Iguazu

Buenos Aires is a long way south from Puerto Iguazu, which nestles on the borders of Brazil and Paraguay. In fact, to put it into context, it takes 20 hours in a bus to reach the town. Along the way, the scenery changes from the pampa to a landscape of red soil and thick jungle vegetation. Protected from the outside world by the cold hum of the air conditioning, it was a shock to step from the bus into the brutal heat and humidity of the north.

Puerto Iguazu is a small town and at 2pm, midweek and mid-siesta, it was deserted. We walked the two main streets in a few minutes before finding a room with air-conditioning in a nearby hostel. In the early evening, we walked down to the river - the town's name giving a clue to the fact that it had once been the port for boats bringing tourists to see the waterfalls. A slow, sedate and deep green river separating Brazil and Argentina, the port infrastructure had fallen into disrepair as buses and planes now brought the tourists to one of the most impressive waterfalls on the world.

The next morning, we caught the first bus north to the National Park and, having paid our six pounds entry fee, we walked through jungle to the start of one of two trails on the Argentinian side of the cascades. Imaginatively called the Upper Trail and the Lower Trail, they were built like pedestrian motorways and, coupled with the size of the bus park at the entrance, we guessed that crowds were part of the Iguazu experience. At a park warden's reccommendation, we started with the Upper Trail and, after a short meander through dense green jungle, the curtain of vegetation was pulled back to reveal an incredible sight. A vast curving wall of waterfalls stretching a kilometre away from us. It was so immense and so surreal that, for a moment, it looked like a huge aquatic grin smiling from the rainforest.

Formed at the border of hard volcanic rock and soft sedimentary rock, the river had aggressively eaten into the soft band and, over time, the waterfalls had been created. Above the falls, the river was perhaps two kilometres wide, but below them, it was confined to two deep, narrow gorges - the San Martin gorge, deep into the Argentinian territory, and the Devil's Throat gorge, split down the middle by the international border. The gorges ran independently for several hundred metres before meeting below the angular San Martin island, from where they ran as one powerful river.

From the Upper Trail, we could see the San Martin gorge with its characteristic two tier waterfalls - the first fall of twenty metres onto black, jagged rock and, after a short moment of calm in a small pool, a second fall of forty metres into the bottom of the gorge. As the river approached the waterfalls, it was slow and sedate, gently drifting in wide meanders, but when it took the inevitable plunge over the edge, like an immediate chemical reaction, it was transformed into white, misty spray swirling in the air currents. On the morning thermals, a flock of vultures slowly circled, waiting for the fat American tourists (of which there were many and mostly old ones) to tumble from the walkway and fed them for a week.

The Lower Trail dropped down steep steps, past narrow waterfalls - minor in the Iguazu scheme of things, but a major attraction in England - to the bottom of the first tier of falls. The scale of it and the sheer verticalness of the rock, was dizzying and the digital camera took the brunt of my excitement. By the end of the day, I would have taken over 250 photos.

The boat took us over the river to San Martin island and we climbed to a viewpoint perched right over the San Martin main waterfall. Rainbows arced in the spray and squadrons of swifts slashed through the air before clinging to small overhangs where they were sheltered from the tumult. The smell of the water, the sound of the thunderous cascade and the feel of the spray on our faces was a sensory overload and a scene to which no photo could ever do justice. We then boarded a speedboat and, like lemmings, allowed the driver to point it into the waterfall. Stripped to shorts, the water was refreshing, but it was terrifying to disappear into something so powerful. Brutal nature.

Back on land, we dried in the heat and then started to sweat again. A train, moving scarcely faster than walking pace, took us to the start of a kilometre-long walkway across the river to the Devil's Throat waterfall. With the sun starting to sink to the west, the light was perfect and, as we crossed the final small island and found ourselves on the edge of a precipice, we could only stare at the huge voulme of water disappearing into the chasm beneath our feet. Like a mountain avalanching, the non-stop movement and rumbling thunder of the water was unlike anything we had seen before. We stood, soaked by the spray, for an hour simply staring, trying to make sense of the chaos. It was hypnotic and an immense display of the raw power of nature. We walked away humbled by the sight (and with a camera full of photos).

Revolution

Cordoba, like most of the cities in Northern Argentina, sprawls on a barren plain, gently coming to life in the morning, disappearing in the afternoon for a long siesta and finally finding its legs at about midnight when the restaurants fill and the bars spill out on to the streets. It is a pleasant city filled with students and opulent churches built by the Jesuits before their expulsion from the country by the Spanish crown. On our first night, we stumbled on a parilla, a restaurant serving meat cooked over charcoal. We ate huge sirloin steaks with a red wine from one of the vineyards that we had visited in Mendoza.


