After our ‘planning field trip’ on the southern highlands in Curitiba, it was time to turn our attention to one of the true postcard destinations of Latin America – Iguazu Falls. This is one destination that you hear loads about when you’re planning your trip and definitely lives up to all the hype. The beautiful raw power of all that water is on display and can be experienced from many viewpoints – from stunning distant panoramas to literally feeling the force by getting soaked on the closest viewing platforms where you can almost reach out and get your arm torn off! We visited both the Brazilian side of the falls and the Argentinean side, both are spectacular, but quite different – the former giving an overview and great photo opportunities from a distance and the latter allowing you to get up-close and personal from on top of and underneath the many individual falls which make up the whole. We even forked out for a boat ride which took you right up underneath the falls – one slip on the throttle and we were done for! We also did a day trip out to Itaipu Binacional – the biggest hydro-electric dam in the world. It was pretty impressive and had a real focus on sustainability in its propaganda, although we questioned ourselves a bit on the impact on the environment and people of flooding the landscape (in the ‘70s) to create a lake 170km long to power it! So Iguazu Falls was a fantastic and very memorable experience on the whole. 
Another long haul overnight bus got us to Sao Paulo in a bleary-eyed state where we got straight onto an impressive new metro line to our ‘home’ in Brazil at Fabi’s apartment in central suburb. Coming from ‘little old’ Auckland every suburb here feels like you’re in the middle of the CBD, and when you get up high enough for a view the high density of tall buildings just goes on and on in all directions. Sao Paulo is an interesting place in that it doesn’t have too many massively famous tourist attractions, but it does have a certain appeal to it – it feels prosperous, lively, happening. The massive waves of immigration in the city’s past are evident in the faces of the people on the street – a real melting pot of European, Asian, African and indigenous Brazilian. There are also many expats who have set up shop to reap the rewards of a rapidly developing economy. We spent much of the time doing the low key local thing here, going out for drinks and to the odd club, checking out a few parts of town. The trip out to the airport was a true Paulista experience in itself – leaving with plenty of time to spare our 40-odd minute drive ticked past the two-hour mark due to a series of serious traffic snarls.
So that brings an end to our time in Brazil, at least for now. Our impression is generally that it’s an exciting, interesting and hugely varied country – from the drum beats of the African north east to the more sophisticated European feel of the temperate cities of the south. We got a fairly good overall impression of the country in out six weeks here, having seen some of the most beautiful and popular parts of the coastline and some real highlights inland too. One could easily spend a year discovering the place, parts we would love to come back to include the Amazon, north eastern coast and the Pantanal.
Tschau Brasil! Lukas
