South & Central America

We'd booked a tour (150R) with Vivian from our hostel as we really liked her, thought the border crossing may be difficult and Anna didn't want to get lost! In retrospect we wouldn't have bothered due to the amount of faffing and learning that the border was easy to cross yesterday. But had a great day and met some lovely people.

Left hostel at 8:30, picked up various other people, and went through Argentinian border - this took way longer than it would have done on the bus due to him taking forever to process a minibus full of passports.

Drove onto the Tri-border point where Brazil, Argentina & Paraguay meet. Not overly exciting in my opinion but Anna wanted to see it. Then had ages to browse various stalls (bought parrot pen for La Tania) whilst waited for another minibus to join us. After saying she usually had small groups we ended up with 22 people :(

Then onto the falls. It was rammed!!! Locals get much cheaper entry so weekends are busier and ours was the Sunday before a holiday Monday - bad timing! We had to wait a while for the train which took us up to the beginning of a 15min walkway above the river to the top of Devil's Throat, the most powerful part of the falls. Halfway there the heavens opened and we hurried into our ponchos etc ... I had chosen my raincoat for the day and it was getting it's first proper test - it failed!!! Big time!! Tip to self: don't skimp on cost with a raincoat. It wasn't completely useless but Anna was much drier in her £1 poncho.

Devil's Throat was quite spectacular - great roar of water and spray everywhere though quite hard to see with the torrential rain. Luckily this soon started to ease. Then it was a very slippery slide back along the walkway.

Due to the crowds we had to wait ages for a train back then had lunch amongst the coatis and monkeys. At this point it was 6 hours into the tour and we'd only seen one thing - we were fed up with the tour. Luckily the afternoon was better.

We walked along the lower trail which had some great sights. Whereas Brazil is more panoramic views, the Argentinian side is the close up views.

Then we started heading down for our boat ride (90R). Halfway down the most torrential rain started to pour suddenly, soaking me before I had a chance to put my half-sodden raincoat on. Water was absolutely pouring down the steps, it was like walking down a river. We boarded our boat (RIB) which drove us near to one of the waterfalls' spray. Already wet from the rain I barely noticed the difference and was starting to regret forking out the extra money for the ride. Then he drove us round the corner to another waterfall and completely dunked us under it twice - I thought I was wet before, but after that I was completely drenched! Quite a short ride but so much fun :)

It continued to drizzle and we wandered along the upper trail quickly. We were virtually the only ones there as the locals had sensibly scarpered home.

We left the park at 5:30 and took us over 2 hours to drop people off, stop at banks etc while I was getting cold and hungry. Has completely put us off future tours, though I'm sure we'll do many more.

All was remedied by a hot shower and some homemade pasta. I also tried to make our microwave bacon popcorn and pretty much incinerated it. The guy from the hostel obviously felt sorry for us as he cooked us up a gignormous bowl of popcorn! He and Ricard (Brazilian guy from tour) then spent the evening quizzing us on English words and attempting to teach us Portuguese. Anna also got an impromptu dance lesson from Ricard.Read more