had finished drinking the milk from.

We were also excited to see that the boats were running as we had been told previously they may be closed due to low level of the river. To get to the river, we took a jungle cruise about 1km in via electrically powered vehicle towing a wagon and then a guided walk down to the river learning about the fauna and Macuco bird. It is quite impressive how many people in the tourist industry here can speak 3+ languages fluently (the tour was in Portuguese, Spanish, and English all by the same guide at the same time). The speed boat then took us down the river into one of the coves to observe the waterfalls from below before soaking us under two of the “Three Musketeers” waterfalls. Definitely one of the highlights of the trip! And the best part was getting the GoPro photos and video of the ride for only $20 (when any amusement park or tourist activity in the US can be 4-5x that price). Here is a quick preview of going under the waterfall!

After the boat ride we headed back to the hotel. Our last night in the tropics sent us off with a powerful thunderstorm and a lot of rain which made for some refreshing morning air the next morning.

Now off to Ushuaia where we get to enjoy a penguin tour and some hiking in Tierra del Fuego before heading to El Calafate to trek on Perito Moreno glacier.

Random moments:

• Entry on to flight to Buenos Aires was fully biometric – no need to show the gate agent a passport
• An Argentinian airport worker was super excited my passport showed I was from Missouri – she said it was her dream to go to Missouri
• Fun food findings: Pringles are popular but smaller in size than US, we tried a Brazilian soda (Guarana) that was cherry in flavor, lots of Messi branded food products, apple flavored Powerade, delicious empanadas / beef / pastries
• Miles traveled: 7,519 on 3 different airplanes