Argentina by www.born2travel.it

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19.01.2009 Puerto Iguazu (ARGENTINA)

The "Pousada Evelina" is actually really cool, well organised and above all very clean! The staff is made up of Mrs Evelina (a 70-year-old Czech-Polish woman) and her daughters and granddaughters.

This morning, with a couple from Berlin (Ian and Katarina) and William from Amsterdam, we organised an excursion to the splendid Iguazu Falls, but from the Argentine side, the wider and more spectacular one...

Let me explain better: this place is on the border between no fewer than three nations: Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. I even stopped on a hilltop where I had a view of all three countries.

Once you cross the border with Argentina marked by the Parana river, you start seeing the light-blue-white-light-blue flags everywhere, the licence plates change, people speak Spanish and pay in pesos...

It was moving when I thought I was treading the soil of Tierra del Fuego, of tango, of Maradona, of the famous meats, of the Italian emigrants...

After about half an hour we reach the great nature park, we're in Puerto Iguazu!

We decide to go into the forest on an enormous open truck, and as we followed those little red-sand paths won after battling nature with machetes, I thought about how hard the journey following the equator described by the South African Mike Horn had been... I remember when he told of the battles with machetes, of the metres won day after day, of the two or three kilometres covered a day in the virgin forest; I read admiringly but didn't fully understand what he described, today I do... Those inaccessible bushes, those animals, those sounds that surrounded and enveloped you... who knows what went on inside those bushes...

After a long route we reach a pier and from there we're ready for a rafting trip right up under the Iguazu Falls!

[Nick]: Our tour continues seeing all the other falls with jumps bearing the most varied names: dos hermanas, Borsetti, tres mosqueteros, la ventana; the most impressive remains the "Garganta del Diablo" (Devil's Throat), an immense drop where you couldn't see the bottom..

On the way back we all stop for dinner together in a little restaurant in Foz do Iguacu with our whole legendary little group, and we stay out having fun until the small hours while the two Germans set off towards new adventures!

The "Devil's Throat" impressed me with the enormous force of nature... That immense mass of water that from various streams and little rivers flowed slow and calm and then suddenly plunged from the rocks, from that high drop, making that waterfall: majestic! That perpetual noise that never left you, those sprays of water that every now and then slapped you almost as if to say: "Have respect for what you see..." I saw people praying before the waterfall, others admiring it with misty eyes, others lost in their own thoughts...

An evening with William. This likeable Dutch guy, though of Cameroonian origin, joined us to our great pleasure and for two days we were inseparable! I relived the same feelings as the interrail evenings, that sense of freedom, that fun of simply being among friends having a cervezinha (as someone would say...), chatting and joking with ever-new people...

I was looking at my flip-flops. When I bought them six years ago for two euros at a market in Belgrade I'm sure they would never have expected or imagined they'd tread the lands, deserts, beaches or cities of the whole world, from Vietnam to Cape Verde, from Mexico to Paraguay, from Egypt to Mauritius, from Israel to Hong Kong... Now I see them, tired, plodding along but trying to hold on because there's still a lot to visit... Meanwhile many new pairs have arrived but that first pair is always on my feet at the moments that matter... Worn, scratched, cut, but they hold on, and they'll keep travelling the world with me as long as they can!

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