Iguazú falls

iguazú falls are so amazing! the falls are located on the north east corner of argentina bordering brazil and paraguay. all together there are about 270 falls, plummeting an average of 210 feet. while i was there 9 times the normal amount of water was surging through the falls, so many parts of the park were closed, which was kind of a bummer. catwalks are constructed both above and below the falls. so you are really upclose to the cliffs where the waterfalls begin. i cannot imagine what it must have been like to contruct these walkways above the falls. at a certain point the catwalk stops, but you can see some old support post from where it used to continue. i guess the last part got swept away in the current? not a very comforting thought. iguazú falls are probably some of the most beatiful scenery i've seen on this whole trip. from almost any angle the falls make these beautiful rainbows, and there are hundreds of different types of butterflies flying about. there were yellow butterflies, purple ones, red, green, orange, irredescent blue, back, and also ones that looked like dead leaves.
so just imagine these beautiful watefalls with tons of rainbows everywhere and a million butterflies of every size and color flying around. it was pretty incredible.

while i was there i decided to take a boat tour. in my guide book, it said that you can take a "safari" boat tour and get close to the watefall spray. at the bottom of this photo you can see one of these tourist boats. this boat trip was crazy! i think the captain tried to get us as wet as possible. like we totally could have stayed dry, no problem, but they brought us right underneath where the falls were coming down, and then decided to do all these tricks in the rapids, like driving in circles really fast so that one side of the boat was tipped way down into the water, and the other side was way up in the air. i should have known something was up when they gave us dry bags for our cameras. i wore jeans and sneakers and it took a couple hours before my pants were totally dry.

to make a long story short, i've been carrying a small packet of ashes of a woman named susie. Susie was a bicycle and pedestrian advocate and was killed in St Louis walking across a street in a crosswalk with a walk light by a bus driving who was looking over his shoulder. She was the director of the Bicycle Alliance of Washington and the first director of the Thunderhead Alliance. She believed in liveable communities and was working for the Methow Conservancy when she was killed. She had just begun her own business as a consultant on alternative transportation and the job in St louis was only her second.

More than 70 people have taken Susie's ashes around the world in the five years since her death. She has been on bike rides across the U.S. and Estonia, and on cruises to Mexixo, the Carribbean, and the Inland Passage to Alaska. In the last year her spirit has traveled to China, Pakistan, Australia. i put my packet of ashes in the bosseti falls at iguazú. so now, her mom can add the iguazú falls in argentina to the list.
just one more week till i come home to california. i can't wait to see everyone. love,
-jessie