My Cousin Visits (pt. II — Iguazú Falls)

As I wrote about in my prior post, my cousin Maddie came to visit Tyler and I in Buenos Aires for a week.

For the second half of that week, we took a trip to Iguazú, a UNESCO Heritage site that is the largest waterfall system in the world. These falls are located at the border of Argentina and Brazil, with 80% of the waterfalls officially located in Argentina.

If you want to learn the best way to make the most of your time in the park, read my post here.

Here are how the events of that week transpired:

Getting to Puerto Iguazú

We only had 2 days booked in Puerto Iguazú, the town which is closest to Iguazú national park. So in order to make the most of our time there, we decided we would fly there super early the first morning, and fly back late at night the following day. It was a great plan until it wasn’t.

Our early flight meant that we had to wake up at 4 am to get to the airport on time. I love sleep so this was not enjoyable.
- Side note: one enjoyable part was that we practiced Spanish with our taxi driver the whole way to the airport. Also (wish we had known this ahead of time) because it was a domestic flight, we got through security in 2 minutes… not exaggerating. So we were inside the airport by 5:40 AM for our flight that took off at 7:50 AM… one could argue we overcompensated and did not really need to wake up at 4 AM, but at that point it didn’t matter, we were there and we were going to be leaving soon to see Iguazú!
In order to save money, we booked out flights through FlyBondi, the discount airline of South America. Our mistake. We should have known discount airlines never leave on time.
- On this day FlyBondi decided to be extra delayed and pushed our flight that was supposed to take off at 7:50 AM to a departure time of 11:55 AM… a 4 hour delay!!!

The airport we were flying out of was EZE, located ~1 hr from Buenos Aires. That plus our need for taxis meant that it was not really an option to return to the apartment and wait out the delay. But thats okay because Maddie and I come from a family of card game players, and what better way to kill time than to play some cards?

Spanish Playing Cards

If only I had not left my cards in the apartment.

But thats not problem. I’ll just buy cards in the airport, I always enjoy buying a deck of cards when I travel. These are kind of my typical souvenir.

I personally believe that handiest thing to have while traveling internationally is a deck of cards because it is endless entertainment for oneself, one’s friends, and also a great way to make new friends because even if you do not speak the same language, card games are international!

To cut a long story short(er), it was not that easy.

Within the departure gates, there was no store that sold cards, so I had to exit back out of security to find a store that would sell them
- Well security did not like that idea and it was quite the hassel to get them to let us leave
Once finally outside security, I found a deck of cards! Success! And there was the added bonus that based on the outside of the box, these cards looked unique and special to Argentina. Double Success!

But I celebrated too soon.

After buying the nice looking deck of cards and opening it, a few these hinted to me that these were not the cards I was used to

There were no face cards, instead there were only number cards
These number cards ranged from 1-12. There was no 13… thus…
There were only 48 cards in the deck (+2 jokers)
These were not the typical “suits” you find in America, there were no spades, hearts, diamonds, or clubs…
and these cards definitely did not restrict their color scheme to Red and black

Upon later investigation I learned I had purchased a Spanish deck of cards. The four suits were clubs, cups, coins, and swords.

I show these cards to Maddie and Tyler and we scratched our heads as to what game we could play with these. Finally we landed on “Go Fish”, with the caveat that we would play it in Spanish (to the best of our abilities).

An Introductory Lesson into Tyler, Maddie & Cody’s Spanish Go Fish

English phrases = Spanish Phrases

Go Fish = ¡A Pescar!
Do you have any # card = Tú tienes cualquieres tarjetas de #?

Thats it.

In the end, Tyler mercilessly defeated us at A Pescar

Maddie and Tyler got hungry near the end of our defeat game, so we walked to the international airport which had many food options (yet I’m embarrassed to report that we all three ate at McDonalds).

And then there’s nothing real important to report between food and when we finally boarded our flight at 12:50 PM other than that I taught Maddie and Tyler the game 13 (using 12 cards ofc). I won first and then Maddie picked it right up and won the second game.
I slept on the plane and Maddie recorded the change of scenery from the brown land of BA to the tall standing green trees that filled in around us as we landed in Puerto Iguazú. After landing we quickly found our shuttle and headed into the city. By this point it was 3:30 PM, 6 hours later than our original landing time (6 horas tarde que nuestro tiempo de arribó original)

Tucan Hostel

We got to our accomodations in Puerto Iguazú, Tucan Hostel, and it was adorable.