With the weather starting to turn, we took a bus south of the city to Alta Gracia – an agricultural town famous for being the place where a young Che Guevara grew up. We visited his home, now a museum recently visited by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela. It was full of grainy black and white pictures of Che before he became a soldier and, while I do not know enough to form an opinion as to whether he was a hero or a terrorist, it left me wanting to know more. Something that a good museum should do.

From Cordoba, we headed north into a green range of mountains where the residents of Buenos Aires escape from the summer heat. The weather had truly broken and, and in howling wind and driving rain, we booked into a hotel with a swimming pool. There is always a pressure when traveling to squeeze all you can into every day and it was a relief to be able to watch television and read our books without guilt. On the second day in La Falda, we stretched our legs on a short walk to a local reservoir, sheltering behind a rock to eat lunch. The landscape was rugged, but attractive – rounded sandstone outcrops, cliffs split by deep cracks and scrubby vegetation reminiscent of the Greek islands.

In the evening, we joined the town at the municipal auditorium for the La Falda Annual Dance Festival. A huge dome, obviously used for indoor football when not being used for more cultural activities, with food stalls down one side selling barbequed meat and plastic garden seats in the centre, the auditorium was filled with several hundred people watching several hundred dancers. The festival started at ten at night and we managed to watch two hours before our eyes got too heavy and we wandered back to the hotel. We felt slightly ashamed as we slunk out - whole families were arriving as we departed.

The weather forecast promised an improvement and we hung on in La Falda for another day for one reason. Just up the road at Cuchi Corral is one of the best sites in the world for paragliding and the next day we stood under a cloudless sky on the top of a 300 metre bluff. The wind was almost non-existent and our instructor, El Turco, wanted a tester flight with Albane (being the lightest) to see if the rest of us could fly. Strapped in a harness and wearing a potty-like helmet, El Turco clipped Albane to him and, with a shout of “Corre!”, they ran towards the cliff edge. It was less dramatic than it might sound and as soon as the wind caught the canopy, they were hauled into the sky. They sailed out of sight and drifted their way far below to the riverside landing site.


An hour later, with the wind building, it was my turn and we ran off the edge without any fuss. The power was impressive and the updraft dragged us high about the take off area. El Turco seemed to be enjoying himself and, with height gained, pulled the toggles and dropped us into a tight, spiraling descent. As we gained speed, the gravity increased and my stomach was pushed somewhere near my feet. As the centrifugal force pulled us outwards, the canopy tilted until it was perpendicular to the ground. I clung on, one hand on the harness and the other pressing the shutter on my camera. I had no idea what kind of photographs I was taking. Finally satisfied that he had shown me what he could do, El Turco headed down and we joined Albane by the river. It had been exhilarating, scary and bewildering as my body had struggled to make sense of the sensation. We both agreed that we will have to try it again.

We hitched a ride back to La Falda with Enrique and Federico, two guys who started talking to us by the river, and we had a drink with them later in town to thank them. Enrique gave up his job to become a singer and Federico runs his own business which he set up when he was nineteen. Who knows how our lives will have changed by the end of this trip?

Memories of La Paz

Mendoza

Mendoza is a large town in the middle of a vast, flat and dry plain. However, irrigated by meltwater from the Andes, it is green and shaded by thousands of trees fed at night by bubbling canals of water. A couple of hundred years ago, Spanish and Italian immigrants settled the area and started producing wine using the same water to swell their grapes. Mendoza is now the centre of the Argentinian wine trade and we hired bikes to ride to Maipu, one of the main regions, 16 kilometres to the south of the town.

It was hot (again) as we gently rolled out of town through the residential suburbs, the dusty lorry parks and the ubiquitous YBF gas stations. It took an hour and a half on the back roads to reach Bodega La Rural - first stop on the "wine-biking" circuit - where we joined a small group for a very quick tour of the vines, a museum showing relics from the early years (including an ox skin in which the grapes were trampled - the juice running from the neck into gourds) and a tasting of an average Chardonnay and slightly better Merlot.

A heavy lunch of BBQed meat - pork, beef, intestine and black pudding - surprisingly didn`t slow us down and we headed west to Bodega Lopez, a vast operation producing millions of litres of drinking quality wine for the Argentinian market. It was a slick operation and, after a video showing the wine-making process, we headed into the industrial warehouses to inspect the machinery that destemmed the grapes, the hydraulic presses, the stainless steel tanks for temperature-controlled fermenation and the huge barrels of French oak- some holding 25,000 litres - where the wine would sit for 1-5 years. It was highly automated and the bottling process was a factory line where bottles were filled, corked, labelled and boxed without human contact.

