Big Water in Argentina’s Jungle

Puerto Iguazú, Argentina
25.5972°S, 54.5786°W

As February approached, Sarah and I couldn’t believe how fast our year of travel was coming to an end. We were eager to get home and no doubt excited to see family and friends. We talked A LOT about how nice it will be to sleep in our own mattress after a year on the road and close to 90 different beds.

But with a week to go before our flight back to Boston, we knew we needed to take advantage of our dwindling days in Argentina. We needed one last excursion.

Much of our time in Argentina was spent in Buenos Aires, a city in the running to be our favorite of the trip. We loved nearly everything about Buenos Aires – the weather, the food, the tree-lined streets – and were glad we decided to base ourselves there as we explored Argentina.

With over a million square miles, Argentina offered so many opportunities (and tough decisions!) for our travel plans outside of Buenos Aires. We had already visited its coast and had been west and seen the Andes Mountains, so for our last trip we decided to head north to the jungle. We took an Andes Airlines flight to the town of Puerto Iguazú, sandwiched between Argentina’s borders with Brazil and Paraguay.

Argentina Falls and a Brazil Fail

Puerto Iguazú is the jumping off point for visiting Argentina’s Iguazu National Park. The park includes one of South America’s most popular natural attractions, the Iguazu Falls. The falls are actually a series of 275 different drops, making Iguazu the largest waterfall system in the world. The Iguazu name is derived from the Guarini language of the indigenous people of the area. Translated to English it means “big water.” I think that sums these falls up well.

There are several different ways to enjoy the falls. Most people tour one day on the Argentinian side and then a day on the Brazilian side of the falls. This was our plan as well.

After spending a full day in Argentina’s Parque Nacional Iguazú, we grabbed our passports and caught a bus the next morning to take us to Brazil’s Parque Nacional do Iguaçu. In addition to the boat ride we were planning on taking, we were excited to get one more stamp in our passports (and say Iguazu National Park in three languages).

Unfortunately, that’s not how things played out. After we crossed the border into Brazil, we were directed to exit the bus to go through customs. As we walked in Sarah asked me if I was sure we were all set regarding visas. I reminded her this was our 19th country of the trip, and I think I know what I’m doing at this point. A visa is needed for US citizens to enter Brazil, and from what we (I) saw online this document can be obtained at the border. What we (I) didn’t see online was that the visa office is closed on Sunday. So there would be no tour of Brazil. We were told we had to catch the next back into Argentina (But if we had crossed the Argentina border, and weren’t yet in Brazil…where exactly were we? Should we be asking questions in Spanish or Portuguese? These were the types of things I said to Sarah to distract her from my failure to fully research the visa requirements.)

There’s More to Iguazu

We were bummed about the border mishap but knew there were a good amount of things to see and do around Puerto Iguazú. After chatting over how to spend the day over coffees in town, we headed out to Guirá Ogo, an animal refuge and rehabilitation center just outside of town.

The Guirá Ogo wildlife refuge houses all sorts of indigenous animals, including monkeys, wild cats, turtles, deer, and a huge variety of birds. We took a tour through the dense vegetation that makes up the 120 square mile facility and saw lots of unique animals.

Just down the street from Guirá Ogo is La Casa Ecologica de Botellas, a house made completely of recycled plastic bottles. While I wouldn’t recommend anyone flies to Puerto Iguazú solely to visit this place, it was a pretty impressive sight. For about $5 each, we got a 20-minute tour of the house and an explanation of how it was built. The guide didn’t speak English, so we missed a fair amount of his presentation, but the gist of it was that they use the plastic from bottles for everything.

Steak and Mate

Our last day in Puerto Iguazú was our second to last day in Argentina. We had two things on our list of “must-dos” before leaving the country: drink mate and have one last great steak. The steak could wait to our final night in Buenos Aires, but the Misiones region around Puerto Iguazú is known for its mate so we knew we had to try it while in town.

Mate, pronounced “mah-tay,” is by far the most popular drink in Argentina (that is not wine). It’s made by mixing dried leaves from a yerba mate tree in hot water. The drink is highly caffeinated and most often is served in a pear-shaped hollowed out gourd. It’s sipped through a metal spoon filtered at the end to keep the yerba mate leaves out. Everywhere in Argentina, you see people walking around with there mate gear, which includes the cup, the straw and a thermos of hot water for refills.

Drinking mate is a very social thing in Argentina. You sip it in the park with your friends, around the dinner table with your family, or with your coworkers at lunch. We put off trying it for the first few weeks with the hope of finding some Argentinians to invite us to share some mate with them. But evidently, it’s harder to break into a mate circle than we thought. When this didn’t happen by our final weekend, we decided we’d have to enjoy our mate experience with the two of us.  We bought some mate and a mug and straw from a street vendor in Puerto Iguazú. We didn’t have our own hot water source or thermos, but he kindly let us borrow his thermos, and then filled it with hot water from his shop. We found a picnic table close by and sat down for our first mate experience.

The mate definitely tastes like dried leaves, but I thought it was pretty good. It tastes very sour and earthy, which is why people sometimes add sugar to their mate mix. Sarah didn’t find it too objectionable, but after a couple sips let me know that “the rest is all you.”

After our mate experience, we checked out Puerto Iguazú’s Hito de las Tres Fronteras. It’s the point where the Parana and Iguazu rivers meet and standing in Argentina you can see Paraguay and Brazil. It’s a bit of a tourist trap but was worth a quick picture before we headed back into town for dinner.

The hotel we stayed at, the Posada La Sorgente, was close to the center of town. It had a swimming pool in the courtyard that was a perfect spot to cool off from the thick and steamy tropical weather. More importantly, we found out when we arrived at the hotel that the restaurant on its first floor was one of the best in Puerto Iguazú. We booked a reservation for our last night in town and enjoyed one of the best Italian meals of our lives.

From Puerto Iguazú we headed back to Buenos Aires for one last night in Argentina before our flight home. While I’d like to say we were feeling nostalgic about the past year of travel or found ourselves sitting on a park bench in the city staring at nothing in particular and reflecting on how lucky we are to have experienced so much, the reality is we only had one thing on our mind: steak.

Now Boarding at Gate 21

As we sat outside of our gate at the Ezeiza International Airport in Buenos Aires, Sarah asked me how I planned to write this final blog post of our year-long trip. I had already been thinking about how to best summarize a full year of travel experiences into one post. I thought that it would be great to summarize in a neat little listicle what we learned about the world, ourselves, what our stomachs can tolerate, etc. I imagined something to the effect of, “Ten Reasons to Take a Year to Travel the World,” or “Eight Things I Learned from Living Out of a Backpack,” or maybe “Five Things Not to Say to Your Wife on a Hike.”

But the reality is we don’t view the end of this trip as the end of anything really. Our love of travel is even stronger then it was when we started and we are doing everything we can in our lives to make sure we can continue to explore new places. Frankly, it’s way too hard right now to wrap our heads completely around our experiences the last 12 months, so trying to put all of it in perspective is just too difficult to do at this point. What we do know is that our level of gratitude for what we are blessed with – as individuals, as a couple, and as Americans – has never been higher. And for now, we couldn’t be happier to be back around so many people we love (and that speak our language).

All that being said, I’m going to continue to use this blog to write about the places we visit, new experiences, and why we love to travel. Hopefully, these future posts will involve fewer couple selfies and fewer pictures of what we are eating….but maybe not. Regardless, it’s good to be home.