Patrick's cousin Caroline and her husband Mike arrived in Brazil a week ago - without their luggage. Perhaps not surprisingly, this being Brazil, working out how to track it down proved difficult but luckily it arrived at our flat 2 days later, 12 hours before we were due to set off for Foz do Iguaçu.

They had had a bit of time to check out our local area and even managed to persuade Patrick to catch the cablecar to Pao d'Acucar (Sugarloaf) with them. An advantage of visiting at this time of year is that queues for major tourist attractions are much shorter.

The weather had taken a turn for the worse shortly before the Elcomes arrived and the forecast for our trip to Iguaçu wasn't looking promising but we turned out to be in for a pleasant surprise. It did rain but only overnight and there were times during our day on the Brazilian side of the falls when it was really hot.

The city of Foz do Iguaçu relies heavily on tourists and felt very different from Rio. There were fewer high-rise buildings, far less traffic (with fewer kamikaze drivers), many more people in restaurants etc spoke English and were generally more helpful to foreigners. It also felt much less dangerous.

The pousada we stayed in was close to the bus station which was useful and although it wasn't particularly luxurious the staff were friendly, there was a pretty garden and they provided a very good breakfast.

As is recommended, we spent one day on the Brazilian side of the Falls and one on the Argentinian side. Interestingly, and you won't hear me say this very often, the Brazilians ran a very slick operation! It was well organised, clean and efficient with well-maintained trails and roads along which smart, themed double decker buses transported visitors from place to place.

The Argentinian park was much shabbier and less well-maintained but maybe it's due for a makeover. Getting to the Argentinian side was more complicated with longish queues at the border but we found a nice young taxi driver in Foz to take us there and back who helped us with the rather excessive formalities involved.

Seeing the falls from both sides gives a
fully rounded view and they are SPECTACULAR! I don't know what I'd been expecting but I hadn't realised that they would be so extensive and both parks are laid out so that you can get very close to the water. The Argentinian side in particular has a number of different trails which enable the falls to be seen from different angles. On both sides the volume of water cascading down so many basalt cliffs over such a large area at one time has to be seen to be believed and is truly impressive as well as very noisy!

Patrick had a quick turnaround on our return to Rio as he just had time to shower and grab his field gear before going back to the airport to join a 3 day BG/Petrobras trip to Natal.
Caroline and Mike had a night in Rio and are now down the coast visiting Paraty and Ilha Grande.

Two brief bits of news from Rio. One is that for the last two weekends there has been a large swell in the population (and consequently the volume of traffic) due to the Rock in Rio festival which the Brazilians, who can't pronounce R's, refer to as Hock in Hio! It consisted of Beyonce, Justin Timberlake et al the first weekend and Iron Maiden and the like last weekend. You probably won't be surprised to hear that Patrick and I didn't go to either event....

The other piece of news is that Rio has recently introduced a Lixo Zero campaign which is designed to stop people dropping litter. It appears to have come out of nowhere and instead of educating the public they impose huge fines ranging from 157 to 3000 reais. At 3.5 reais to the pound, being seen dropping a cigarette butt is now an expensive mistake! How successful the campaign will be in the long-term remains to be seen.