La Garganta del Diablo; Iguazú Falls, Argentina

The Devil’s Throat.

That’s a pretty commanding name for a bunch of water.

Joe and I were in magnificent spirits the whole ride to Iguazú. Joking all through the day and laughing at the ridiculous movies on the screen above us in our posh-tastic bus. We weren’t the only ones. One specific laugh pealed out from behind us throughout the ride, and that just made us laugh more.

The land changed around us, from mostly flat terrain with a few trees, into something that might have come from the mountains of North Carolina; doused in pine trees and greenery.

The next morning as the bus was nearing our final destination, Joe and I reviewed our plans; still laughing in synch with our echo from a few seats back. We thought we would need to get a taxi from the bus station in Puerto Iguazú, the nearby city, to our hostel a couple kilometers from town. We got lucky and the bus stopped right at our hostel, The Hostel Inn, and dropped us off along with several other tourists.

The place was hopping. It truly looked like a resort; a giant pool outside complete with lounge chairs holding various bodies and a sound system pumping out some indecipherable garble. Check in took a small eternity because of the press of bodies, and there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it but eventually we made it down to our room and met a new sort of traffic jam.

Our little room was home to a Kiwi girl who seemed permanently ensconced in her bed. She made mention of the fact that her iPhone battery was dead, so I offered to let her use my charger. About 47 minutes and a throbbing earache later, we were able to ascertain why her iPhone was dead; the girl’s mouth had no off setting. Somewhere in the onslaught I completely lost track of her name.

Ok bye.

“And then…”

Ok bye.

“Oh you are leaving.”

Ya, bye.

“Ok, so we’ll catch up later.”

Ya bye.

“Sweet, what are you doing tonight?”

Gotta go to the store. Bye.

“All right. Are you going to the barbeque?”

Um, I gotta go catch up to Joe.

“Ok, so are you going to the falls tomorrow?”

On and on it went, until I simply closed the door and chased after a vanishing Joe. We were outside the normal lunch hours for the cafeteria in the hostel and walked off to find some form of a market nearby where we could procure enough food to feed our empty bellies and restart our brains. We found the market something akin to Old Mother Hubbard’s kitchen and were barely able to scrape together enough supplies to make our now famous Danica Patrick Salsa Golf tuna sandwiches with some red peppers on lovely bread con pan.

Back in the kitchen at the hostel, we found a magnificent surprise: Johnny Walker powered Israelis.

They called us out immediately.

“You were the laughing guys.”

Zizi and Dana, busy with making backpacker spaghetti extraordinaire, swirled around us in the kitchen. Zizi carried most of the conversation with Dana simply smiling and injecting a word infrequently. I wrangled up my standby bribery bottle of Johnny Walker, since at this point we had no more border crossings to manage, and we unloaded it on some Coca-cola light and the four of us shared a magnificent repast; knocking down our dranks and staring in horror at the meat con carne being prepared on some dirty wood tables covered with god knows what out the window.

Zizi immediately began laughing. She almost didn’t stop for the next two days.

Joe and I decided to invoke the optional shower and actually get cleaned up for the first time in a couple disreputable days. We each took turns listening to the incessant Gatling chatter from our young Kiwi while the other hid out in the shower.

When we made it back up to the immense lobby, we again met D and Z and decided we should abandon the rapidly filling common area in search of food that wasn’t prepared by a madman with a machete out back.

There ARE options for food nearby the resort, but there isn’t much English so be prepared. If you are going kosher, be a lot prepared.

Halfway through the ordering process, our waiter exclaimed he would be bringing Dana a half a chicken. She nodded in agreement, and I asked her if she knew what she had just agreed to. She did not.

The waiter and I went a few rounds, our conversational waters further muddied by the occasional interruption from Dana while Joe and Zizi simply sat back and laughed.

When the food did finally arrive, the salad was somehow un-kosher (something to do with cheese, I think) and the waiter was 2 pesos shy of hostile when we asked him to make it right. By meals end, we had all fed well and managed to knock off two bottles of fantastic, affordable Argentine Red.

Yes; only two.

The mild shenanigans of the hostel’s barbeque had turned into full scale Brazilian madness by the time we returned from dinner. There were two girls dancing around the lobby who appeared to have come straight out of Carnival. Feather, tiny bikinis, impossible bottoms; the works. They were pulling young men out of the crowd and dancing around with them, dragging the excited lads over to a chair and sandwiching the guy between the two of them.

The best part came when one the dancers grabbed an Israeli guy from the crowd, then pushed him towards the chair where he happily sat and gyrated on what he thought was the other dancer girl. It was in fact, another man that had slipped in behind him. It was hilarious to watch; you just have to imagine it.

When the squawking died down, we four sat down and jibberjabbered on the couches for a while, until I realized it was the 5^th of May. Cinco de Mayo.

Cinco de Mustache!

Finally, spent from laughing, we all turned in to get some sleep and prepare for our trip to the Devil’s Throat the following day.

Joe and I awoke looking at another 20+ hour bus ride that night, so we repacked our bags and locked them up in the left luggage room of the hostel before rolling out to town to get more magical paper from the ATM machine that was hidden behind a line of dozens of people waiting for what appeared to be the only working bank-o-mat in town.

You must understand that Iguazú Falls is not just cool in Argentina. It is world renowned. If you haven’t heard of it, then you are obviously a social pariah and should be ashamed of yourself. I had been hearing about this place for months from everyone who had traveled through South America. I had also been hearing that you had better just consign yourself to the fact that you are going to get absolutely soaking wet. Completely disregarding this bit of the story, I decided to buy a couple of ponchos for Joe and I before he informed me that he already had one.

In the 36 seconds since I had paid for the ponchos, the shopkeeper seemed to have completely forgotten who I was and that I had purchased it from him and denied me a refund. I was so frustrated I simply fell completely out of any ability to speak Spanish and started speaking English at her. She suddenly remembered me and I was able to get back my diez pesos.

As luck would have it, once our dynamic duo had passed into the park and was looking for directions, we met the other dynamic duo of D n Z, and we joined up to become something of a dynamic Voltron of wonderment and brought laughter and greatness to the park for the rest of the day. The whole park was a wonderland.

La Garganta del Diablo is simply staggering. These falls are so huge, even with a telephoto lens everything looks far away. Standing in the warmth of the sun and the spray from the falls, it is difficult to count the passage of minutes. We sat and stared for quite a while, until finally Joe reminded me only had so much time. I hope the pictures can speak for themselves.

We walked many kilometers that day accompanied often by butterflies and always by laughter.

After a hike or three, we finally got to play in the water. We had to climb over some caution tape to do it, but hey, we came to play.

At the end of a long, wet day, some of us were pretty tired.

Still, D n Z introduced us to some of their friends who had enough energy left over to serenade me with an Israeli lullaby about San Francisco.

Our bus ride, turned into a relative mad dash for the station in town, though we arrived in plenty of time to get some food before the bus left, and even saw D n Z one more time in the terminal as they had come down to sort out some transportation questions of their own. We couldn’t get away from them!

Tickets in hand, in honor of Pato, Joe and I enjoyed a lomito before we hopped our next all-nighter bus with full stomachs and slightly heavy hearts for Buenos Aires and the evacuation.