Our buffet tea was nothing special, and if you´ve read Anthony Bourdain´s ´Kitchen Confidential´you´d know why...apparently in restaurants all the gone off meat/day old specials etc...go into buffets, glad we´ve got 3 days of them then. My run of consecutive steak days is over - I think I made it to around 16 in Argentina, not bad considering.

Having been told yesterday our bus would be with us at 8am and there would be an English speaking guide we were a little annoyed come 8.40 when the bus finally arrived and the guide only spoke Portuguese and Spanish. However, she assured us, she´d fix us up with an English speaker when we got to the park. Today was Brazil day, and after another hour we finally made it to the other bus, Jorge our new guide, and Iguazu Falls. The falls themselves are massive, almost too big to take in, but the Brazilian side gives you the best opportunity to see them from afar, the panoramic views are better here than in Argentina. The falls themselves are 2.4km long, over 100m high in places, and are surrounded in lush jungle, giving almost a fantasy-book look. There are many seperate falls, but today we got the views of the biggest. We had a good hour and a half to walk around the short boardwalks and we duly did so, followed closely by some weird looking creatures more interested in the contents of our backpacks than anything (no they weren´t Brazilians, more like raccoons...) The only casualty of the day was my bottle of water than tumbled the 50 or so metres to the rocks below where it promptly exploded. Not like the river needed more water but there you go... Our guide then shuffled us around a couple of buses, we had another buffet lunch (arghhhhhhhhh!) with weird meat on skewers. Unlike China where they just told us all the meat in a similar restauant was beef here they at least pretended it was something else, hell we even got offered chicken hearts and back chicklets, done whole, bones inclusive...yum yum!

The afternoon was a bit like the afternoon we had on the penguin tour in Purto Madryn, although no Welsh tearoom (no tearoom at all for that matter). First up was a really bad souvenir shop, if you wanted amythyst nativity scenes, dried out stingrays and piranhas, or just tack then this is your place - we loved it for novlty and awfulness value...do people really buy this crap?? Our next stop was a visit to Itaipu dam, the largest hydro-electric plant in the world, which started with an utterly hilarious video about how great the plant is and how wonderful pylons look at sunset, or something like that. The plant itself is impressive, and provides 95% of Paraguay´s power and 25% of Brazil´s. It is massive though and the full extent of the environmental disruption caused by it´s building in the late 70s and early 80s will never be fully known. It is thought that some entire ecosystems were wiped out, and the laughable propaganda in the film showing happy animals just looked more than a little trite. The tour itself was so dull I fell asleep, and awoke just in time to arrive in Foz du Iguazu - the Brazilian city closest to the falls...and my word but the words ´hole´ and ´shit´ have never looked more appropriate together than when describing this place. From the moment we left the bus we were houded by incredibly persistent unwashed kids begging for cash, hawkers selling really bad souvenirs, and watched everywhere we went, just like Asia then again really...

Eventually we got to the ticket place and tried to buy a ticket from Foz to Rio on the 8th. We were told that NO SLEEPER BUSES make the 22 hour trip, but we could get a sleeper from Argentina (Puerto) for a load of cash more ...we obviously went with the latter and now have our first 24 hour long one-journey bus ticket...ohhh how exciting.