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A few folks have emailed asking for the specific order of the trails that we took and any other tips.

1. Ask for a map at the front gate – they are free, but you have to ask.
2. I didn’t go to the Brasilian side of the falls and haven’t heard from Fleur how that was (worthwhile, etc.) Going to Brasil for US Passports is problematic.
3. If you follow the crowds from the park entrance, you’ll end up at a train station. Probably not what you want.
4. Bring 5 hours of water for each person. Water is available all over the park, but it will be expensive. Don’t get me wrong, it is cheap by USA standards – AR$6 on the trails (about US$2), but outside the park bottled water is AR$2.
5. Follow the Salida/Exit signs once you’ve see a particular train/sight. the exit trail will have a nice grade back up the hills.

1. Enter the park
2. Go to the Green Trail
3. Take the Circuito Inferior – Lower Circuit
   1. Salto Alvar Nunez
   2. Salto Dos Hermanas
   3. Salto Bossetti
   4. Salto Bernabe Mendez
   5. Salto Mbigua
   6. Salto San Martin
   7. Salto Escondido
4. Take the free boat to Isla San Martin – note, the trail on the isla is very steep.
   1. Climb the trail and stay right for the best views of these falls
      1. Salto Dos Hermanas
      2. Salto Bossetti
      3. Salto Bernabe Mendez
      4. Salto Mbigua
      5. Salto San Martin
      6. Salto Escondido
   2. Go back and take the middle trail to see
      1. Salto Escondido
      2. Salto Rivadavia
      3. Salto Tres Mosqueteros
      4. Salto Dos Mosqueteros
   3. Go back slightly and head west (this is a loop with the western/center loop)
      1. There’s a fabulous view of Saltos Escondido and Rivadavia through a natural arch tunnel. You’ve probably already seen this in pictures of these falls.
   4. Follow the remaining loop back to where all 3 trails meet and carefully take the steps down to the beach.
      1. Relax on the beach if you like – go swimming, but don’t venture too far from the sand. The currents are deadly, people die every season.
   5. Take the boat ride back to the Circuito Inferior and follow the Salida/Exit signs that go to the Sheriton Hotel and join the Circuito Superior
5. Circuito Superior has views from above of
   1. Salto Dos Hermanas
   2. Salto Bossetti
   3. Salto Bernabe Mendez
   4. Salto Mbigua
   5. Salto San Martin
      You can see the people on Isla San Martin and on the Circuito Inferior – where you’ve already been.
      Take the trail back to the main green trail and head north to Estacion Cataratas – grab some lunch or ice cream or water or soda here while you wait for the trail.
6. Take the train west to Estacion Garganta del Diablo
7. Follow the trail/steel track over all the rivers feeding all the falls that you’ve already seen – watch out for snakes – until you reach ‘’Garganta del Diablo’’
8. Garganta del Diablo is a multiple of falls, all connected.
   1. Salto Union
   2. Salto Florano
   3. Salto Santa Maria
      All the falls – ‘’all of them’’ feed into Rio Iguazu.
      Doing this at a leisurely pace took about 4 hours and both Fleur and I were tired.

However, it seems we didn’t do all the trails that were available. After all this writing, I see the Sendero Macuco trail wasn’t done. That trail is marked as difficult and were I doing this again, I’d do it after the Superior/Inferior Circuitos, but before Garganta del Diablo to be certain. That extra trail would probably add another hour to the day and would certainly require another bottle of water per person.

I had 3 water bottles, but wish I would have had 4 during the day. It was about 85 degF and I was wearing a cotton t-shirt and nylon (quick dry) convertible pants. I didn’t convert them into shorts – probably a good idea since the sun would have burned my legs. Anyway, I was very near heat exhaustion at some points during the day. I felt the coolness that hints at the onset and took a few minutes to rest and cool off. There were a few older people on the steel track that were overcome with the heat. Be careful.

