January 10, Tuesday – disembark. Buenos Aires, Argentina

Today we had to leave our home of the last 21 days.  The cruise was great and we had good weather and wonderful sites were seen and experienced. 

Most of our sightseeing today is outside of the city proper.  Our guide and driver took us north of the city along the coast and through some old and exclusive neighborhoods. 

We also stopped to see the beautiful St. Isidro Church.

The church had a lovely interior with many stained glass windows.

Then we boarded a boat for an hour cruise through the Tigre River Island…quite a maze of islands.  

The canals were lined many buildings including a casino...

and many homes, some very lovely...

and some very simple and a little run down.

The homes were accessed via the canals using docks and piers and there are no roads on most of the islands.

The tour boats make quite a wake.

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We saw a floating store that travels through the canals carrying goods for purchase.

We also saw some abandoned boats.  

We had the afternoon off and then headed to the Carlos Gardle Theater for dinner and an evening of tango music and dancing.  Gardle was a renown Tango singer.  Along the street outside the theater was a row of statues honoring various Tango singers.

The show was really great and we highly recommend it.  During dinner, there was a narrated slide and video show of the history of the tango in Brazil.  Most was about the music and songs, which caught us by surprise, as when we think of tango, we think of the dance. But there was certainly a lot of dancing. 

One gentleman even danced with a pair of brooms.  And the brooms danced very well. 

January 11, Wednesday – Iguazu Falls, Argentina

On our way out this morning we noticed a picture of our hotel in the front lobby.  It included a note indicating that the hotel (Melia) was the home of Evita Peron from 1942 to 1944.  We have found that there is a lot of Evita stuff in Buenos Aires.  She was obviously much loved.

We were up early to get to the airport in time for our flight to Iguazu.  The plane was delayed so we sat at the airport for a while.  On our approach Mary noticed a large concentration in of mist not too far from our flight path.  It turned out it was the mists from Iguazu Falls.

Our guide, Beatrice, met us at the airport and we headed off to Iguazu National Park.  After checking in we had lunch with views of the falls in the distance.  

After lunch we headed out for a walk towards the Upper Circuit where we got our first glimpse of some of the local wildlife.  

This took us along the top of the falls.  Iguazu Falls is the largest waterfall system in the world and after the rains of a couple of days ago it appeared to be operating at its maximum.  Thunderous and beautiful.

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After finishing the Upper Circuit we took a short train ride to a walkway over the Iguazu River...

where we saw quite a bit of wildlife 

including the cicada that were out in force...

The walkway took us right to the edge of a thunderous section of the falls.

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In the distance you could see many vultures circling the falls.  And we saw a large number of them in the trees near the falls.  The falls were throwing off so much mist it was hard to see them.

While at the train station waiting for a return to our hotel we saw a couple of coati families.  They are really tame and apparently have become so due to people feeding them.