Buenos Aires

We flew to Buenos Aires… a ten hour red-eye flight.  We’ve been spoiled by getting almost automatic upgrades to economy-plus seating, with its extra legroom, on most all flights with United.  But not this one! The flight was really overbooked.  They kept asking for two people booked in first class to give up their seats, in exchange for a first class the next day or economy ON THE SAME FLIGHT, and a $5,000 credit on future flights and 250,000 miles on their account!! And NOBODY wanted to step down. After trying to sleep all night in that cramped seat maybe I understand. If you could afford first in the first place 😎

Getting through immigration took forever, customs was no problem, changing money was even longer (1.5 hours?) and then to get official taxi was a wait too… from touchdown to leaving the airport was over 4 hours. Some kind of record for us!

We had a very nice little hotel in Buenos Aires, and the desk folks were very nice and helpful. We checked in and immediately checked out (as in a nap for 2-3 hours).  When we woke from our nap we walked around the neighborhood and ended up having a fabulous dinner at an Indian restaurant.

Iguazu Falls

The next morning we were back in a different airport, to fly to the Iguazu Falls.  This felt short, being only a 2 hour flight instead of the 10 the night before.

Here is the new airport in Iguazu- it looks like they haven’t bothered to remove the old tower yet.

 

There are multiple walking trails leading over, under and around the falls.  I was prepared for amazing, but was not ready for HOW AMAZING these falls are!  “Best in the World” does not do them justice!  There are something like 275 separate falls, but all combine to make an effect that is stunning!  They extend so widely there is no way to see them all at the same time, let alone photograph them.  So you just take 350 or so photos and sort them all out later.

 

Some vantage points get you VERY close to the falls – with the result of getting pretty wet.

 

We hiked over 7 miles of trails to see these magnificent falls from as many angles as possible.  Below is a very wide angle shot from a distance, but it still only gets 73.4% of the falls. (I measured)

We were blessed by seeing lots of interesting birds and animals, too.

 

 

 

There were many beautiful butterflies too…

 

This one loved Cherryl’s backpack.

 

There were coati all over – they apparently get very aggressive and can do a lot of damage to a person trying to feed them.

 

 

Wednesday we boarded the Zaandam – one of the “Dam Ships” in the Holland American line.  Just in case we hadn’t seen enough animals, we were greeted with a lobster on our bed!

 

Our balcony overlooks the busy commercial harbor – interesting to see the huge cranes shuffling containers around.

 

More of Buenos Aires and beyond coming in the next blog…