Our first South American overnight bus took us from Buenos Aires to Puerto Iguazu, the Iguazu Falls city in Argentina. The bus ride itself was pretty decent as we managed to get semi-cama seats which are effectively airplane business class seats. This certainly helped ease the 17 hour journey.

Puerto Iguazu is a small town that is clearly used predominantly as a rest town for those visiting the falls and there isn't too much to do here outside of going to see the falls. At night, though, there are quite a few restaurants around the bus station and there are even some bars a bit further down on Av Brazil.

We gave ourselves two days to try get the most that we could out of our stop over and allow time for the Brazilian and Argentinean sides. First up was the Brazil side at Foz de Iguacu. This side is great for a full panoramic perspective of the falls. The BRL 50 return bus trip here requires border crossing and stamping (which ate up a lot of the very limited space left in our passports) and can easily take up to two hours in peak season to stamp on both sides of the border. Then there is a BRL 42 entrance fee to enter the nature reserve. This side is also less physically demanding as there is less to see but the pictures that you'll take are all postcard worthy - they make it easy for even us amateur mlungus to look like pro photographers. It took us closer to half a day here than the expected three hour round trip but this was mainly due to the extended time taken to cross the borders.

The Argentina side of the falls is the prize. You need at least a full day here and can easily do two days if you want to do everything as there's a lot to see and quite a bit of hiking to get around but the views, closeness and experience that you get here definitely outweigh effort. It also costs ARS 100 (about BRL 42) to enter this reserve and there are lots of hikes here that take you to different parts of the falls, all of which are worth doing. One of the best parts of the falls was taking the boat ride that literally takes you into the falls - well the second biggest falls as the main one would be, ummm, deadly. This set us back ARS 125 but it was definitely one of our highlights. Our recommendation, as we were told to do, would be to leave the big boy of the falls, El Diablo, for the end as its crazy busy with group tours in the morning. When we finally got to this monster waterfall, we were gobsmacked wowed. It was incredible. The power and size of the falls was unlike anything we've seen or experienced before as neither of us have seen any of the world's major waterfalls. You literally stand on top of the falls on the Argentina side and if you tried to get any closer you would be in the actual water. Seeing the falls from this close was both hypnotizing and energizing. It's one of those things that you can just stare at for hours.

We were happy that we did the Brazil side first as it gave us a good perspective for taking in the Argentina side. If we only had one day to see the falls, though, and had to choose which side to do then we would definitely choose the Argentina side; It was really something special.

Trek on...Brett and Darren

P.S. Keep up to speed with where we've been staying and how we've been getting around in our blog posts from Johannesburg

Also check out our video channel on YouTube (cause we now technologicious like that):

http://www.youtube.com/user/MlunguTrek/videos?view=pl