Birthday at Iguaçu

It was David's (my uncle) idea. This weekend is a long weekend because of some crazy roman-catholic holidays or something, so why not take a birthday trip(Question mark) going to iguaçu now allows me to focus my longer backpacking trip in northern brazil.

the idea was originally leave for the falls in mid december, go to florianopolis for new years, then work my way up the coast to recife for carnival...a LONG way up the coast. Now the whole carnival plan is much more doable.

so last week i bought bus tickets and a shitty back pack (shitty as in no frame and minimal padding on the hip straps). I left são paulo as always with paulo's disapproval, but with a very full backpack: i decided to use this trip as a guinea pig for the bigger backpacking trip. what have i learned so far (question mark): gotta get some padding for the backpack.

left late last night on a red eye bus. seated behind me was a couple from bermuda: a local who married a canadian. 'i was an underwriter, she was an accountant' 'sounds romantic...'

i learned alot about bermuda. wierd little place. apparently it's reached critical mass with foreign business moving in. mainly insurance companies. moreover, they have more accountant jobs than they can deal with. all sorts of wierd shit....seriously, the country sounds like it came out of a douglas adams novel.

so we arrived this morning and after moving into the hostel (which is a PALACE for a hostel. even has a bar by the pool), i hit the falls with another kid form the hostel. i'd post pictures, but i'm having trouble connect my archos, but i'll try again later. to say the least, the falls were SPECTACULAR. loaded with toursits though, and none of the hiking trails were open to the public. they are all operated by a third party eco-tourism company, so if you wanna hike, you gotta get in on a bigger package. fucking lame ass. hopefully the argentinian side will ahve some hiking, but i doubt it.

in search of hiking, i went across the street to another national park, parque das aves (park of the birds). I was suspicious of this park from the get-go and my suspicions were verified upon entrance: not a national park, an aviary. just a big zoo. i mean, it was cool and they had nice birds, but it was really anti-climactic and i was kinda dissapointed.

still, the night is very young and i've got time to get shit-faced and party. i mean hey, it's my birthday!!! although, ain't nothing special about turning 23....maybe my auto insurance goes down or something.