A Long Trip Home

 On Sunday, March 26th, we flew from Iguazú to the main Buenos Aires airport.  Since some of us would have a very long layover (in our case, nine hours), Mechy had us taken back to the Argenta Tower, where two rooms were rented for several hours.  Mary Joy and I picked up and ate a takeout lunch from Dos Escudos, then repacked our luggage (we had left some of it there while we were at Iguazú).

When we were dropped off at the airport, we still had about a 5-hour wait, then more than ten hours to Dallas, getting in around 7 a.m.  Since we were early, we managed to get on the 8:35 flight to MSP, rather than wait until 12:39.  No problems.  Global Entry was a breeze.

Iguazú National Park (Argentina)

On Saturday, March 25th, the group left early in order to get near the beginning of the line to get into the Argentine park, so that we could get on the first tram to the Garganta del Diablo.  We were successful, and walked out the 98 bridges to the overlook, without stopping for pictures.  Iguazú Falls is the biggest tourist attraction in Argentina, and we were there on the Saturday of a three-day holiday weekend (Friday was the national day of remembrance for the Dirty War and disappearances in the 70s and 80s), with nice weather, so the crowds would be enormous.  The faster we got to the Garganta, the less likely we would be to find ourselves boxed out of the views.

On the way back to the train, we saw wildlife, including catfish and turtles and even a toucan flying high overhead.  We also saw pieces of the previous walkway, washed away by floods last October and only replaced a few weeks before.

We took the train back to Cataratas station, and from there walked the Superior Circuit trail.

We had lunch at the food court (not great) and got ready to get wet: we had swim trunks on, and took off and put in our backpacks whatever else would be hard to pull off quickly and stuff into the waterproof sacks that we were going to receive.  Then we walked down and to where we boarded a big yellow truck, that took us through the jungle to the place to get off for the speedboat ride.

Just as we arrived it started raining pretty heavily, so we were soaking wet as we picked up our waterproof sacks and life vests and went down the long staircase to the dock.  Once we got on the boat and started upriver, however, the rain stopped, and didn't start up again until we headed back.  The boat got us close to various falls, for views and pictures.  Then, we were told to put our cameras in the sacks, and drove up under some of the lesser falls, and would have gotten completely soaked, if we hadn't already been.  

Then, it was back downstream to the dock, drop off the life vests and sacks and wait for  a truck to take us back to the main park area.  By then, the rain had stopped.

When we got back to the hotel Mary Joy and I hung out at the pool for a while, before dinner.  The pool was not designed very well for swimming laps, but I did so anyway, between splashing Mary Joy and sitting in the sun.