We drove along the coast and then to Ilha Santa Margarita, home of Florianopolis. We got off the bus to beautiful clear crisp skies to find the town, home to about 300,000, completely closed. This is not the first time that for whatever reason we´ve happened across a deserted city, but few have been as closed up as Florianopolis. We spent nearly an hour looking for an affordable hotel in the center and gave up. Then we walked a few miles looking for a restaurant open and serving something other than beer and empenadas. Failed on that front too. Slept well in our overpriced room but were woken at 2 a.m. by someone knocking on our door. We ignored it, but scary nonetheless.
Monday morning dawned clear and when we went outside we found the city positively humming. Streets packed, everything open, cars and busses everywhere and people all about. A pretty city, but I felt a bit put off from yesterday and we decided to take a night bus to Foz do Iguacu. We got our tickets and left our packs at the bus station and caught a local bus out to a beach on the east side of the island. The bus left the busy waterfront and climed up a steep canyon. From the mountain crest we could see a lagoon, huge dunes and miles of white sand beaches.
We got off at a village called Barra de Lagoa to find sandy streets and waiters from nearby cafes rushing up to us to show us the menus. We passed on an early lunch and walked on to the beach and took our shoes off. The beach, backed by pines and palms and narrowed by high tide. curved around to the right. Two dogs followed us. We walked for a half-hour as the waves grew. I saw three black rocks out in the water and Laura asked if they could be whales. I said no and suddenly she was running toward the spots, trailed by the dogs. A second later I saw one of the rocks blow water skyward and I was running too. A halfmile later we were abrest of two whales 100 yards offshore, and we watched for an hour as they jumped, blew water, waved their tails and fins and cavorted about.
The afternoon waned and the skies clouded. We took the local bus back and got to the bus station with an hour to spare -- just enough time for a dinner of beans and rice and pineapple juice.
The bus dropped us off 17 hours later in Foz do Iguazu, a busy town of 200,000 12 miles from the famous waterfalls. We had breakfast in the station and took a bus into town, checked into another overpriced hotel, and rode a local bus out to the Brazilian side of the falls.
Iguacu falls is hard to put into words, and hard to compare to anything -- even the inevitable comparisons to Victoria and Niagra don´t come close. It´s a stupendous miles-long wall of falling water, sometimes in slivers and sometimes in magnificent plunges of thunder and spray.
The next day we crossed the border back into Argentina -- good to be speaking (sort of) Spanish again. We took the day off to read on the patio of our quiet hostel and then the next day went back to the falls on the Argentine side. Argentina has their side of the park set up so you walk to the falls through a dense jungly forest, which even though you are sidebyside with what seems like millions of tourists there is still a sense of discovery.
Laura got a fever in the afternoon -- 100 -- and we were whupped by the time we made it back to town. Our next goal is San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, a daunting 40-some hours by bus in total. We decided to bite off just 5 hours in our first stretch, getting us to Posadas, a town of 250,000 set along the banks of the Rio Parana and facing Paraguay. Nice, but it´s hugely inconvenient for travelers -- bus station is 3 miles out of town, very few hotels and none which are affordable, and lots of other services seem hard to find. No matter, we´re out tomorrow and headed for Salta, where we hope to do a big smelly load of laundry and take a few days to relax.
Here´s what you´re waiting for: Laura´s pictures
1 comment:
All I can say is: "Wow." -e.
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