Iguazu baby!!! Wow, what a place! We'll commence this entry with some immortal word's from Guns'n'Roses' old lead man, Axl Rose: "Welcome to the jungle baby...you gonna die!!!" Coming from the cold and wind of the Antarctic a couple weeks ago, to a place as hot and humid as this is a real headtrip. A completely different environment of landscape, flora, fauna and animals. Those, the animals mostly, are what inspire the rock'n'roll quote. Here there are snakes, spiders and all manner of 'big cats' that could take you to the grave! Ok, ok, so you are probably more likely to fall into one of the fast moving rivers and get sucked under, but checking out these critters makes you wonder what it would be like to get crushed by a boa constricter!!! Ha ha! My second quote of the day comes from a rocker-type a little more obscure than Axl, but certainly a lot stronger, even though, at the time of print, he is dead. Bill Hicks, in the opening of his masterpiece Arizona Bay was making fun of Los Angeles when he said: "Snowin' back east? Not here. Here? Hot and sunny. Hot and sunny everyday. Hot and sunny. Hot and sunny. And do they like it? They love it. I don't understand why...only lizards get excited about this kinda weather!" In Iguazu, you are sweating in your sleep in the middle of the night with the fan set on high. At that hour it isn't because it's hot, it's because it's still humid as a bastard. You get up in the morning and the air is clean and wet in your nose and the clouds are all piled up in technicolor skies and you know that this is heaven for somebody. Many people actually. It is completely beautiful. You take a morning shower and feel fresh and clean and that lasts for about ten minutes and then by noon you are walking down the street and the sun is burning your flesh right through the sunblock SPF 3000 that you are wearing and you are dripping your own sweat off the tip of your nose and questioning just what type of paradise it really is. The nice thing is that the ladies don't wear much clothing and, being as close to Brasil as we are here, they are all beautiful. (Exaggeration for effect.)
Iguazu sits on the line where three countries come together. Argentina, Paraguay, and Brasil. (They spell it with an 's') There are a couple rivers that come together and these sorta form boundaries. I had a 'sucks to be American' experience when I got here at the Brasilian Consulate and was denied my entrance visa until later. Conditions I won't explain here, but trust that there was a mountain of bullshit involved...oh yeah, and that wonderful guy we got running our country, George something...anyway, where there's a will and some benjamins there's a way so I did get across those borders to check things out. Here Paraguay is like the punkass little brother that always tags along. They keep him around out of pity or to amuse themselves or whatever, but they make fun of him the whole time. Everyone in Iguazu makes fun of Paraguay. They are poor and have little going for them economically, and their neighbors don't let them forget it. The Argentinians don't love the Brasilians but here they get along. They have a mix of languages along the border which is spoken rather regularly that is called Portuñol. My portugese is shady at best so I just speak straight out spanish and hope they get what I'm saying. Seems to work, so I keep on doing it.
The attraction here is the huge set of waterfalls that pour from the shelves of the jungled terraces. The border between Argentina and Brasil runs right up the middle of the falls and river, so you have two different and distinct vantage points from which to view all that is going on. And let me tell you, there is a lot going on. The area of actual waterfalls is vast. Hundreds of individual waterfalls roar off the cliffs and break around rocks and islands before finally coming together and calming down in the river below. It is really something to behold. On the Argentinian side there are three major trails you can take that wind around through the jungle and take you to different view points. On the top couple of trails, you actually walk most of the time on bridges that go above the river and put you right next to, and above the actual falls. Here, there is water spray everywhere and a continual raging of water that is loud and exhilarating. The top most trail takes you almost a mile across the headwaters of the falls to a place called La Garganta Del Diablo. The Devil's Throat. This is the wildest point of the falls. It is where water on three sides cascades furiously down into this chasm, sending a plume of spray a kilometer up into the air. It is deafening here and one remains dry for less than a second before getting drenched. There is an energy here that is just like that of Victoria Falls is Zambia. I remember standing on the point in front of that water-monster in total awe...realizing that I was not witnessing, but experiencing something really special. Here it felt the same. You wish you could some how take it with you, but you have to just take as much as you can into your eyes and ears and nose as you can. I posted a bunch of photos on my myspace of this area...but as always, no justice is done.
That day the clouds came in the afternoon and I was on the lower trail in the jungle when the torrent came down. For a while I hid out under a bush, but you could tell early on that this storm was going to last for a while. So I found a bigger tree and hunched down in the dryest spot I could find. It got really dark in the forest and the thunder loudly followed the lightning by less than a second. It grew quiet amongst the trees and the other storm pilgrims and I smiled and watched the plump raindrops pummel away at the huge green leaves. After about an hour the rain abated, and I was so wet anyway I struck out to finish my circuit of the trail. It was great. A half an hour later the sunbeams were back out in force and the birds and insects were making a racket and aside from the huge orange puddles everywhere, it was almost as though nothing had happened.
The next day I went to the Brasilian side and went to an aviary where there were over 800 types of tropical birds. They also had a large array of reptiles, amphibians, butterflies and other tropical stuff. The first thing I saw there was this tree that had strings of flowers hanging down that looked exactly like bird's beaks. It was incredible...like the plant imitating the bird or vice versa. Mother Nature is a crazy-ass chick. You can actually walk into these huge pens where you don't see the fences and it's as though you are in the wild. There are birds cawing everywhere and fish and gators in the water and lizards running around. It was really neat to be there and watching the little kids in total awe of all that was happening around us made me realize that I still feel that awe too. My camera and I suck at taking photos of animals, I don't know why but we do, so the ones that I have posted are only so-so. Let me tell you though, it was a really cool thing. Lots of the parrots were saying 'hola' and 'hello' and all the kids were imitating them and it was a whole lotta pandemonium. At one point I entered this aviary with a sign on the gate reading 'ENTER AT OWN RISK'. I like this kind of sign so I entered and immediately knew why the sign was there. I was dive bombed, upon the closing of the gate, but at least four bright blue and quite large tucan-type birds!! Man, the racket in there was almost as deafening as the falls! These birds were all over the place. Green ones, red ones, blue ones. I waddled my way to a rail in the middle and watched the birds lives for a while. They are beautiful, and in ways, a lot like humans. (Look dumber, probably smarter.) After a few near misses with dive bombers, I scooted out the exit and made my way towards the Brasilian side of the falls.
I actually liked the Brasilian side better. The views were a little more panoramic and when I did actually come to close proximity, it was even more exciting still. This day saw the sky full of incredible puffy clouds, which served as a perfect backdrop to the rushing whitewater. I slowly made my way along the trail up towards the falls and again I enjoyed the rushing wind and water out on the viewpoint, almost in the middle of La Garganta. Again, it is something that I can't explain, but it really is something. That waterfall is an experience, not just a place to see, and after seeing a lot of tourist crap around the world, I have really come to value a thing like this.
The next day I went to the huge reservoir and hydro-electric dam in Paraguay named Itaipu. It was and still is, a controversial project that currently provides over a quarter of Brasil´s electricity and all but a couple percent of Paraguay's. It is the largest hydro-electric plant in the world (for the moment, there is a bigger one being completed in China), and it is absolutely immense. They have tens of 90 foot wide tubes that channel water down into the rotors and at any time, two of these tubes channel as much water per second as all of the waterfalls in Iguazu combined. This dam is on the Paraná River, on a site that used to be home to waterfalls bigger than Iguazu. All that land is now under hundreds of feet of water in the massive reservoir above the dam. One of the major reasons it is controversial. The plant is split down the middle along the boundry lines of Paraguay and Brasil. They have a yellow line which runs through the dam that allows you to know at all times which side you are on. To me that is funny. The control center of the dam looked an awful lot like the deck of the spaceship from Star Trek. (I am sure a lot people would slap me for not remembering the name of that damn ship, but I don't.) In the middle of this room was the yellow line and on each side of the line, there were separate teams of workers and computers and switches, each belonging to the respective countries. Evidentally, Paraguay uses less than half the power that they produce and so they sell the rest of it to Brasil. This is good for Paraguay, because like I said, it is poor as hell. A lot of Brasilians travel to Ciudad Del Este in Paraguay to buy things like electronics because they are so much cheaper and even with the costs of travel and transit, it is still cheaper than buying things in Brasil. (Sorta like in New England, how a lot of the senior citizens were travelling, for some time, to Canada to buy their prescription meds. Drug addicted country that we are...) These borders also see a lot of contraband and I can't figure out why they don't police them better. Oh yeah, $$$.
Here in Iguazu, there are lots of out door fire pits that have metal crosses staked into the ground with big chunks of meat slowly cooking on them. I stopped and chatted with this guy who was tending to one fire pit. He was probably 25 years old and was shirtless and sweating profusely. He had a huge belly and a tattoo of a vine-wrapped heart directly over his own heart. He had closely cropped hair and big, friendly eyes. He was a talker and got really happy when I told him that I too was a cook. (Anywhere you go, we cooks have a community.) He explained the processes of his trade and told me that those pieces of meat took seven hours to cook...mas o menos. He talked a lot about the state of modern Iguazu and asked a lot of questions about the US. There is a lot of foreign land and business investment here in this region and he thought it was a good thing because the government doesn't take care of things there, and private business owners did. He was a cool guy. Standing next to that slow-burning, but screaming hot firepit, I felt at home with this big fellow. I thought about the hot kitchens that I have cooked in and the people I have cooked with and around. Believe it or not, there are times when I miss having a job!! Ja ja ja!!! I have met a lot of interesting people in Iguazu. My spanish is good enough at this point to just walk up to someone and shoot the shit. That's nice because one of the major reasons I like to travel is to talk to different people about their worlds.
Next week I will be heading to Chile, to a completely different scene. I have more language school that will be happening in Santiago, but first I want to try to get down to the wine regions of Curicó and Colchagua. Try to meet some people there and use some Carmenere (Chile's signature grape varietal.) to help me figure out the local dialect. Iguazu has been yet another treat. If anyone is going to Argentina, it would be a shame to miss a visit to this hot and roaring place, I highly recommend it. Until next time, here are some more words of wisdom from good old Axl, may happiness find him wherever he may be: "And if you wannit you're gonna bleed but it's the price you pay..."
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