You might permit me a short period of what Elmore Leonard calls hooptedoodle, a passage of writing which does nothing for the story or the characters but is satisfying to the writer. It has occurred to me several times on this trip that while I knew the world is a complex and diverse place before setting out, actually feeling that complexity and diversity is entirely different to knowing it exists. This is a truism of the first order, unworthy even of a place in the fortune cookie canon, and yet there is a regressive element within the statement that I hadn’t appreciated until recently: even understanding that the world is endlessly complex and diverse requires an understanding of the complexity and the diversity of the world. And when something triggers that awareness – great literature or mind-stretching science or the experience of a new physical place or whatever it might be – it feels to me like a dawning, like the sun is rising over a vista of knowledge and information and awareness that had been dark to me before. In this context ‘it dawned on me’ is a more meaningful phrase than a cliché-detector might allow.
There is just so much there. There are the dimensions of knowledge, like sociology and anthropology and history and science and on and on into the thousands, and then there’s the range of scale, from a tree to a path to a street to a city block to a continent. To understand and internalise even a minute portion of it is straining and exhausting and frustrating and inspiring. For people to say they have ‘travelled the world’ is laughable; at best they have travelled a portion of it so small it’s a rounding error on the level of the planet, and the most they can take from the experience is that it is theirs and theirs alone, a unique narrative path through a limitless complexity. There are 5,500 cities in Brazil, and 200,000,000 people. Are you sure you’ve ‘done’ Brazil?
The waterfalls we saw today were one of those things that let the light shine for me. They’re so jarringly massive and awe-inspiring that you would need to be deep indeed in your established rut not to be jolted out of it. They are created by the Iguazu river flowing off a cliff, but that calls to mind a river flowing in a straight line to the edge and continuing in a straight line at the bottom. The reality is quite a bit more complex.
First, the river is enormous. It’s much more like a flowing lake than a river. And the cliffs it flows off are curved and irregular, meaning there are multiple waterfalls – 250 at the official count, which includes all the ‘small’ ones. The cliff is only sheer at one major point and in most places there is a step of 50 to 100m wide, so the total fall of approximately 85 metres is broken into two roughly-even chunks. So you can think of the river meeting a straight-line cliff but at an angle of maybe 45 degrees, and in places the cliff curves in and out, and in most places there is a step. On top of that, at one of the two main points there is a ramp of sorts running down from cliffs to the ground-level below, and the flows circle around and through it, forming an island. All this happens over a site that I would estimate at two kilometres in length, though I don’t know the official number. The river forms the border between Brazil and Argentina, and the park is partially in each country. Argentina has most of the actual falling water, but the view from the Brazilian side allows you to appreciate much of it at once.
There are two main areas. The first is at the island, which is called San Martin, and it presents a panorama of multiple huge waterfalls flowing down to the step then the level below, plus the falls which happen around the island itself. There is a small island among some of the most ferocious of the falls, and great trees grow on it, continuously soaked in the spray. It looks like it should be the residence of an infinitely wise being. There are upper and lower walkways which you can follow which take you to the edge of the falls, and you can get down to the lower level to look up at them, and no matter which way you see them the power and intensity of the falling water is baffling, hypnotic, impossible to internalise. When you are up close the sound is a roar from something whose breath is endless. The videos we took go some way to conveying the immensity of it all. Still images freeze the water in a way you cannot see in real life, and show a different side to it, but don’t illustrate what it is like to be there in the same way.
We arrived early in the morning for our tour and took a truck through the jungle from the entrance area. There were about 30 people on it, some of them the type of Americans who create the negative stereotypes about American travellers. But we got an idea of what the surrounding jungle is like. Stretched just over our heads were spider webs from one side of the road to the other, a span of several meters, with spiders the size of my hand in the centre. The body was about as big as my index and middle fingers beside each other. High in the trees we saw a toucan bird, a familiar shape from the old Guinness ads.
The truck dropped us off and we went for the boat tour part. This took us down the river at an energising speed, and up ahead we got our first view of the falls. An American woman clapped and shouted ‘Yeah! Oh yeah!’, and while it made me cringe and wonder yet again how they created such a great country without understanding irony or how to lower their voices, I appreciated the sentiment exactly.
