Iguazu Falls – Poor Niagara?

On sighting Iguazu Falls, US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt reportedly declared “Poor Niagara”.  Now we haven’t been to Niagara Falls, but plenty of our fellow passengers have and I think they pretty much agree with her.

Iguazu from the upper trail

The people who had also been to Victoria Falls in Africa appreciated the difference and preferred Iguazu’s pristine yet accessible – to an extent – location.

View from our hotel

These falls on the border of Argentina, Brazil and a tiny bit of Paraguay are formed at the confluence of the Iguazu and Parana Rivers.  This area gets 2 metres of rain a year and upstream there’s even more and they’ve got to go somewhere - hence the falls.

Once named Santa Maria falls (Holy Mary was not the term I used when I caught sight of the main drop), they are now universally known as Iguazu and the derivation is from  the native Guarani Y (meaning water) and uasu (meaning big or thundering) – pronunciation of Ig’ wahzoo was stressed to us over and over by our guide.  Incidentally, another Guarani word is Piranha meaning ‘fish of the devil’.

Devil's Throat

We actually weren’t originally to do this tour – we thought staying in Buenos Aires would be great for a big city experience – but we were talked into it by an Argentinian by the name of Oscar Mendoza who we’d tried to hire as an ‘informed’ guide in BA.  Part of his erudite yet witty response stated:

 In my opinion you definitely will have made an unforgivable (though still rectifiable) mistake were you to skip a dash to the Iguazú Falls. I’ve been there several times, and I’ve also visited Niagara Falls in the US-Canada border, and, believe me, the only thing they have in common is that large volumes of water and a proof of the law of gravity.… I would by all means strongly recommend – indeed encourage – you to try and rearrange your schedule here so that it includes Iguazú Falls.

It went into much more detail, and was sufficiently convincing for us to do an about turn – and hey, guess what?  Oscar was right!

Main Falls vista

I can quote facts and figures about water volumes and compare various falls; suffice to say there is a lot of water and we were fortunate enough to stay within the National Park and therefore be the first in and the last out as, since gaining its new 7 Wonders of the Natural World title, despite its relative isolation, it’s a popular spot.

Monkeys on Comm Tower

Map of the falls

Now any photos I may care to add are never going to give you any concept of the scale, noise or power of the Falls – there’s 270 discreet named falls and the water was flowing at around 2,200 sqm per second at our visit, but it has been much higher – about 20,000 sqm/s in flood and in September 2006 it actually stopped due to a drought.

Paul and neighbour Roger - feel the power!

A number of movies have been filmed here most notably The Mission in 1986 and Moonraker in 1979.  Our guide Nouxa had recently spent some time helping film an instalment of the “Amazing Race’ here.

Twin Mary and Teresa falls - seen in 'The Mission'

The region is also a sanctuary for hundreds of different species of birds, butterflies and some rather cheeky animals.  To be honest, we really only touched the surface of the flora and fauna.

The colourful '88' butterfly

Coatis scavenging in packs

Like the silly people we are we joined a jet boat to run UNDER the falls- and let’s say having 2 million litres of water a second fall on you was quite an experience as was the boat ride weaving in and out and behind the curtain of water and nearby rapids.  Yee-ha!!!