The temperature hit me like a mugger carrying a hot wet towel. I had started my day taking breakfast nearly 1600 miles (2500 km) away on Argentina’s Patagonian Atlantic coast at Peninsula Valdes, where the morning sun came with the threat of a sharp wind off the sea. Now, as I stepped onto the scorchingly hot tarmac at Puerto Iguazú airport, I could instantly feel my shirt stick to my back as every pore began to prickle with sweat. This was still Argentina, but it felt like a very different country.
I had flown north to experience one of the world’s greatest natural wonders: Iguazu Falls. Every statistic I had ever read out about it screamed something superlative at me: a hundred or more waterfalls falling in a continuous curtain two and a half miles wide, tumbling over cliffs more than 80 metres high. The most ludicrous number of all was the sheer amount of water involved: 1600 cubic metres per second surging into the air. Or was 64,000 cubic feet per second? And what does that even look like? All I knew was that I was going to have to change my shirt before I went to find out.
Into the rainforest
Patagonia overwhelms you with its grandeur in subtle ways. Its clear mountain light seems to summon whole mountain ranges out of thin air. Iguazu was having none of that. As I transferred to my hotel, I was overwhelmed with a towering green wall of rainforest and air thick with birdsong and endlessly buzzing insects. Perhaps it was the fact that Iguazú Falls straddle the border with Brazil – everything seemed bright and vibrant as if Carnival was going to break out at any moment. I planned to experience the falls from both sides of the border, so I’d be able to put that to the test.
I had to experience Iguazu from the Argentinian side first however. Partisans from both countries insist that the best views are from their particular side, but one fact is incontrovertible at least: Argentina has the lion’s share of the water, with around 80% of Iguazu’s great curtain of waterfalls lying on the Argentinian side.
The next day I explored the network of trails that runs around the edge of the falls. I started at Estacion Cataratas. Everywhere there was life. Butterflies danced in the air like iridescent crowds, while every now and then you’d get the bright yellow flash of a toucan’s bill in the trees. When the pathways opened up, I could even look down on parrots and toucans flying beneath me, or up to high to vultures and raptors lazily circling above. Sometimes, a coati snuffled through the undergrowth – a South American take on a raccoon, but with a long pointed face and a stripy tail like a lemur. Like racoons, they’re cunning scavengers, and signs implored us not to feed them.
Curtains of water
The closer I got, the more I realised that those statistics about Iguazú were always designed to fall short of their purpose. As I looked out onto the great curtain of basalt cliffs and the overwhelming power of the water cascading over them. Iguazú resolved itself into a series of extraordinary physical sensations.
Iguazú felt like a series of freight trains constantly passing you by at great speed. I could feel it in my legs and in my belly, a low frequency rumbling that was matched by the great roar of water tumbling into oblivion.
The earth around Iguazú was a rich red oxide clay, so typical of rainforests, and so was the water coming over the falls. My guide told me that because of unusually high rains, there had been eight times as much water as would normally be expected. The authorities had attempted to control the flow as best they could with sluices from the hydroelectric dams upstream, but the flow was so unusually strong that one of the boardwalks across the river had been damaged (it is currently being rebuilt).
We were viewing from dry land, but the walkway had been one that spanned the river out to the horseshoe falls known as Garganta del Diablo, or the Devil’s Throat. With a name like that, I wasn’t too sorry to stick to dry and. Or as dry as it got anyway: the constant clouds of water from the falls bathed us in cool mists. I resigned myself to the fact that a dry shirt was going to have to wait until I changed for dinner.
I spent the next day exploring the area at my own pace. I had breakfast at the Melia Hotel, the only hotel inside the boundaries of the national park. It certainly made the most of its location, with sublime views over the rainforest canopy and the spray clouds rising into the air to catch rainbows over the falls. Just as exciting, the Melia’s boardwalks into the park offered the chance to explore the falls before the main gates opened to the other tourists.
Nature trails
It was tempting just to spend the whole day by the infinity pool and watch the monkeys in the trees, but instead I broke off to visit the Selva Yriapu rainforest reserve, managed by the indigenous Guarani people (the name Iguazú is a Guarani word: it simply means ‘big water’). I was still surprised at how lush everything was: much of the land had been logged out in the 20th century, so we drove through secondary rainforest that was less than 50 years old. It was an extraordinary testament to nature’s powers of recovery.
As we walked through the forest, my guide pointed out a constant stream of different trees I struggled hard to keep track of: guatampu, black laurel, loro negro, and ubajay. I just about managed to identify the enormous stands of bamboo, and then the pineapple, papaya and small stands of sugarcane, corn and sweet potato that marked out Guarani plots of land. We picnicked by a river and watched more butterflies dancing over the water. A large starling with an emerald eye and scarlet back hopped close at hand. Around half of Argentina’s 1043 species of bird are found in the rainforest here. If they were all as pretty as this red-rumped cacique I could see how you might spend days here ignoring the falls completely to tick off your life list.
The view from Brazil
But it was the falls I had come to see, and the next day I grabbed my passport and crossed the border into Brazil to experience them from the other side. While most of the falls are in Argentina, the washed out boardwalks on that side meant this was my first opportunity to see them as an entire panorama.
The giant curtain of water gave a completely different perspective. I walked out onto one of the walkways that led into what seemed like the heart of the falls; creeping to the edge of one set of falls, surrounded by lush islands of mini-jungle while almost completely surrounded by an amphitheatre of water.
There were waterfalls below me and waterfalls above me. When I looked over the edge, I could see a complete rainbow, with both ends rising out of the torrent that was boiling far beneath me.
All the statistics and numbers about Iguazú also boiled away in the mist. I was deafened by its sound and drenched by its waters and finally understood: Iguazú was about pure sensation. I couldn’t hear myself above the roar, but it really didn’t seem to matter at all: I still shouted for joy.
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