Buenos Aires to Puerto Iguazu, Argentina: One Long Ride

Last night at 9:15pm, I boarded a bus in Buenos Aires that was to transport me to Puerto Iguazu, which is at the top corner of Argentina, right where Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay meet.  The first ten hours of the 17-hour ride passed uneventfully, and I slept for most of them.  However, at about 7am this morning, the air conditioner on the bus stopped working, the sun came out, we realized we couldn't open any of the windows in the bus, and it was absolutely stifling.  Babies were crying, everyone was complaining, and it was not good.  Fortunately, we stopped around noon to get the bus fixed (despite the fact that we were in the rainforest of Argentina in summer, it was actually cooler outside the bus), and ended up waiting in this tiny little town for an hour.  The picture above is my trying to get as much of my body in contact with the cool tiles as possible.

The rest of our journey, which took place on roads like these, was uneventful (and much cooler!), though some construction, plus the air-conditioning stop, caused us to eventually make it to Puerto Iguazu two hours late.  I suppose it's all part of the experience!

Once here, I walked around the small little town of Puerto Iguazu (this is basically it), which--from what I can gather--basically exists to serve the tourists who come to see the waterfalls, which I can't wait to do tomorrow!  One other thing happened today, which was really neat: I was eating dinner outside at one of the local restaurants, when all of a sudden, these three Bolivian ladies came up and asked to sit down with me (I was at a table for four, and there were no more seats outside).  We then proceeded to have a lovely hour and a half conversation, completely in Spanish.  It was wonderful!