After having given our last farewell in Buenos Aires, we leave the big city for another long bus trip, direction the extreme North East of the country, near the borders of Brazil and Paraguay. We can admire there the most impressive water falls of the world, Iguazu. After having visited the Victoria falls in Zimbabwe last October 08, we are curious to visit this site that we also heard a lot about!
Throughout our voyage by bus, we can see the landscape changing. The mountains and steppes of Patagonia are far behind us, as well as the pampa in the state of Buenos Aires. Lots of green, trees and luxuriant hills, we can feel the tropical weather coming back around us. Crossing small villages and dirt roads, people looking more and more tanned and wrinkled by the sun, the African mix in their faces, here we are back towards Brazil!!
Arrived at destination, Puerto Iguazu, we feel crushed by the heat straight away. A good 30-35°C, in full contrast with the 0°C of Ushuaia a few days earlier. Delphine is hungry, thirsty, tired and struggle to carry her bagback. In these moments, I know by experience that I should hurry up, and to avoid a good crisis take initiatives to settle down. Twenty minutes later, we set our tent in a large green camp-site, a few kms away from the city.
Running deeper and deeper into this maze of dirt streets, constructions became increasingly precarious, as abandonned. The state has built social housing as far as the eye can see, all identical and numbered with letters and figures, like a bar code in a serial product. I find airs of Soweto there, one of the suburbs of Johannesburg that we crossed by car in South Africa. I do not feel though insecure, even if I see some trafficking around. Five kms away is Paraguay, known as a big producer and exporter of broad quantities of drugs. In my head, I imagine some houses being hidding places, and these men sitting in front of them their guards. For at least one of them, I am sure I got it right! People only look at me with a funny look, wondering what this man is doing running under such a crushing heat, with on top a postcard in his hand.
One hour after having started to run, I stop, exhausted. Still lost in this very typical neighboorhood, I start walking randomly, while still enjoying the daily life scenes around me. Far from the city and in the heart of the rural life of simple people, in the middle of this decor of earth and tropics, I feel well and enjoy.
A few hundred meters further down, I fall back on the main road that I reckognise. Shops, tourists, I am well back in another world, built for the rich and the tourists. I find the post office, post my postcard for our friends Diego & Lolita, and I walk back to the camp site.
Running through the back of the city, back in rural Africa
After a nice and relaxing tanning session around the pool of our camp site, I pull myself together to go for a run and dissolve the superfluous calories absorbed in Buenos Aires. Under about 30°C, I throw myself on the road, without knowing yet that I was going to carry out one of the most intense joggings that I ever did.
Very quickly I leave the main road and I get deeper into the back of the city. I am struck by my surroundings. The concrete roads turn into terracota dirt roads, and the dwellings in small precarious farms which seem to sag with time. I have the impression to be back in Mali in West Africa, with instead of the African people some mixed men and women, with Paraguayan type features. Scene after scene I continue to run completely captivated by what I see. Around me, it is disorder. Loose hens cross the street, two men layin down under a car, a woman painting the footnails of another, all these people sitting on the ground with nothing to do, simply spending their day, quietly.
The Iguazu Falls
The following day, we wake up early to spend the day in the National park of Iguazu. The site, UNESCO classified, welcomes about 15 000 visitors per day, and we hurry up to get in to avoid the crowd and the 'Touristland' effect.
Inside, all is very organized. Many paths and footbridges were created through the tropical forest and all around the falls. There are even a train carrying the laziest, and a boat bringing us on a small island where the views on some falls are very impressive. The park is immense, there are approximately 200 waterfalls to look at!
We are of straight away taken by the show. The water flows are much more important than those of the Victoria falls in October, and the number and the size of the falls more important. We can hear the water humming, the steam from the top of the water surrounds us to make us sweat, we feel right in the heart of a great natural phenomenon! The most spectacular fall is the Union fall, under the Devil's Gorges. A few meters away from the fall, on the top, we can admire thousands of liters violently falling 80 meters lower, forming a large vaporized water cloud.
We will spend about 6 hours walking through the trails and footbridges, with the company of two Swiss Germanbackpackers met on the way. We can also admire fauna and flora, very rich in this intense tropical zone. We will see neither a puma nor a toucan, but were lucky enough to to see a varan, a small animal with a hard shell, thousands of butterflies, some coatis and this small strange animal, a kind of mille patte with soft hairs.