• Car lanes are optional – especially for motorcycles which ignore every traffic guideline
• Weather stripping, double paned glass and sound deadening is wonderful
• Disco is a chain of grocery stores
• Eating a bunch of really good food doesn’t necessarily add any weight – I don’t know why.
• ‘’Portenos make fantastic pizza’’ – I don’t know how to say this any more clearly.
• Coffee con letche isn’t the same everywhere.
• Agua sin gas is normal bottled water; agua con gas is just nasty.
• Iguazu falls needs 3 days to do everything. 1.5 days if the weather is nice and you really move.
• Buenos Aires has many, many night clubs, bars and pubs. You can find whatever you are looking for and more.
• Coffee will never be the same after a visit to Buenos Aires. The city is littered with Cafes.
• If you aren’t into the night life, 3-4 days for Buenos Aires is all that you need.
• For other parts of Argentine culture, you need to leave BA.
• Taxi drivers pretend not to understand you even when they can. Call them on it if they appear to be traveling in the wrong direction.
• Get a city tour early in the trip to get the most out of it from a local that covers:
  • Port
  • Tango
  • Barrios
  • Overall Government
  • Important Buildings (train & bus terminal, post office, the pink house, etc.)
• Don’t expect the same quality of fruit as you get in the USA. It got to the point where I couldn’t select any bananas since none were even close to normal USA quality.
• Gummy candy is lacking, at least I didn’t find any worth mentioning.
• I still don’t enjoy crescent or pastries.
• clothes dryers are good.
• Travel with friends that have similar interests in their travels. For example, if you like culture, travel with others that do as well. If you like dancing, travel with friends that like to dance too.
• Extra wrapping of your luggage is available at multiple places inside the departure terminal. Don’t wait in line. The price was the same at all of them. I didn’t use it and my bag wasn’t any worse off without it. Jim’s with the wrapper wasn’t too bad off either.
• Duty free stuff is probably more trouble than it is worth and not a good deal.
• Always check into a hotel with some bottled water when potable water is a question.
• Review public transportation on the web before heading to a new city.

I awoke in Puerto Iguazu, Argentina dead tired from hiking the falls on Sunday.

• Slept in as long as possible
• catch the bus into the town center
• purchase some breakfast at a local grocer
• wander in the shopping district
• sit for awhile
• water
• Lunch where I get the local interpretation of a hamburger
• wander around the small town some more
• Look for a minibus to the airport – no good
• pay a taxi AR$50
• Wait and wait in the airport
• Flight – mostly on time; I speak English so I can sit in the exit row seats.
• Flight back
  • a Chinese tourist sees all the empty seats in hte exit row and takes on. Quickly the crew asks him, in English, whether he understood them. When he refused to answer or move, 4 of the crew helped him. I suspect he was delayed significantly once we landed.
  • see some of the fires causing huge air pollution issues for the entire region from the air (camera is packed away)
  • see Buenos Aires just as the Sun sets – beautiful view
  • From touchdown to apartment is less than 20 minutes.
• Quick coffee with Jim’s family; goodbye
• Pizza! We return to the best pizza place so far. Order 4 Cokes with the pizza, 2 each, to avoid having to wait for service. The bottles are just 10oz each.

Shopping day.

• Leather
• Food
• Taxis
• Dinner with Matt

Leather
Matt told us where to go for lots of selection at reasonable prices. Bang! He was dead on. Google Map Link to the neighborhood for leather.

Lunch Food
Burzako – Basque food. Bread, egg/potato/cheese, pasta, desert – yummy. Well, the desert was a gel and cheese thing. Not my taste.

Dinner Food
Dinner was near Matt’s place in Barrio Norte. I had a steak with fries and a little taste of something called ‘’Sweet Bread.’’ This is the glands of a cow. Not my preferred food – Jim and Matt ate it up, but at least I’m not in Namibia eating slightly cooked ass and rectum from a boar.

After dinner (midnight) we found a local bar and drank until 3am before catching a taxi back to the apartment. Our last night in Buenos Aires successfully accomplished.

