Iguaçu Falls

The eternal bus journeys have improved notably since I discovered a wonderful invention called the "Discman", having previously obtained some CDs with new and interesting music. My record without music was 19 hours from Porto Seguro to Río de Janeiro, and that with a "stomach problem" (probably a parasite I picked up drinking river water during the trek in Chapada Diamantina), for which I decided to take an anti-shit pill. Yes, the life of the traveller is full of paradoxes. "Why would you want to do that?", some might ask. But once in a while he encounters a unique moment, for example, lying on a rock overhanging the edge of "Caçoeira Fumaça", the highest freefalling waterfall in Brazil. 400m below, the natural pool in which we had bathed the previous day looked the size of a 10 centavo coin. The water evaporated into a fine mist about halfway down, answering a question we had asked ourselves the day before, is it possible for a waterfall to evaporate into nothing? The 3-day trek along the river Capibara was one of the highlights of my travels in Brazil.

I'm now in Puerto Iguazu, the Argentinian side of the border, defined by the river Iguaçu. The 22 hour bus journey from Río was no sweat, this time with music. The buses here double as cryogenic freezing units. A new friend from Alaska mentioned that it was becoming fashionable to cryogenically freeze pets and family members in some circles. The next step could be to have them frozen in a familiar pose. "Sis, you got your hand in the cookie jar again?", or "Dad, you still in the John?" (For those of you who don't know, John is an American term for bathroom/toilet.

I'm still awestruck by the visit to the waterfalls here yesterday, vast quantities of water falling all over the place, the splash and spray from the bottom bounces up and creates this kind of upside-down rain effect, and the sunlight in the afternoon refracted to create 360º rainbows. Swifts live behind the thick wall of water in the falls, and towards sunset, they come home to roost, kamikaze style, straight through the falls.

Back at the hostal, met a fellow traveller/new friend photographer of mine with whom we discussed whether a rainbow perceived by two different people is in the same place or not. She reckons it's the same rainbow independent of who's looking at it, I wasn't convinced. Had a look at some interesting sites about rainbows on the web, and discovered I was right, rainbows are an optical illusion -- the sun must always be at your back in order to see one. No two people ever see the same rainbow!