Florianópolis to Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil 19 - 20 March 2006

Splashing out at Iguaçu falls

The landing fee in Florianópolis came to about 100 USD, which wasn’t too bad for a Category One Brazilian airport. We had nice flying weather with scattered to broken cumulus clouds and there was a beautiful approach to runway 32 over the Rio Iguaçu, with a great aerial view of the falls.
We’d only planned on one night at Iguaçu falls but, checking the guide book, we discovered that the national park was closed on Mondays and today was Sunday. If we stayed at a reasonably priced hotel in the nearby town of Foz do Iguaçu, we would only have time today to see the falls either from a boat or from the park. We decided to splash out in more ways than one. We went on an exciting (for Flemming), terrifying (for Angela) and wet zodiac boat ride below the falls and stayed the night at the Hotel Tropical das Cataratas which is a complete rip-off (US$ 200), even though we negotiated a special rate for pilots. Of course, they have the monopoly as the only hotel on the Brazilian side of the falls that is just a stone’s throw away from them.
Nevertheless we’d made the right choice. It was great to have the falls practically to ourselves both after park closing time that evening and early the following morning when the falls on the Argentinean side (best seen from the Brazilian side) were in the sun. Although our room wasn’t up to much and could have done with some renovating, the hotel does have plenty of old world charm. The buffet dinner in the beautiful garden with a duo playing bossa nova made a very pleasant end to the day. And the room where breakfast was served was decorated with prints of paintings by the English botanist Margaret Mee. Angela met her in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1980s. Until her untimely death in a road accident back in the UK, she made numerous trips to the Amazon and discovered plants such as the Moonflower (so named because it only flowers at night).
One’s supposed to see a lot of butterflies near the falls. We didn’t see many of those, but we did see a lot of coatis (those raccoon-like creatures that we saw in Costa Rica) sniffing around the rubbish bins and Angela spotted a beautiful toucan in a tree by the hotel.