Part 2

Siesta

Ok, we take the city bus (AR$4) and Fleur gets off at her hostel as I continue back to the terminal. I know now that I should have stayed on the bus all the way to my hotel, but at the time, I didn’t. And we are walking … I see some of the town, learn the map and hike for 30+ minutes directly towards my hotel – The Esturion about 1.5 miles outside the city center, but still in the town. On arrival, the hotel claims to never have heard of me or my Travelocity confirmation code. They give me a 2 single bed room, ground floor for the same rate. I take a hot shower and nap for 90 minutes or so.

City Bus to Park

I ask the hotel which buses to take to get to the park – ’’Cataratas’’ is the name and it stops out front and heads to the park through the terminal, same price for the entire trip. I believe that I’m just a little late getting to the bus stop. About the time I’m convinced I missed the bus that Fleur and I agreed to meet on, a few taxi drivers offer me a ride. AR$15 to the park – mucho dinero I say and decide to wait for another taxi to catch. Just then – 1 minute later – the bus comes. It is running 15 minutes late. Fleur also catches the same bus – bonus.

Moonlight view of the falls – Garganta del Diablo

8:30pm-ish. ‘’Wonderful.’’ Don’t experience it alone. Bring a camera with high ISO manual modes and a tripod. If you can set the exposure manually to 2 seconds, you can capture photos of the water falls. The full moon lit the falls beautifully – none of my photos turned out. We met a couple from Israel who helped make the evening even more fun. Eitan and Inbar had an SLR camera and used a 2 second exposure to get the photos. I hope to get those via email in a few days.

10:30p-ish Diner was surprisingly good. A buffet with a good selection of different salads, side dishes, 1 chicken dish and a Carne (beef) window. I didn’t have any red meat – not my bag, but the other 3 did and said it was good. Overall, we were pleased with the meal. Catch the bus around 11:30p back into town. Say goodbye to my new friends along the way. I wish we weren’t so tired from the very long day and could hit a cafe or bar and chat some more. Alas, email will have to do as we’re all headed to different parts of the world later this week.

The bus stopped at the terminal and everyone got off except me. I moved to the front and told the bus driver my hotel was Esturion – he drove to the main drag in the correct direction and opened the door saying – 6 blocks in that direction. I’d walked it already and knew the way. 15 minutes later I’m just entering the hotel compound. To bed.

Hotel

Yawn. 10am checkout time. Nice shower. The toilet seat is a really cheap plastic model. A bottle of water is AR$20 – ouch. The A/C is very loud, but works well enough to remove the humidity. Simple and mostly clean. I won’t stay there again after my overall experience. Free wifi, but only in some part of the hotel that I wasn’t.

As I write this on Saturday morning, I’m only tired from being out late, not from being up all night with noise. There’s a small bedroom away from the street – close the door and most of the city noise is gone. Put in some earplugs – yawn – wake up hours and hours later. A good night of sleep.

With the bad smoke covering the city, we decided to take it relatively easy today and do a little shopping. Nothing purchased other than lunch. The early photos show how bad the visibility was – so do the late photos of the Obelisk just a few blocks away.

Sorry about the porn shop photo. I couldn’t help myself.
HSBC – huh, you ask? I never noticed that bank until Hong Kong. Since then, it shows up at least once for every trip.

We were invited out to dinner – Armenian – tonight. I was told a few times to not eat breakfast or any snacks all day. A light day was needed for 2 reasons. Lots of food and I have to be at the airport very early on Sunday morning. Sunday will be a very full day, hiking, being soaked, checking into a hotel, moonlight tour of the falls, then back to the hotel around midnight. Up early on Monday for more hiking, lunch and finally back to the airport for the flight back to BA. It is doubtful I’ll have any internet access in Iguazu.

Nothing planned today for me.

Al and Jim planned to go visit some site that I wasn’t interested in. Rafe is in school.
I planned to sleep in – that would be nice if I’d had a full night of sleep the entire time here. Road noise has kept me up and prevented a good night sleep the entire time. I wore ear plugs again last night. They just muffle the noise, but the compressed air feeds into all bus/truck tires still cut through. Horns at all hours of the night, morning, day, and people yelling get through too. I’ll try to sleep in the back bedroom this afternoon.

