Brazil rejected me. No nice words, no attempt to make it
work, just a solid rejection. Arriving in Iguazu during the holiday weekend
means if you don’t plan beforehand and you are American, Canadian, Australian
or Japanese, you are not going to get the chance to go across the border and
see the falls from the Brazilian side. So what are the options? A half-day excursion including rappelling and hiking on the Argentinian side for a reasonable price or a 5-minute walk to the animal sanctuary. My choice was immediately head out to rappel (something I've never done!) but apparently quite a few other people had the same idea. Unfortunately, the brochure I show in the video is as close as I got to that excursion! What I did get to do was head to the
animal sanctuary for a 1.5 hour tour of birds. BIRDS. That may or may not excite you but for me, that is as exciting as someone telling me I can have 2 tasteless airplane bread rolls instead of one; hardly thrilling. 
As an American, I need a Visa to
get across the border and I have to pay for it. Fortunately for my friends who
are Norwegian and Korean, they had no problems and after very sweetly worrying
about me and wondering if they should still go, I forced them to leave noting
if I were them, I would definitely go! I headed down the road from our hostal
to the petstore, I mean sanctuary. Every 30 minutes to an hour there is a tour
in Spanish and English and so I waited for the next one. Our tourguide was a
really nice woman who spoke Spanish as if she didn’t speak fast enough, the
animals might escape. I tried to keep up but mostly waited for her English
explanations which went something like this:
(Long Spanish explanation rapid-fire)
-“Sorry guys, my English is not great and I could tell you
many things but there isn’t time so see all these birds? I will tell you about
one of them.” (interesting 2 sentence explanation) “ok we go now. Follow me”
This just didn’t do it for me and I grew bitter that because
the U.S.A is so demanding at their borders, payback by the S.Americans meant I
was stuck staring at unidentified birds and steering clear of spiders the size
of golfballs. So because I like to find a positive in everything, I went with
the fact that I learned a great lesson:
you usually can get away with planning trips on a whim but when it comes
to visiting other countries, plan ahead! That or marry a foreigner from
somewhere like Norway where everyone loves you and get dual citizenship.
Whatever way works for you!
(This bird looks as confused as I was)
