A leisurely start to the day was changed at check out when after waiting 20 minutes the hotel's electrical system failed. With our taxing waiting outside and a bus to catch at 1100, it finally rebooted at 1030 so we made a hurried exit. Luckily as it was Sunday it didn't take long to get to the terminal; we were sitting on the front seats of the bus with 10 minutes to spare. Our journey north was only 240kms but as we are now used to the 5 hours was spent going through local towns on the highway picking up local people as they hopped from town to town. As we progressed up this part of Argentina which is squeezed between Paraguay in the west and Brazil in the east (it looks a bit like a thumb on the map) we noticed how much poorer people appeared to be. Some of the places we passed were like shanty towns with lots of dirty kids with no shoes on their feet. Each town we passed was busy which might be the fact it was Mothers day here. We passed through places such as Eldorado (that's were it is!), Puerto Rica and Wanda, the only exotic thing about them being there names. Yes it would be much easier and less time consuming to fly straight to Iguazu from BA, as most people seemingly do, but this is all about seeing the countryside and how people live in other parts of the world. That's partly why we opted to travel by bus although Simon did question our judgement when a young woman sat on the bus next to us at Wanda and intermittently breastfed her small child. At least it kept it quiet! The vegetation was becoming much more tropical, with the jungle reaching right up to the road verges. We arrived at Puerto Iguazu just after 1630, walked the 500m to Villa 14 where we'd booked to stay over the next 3 nights. Whilst it's in a neighbourhood away from the main drag, it's a very quiet place, especially as we found we were the only ones staying here (it is the quiet season). Claudia the owner welcomed us with her 4 cats and 1 dog and in excellent English explained how to get to the falls both on the Argentinian side and Brazilian one too. It looks very easy (unlike the Missions!) and so after having a Mexican meal in town, which was a nice change after our recent fare although lacked any spices, we went to bed confident our plans were sorted for the next two days at least.
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| Posadas from our hotel window |
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| Not a lot to see... |
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| On the bus waiting to set off |
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| The road north |
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