The Devil's Throat The 'smaller' falls Soaked, but Stoked


Next time I come, I'm going to take a canoe trip through this river. And some interesting (though understandably unconfirmed and surely exaggerated yet worth relating) eavesdropped information is that, because it'd been raining so much, there was an 80% increase in the amount of water falling over the Devilís Throat. Seriously, I wanted to climb over the railing (or, 'overtake the barrier') and wouldn't it be fun to repel down any of those cataracts? I was thoroughly soaked, all the way to my sneaker-clad toes, but there are few things I like more than being caught in rain on a warm day. It was toe-curlingly good and definitely one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life.

Destroyed: my cheap umbrella (although not before I sliced up my thumb pretty good as I struggled with it to take a photo)

And proof that a man-made Wonder of the Modern World is just not as satisfying to look at (the dam):

Actually, I'm going to write a paper analyzing how these two parks mirror each other in terms of how they are presented to the tourist public. I dont think you can understand the importance of the Iguaçu cataracts without the hydraulic plant. Apparently, Paraguay had beautiful waterfalls as have Brazil and Argentina, but it sacrificed them to build the power plant. I haven't been able to find any before pictures. Thereís a careful public relations project on the part of Itaipu Binacional (the hydraulic dam run by Brazil) that portrays how environmentally and socially responsible the dam is, depicted as the result of humble collaboration between Man and Nature. Unmentioned are the repressive dictatorships under which the dam was built and the immense dissatisfaction Paraguayís people feel on the terms of the energy agreements with Brazil signed during those dictatorships which constrict Paraguayís right to sell energy only to Brazil and that below market prices. The culmination of this pr project is a video in Portuguese with English subtitles. Itís very Disney/EPCOT-Center-esque. However, in the past 30 years, only ~300,000 visitors have come from English-speaking countries compared to more than 3,000,000 visitors from Argentina alone. What public is this pr project aimed at?

I’m not sure where my fear of having a boring life came from, but it’s definitely been one of the forces behind how I make my choices. Admittedly, fearing the fear of the unknown isn’t the best decision-making process (although I’m not sure that fear of the unknown is that much better). Nevertheless, the thing about being here, where I knew no one before I came, where I barely had even a miniscule agenda (more on why this is so hard later), where I didn’t even have a guidebook (because no one writes guidebooks to this country… all I could do was read a measly chapter in “[Blank] Guide to South America”) is that everything is unknown and everything is new.

Including “sopa paraguaya” which is an entire misnomer since really it’s cornbread with cheese.