Since
coming home we have been very busy and struggling to put together the blog posts
that will finish off our time in Brazil. Sometimes capturing the moments can be
tiring rather than exciting when you are physically very distant from the place
which you want to write about. Although it has only been about a month, the
memories are already fading and soon they will be nothing but a collection of
good times gone old.
However this
post is about a place that will stay with us for a very time (unless I get
amnesia)... Iguassu Falls. This beautiful place captured our imagination whilst
simultaneously making us realise our own insignificance. A place this stunning,
this mindblowingly beautiful surpasses the need for one of our view-grabbing blog names that
usually exaggerates the mundane into the fundane. This would sully the memory of the experience and I like my
memories unsullied thank you very much. Even putting into words the world we
glimpsed somehow cheapens it. I have travelled a lot and I think this is
the most breathtaking place I have ever visited.
The
micro-explosions of never ending water are truly magical and it's impossible to
imagine the scale of the falls even whilst you are there. As a chemical
engineer, the flowrate was astonishing to me and as a human being, the grandness was
overwhelming. This beautiful place is really a once in a lifetime thing to see. We have seen
many waterfalls but these falls were something else.
I cannot
even imagine the wonder of the first Europeans who laid eyes on this. Their hearts must have been shaking even more than mine was. I almost felt a
spiritual connection when staring at the water. I don’t say this lightly… It is
phenomenal.
We saw the
falls from far away, from up close on the platforms and walkways, from Argentina and from Brazil, from the river itself by
taking a boat that even went into the falls, and last but by no means least,
from the air. A helicopter took us around the falls and we got to see this
landscape from the sky. What an incredible experience.
I don't
think any more words are necessary, instead I intend to bombard you with the
top photos from the falls. It was difficult to cut them down to this many,
believe me!
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From the
Brazilian side we got some incredible panoramic views of the falls.
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| Not only were the falls spectacular, but the forest surrounding them was so lush and beautiful |
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| The weather wasn't so great on this first day but it made the whole place seem quite surreal, as the spray from the falls blended into the grey sky and roaring, foamy river |
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| It was hard to get David to pose for this photo because he didn't want to turn his back on the awesomeness! |
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| At the end of the walkway we got a great view of The Devil's Throat, which threw up so much spray it was almost impossible to actually see at times |
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| Watching the water endlessly tumble down and crash off the rocks was hypnotic |
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| On the Argentinian side we were able to walk where we had been looking across to from Brazil, and we got a whole new perspective of the falls with a much more up-close-and-personal experience |
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| It seems impossible that this calm, almost mirror-like water has so recently gone through all the violence and trauma of the falls, but we were really only a few minutes downstream at this point. |
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| I know...just perfect. |
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| From this point on it was nothing but rainbows! |
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| Looking down into The Devil's Throat - there was so much spray we couldn't even see the walkway we had been on the day before! |
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| And finally, we flew over it and it started to make a bit more sense. It's so hard to put something so huge and so incredible into context but the helicopter ride really opened our eyes to what the falls really are |
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| After all that water, it seemed fitting to have a boat of sushi for dinner |
The next post is going to be about the wildlife we saw during our trip. It's well worth a look!
