Journal: Day 5

Daily elevation loss: 4300 meters. Not many places in the world allow one to take a bus that passes through 4700 meters elevation, and in two hours bottoms out at 400. But that's why Bolivia rocks. After getting into La Paz, which is quite possible the most...

Shit its raining.

Yes, we have fallen victim to a tropical shower here in the principle steps of Bolivia's Amazon Basin. Anyway, La Paz rocks; I'll get back to that later.

High Andean plains outside La Paz.

We took an early bus this morning down the mountains, finally making our way off the puna. Coming over the Andes outside La Paz, we peaked at 4600 meters in a wide rolling yellow highland tundra widely inhabited by llamas. Llamas also rock, and it hurts me inside to know that I may never see so many all together in one place again. Towering above this llama haven, we finally caught a good steady glimpse of those stereotypical Andean peaks we'd been looking for from Ushuaia to Bariloche to Mendoza to San Juan to JuJuy to Tupiza to Potosi - unbelievably massive, sharp, jagged rock peaks that actually rise up above the clouds that swirl around them, totally devoid of even the smallest hint of life. That's the kind of think one sees in documentaries and in magazines, but never imagines he will get to stand in front of and feel. I am humbled to see a creation so awesome.

Just like that, we hit a very definite point where the bus began to head down...    down, down, down nearly 4300 meters directly to Bolivia's slide of the Amazon Basin - an amazing change of terrain to witness in just 2 hours. Where else on the planet can you descent from snowy tundra crawling with llama set before such massive rocky peaks to a cloudy tropical forest 4 kilometers directly below? Probably nowhere.

Our chosen path of descent carries with it the title of "the most dangerous road int he world," a name inspired by the high fatality rate of travel on its paths, no doubt due to the lack of guard rails as the gravel road plummets down the sides of mountains. Descending, just as the yellow grass and mosses began to grow longer and greener, we entered the clouds - a major milestone in a a road trip down from the heavens. Riding along mountain ridges and looking over the edge, the forested earth just faded out to white in the near distance, giving rise to the question of whether or not the ground actually exists below us. We continue, and as the mountains above use disappear into the sky, we hit the breaking point of the clouds.

And just like that, we've left the realm of the sun and stars and clouds and moon and in front of us lies the massive expanse of the tropical rain forest, rolling on an infinite sprawl of hills channeling countless streams and rivers between them. The forest sprawls on as far as can be imagined, and the road improved to cobblestone as we re-enter a realm in free from strictly prohibitive slopes, and thus one again rich in human settlements. 

Now, I find myself perched atop a mud brick wall in the forest outside Coroica writing these words to be read. We spent our day off the bus eating a delicious meal of spicy river fish with fried bananas, then took a walk to feast on the abundance of tiny wild tangerines that grow on the broad-leaf trees. My discoveries of the day are two-fold: First, the rain forest floor does no lie where it appears to, but rather a good meter or so under crushed subdue vegetation that will swallow you up if you don't step just right, and second, it rains a lot in the jungle.

Iguazu

Taking shelter from the rain

After one whole free day to recuperate for a good 10 previous days on the road, we made the 18 hour jump to Misiones province, which our first stop at the Ruins of San Ignacio, and old Jesuit estancia that seemed an awful lot like King Luey’s palace from the Jungle Book. We didn’t get to stay that long, or really have that good of a look around, as we got our first taste of tropical rainstorms (which would persists several times daily for the next 5 days) within 10 minutes of getting off the bus. The ruins where the remnants of what could almost classify as a forgotten empire, from a time when several Jesuit priests directly controlled and cared for over 8,000 guaraní and quecheua Indians, and indirectly influenced many many more. They had their own cities, and a well developed network in between, and were actually expelled from the new world by the Spanish in fear that they could get too powerful with the native population.

Speaking of which, alter traveling for several days in a region largely inhabited by direct descendents of Quecheua Indians, a group distantly related to the Incas, but a group which did form a part of the later empire, if was quite interesting and very notable seeing the ethnic change to the descendants of the Guaraní Indians who come more from the rainforests of Brazil. In both regions, the native language is still maintained and certain aspects of the native religion as well. In Misiones, guaraní choirs are not uncommon to see, as it became traditional after the Jesuits practice of teaching Guaraní children to sing to prove to Spanish dons that they were real people.

Riverboat on the Rio Iguazu

We stopped in Puerto Iguazú, where some friends and I immediately dashed down to the Iguazú River where we had been told not go, just to explore. We found a man with a boat and struck a deal to get an hour boat ride for 60 pesos. The Rio Iguazú is huge, about 800 meters across. That’s a little less than half a mile, and the reddish brown water, all runoff from the Paraná province in Brazil, runs right between cliffs covered in thick tropical rainforest, complete with wild banana, papaya, cayman alligators, and piranhas. Our boat took us to the point where the Iguazú and Paraná (the 4th largest river in the World) come together to form one river, at which point Argentina meets Paraguay and Brazil, and each country has constructed an obelisk of their color son their respective cliff above the river.

In our next day we crossed the half kilometer long bridge over the Rio Iguazú to Brazil, to see the Brazilian side of the waterfalls. Turns out that in the week we happen to visit, 10 times the normal quantity of water is falling per second over the falls; what is normally 1,400 cubic meters per second was 14,000. So, though, several parts were closed and inaccessible due to the amount of water, it was more than impressive to see. One path that would normally take you close to one of the falls and get you wet, because of the falls being significantly larger than normal, took you nearly under the water, or at least close enough to the point that it became difficult to stand, difficult to breath, and impossible to open your eyes.

 

The spectacular thing about Iguazú falls is that its not just a river that falls over a cliff – the river forms a sort of delta; its own little floodplain, just a huge body of water, and its that water that falls continuously over a huge Plot of more or less terraced Earth – cliff alter cliff, and with 14,000 cubic meters falling every second, it rounds like an airplane getting ready to take off. Likely there would be a lot more that I would say about this place in particular had it been at the beginning of this note, or had I arrived at that subject before writing 3 full pages…  

Cataratas de Iguazu