The smoke is bad – more cancellations and closings from what we can make out of the local coverage. Everything is in Spanish with only the occasional movie subtitled in Spanish and spoken in English. A fully dubbed version of Ghostbusters is playing now.

I did a little more research and found that flights to Miami, Atlanta and Iguazu Falls (IGR) all took off the last few days from either AEP or EZE airports.

Friday night Jim and I had dinner with his family in Buenos Aires at the apartment of the grand parents. Appetizers, wine, champagne, conversation, more appetizers, dinner, politics (local and world), another course, and another … when I was stuffed, 1 more course came followed by ice cream. Everything except the ice cream was from scratch. Jim knows the names of everything – Armenian food. Only 1 item wasn’t fantastic. I hope enough photos were taken.

Thursday was filled with

• a little extra sleep
• Famous Cafe for coffee – something about it being the oldest in BA
• Jardin Japonese
• Malba – Museum of Contemporary Art
• Shopping at The Mall
• Grocery shopping
• short siesta – I do a few Pimsleur chapters.
• whatever happens after this … it is Rafe and Al’s last night here.

We trek – 2 miles to the oldest Cafe in BA. It had a nice atmosphere, but the food seemed only so so.

Next was the taxi ride to the Japanese Garden across town. The driver had to ask were it was. The gardens were as peaceful as could be expected when surrounded by a city of 13 million. The roar of the city just outside the garden was always present. Lots of photos – more than it deserved.

There is a sushi restaurant at the garden, so we ate lunch there. Al found a new beer that he liked. Jim didn’t order sushi, Rafe was still in Spanish class, and I ordered mixed tempura and 4 pieces of sashimi (no rice please). As we were finishing up, Rafe called and was headed over in a taxi. He ordered a mixed sushi platter – muy rapido and paid the bill.

Next, on to the Malba Art museum. This is 2 floors of contemporary art. Not nearly as nice as the museum yesterday, IMHO. I find contemporary art to be either too simplistic or too busy. There were a few pieces that I liked, but much of the display was pencil drawings that appeared to me to be drawn by 4th grade students. Combine that with the entrance price and complete No photography rule, and I’m not happy. How many parallel lines does it take to make art? Phuft.

Next to the Malba is the 3 story mall – upper middle class shopping. Very pretty stores, nothing jumped out at me. I was interested in the supermarket on the ground floor, but we didn’t go into it.

Taxi ride home. The driver didn’t take the most direct route, so as soon as we were near walking distance, I said aqui – here – we got out, no tip.

Grocery store – water, bananas, apples, some biscuits and we get into the shortest line. 20 minutes later it becomes clear the different lines are for different purposes. I’m not certain, but it appears a few lines include home delivery if you buy a certain amount. There definitely is a need for optimization in this store. At 4 pm, the manager was called to provide change for 50% of the transactions, not very efficient. A guard followed her between the cage, other checkout lines and ours – for a AR$40 change need. That’s about US$15. I didn’t see any credit card use, but I did see a few checks written with photo ID required. The fruit selection had more varieties than normal, but none of it seems like the high end quality I’m used to at my home Publix store. None of the bananas were like what we get in the USA. Zero cauliflower, nada broccoli and the oranges were smaller than I’m used to seeing.

Back to the apartment … things seem a little off inside. Jim and I both have a feeling that someone was in here. My bathroom window is closed, but not quite closed. Jim’s bathroom is missing a roll of TP. I check all the windows – nothing else seems open or wrong. We decide to use some 007 techniques when we leave next time. In theory, nobody else should be entering this apartment – even the cleaning lady had to be let in and out. Hopefully, we’re just being paranoid.

We plan to be cautious especially the few days before we leave.

There are fires covering hundreds of square miles of cropland here. The smoke is covering the river delta and most of Buenos Aires to the point that both airports were closed and traffic accidents occurred. The in-town airport is closed more than the international airport, which is good for Rafe and Al. However, my flight to Iguazu Falls early Sunday morning will probably be impacted in some way. With all the smoke comes respiratory concerns. Even I’m feeling the smoke, but Al and Jim have allergies.

