Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay

Argentina and Iguazu

I spent a few days in Salta, Argentina, after I left Chile. I didn't
do much there except relax and try to take better care of myself. More
sleep, some strength training at a nearby gym, better food. I watched
Mark Rippetoe's videos on YouTube about the back squat and tried to
apply what I learned as tweaks on how I've been squatting, on and off,
for the last decade. Rotating my pelvis made an enormous difference
and I was hardly able to walk afterward, despite using less weight
than last week.

Mostly, though, I struggled to fill my days. For different people this
is either a really great thing or a really terrible thing. I don't
like it much. Breakdancers in the park, some movies, ridiculous
amounts of walking. I went to a lovely dance and acrobatic performance
one night and fell in love with one musculed Argentinian girl after
another.

Twenty five hours on a bus put me in a small town called Puerto
Iguazu. It's in the triborder area, where Argentina, Brazil, and
Paraguay touch. The nearby Iguazu falls are visible up close from the
Argentine side and in panorama from the Brazilian side. That a
Brazilian visa for an American costs USD$135 decided that for me.

There'd been rumors swirling about how a drought reduced the flow over
the falls to a meager 900 cubic meters per second. The normal flow is
about 1200 m/s, tenfold in the rainy season. "Under 900 m/s isn't
worth going," I'd been told. I'd seen photos from a month ago and it
looked, truly, like it wasn't worth going at all: little wisps of
water, tumbling over a dry, dirt cliff. In Salta, I googled up a web
site run by the Brazilian government with hourly flow data. 1200 m/s
one day, down in the 900s the next, then the 600s, then back up. The
flow changes so quickly that a photo from a month ago turned out to
mean nothing.

The Argentine park is nicely arranged and clean. On a Wednesday
afternoon, it was nearly deserted. The piece de resistance of the
whole splashy mess is an area called Garganta del Diablo, the Devil's
Throat. I had big plans to take some excellent photos. Foreground
objects to give scale, panoramic expanses, rainbows in the mist from
the water breaking, perhaps some birds in silhouette flying over the
falls to draw the eye.

Nothing went as planned. The catwalks above Garganta del Diablo were
so wet with spray that within seconds the camera was soaked, dripping
water off the bottom of the lense, with me tucking it under my shirt
and running back the other direction to pat it dry before the seals
gave and the whole thing short circuited. I didn't want to eat $1000
for a picture of a waterfall and so that was the end of that. The
whole Iguazu expanse is about 4 km wide, so there were plenty of
other, less spectacular waterfalls to photograph.

I probably only spent a few hours in the park, all told, before I left
for the border.

posted by daviduri @ 7:31 AM