Really Visiting Puerto Iguazú

As I’ve alluded to in a couple of my posts from my base in Puerto Iguazú, Argentina, my hotel may or may not be in Puerto Iguazú. When I booked, the hotel’s webpage said it was in Puerto Iguazú. And when I look at the current location in my weather app here, it, too, says I’m in Puerto Iguazú. But the hotel is not in anything that looks like a town. It is in a jungle. Seriously. However, the town’s legal boundaries may encompass some of the jungle, including where my hotel is.

As I found out today, the town per se is a five- or ten-minute drive away from my hotel. (I wasn’t the one doing the driving.)

I arrived here three days ago, but it was too late to do anything that day other than go to my hotel, check in, settle in, accept my welcome drink, enjoy looking at the jungle outside my hotel room, and have dinner at the hotel.

I spent all of my activity hours yesterday morning and afternoon and then again this morning in the nearby Iguazú National Park. (The Iguazú River forms a boundary between Argentina and Brazil. The two countries each have a portion of the amazing Iguazú Falls. I think Brazil might have its own Iguazú National Park. (But spelling it “Iguaçu.”) However, I didn’t go over to the Brazilian side.)

Consequently, before this afternoon, I hadn’t seen the town of Puerto Iguazú. I thought it was time.

(By the way, the town on the Brazilian side is Foz do Iguaçu.)

So, after leaving Iguazú National Park, I went to town, so to speak.

Programming note: I leave tomorrow for my next and final destination on this Argentina journey, which was also the starting point for this trip, Buenos Aires. I’ll be in Buenos Aires for two nights before I catch a flight back home.

I don’t have to leave for the airport until sometime a little after noon, but I don’t plan to do anything in the morning before heading out for reasons that will become apparent in the summary that I’ll include at the end of this entry because this will be my last post from Iguazú.

Furthermore, because I won’t get to my hotel in Buenos Aires until sometime after 5:00 p.m., I likely won’t post anything tomorrow unless something unexpected and interesting happens. Then again, I haven’t always made interesting a requirement for inclusion here. So, let’s just make that unexpected rather than unexpected and interesting, shall we?

In Puerto Iguazú

I probably shouldn’t have bothered going into town. There’s not much there.

I asked the driver to let me off in downtown Puerto Iguazú. It was the same driver I had yesterday. I have since learned that he is a driver for a service contracted to the hotel rather than a rogue cab with an unmarked car. So I trusted him to be honest rather than piss off the hotel guests he depends on.

I mention the trust question because I looked around and thought, this is it? This is downtown? There were some shabby and some not-shabby, but not charming retail storefronts primarily on one block and a bit past that and on a block of a couple of cross streets. That was pretty much downtown.

I realize that I’m a big-city snob, but I do enjoy spending some time in charming towns. Charm is rare in Puerto Iguazú. A couple of buildings approach the fringe of charm, but don’t quite get there. Not seeing much worth spending time looking at in what was supposed to be downtown, I didn’t explore it much further.

However, I did take a 20-minute or so walk to what I think is the town’s only recommended sight (unless the town’s boundaries extend considerably farther than I thought and cover the park, which is sensational), Hito Argentino.

On the walk to Hito Argentino, I passed a couple of large hotels that looked relatively high-end. (As the name suggests, Puerto Iguazú used to be a port. It was used to ship wood from the region. But those days are gone. Now, it gets most of its revenue from tourism. So it’d be in big trouble if it didn’t have hotels.)

Puerto Iguazú’s Hito Argentino

Hito Argentino is a small, not overly inspiring plaza. (Plaza as in a public square, not as in shopping plaza.)

The plaza contains four items: a not particularly tall obelisk painted in Argentina’s colours and three low cylinders painted in the colours of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil, respectively. There are also two or three kind-of-shabby shops off to the side of the plaza.

But the plaza is not what gets Hito Argentino mentioned in the few scant guidebook entries I could find about Puerto Iguazú itself, as opposed than the nearby Iguazú Park and its Iguazú Falls.

