Iguazu Falls, Cordoba, & Bariloche

One of the natural wonders of the world is on the border of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil.  It is a huge collection of waterfalls, and we visited the Argentine side in Iguazu.  The first waterfall we came to was The Devil´s Throat, where vast amounts of water from a huge river flow down hundreds of feet, and send mist far into the air.  You walk out over dozens of smaller river systems on metal boardwalks to peer over the edge of the falls.  Next, we went and saw a bunch of little critters that look like a mix between anteaters, raccoons, and opossums called coatis.  They have a slow train that takes visitors to different trail heads which we took a few times too.  We viewed dozens of other waterfalls from a variety of angles from a number of different trails, and even saw little monkeys before we left the National Park of Iguazu.  Unfortunately, that evening I got the flu, which made me spend the majority of the next three days in bed with a fever, deep cough, headache, etc.

Another city in Argentina we visited is Cordoba.  It was hard to find a hostel here because the big soccer game, the American Cup, was playing in the city the very next day.  The big cathedral here was gorgeous and they had amazing paintings all over the ceiling.  There were many other buildings in the city that were hundreds of years old, some of which the Spanish built long ago.  While I slept and tried to get better, Mr. Madison watched the soccer game in a restaurant (you can get a huge steak dinner for only $10 down here!) and Argentina won!

From Cordoba, we took a bus to Patagonia, the southern tip of Argentina and Chile.  The buses in Argentina are not like the ones in the USA.  Here, the seats lay way back and you get dinner and pop and free juice and coffee the whole way.  We stayed in the city of Bariloche, which is a ski town in Argentina.  The first day, it rained, so we took the opportunity to visit a bunch of the chocolate factories here, where the chocolate is DELICIOUS!  On the second day, it started SNOWING!  We took a gondola to the top of the mountain, but we couldn´t see much besides a lot of snow!  After going to another delicious dinner and eating more chocolate, Mr. Madison and I headed over to Chile on another overnight bus.