We knew that the boat was going to take us close to the falls, but what we had not realised was just quite how close. Perhaps we should have got an indication from the fact they issued us large dry-bags for our backpacks, and told us to put anything into them that we did not want to get wet, including cameras and watches. We packed our stuff in and folded down the top of the dry-bag and clipped it shut as instructed so that it was entirely waterproof, and then we went close enough to one of the falls to feel the heavy mist that rises off it, and then we went properly close. The boat bounced over the roiling water and we were hit with a blast of cold water equivalent to being under a massively scaled-up shower or the heaviest thunderstorm I can imagine or a firehouse if the water was dispersed. It was coming at us mostly horizontally and we were immediately soaked through, like we had been swimming fully clothed. The shock was hilarious and extremely invigorating. One of the staff took a video with a camera in a waterproof casing and we later bought a copy. We haven’t been able to watch it yet but I imagine it just shows us spluttering and laughing and shaking away wet hair and trying desperately to look up. So much water is in the air that it is very hard to open your eyes to see the main body of the falling water coming from above, and though I managed it through one eye or the other I never did get them both open at the same time. Later on throughout the day I saw people in sopping clothes with a shocked expression, and I would imagine they had not been told quite what to expect either.
In the heat our clothes dried quickly, though the humidity slowed the process, and we walked every trail on the map, seeing the falls from as many angle as possible. In one place two big waterfalls are separated by a distance of 50 metres or so and anywhere else they would be a huge attraction in themselves. Here they attract a few gazes and an obligatory picture before people keep moving to see the real monsters again.
The second major attraction is at the opposite end of the site from where the island is. It’s called the Devil’s Throat, and the name is apt. At that point a partial cylinder is missing from the cliff wall, and so the water seems to flow off it into a great three-quarter closed hole. The fall is about half way across the river so there is a walkway out to it, at the end of which is an observation platform, and it illustrates the size of the river that the walkway is 750m long. It feels like you are in a world of water when you are crossing – water stretches as far as you can see, interspersed with islands of varying sizes to create a complex network of channels.
Once you reach the platform at the end you can see the water flowing into the hole, and it feel like standing at the edge of the world watching the sea flow off into nothingness. The hole is in the region of 70m across at its widest point, I would guess, and from every side of it water falls off the edge. The cliff is sheer at the Devil’s Throat – there is no step below – so the water falls the full 85m. But you can’t actually see it land, as the volume of water entering into the hole sprays upwards like an explosion that produces an unusually viscous smoke. The sound is incredible. When you stand on the platform you get drenched by the water which billows upwards and is carried over by the wind, like a heavy cold rain. We stayed there for a few minutes, and I guarded my camera very carefully. It’s a strange contradiction between the desire to stay there and listen to that sound and watch the endless flow of water over the edges and see the bellow below, versus the physical discomfort of actually being there and getting soaked. Mike had the presence of mind to bring a rain-jacket, which I had forgotten to do, but even with that you get a blast of cold water in the face every now and again and you have to turn away from it and wait for it to pass.
The day shot by. It was hard to take a bad picture. The final stage of our tour was to get a boat back from the Devil’s Throat to near the main entrance. It was an inflatable craft that held about 15 people or so, and was paddled by one guy who sat in the middle and steered it down the current. Far off to our right was the Throat itself, the steam of water visible above it. You wouldn’t want to get too disorientated in your paddling. On the way back we saw a cayman, similar to an alligator or crocodile. It was silent and still and evil-looking. Mike loved it; it turns out he has an enthusiasm for such creatures, and was able to tell me the difference between it and a crocodile and an alligator, which I immediately forgot.
We walked from where we were dropped off back to the main entrance, which was not even a kilometre. There is a train that runs the length of the park, from the Devil’s Throat at one end to San Martin at the other, and we had taken it earlier in the day. We were unfortunate enough to share our carriage with a group of unusually obnoxious French people, most of whom chewed gum with their mouth open and all of whom were loud. The journey was trying, and I passed the time with uncharitable thoughts. It was their own philosopher who so well noted that hell is other people.
So it was quite the day. In the evening we went for dinner at a place on the main street, where we had steak of a fine order, probably a 9.0 or 9.1. We have taken to competitively playing a game on Mike’s iPhone called Canabalt and rounded out the day with some of that. A little man runs along rooftops and you have to make him jump from one to the other while avoiding various obstacles, and that’s the entire game. Think twice before you try it, though; from a certain point of view, heroin is just a drug that can give you a pleasant high.