Thursday evening, we go to a restaurant that is supposed to be known for BBQ to meet up with others going to the language school with Rafe. Rafe is the only beginner to show up, the other 8 or so people are near the end of intermediate class or in advanced. They are from all over the world. Anyway, the food is ok, bad, good depending on what you happened to order and fairly inexpensive. We leave ASAP and split up for the remainder of the evening. Rafe probably spent his last night with a local girl we’d met on day 1.

Al and I head back to the Shamrock Irish Pub – packed with youngsters for a few drinks. We know the main bartender there by now and get good treatment from her. The upstairs and downstairs are filled with 20-somethings exchanging cell phone numbers. This bar has a completely different feel than on slower nights.

Wednesday started really slowly due to the prior night out. Around 11am, we headed out towards the train station for a day trip to a resort just outside Buenos Aires – Tigre.

The train out was very cheap and setup for quantity, not quality. We leaned against butt holders for the entire 90 minute trip. Some riders sat on the floor while others found seats. Just getting tickets was an experience – exact change only at the ticket counter. I really don’t know much about it since I was moving really, really slow for most of the day.

we arrived and wandered around the tourist trap part of town searching for a river tour. Eventually, Alan walked into the tourist information office and got the short version of what we needed to do, where to go, etc. I was sitting outside holding my head in my hands – in pain still.

We walked down a street, then another and came to a different train station. No nearly the $2 peso version – more the $24 peso version – that would be our ride home even though we’d already paid for the return trip on the other train. Next we walked by the casino – hi Mom! – and over to the other boat tour lineups. 3 tickets purchased from a statuesque brunette and a recommendation for a quick lunch.

Muy rapido on the lunch – Alan ordered something after being told that 3+ of the dishes were sold out for the day already. Mismo – the same for Jim and I. 3 plates delivered and quickly eaten. VERY TASTY doesn’t work. It was good, but I couldn’t finish mine even if we had time to relax and eat it all.

The tour was modified from the normal tour due to low river levels. Mostly we saw summer homes, boat clubs, with trees, plants, birds that appeared almost normal, but not quite normal. 2 hours later and we’re back at the dock ready for a little walk around the Porte de Frutis.

Standard tourist trap area except since this is autumn, so most of the shops are closed. The types of items for sale are mostly home furnishings. We could have bought reeds to make into baskets, for example.

We slowly trek back to the luxury train, buy our tickets and wait. I mention that I’m not certain which of 2 tracks the train will enter on – we could be on the wrong track and which way we need to be certain the train heads. The tracks end at this station, so it isn’t likely we can head in the wrong direction. The seats are comfortable – leather for the rear. About half way home, the line ends and we walk to another train – also going only 1 way, towards BA. 3 more tickets purchased, 3 peso’s total. It is a more utilitarian train, but we find seats. 30 minutes later and we’re back at the central train station walking 2 miles back to the apartments.

Jim and I are beat and decide to stay in for the evening. The left over pizza from last night will have to do for dinner.

The movie Barbed Wire is on the SPACE Channel – I watch the first 5 minutes and fall asleep by 10:05pm.

And we are walking …

1. Lunch was at a local diner known for pasta dishes.
2. The afternoon was spent at a huge cemetery.
3. Next the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes – Rodin, Picaso, Monet, and others.
   With an automated system saying Please step back behind the line, but not in English, so every time it started, I thought it was announcing the closing of the museum.
4. Brew pub for a few drinks.
5. Pizza for dinner – possibly the best pizza I’ve ever had in my life
6. Shamrock Irish pub for more drinks with a friendly staff (read as high alcohol content). Someone said Jägerbomb more than once.
7. Cab to someplace else – don’t really remember much of that, just that whatever we were their to see, I couldn’t see!
8. Cab home as logic dictates. I’m a little fuzzy on it.
9. Bending over outside a Citibank.

Neither rule #1 or #2 were followed. As I write this, it is a very bad morning for me. Last night will be discussed amongst my friends for years to come.