Makes Niagara Look Like a Leaky Faucet

Iguazu was amazing. Utterly Unbelievable. Before I went, one of my Argentine friends told me that she is skeptical about Iguazu. "I mean," she said, "it's just a lot of falling water."
Well, I guess even something so boring as falling water, in the right place and in the right quantities, can be an amazing experience.
The bus ride up to Iguazu was an 18 hour ride, but I have heard much about the excellence of the Argentine inter-city bus system and the wonders that they perform; that they have extremely comfortable chairs that turn into beds, that they serve food, that they have great movies and a/c and bathrooms and they are comfortable and easy to sleep in and big and spacious and raise the dead and walk on water etc.
Well, unfortunately, almost none of those were true on the trip up. The a/c did not work, they forgot water (so thirsty...) the seats went almost-ish back, though the comfy, but they blasted (really loud) three of the worst movies ever made, movies I had never heard about before the bus trip, movies that I had hoped never to know of, movies that, by all standards of decency, should not exist. I completely forgot everything about one of the movies, perhaps because it was so traumatizing, one of the names of these movies escapes, but it was some horrible story (if you could call it that) about a bride who dies on her wedding day and comes back to haunt her ex's love life, and the other was, get this, "Confessions of a Shopaholic." What the hell kind of name for a movie is that? They give that title to the movie and they expect to sell tickets? It was pure pure torture, and the headphone jacks did not work, so the movie was blasted throughout the entire bus at an extremely high volume; my Ipod at max would not drown out those movies. I had to make the best of the situation and try to use the Spanish subtitles to learn a bit, but having my brains dribble out of my ears stopped me from picking up anything useful.
We arrived in Puerto Iguazu at around 8ish, and I wandered the town looking for a hostel with an opening; I finally found one but check wasn't until 10, so I left my stuff and went to the park. The sky was ominously gray.
As I passed by an information booth I overheard a middle-aged fellow asking (in English) how to get to the Garganta del Diablo (there are three trails that lead to different observation points; the Paseo Superior, the Paseo Inferior, both of which view the main section of the falls, and the Garganta, the Devil's Throat, an experience in and of itself). I told him that I was walking there myself, and that they could join me, and so he and his sister and I walked to the Garganta. 30 seconds into our introduction he said something along the lines of "well, us Jews need to stick together." Turns out he and his sister are Hungarian secular intellectual Jews. He lives in California, she in New York, and we hung out for the entire morning and into the afternoon, walking to the Garganta and the Paseo Inferior, and hanging by their hotel pool (the Sheraton; they bought me a juice). The conversation was quite interesting, and he especially reminded me of Sabba in conversation (v'hameivin yavin).
After we split I went to the boat ride, which takes you into (literally into) the falls. Niagara has the fluffy cutesy "Maid of the Mist," but Iguazu has the "Pro-WWF Wrestler of the Holy-freaking-moly I am inside the actual waterfall."
It started to pour while we stood on line, which was a bit of a downer, but I met a Texan video game designer on the line, and I saw one of the neater things of the trip so far. There was a girl in front of us and she had a tattoo right above her, well, her tushy (everyone but me, the idiot, was in a bathing suit). The tattoo, however, was the inscription of the One Ring in Elvish. Two very different worlds collide. After the boat ride, soaked, with no chance of drying off in the pouring rain, I went back to town. In the hostel I showered and dried off, and spent the rest of the evening in conversation with various Israelis, Americans, and a Dutch girl. I also ran into two Israelis that were staying at the hostel in Buenos Aires, and we decided to travel together the next morning.
The next morning we woke up bright and early and,lo and behold, praise be, the sky was (mostly) sunny and the day was gorgeous! We took the first bus into the Park and did the Selva Macuco, a lesser known 'off-road' trail that was all mud. The two Israelis were fun to hang out with, a classic pair of friends that remind me of another pair. The highlight of their interactions happened as one of them, Penny, and I were talking (for quite a while, in Hebrew) and finally, the other, Yigal, said, "Nu, kvar, mishtamesh b'eynayim shelcha, l'chapes l'eizeh kof o mashehu," which means "Come on man, use your eyes to look for a monkey or something!" Penny responds to this by saying, in thick Israeli accent:


the accent is important



remember to imagine this with the accent


"Legolas, what do your elf-eyes see?"
Amazing.
Anyway, we saw no wildlife on the way down the 3.5km trail, but at the end there was a pool with a smaller waterfall. I immediately took of my shirt and went in; Penny soon followed. I should have taken off my pants, but it was totally worth it. Standing beneath a waterfall was amazing, the highlight of the trip. On our way back from the pool, soaked, we saw a toucan (finally!). The rest of the day I spent doing the Paseo Superior, and I left the park exactly on time, right before the sky opened up once again. Back in Puerto Iguazu I walked to the Tres Fronteras (a point where you can see Brazil and Paraguay all at once, showered, and got on a bus to go home (it was supposed to arrive at 9, but got back at 12:30, yet another failure of the famed Argentine bus service). The trip was amazing, and even with the buses, given a choice to go back, I still would have done it. Do check out the pictures on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2082182&id=43906579&l=b9cc758a93