Thursday, March 14, 2013

The Lear Jet flight on Elgin Air (courtesy of Lider) from Lima to Foz de Iguassu was comfortable and took approximately 3 hours and 45 minutes.  We moved two time zones east so it was 4 pm when we landed.  Dom Giossan our guide for Brazil and Ciro a local guide for Iguassu Falls met us. 

Dom (on the right with the umbrella) is 50 years old and has been in this business of guiding for many years.  He knows all the great guides we have had in the past fro B&R.  His late father was Romanian, his mother Latvian and he was born in Majorca.  Truly a citizen of the world he lives in Vancouver and has a Canadian and Latvian passport.  We obtained his name from Tyler Dillon, our Georgia Bulldog guide in Myanmar who led such a wonderful unmatched trip there.  Ciro is a Brazilian of German extraction and hails from the Santa Catarina state that is south of Iguassu on the way to Uruguay. It is the second most southern of Brazil's 26 states. He has three children and four grandchildren.  This is a seasoned cohort of guides. 

Our hotel is Hotel Das Cataratas, an Orient Express property that in actually in the Iguassu Falls Park.  We each have lovely suites complete with arrival gifts. From the hotel and from Butterfield.  The property itself reminds me of some of the old hotels in former British territories such as the British Colonial in Nassau, or the Hamilton Princess in Bermuda, the Lord Nelson in Cape Town or the Norfolk in Nairobi.   Each of these has grounds as well as a main hotel building and is carefully groomed.  Hotel Das Cataratas is situate on a hill but discretely in the trees, commanding a view of the falls.  It is a pastel color and its grounds include a large swimmable pool.

We dropped our luggage and headed out to the park to walk the trail on the Brazilian side of the falls.  The gates to the park are closed at 5 pm so we had the park virtually to ourselves. We saw some of the other guests of the hotel – but only a few.  It was raining but we were told one always gets wet at Iguassu, from rain, from spray or from perspiration.  Our walk took us along a descending one -half mile path with overlooks along the way.  Right of f we encountered Cuatimondis, raccoon like animals that seemed quite plentiful.  They are a strange sight to see and worth avoiding as they can carry rabies.

Iguassu Falls has several hundred falls and Ciro told us that it had a width of 1.6 miles.  On average 1.4 million litters per second cascade of the falls.  We are here in the wet season and we were told that the flow was up to 6 million liters per second.  The average flow at Niagara is 7 million liters per second.  It is a staggering indescribable sight and must be experienced We went to the end of the trail takes on to a walkway right out near the face of the falls. It was a very impressive sight.  We returned along the same trail. Dinner was in the informal hotel dining room.  The hotel has two dining rooms, one fancier that the other.  Dom had planed for us to dine in the fancier dining room but it was closed so we dined in a buffet style restaurant across the hotels grounds from the main building, I had a shrimp risotto and the rest had a sea bass.  The food was good  We shared a bottle  Brazilian cabernet named Casa Valdugas.  Its denomination was raizes.  It was very nice.

Friday, the Ides of March

This morning we arose and met for breakfast at 6:30 am.  We wanted to get an early start against the possibility of a long delay at the Argentine  border as Caroline and I did not purchase special entry permits .  We have visa and were told they were sufficient because we have valid five year Argentine visas and we were told that was sufficient.  It turns out that they were.  Even so we delayed for twenty minutes at the border.   Dom and Ciro had planned for us to enter over onto the Argentine  and hike two of the three “essential paths on the Argentine side and walk onto the gournds of a Sheraton Hotel on the grounds of the Argentine iguassu Falls national park.  The national park is very well done.  The paths include opportunities to walk out over portions of the falls and take in the view.  

It was wonderful.  We made it to the Sheraton about noon.  Dom had arranged 30 minute massages for us in their spa and a shot at their hydro therapy pool, which is really a jacuzi on steroids.  It has several stations o high pressure jets in a pool, each set to address different muscle groups.  All four partook of massages but only Caroline and I tried the hydrotherapy pool.  Where Ben, Gail and Caroline went up for lunch, I took a little swim in the pool and joined them as they were finishing.  I had my lunch and we headed to the next stage – a flight to the Pantanal.

Air transportation from now on is provided by a joint venture between Elgin Air and its much more modest and less experienced joint venture partner Hardin Air.  The equipment is a very nicely appointed King Air 300.  While a twin prop and therefore slower than the Lear, it is actually roomier.  This joint venture worked well in South Africa a number of years ago although that venture involved two single engine propeller planes to permit landing on remote strips.  We are headed to the Caiman Lodge in the Pantanal