Iguazu....Almost

after the relaxation experienced in salta, we had one major leg of the trip left. the waterfalls at iguazu, nestled away in the northwestern corner of the country bordering on paraguay and brazil, beckoned us.

however, first was the 24 hour bus ride to get there. while we took the bus many times, there was nothing to match what was happening on this. our first mistake came in thinking it would be a great idea to sit at the very font on the second level of the bus. we expected the scenery to be beautiful and wanted a great look through the massive windows at the front of the bus. however, this prevented us from having a decent look at the television monitors for movies, although given the slate of movies it ended up not being such a poor choice.

that day we were treated to such films as night at the museum, deja vu, antwone fisher, and next. while antwone fisher had a couple redeeming moments, the rest had little to offer. i've already written up next, and deja vu shouldn't be too far out itself.

so if we assume these movies averaged about two hours in length each, that still left over sixteen hours to be passed on this interminable bus trip. what did they do to fill the time? just leave some quiet time for people to be left to their thoughts? nope! instead, they forced us to play bingo. seriously. the attendant guy went up and down the aisles and forced a game card on every seat. since they didn't have the normal equipment to draw the letter and number combination at random, the leader of the game was just calling out combinations he made up. when he grew tired of that, he started soliciting people on the bus to call out numbers they wanted to be called. while i'm not one hundred percent sure about the rules of bingo, i'm fairly certain that allowing people to call out the combos they need is severely antithetical to a game predicated on chance.

in spite of these attacks on my patience, the bus continued on its way, stopping at several smaller towns in the northern provinces of argentina, each time dropping off more passengers than picking up. Elizabeth and i found ourselves some of the last few people on the bus for the final overnight leg into iguazu and as the night drew further, the overcast weather turned to rain storms. normally, i have a pretty high tolerance for feeling comfortable in moving vehicles, but several factors coincided to make me feel unsafe and struggle through sleep that night. such factors included:

• driving rain which made it difficult for us, let alone the driver, to tell what was in front of us
• no seatbelt that was on my original seat
• a red light accompanied by piercing buzzer when the bus exceeded its speed limit (this was going off consistently all night meaning that our driver was speeding through windy roads in storms)
• no leg room

i spent a fair amount of overnights on buses in my south american stay. this one was by far the worst. when we arrived in iguazu the next morning, Elizabeth felt miserable enough to spend our first day out of commission. i started exploring the seriously tiny town and then amused myself with internet for a while before picking up my book. an interesting prelude to the ultimate stop on our trip.