We are now in Argentina....

Hello!!! Hope you are well. We are both fine and dandy. Well, Lynn has loads of mosquito bites on her legs and some of them are swelling up and looking quite hideous but she's taking antihistamine which is helping and anyway I'm alright Jack! Well, as you may have noticed from the subject title, we have crossed our first border and we're now in Argentina. Not far into Argentina, only a couple of miles at the moment. We are in a little town called Puerto Iguazu and in 90 minutes we get on the coach to Buenos Aires. It's an 18 hour journey so we're going in style on one of the big luxury sleeper coaches. It's a lot like First Class on a plane but with better views! The seats are huge and lay out almost flat so we can sleep well tonight. You get blankets and pillows and a goodie bag when you get on and a hostess comes round serving you food and drink throughout. I believe there's also a TV in each seat like on a plane but I can't confirm this yet. The cost for this journey is just over 30 quid each so pretty good I think. Since my last email: We went into the rainforest with Nicolas but unfortunately we didn't see much. The closest we got to any wildlife was walking into spider's webs which always seemed to be strategically placed at head height so that the first you know of them is when you are spitting out the bits of web whilst simultaneously watching some giant spider scurrying about right infront of your nose! We found a few fresh armadillo holes but no amount of poking with a big stick could extract an armadillo so they must have been empty. No snakes either - I was almost positive I'd see a snake but alas no. Not even a miserable, little one. No monkies either. There are howler monkies living in the treetops and we saw plenty of evidence that they were close by but they kept eluding us. We saw lots of butterflies and some hummingbirds but that's about it. 2 days later we left Maria and Nicolas and their lovely little Pousada in the middle of nowhere and got a bus back to Curitiba. It rained everyday on our last visit to Curitiba. This time we had a 9 hour wait before we got a coach to Foz Do Iguacu and it rained, heavily for the entire 9 hours we were there. Foz Do Iguacu is a small town close to the majestic and famous Iguacu falls which are on a 3 way border between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. We stayed at the youth hostel on the Brazilian side for 2 days. On the first day we visited the falls on the Brazilian side and on day 2 we visited them again as a day trip to the Argentinian side. On the Brazilian side you get the panoramic views of the falls and from the Argentinian side you take walkways between and overhanging the falls so it was good to do both. The biggest fall is called La Garganta Del Diablo - The Devil's Throat. It is horse shoe shaped and there is a walkway which overhangs it so you see right down into the foaming mass below. Words can't describe how spectacular it is. The sheer size and amount of water are overwhelming. To give you an idea, 4 times more water goes over Iguacu Falls than Niagara Falls and Niagara Falls is MASSIVE! The only downside to the trip was the rain. It was absolutely torrential for the entire day when we went to the Argentinian side. I have never seen rain like it and for so long. It was like giant glass rods falling from the sky. We were thoroughly soaked through, all our camera bags were thoroughly soaked through. We couldn't have been wetter had we jumped into the falls themselves. Luckily we had the forethought to put all of our camera equipment into sealable plastic bags otherwise they'd have been ruined for sure. Needless to say we couldn't take many photos. I took about 10 all day when we were undercover but that's all. When we finally got back to our hostel at about 7pm we found out that the rain had got into our room under the door where there is a big gap and through the ceiling above the door which was sodden. The floor was like a swimming pool and anything on it was drenched - Lynn's rucksack of clothes! Last night as we went to bed our room looked like a Chinese Laundry with clothes and camera bags and rucksacks and shoes and everything all hung up to dry on every available line, hook, door knob, curtain pole and headboard and anything else that something could be hung from as we frantically tried to get everything dry for this morning so we could re-pack it for the border crossing. Well, 95% of it we managed to dry and nothing seems to be ruined so it's all ok in the end but I really hope we've left the rain behind for a while. We met a South African girl at the Falls who had just come up from Argentina and this was her first day of rain in South America in 2 months so hopefully we'll have a few dry days now. Right better go, the coach will be here soon. Bye for now, Rich