What a lotta water

Waterfalls
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The bus journey from Rio was comfortable but very, very long - 23 hours in all. There were very few people on the bus and the staff were very friendly so it wasn´t nearly as bad as we´d worried it was going to be.

We arrived at Foz around 1pm and took a bus into town and found our hostel without incident. We checked in, got some food and too many beers (they taste so good when you´re sitting in the sun) and then fell asleep.

We got up later on, hung around the bar and chatted to some of the people in the hostel and then Cathal was hungry again so we went to this place called Mega Pizza. It´s a simple concept. You pay a set price for food - 10 Reais, about $5. Then the waiters bring round pizza after pizza and you can have as many slices as you want. Once we´d got across that we didn´t eat meat, everytime they had a veggie one they came straight for us. Some of them had bacon in them!

More waterfalls
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There´s a funny thing about bacon. In many countries - Russia, France, China etc. people do not consider finely chopped bacon to be meat.  I have no idea why. But it happens all the time.

We ate about 7 slices of pizza each, I had some blue ice-cream to follow and we paid up. We had good fun trying to work out how many pizzas they must get through, we reckon it´s over a 300 a night!  That´s a lot of cheese.

The next day we took the bus to the falls. It´s very well organized and a huge visitor centre. We had some trouble with the language buying the tickets. They track the nationality of visitors, so we said we´re from Ireland which is often heard as Holland. We went back and forth saying Ireland, she says Holland and so on for a while. In the end we admitted Dutch citizenship, seemed easier.

Even more waterfalls
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We boarded a brightly coloured bus which went about 30km into the National Park and there were various announcements about all the exciting activities you could do. None of which we did! We got off the bus and walked about 1.2km along pathways getting various views of the falls.

At first glance we weren´t that impressed. Having seen Victoria Falls, does make it hard to be impressed though. However as we went along we realised just how big it is. Not really all that tall, but the falls go on and on.There´s 275 different waterfalls. It´s very pretty and spectacular. It´s very built up though, so you can walk right along walkways over the falls and take a lift to get a higher panoramic view which does lend a bit of a themepark feel to the experience. Still it was very impressive.

Did I mention there were 275 waterfalls?
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In the evening we went out for some Lebanese food. There´s a lot of (not very good) cheese in Brazil and if you´re veggie you can end up eating a lot of it, so we were keen for some less lardy food. Aziz, a pilot from Kuwait we´d met at the hostel recommended this Lebanese restaurant and we gorged ourselves on falafel and baba ghanoush. Yum.

We spent the evening chatting to the people in the hostel, swapping stories and the next day we headed for Buenos Aires on another epic bus journey.