It is a family run house with multiple generations living there. There were young kids sitting at the computer when we came in and their mother found us immediately and checked us in. There was a pool in the front yard, air conditioning in the room, a back enclosed patio with a tv and large table, and a backyard with a giant gorgeous tree. Oh! and the best of all, there was an adorable cat who may or may not have been pregnant who it seems the children had adopted. It was adorable. We loved it. Only comment I had on the hostel was that there was only one bathroom for everyone staying there and that was kind of hard.
We met the two other people in our room. One was a girl from the Netherlands and one from Columbia. We enjoyed chatting with each of them and we got some recommendations for where to eat at night. Soon we left and got gelato, saw some tasty looking meat cooking, and then we walked and saw the Tripoint (where Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil all intersect)

…and then we got dinner with the Danish girl before heading off to bed early (we had our alarms set to wake up at 6:30 to catch the first bus to Iguazú Falls).
See this Google link for the Puerto Iguazú recs given to us by our hostel owner.

Iguazú Falls

Let me tell you, waking up at 6:30 after this week was hard. We made it though, and we were on the very first bus to the park. Once we got in, we took a very strategized plan of attack as to how we would make sure we got the most out of the park and avoid the crowds much as possible. In total, we did three hikes. The upper loop, the lower loop, and the hike to the throat of the devil.

Both loops showed us the waterfalls and we were able to get up close either below or above them and take gorgeous photos. As we walked along these loops, we came across wildlife, such as monkeys (monos), birds (specifically the Plush-Crested Jay) and even Coati’s (which ate Maddie’s lunch)!

The waterfalls were just as gorgeous as I could have hoped to imagine.

We learned that Argentina owns 80% of the waterfall and Brazil has 20%. The Argentina has many more trails than the Brazilian side and is less modernized. The good thing about the Brazilian side is that it has the best view from which you can see all the waterfalls at once but if you do all the trails that we did on the Argentine side, you still see the waterfalls and you are much closer to them than you can get on the Brazilian side. we ended our time in the park going to the throat of the devil, which is requires you to take a train up to the top of the falls and then you walk out over this walkway that takes you over the river and to the edge of the waterfall to a point where there is a big U-shaped in the edge of the cliff, which means that water holes are dropping in 270° around you.

Everyone says that you’ll get soaking wet if you go there and we can confirm. But the spray from the waterfall was nice because it was really hot, as we walked back from the throat of the devil, we were constantly amazed by many butterflies that were unafraid of people. I even caught a photo of one on my hands.

In addition, we saw Coatis, they are an animal native to this location that appeared to me to be a mix between a possums and raccoons. Maddie was carrying her leftover pizza from the night before that she planned it for lunch, but these Coatis came up from no where and ripped her food off of her! It’s really bad because we know its bad for local animals to eat human food but literally there was nothing we could do in this instance.

By the time we get on the train to go back to the entrance to make our journey back into Puerto Iguazu, we were dead. At one point Maddie picked up her hat and her sunglasses went flying off. I pointed this out to her and said “oh no, your sunglasses” and she looked at me… exhausted.. and said “I don’t care.”

By the time we exited, went b ack to Puerto Iguazú to grab our bags, and got to the airport, we were absolutely wiped. I mean DEAD.

Even though initially we had wanted 2 to 3 days there, we actually felt that we saw everything we wanted to see in what was just around 24 hours. That being said, if you, my reader, decide to go to a Iguazú, I do recommend arriving the night before you want to go to the park. This way, you spend the night in Puerto Iguazú the night before, allowing you to wake up early and be the first ones to get into the park the following day. That’s what makes it special. If you really want to do both the Brazil and Argentina side, then you likely want to different days to go. As for me, I felt complete with just the Argentine side.

As tired as we were, our adventures did not fully end there.

Why? Do you ask?

Because, once again, we were flying FlyBondi back to Buenos Aires. And as always, FlyBondi faithfully delayed our flight. Honestly, compared to the last one, this one really was not that bad. We were supposed to board at 5:20, but instead FlyBondi boarded us at 6:20 (mind you, the flight was supposed to leave at 6:10). And when I got to my seat, my air conditioning was broken 🙁

A local friend of our messaged me and said that JetSmart was the better of the two budget airlines. Hence the photo I created: