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So where were we?? Right, finished up in Bariloche and enthused by the success we had on public buses in Bariloche, we managed to navigate our way on public transport to our hostel in Buenos Aires. We happened to just be in Buenos Aires again for only one night but in the midst of the international Tango Championship... so of course we had to go and have a look.
We took a bus out to the exhibition centre and the entrance was free (Win!). We saw an amazing live tango band - they were fantastic. Unfortunately the competition was over for the day, but we saw lots of (very good) couples 'freestyle' tango-ing on the dance floor. It was great, fantastic to see so many people still enjoying a traditional dance. It's quite an intimate dance too. A very nice experience.
Unfortunately Karl didn't get to see the mechtronic full sized dinosaurs that he wanted to see but he confused some of the flights and as a result with the little time we had it made it a bit hard to fit it all in. We both really enjoyed Buenos Aires a lot and hope to be able to visit again one day, hopefully a rugby world cup will be hosted there in the future as this would be a perfect excuse for another visit.
The next morning, quite early, we got on a plane to Brazil. We landed at Foz do Iguazu - it's a town in a corner of Brazil that boarders Argentina and Paraguay. The word Foz means where something ends- so it's the end of the Iguacu river. (Igaucu in Portugese, Iguazo in Spanish).
We had landed ourselves in a nice little hostel called Hostel Klien - it has a few perks - $5 for a homemade dinner at night, a decent breakfast and there was plenty of good company too! (And a pool, but it's still winter so not really used!).
The first day we were there we went to the Argentinian side - we couldn't keep away ;-) So over the boarder we go and arrived at the Park about 11am... we had until 5pm to see the falls and we used every second of it! There's three tracks that you can take to see the falls - the upper, lower and the devil's throat. We started on the lower track and saw the falls from afar. Still quite amazing and interesting to se them form further away - there are quite a lot of falls stretching for at last 1km.
We took a small boat over to an island to get a closer look and managed to get our first waterfall spray! It was fun. The falls are so amazing closer up. They result from lava flows ages ago which stopped at a point to create a sharp cliff - there were subsequent lava flows and so it's almost like a few steps up to the top of the falls.
Then we took the little train they have around to Devil's throat - the really famous part of the falls. It is truly amazing! Just spectacular to see the super wide (800m) river - it's not so deep (maybe 50cms to a meter) - from the top and see it plunging over the cliffs! We took a video here and it's up on Karl's facebook page if you want to see it.
Then we took the superior track, which ironically is lower than devil's throat. You can see some of the smaller falls from their top too - very pretty views of the whole vista. In the national parks, on both Brazilian and Argentinian sides there are animals called Coatis. They're pretty cute and look like a badger crossed with a pig. But man! have they become accustomed to people and they're quite keen on getting at your food too!!! There's a lot of signs up warning you to be wary of them, that they carry disease and bite and scratch to get food.
We had our lunch on the island - where there are no coatis - so we were safe, but we did see them steal some other people's things. At one point, one coatis stole the fruit bag from a family, while the kids ran after that one and the mum was screaming at them all another coatis came up behind her and stole their sandwiches too!! At another point, there was a group of tourists at a table and one came up between them to poke its head onto the table, when the girl saw it, she screamed and the coatis took this moment to grab her hamburger and make a break for it. Cheeky things!
That night, we didn't feel like cooking and were too late to book into the home made meal at the hostel, so we caught a bus into town and went to a churrascaria. Wow! So Much Meat! Infact, 36 different types are on offer. This is 'the thing' in Brazil - you go to a churrascaria and for a set price you get a buffet of salads and guys walk around with massive spits of meat and carve a little off onto your plate for you. It was amazing - Jane has got to learn how to say no!! We had no idea what a lot of the meats were, but we had chicken and rabbit and cow and mamaita (!!?). The yummiest thing Jane had was spit roasted pineapple covered in cinnamon, nutmeg and sugar! Delicious! The meat was really good too. Apparently that's an 'ok' one - you get what you pay for and we only paid $10 each, so we are happy with that! I'm sure we'll find a time to try another churrascaria before we leave! (if you like the sound of it, there's one in Brisbane called Mundo Churrasco - it's in Bardon).
So the next day we went back to the falls - this time the Brazilian side (the river is the boarder). The Brazilian side is nice too, it's a bit further away at first so you get this fantastic overview. Then as you walk along you get closer and closer. Eventually you're on a walkway going out over the top of the first layer of falls - so you can se the top and get a great (if wet and windy!) view of the other falls coming down at you! Again there were Coatis and heaps of animals to occupy our attention too.
There's not as much to do on the Brazilian side, but that's okay because at the entrance there's an amazing Bird Park too. It's really cool - giant aviary where you can go in with the birds. They're slightly accustomed to people and so they get close enough to have a good look. There were so many types - toucans, maccaws, scarlet ibis (so pretty!), harpie eagle (giant! we didn't go in with her!), flamingos - interestingly - they had mirrors in the flamingos area and information about how flamingos in the wild like to be in groups in the thousands because they feel safer. So the mirrors make them think they're in a bigger group, the feel safer, and they breed more!
Karl seemed to have the magic touch - in one of the avairy's two birds were competiting over sitting on his feet! Then a toucan was trying to sample the water tube from the camelback that he was wearing! It could easily have bitten through the tube but was just giving it curious nibbles (it's all disinfected now!). The macaws come in such a variety of colours and so so vibrant! Blue, yellow, greens and scarlet! So pretty and seemed very intelligent trying things out. We got to go in with them in the afternoon and they didn't really pay us any attention.
Then on Wednesday we went to the Itaipu dam - this is a bi-national company/government owned enterprise between Brazil and Paraguay (another river-boarder). They created the biggest dam in the southern hemisphere and we got to go check it out. The dam wall is 8kms long. There was information there saying that the reservoir has 6 MILLION liters of water for each person IN THE WORLD! That's too much water for Jane to get her head around. They have 20 hydro-electric generators - they use 18 at a time and have two extras so they can rotate the downtime for maintenance.
As Brazil and Paraguay both contributed equally to the project, there's a treaty that they both share everything equally. So of the 50% that Paraguay gets, they sell 41% back to Brazil. Although they're only using 9% of the capacity of the dam's power, it's enough to power 90% of their population. Paraguay has 100% hydro power - go them! Brazil therefore uses 91% of the dam's power and that powers 17% of Brazil. A lot of Brazil's power is also hydro-power, they use the power from Itaipu for industrial regions in the south of the country. (big population differences - Paraguay has 6million people and Brazil has 200 million people, so they need different amounts of power!)
Karl was in geek heaven for all of this part of the trip. He took so many photos that i think the guide was starting to doubt his intentions - I'm pretty sure that's the happiest Karl has been all holiday - getting to go inside the dam wall and look at the turbines etc!
Wednesday afternoon we had a flight to go to Curitiba which is near the southern coastline - the Foz airport was awful - a line to check in even! But anyway, we made it safe and sound to Curitiba : ) We will say more about that soon!
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Uellan I saw a tv show last night where Stephen Fry was with someone who was photographing a rare bird - the bird then decided to hump the phontgrapher on the back of the neck! thank your birds they just wanted to sit on your feet Karl! lol!