Iguazú is 275 separate falls along a 2.7 kilometre front, and the number is the least useful thing about it. What matters is that the drop is only about 80 metres, the forest comes right to the lip, and the whole thing is arranged in tiers, so from anywhere on the Argentine side you are looking at water coming over four or five levels at once with trees growing between them.
The Argentine side has about 80 per cent of the falls and the walkways to go with them — an Upper Circuit along the top of the drops and a Lower Circuit underneath. From the upper walkway you look down the line of the Salto Bossetti and the rest, white water dropping into green, with spray standing up off the plunge pools and drifting into the canopy.
The boat
There is a jetty on Isla San Martín where the launches come in, and a queue of people in orange lifejackets waiting on a wooden landing under the trees. They come back soaked. Everyone comes back soaked; that is the entire proposition.
The river above the falls is the other picture nobody takes. Broad, brown, moving fast over a shallow bed, and then simply gone over an edge you cannot see from the water. There is a sandbank on the far side with people standing on it, perhaps two hundred metres upstream of an 80-metre drop, and they look entirely relaxed about it.
I’m staying at the Sheraton Iguazu Falls, the only hotel within the national park on the Argentine side. It’s worth the price have the park to myself in the early evening when the rangers are closing the trails.
