These waterfalls are the biggest in the world, more spectacular than Niagra. They really were amazing. Pictures do NOT do justice to them. The first day of the trip was spent traveling. We had a five-hour layover in the Sao Paulo airport, which meant we had nothing to do. The first flight had been three hours, and after the layover the next flight was only an hour and a half. It was late afternoon by the time we got into Foz de Iguacu. Our tour guide, Oliver, took us through our entire trip. He was pretty entertaining—between the broken English and constant repetition of telling us EXACTLY what we were going to do. We went to the hotel first, which was pretty nice. It was slightly ghetto (alarm clocks didn’t work, we didn’t always get hot water), but it was still a lot nicer than I had thought it would be. I ended up with a really nice roommate, Michelle, and we ended up spending most of the trip together with another guy who had sat next to us in the nice long layover in Sao Paulo, Brad. After getting a chance to shower and clean up, we headed to Rafain, a Brazilian restaurant with an all-you-can-eat meat buffet. It was absolutely delicious (especially after ten days of ship food). Then they put on a “cultural” show, hosted by a weird Portuguese man. It was definitely commercialized and not that authentic, but it was still fun.
The second day we started out by heading into Argentina to see the falls from that side. We got soaking wet when we went on the walking tours, and got right in the Devil’s Throat. I can’t even describe how awesome they were. We did tons of different walking tours and saw the falls from tons of different views. In the afternoon, we got to go in rafts and actually go under some of the falls. It was amazing and I ripped through a waterproof camera in about ten minutes. Then after getting a chance to dry off, we went to a bird park. It had some pretty cool birds, and it was a nice way to “end” the day. Afterwards, we were on our own for dinner. Oliver suggested going to the Bier Garten. (We thought he had meant Beer Garden). Not all 40 kids wanted to go to the same place though, so we split up. We told our taxi driver we wanted to go to the beer garden, so the five of us in our taxi ended up at a legit Brazilian beer garden: Cervaja de Jardim. It was so good. I had the best sangria, and we split two pizzas: quarto queijos (4-cheese) and moda de casa (it had peas, asparagus, bacon, and other stuff on it—it sounds gross but it was absolutely delicious). It was nice getting to know the other kids, and overall the trip was a really great bonding experience. The other kids who went to the real Bier Garten said it wasn’t very good, so we were lucky. The waiter had been really nice too. He tried to speak as much English as he could with us, and even called us a taxi.
The last day we went to Itaipu Dam (currently the largest dam in the world, and one of the most environmentally friendly). It was pretty much just a big dam, not horribly exciting. It was exciting to go back to Igaucu falls though, and see them from the Brazilian side. Argentina had the wet side, but Brazil definitely had the picturesque view. I probably took over 150 pictures of the falls, and none of them are as great as it actually was being there. We did more walking tours and even went up in an elevator to get a better panoramic view. We got a bit wetter, but it hadn’t been as bad as the day before. After a few hours we headed to the airport, where we were stuck on a three flight with one stop. The flight got pretty entertaining though. We spent most of it telling lame jokes. Then we had another hour layover, and by that point we were exhausted, tired and delusional (so it was a lot of fun). We made it back to the ship at about midnight, and I immediately passed out.
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