Six weeks in South America–where to start?  Patagonia in general and Torres del Paine, in particular, have been calling for decades.  Finally, we are going to make it happen.  Arranging enough time off of work and pulling the kids out of school took a while to organize, but finally, we are on our way.  Obviously, we can’t see everything, so how to decide?  Fortunately, this isn’t our first time in South America.  Machu Picchu, Titicaca, Galapagos, Amazon . . .  We have seen a few of the highlights already.  Iguassu seemed like a logical place for us to start.  Generally regarded as one of the seven natural wonders of the world, Iguassu falls has also been on my “must see” list.  As the falls straddle the border of Brazil and Argentina, it also seemed logical to start in Brazil and see both sides as we worked our way south into Argentina.  As it turns out, this was a great way to go.

There is only one hotel within the park on each side of the border, and both are very convenient to the falls.  We started in Brazil, staying at the Belmond Hotel Das Cataratas–fantastic!  Beautiful building, great facilities, friendly staff.  Couldn’t ask for a better way to start a vacation.  The hotel only has a partial view of some of the falls, but right across the street is the trail along the river and we had free access to the falls.  Early morning walks with a handful of others was a pleasant treat.  Within a few hours, bus-loads of tourists were arriving from the park gate, 10 kilometers away.

The trail on the Brazilian side offers spectacular panoramic views of the falls, the majority of which are on the Argentine side of the Iguassu river.  An elevated boardwalk takes you out over the river in the midportion of the Devil’s Throat, the largest of over 350 falls that form as the Iguassu river plunges for nearly 2 kilometers.  From this platform you hear and feel the roar of the cascades, you are quickly drenched from the spray that blasts out from the bottom of the fall and rises almost 500 feet into the air.  From the Brazilian side, you can see walkways along the tops of some of the falls in Argentina.  It seemed that walking along the top of a waterfall, even one as impressive a those at Iguassu, couldn’t possibly compare to the view offered from the Brazilian side.

Traveling to the other side, though, it doesn’t take long to realize that to truly see the falls you need to see both sides.  Walking the several kilometers of elevated walkways on the Argentine side is a totally different experience.  You don’t appreciate from the Brazilian side that the Argentine trails are in the river.  Just above the falls, the Iguassu river is nearly a mile wide so it is quite a trek out on the walkway that leads to the Garganta del Diablo–the Devil’s Throat.  The walkway ends at a perch looking down into the largest fall at Iguassu.  Even if it wouldn’t have been raining we still would have been drenched.  The other two trail circuits were also spectacular and offered a unique perspective from the top and midportions of the Argentine falls.  Very different, but both offer unique opportunities to see and enjoy what has to be the most spectacular waterfall in the world.

On the Argentine side, what used to be the Sheraton has recently changed names and is now the Melia Iguazu.  The hotel itself is not nearly as nice as the Belmond, but our rooms had great views of the falls.  It also offered easy access to the trail network around the falls and saved us traveling back-and-forth across the border to see the falls, and later to catch our flight from the Argentine side on to Buenos Aires.