What captures attention for Hito Argentino is the view from it. The view is pretty, but not gorgeous. It takes in the confluence of two rivers, the Iguazú River (well downstream from its falls) and the Paraná River.

But that’s still not what makes it special. Its claim to fame is the borders that the rivers form. Standing in Hito Argentino in Argentina and looking out, you can easily see two other countries on the other side of the intersecting rivers, Paraguay and Brazil.

I’ve included a picture I took with the countries labeled. Needless to say, those labels don’t occur naturally floating above their respective countries.

I am graphics app-challenged, so that took me a lot longer than it should have to do. I hope you appreciate it. My readers are all that matter to me. My readers and travel. I’ve also like family and friends. And a good meal. … among the many things that matter to me are …

Sorry, I channel Monty Python every once in a while. It’s not something I can control. It happens unbidden.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. After looking at Hito Argentino, I walked back to “downtown” Puerto Iguazú, had some lunch along the way at a little restaurant, and walked a couple blocks farther afield in the downtown to see if I missed anything. As far as I could tell, I hadn’t.

I sent a WhatsApp message to the driver, saying I was ready to head back to the hotel as soon as he was free. He didn’t take much more than ten minutes to rescue me.

I got back to my hotel mid-afternoon and did most of the work on my morning post before going to the bar for an Aperol spritz. I then headed back to my room to post my morning entry and start this one before heading to the hotel restaurant for dinner.

In a way, I’m glad Puerto Iguazú wasn’t more inspiring, and not just because heading back to the hotel earlier gave me more time to work on this claptrap.

I had sun or, at worst, one short period of overcast skies and mixed sun and cloud at times all of the time I was out, despite the weather forecast warning me that it would rain almost all day.

About an hour after I got back to the hotel, the local rain god said to itself, “Oh my Self! I forgot that I was supposed to deliver unto Puerto Iguazú rain for most of the day.”

The Puerto Iguazú rain god made up for it in about an hour with a torrential downpour of biblical proportions.

I went to the hotel bar during that. The halls at the hotel are covered, but otherwise outdoor. As I walked to the bar, I saw that there are water spouts on the roof that don’t extend out much beyond the roofline. They served to concentrate the water and send it in mini, but still impressive Iguazú Falls. I don’t know if that was the intent of those spouts, but that was the result.

Had the town of Puerto Iguazú been charming or inspiring enough to induce me to stay longer, I would have been caught in that drenching.

Iguazú Summary

The three nights—two full days and the half-day tomorrow that I’m not going to take advantage of—was about enough in Iguazú for me. The park is spectacular, but I strolled all of the trails, making frequent vista stops along the way, and went on the Gran Aventura, in a day and a half. It was sufficiently beautiful that I wouldn’t have regretted walking one or more of the trails twice, but it was probably enough. How much resplendence can one curmudgeon take?

And if I had known how unimpressed I’d be with the town of Puerto Iguazú, then if I could have found flights that worked to give me a half-day less, maybe leaving this evening rather than tomorrow, that would have been good too.

That said, there are day trips you can take from Puerto Iguazú, such as to Foz do Iguaçu on the Brazil side. But I couldn’t be bothered checking if I needed a visa to enter Brazil. And, it would be the same falls from a different perspective.

Then again, thinking of a falls I’m more familiar with, if you go to Niagara Falls and see it only from the American side, you’ll miss the best view of the best waterfall of the three falls that make up Niagara Falls. Maybe that’s true here as well if you stick only to the Argentinian side as I did. I don’t know.

There are some day tours you can book from a Puerto Iguazú base to elsewhere in Argentina, but none of them looked overly interesting to me.

The funny thing is, when I first arrived at my hotel here and saw that it was in a jungle rather than in the town, I was disappointed. The jungle is very scenic and peaceful, but, while I like to get out in nature, I like to stay in civilization where I can walk to restaurants and take in some manmade sights without a car. And there’s a bus from somewhere near the centre of town, such as it is, to the park entrance. I don’t know how much it costs, but undoubtedly considerably less than the driver cost me.

However, having seen Puerto Iguazú, I’m thrilled with my choice of hotel. I think I would have been depressed in town with so little of interest to me there.