The tasting of a 2003 Malbec, the definitive Argentinian grape, was much more interesting with deep aromas of dark cherries flooding from the wine. I had a second glass - purely to help the legs for the hour`s riding back to Mendoza where we collapsed in San Martin park with an ice cream and the glow of satisfaction that comes from too much sun, wine and exercise.

The good, the bad and the ugly

About two hours north of the Argentine border lies the township of Tupiza. Comfortable in the bottom of a green valley, it is surrounded by a dry, barren desert landscape populated by cacti and the ghosts of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Not quite ready to leave Bolivia, we had stopped in the town and, with the hope that it wouldn´t hurt too much, we had signed up to do a 2 day horse riding tour of the surrounding mountains. Apart from Albane and I, our small, but perfectly formed group comprised Ismael (the guide) and Michelle, a dancer from the US. With next to no experience amongst us punters and 14 hours in the saddle ahead of us, we were all pretty nervous.

Our horses seemed nonchalant as we were introduced and it seemed that they could indeed do the tour on “autopilot”, as we had been promised. We swung ourselves into the saddle and the horses walked sedately south on the railway line. With only six trains a week, we were in little danger and it was a gentle start with the three of us finding our balance, getting used to the movement of the horses and trying to relax. After half an hour, we climbed on a dirt track through scree and cacti, only piles of plastic soft drink bottles giving away the fact that we were in Bolivia. The heat was intense, radiating off the rock with scant regard for the gringos. It felt like we were riding in a sauna. The valley narrowed and we found ourselves squeezing through a cleft in a huge cliff. It was like something from an Indiana Jones movie with the valley tightening even further until we were forced to dismount, tether the horses and walk between twisting walls of dark rock, duck through natural arches and climb dried waterfalls crusted with salt crystals.

A couple of hours later and we were sat in the shade by a shallow, trickling river eating lunch. A popular Sunday afternoon spot for Tupizians, we were taunted by the smell of steaks on the barbeque and our ham and cheese sandwiches did little to satisfy our cowboy hunger. In the afternoon, we headed up the wide valley of the San Juan del Oro river and found our confidence growing as the scenery became more and more impressive. Flat alluvial gravel gave us the chance to risk a gallop and we clung on for dear life as the horses careered upstream, occasionally slowing to a trot to cross braids of the river. Intense green beans and young maize plants flourished on the rich soil to the edges of the river and the colour seemed almost foreign against the ochre reds and gun metal greys of the surrounding ridges. In the late afternoon, we reached the small village where we would spend the night. Surrounded by vertical, smooth cliffs, the adobe church, dating from Spanish times, looked beautiful and, later that evening I looked around its deserted interior - pages of latin text blown into the corners, two ancient rifles propped by the altar and crowds of decaying Jesus Christ dolls.

We woke the next morning feeling stiff and a little sore (imagine sitting on a stiff leather saddle for 7 hours and you´ll know where we were feeling sore), but keen to see more and to ride more. The sky was deep blue and with the long dark morning shadows, the landscape was stunning – big cliffs, jagged ridges and fields of green and purple alfafa. We crossed the river and gave in to the horses´ desires. A small dig of the heels into the ribs and my horse accelerated straight into a gallop. Hearing the noise, the other horses sped up and we found ourselves three abreast (Ismael keeping out of the amateur fray) across the gravel, dirt flying, and screams filling the air and fuelling the horses´ frenzy. It was terrifying and exhilarating in equal measures.

After a long, slow stretch north along the train track when we all felt the heat, we stopped in the shade, drank a couple of litres of water and ate fresh bread and tinned sardines. It was a welcome break and gave us a chance to find our strength again as well as letting all our aches die down. The rubbing of our legs against the saddles had given us all sore patches and, in my case, the friction had burnt the hairs off my legs leaving me with two painful, red, bald patches.

The horses were slowing by now and we plodded into the Valle de los Machos where spires of rock, ribs of solidified rubble and rain-shaped ridges filled a wide gorge. We snapped a few final photographs and headed back to Tupiza, the horses managing one final gallop before we swung our cramped legs over the saddle and tried to coax some life back into our locked knees. We were hot, dehydrated, sweaty and coated in dust, but we were happy. Despite the aches and pains, two days of riding in the most spectacular scenery had left its mark on us and I don´t think that any of us will forget it for a long time.