BRAZIL Iguacu: July 14 and 15, 2006: Gringo in Brazil – Days 1 and 2

Ola –

First, apologies if this comes out looking very dorky.. I’m typing at the business center of the hotel as the rooms do not have WiFi and there also aren’t any high speed lines in the hotel. The business center keyboard is Portuguese so there are a lot of symbols that keep showing up when I try to capitalize or do punctuation. I´m also charged by the minute so I’m not proofing this very well as I type.

Arrived at Sao Polo airport fairly easily and not too tired given that it was about 24 hours since we had gotten up and gone to SFO… The flights were about 17 hours with a 2 hour layover in Chicago… Then the fun began. Varig Airlines has gone bankrupt so nearly all its flights were cancelled. We needed to get from Sao Paolo to Iguacu… on Varig. The lines at Varig were wrapping around the airport since everyone on cancelled flights needed to talk with the counter people to get re-booked.. and we needed to check in. We were grateful to have had 2 hours.. but we barely made our plane… as it took nearly that long to get to a counter person… they had about 30 stations but only two people working… and it seemed as if they really didn’t know what to do. Fortunately we got everything on as carry-on so we didn’t have to deal with luggage.. not sure anything would have made it..

We have two more Varg flights — one tomorrow from Iguacu to Curitiba and one on Thursday from Curitiba to Sao Paolo… so not certain how all that will go.

After landing in Iguacu, we opted to take the hike to the falls on the Brazil side rather than sleeping.. a decision that could be questionable.. Anyway, it was quite spectacular, but nothing compared to the hike today on the Argentine side.. I´ll tell more tomorrow as my purchased time is running out on this computer.. but the trek to the Argentine side is a 45-minute drive and then once you are in the “park” you take a little train to the start of the hike (although on the way out we bypassed the train and walked) … That side is far more spectacular and the walks through the rainforest bring you fairly close to the falls.. You’re constantly getting sprayed… The falls are huge.. with drops of about 30 stories or so… and there are literally hundreds of them…  We managed to extend our walk and get back too late for the taxi driver that we had already paid to wait for us.

Time up.. will finish tomorrow..