IGUAZU FALLS
(The Place Where Clouds Are Born)
Remember, snakes are your friends.
Andres Hausmann
They were the color of bad cream cheese, the Indian couple next to me was, as we touched down in the steamy river-front town of Formosa Uruguay.
Probably from the Guarani tribe, the jungle dwellers misplaced by giant Itaipu dam I was thinking, when a loud squeak escaped them as the engines reversed. They were frozen with fear now, like rabbits in the headlights.
"First flight folks?"
The plane rolled to a stop, the door swung up introducing a surge of sultry jungle air. Next to me the couple was wild eyed with panic. They struggled, frantic for escape. Like cornered rats.
"Here," I said, " allow me." I leaned toward them, cautiously reaching toward their laps, & .....released their seat belts.
The couple exploded from those seats like rodeo steers, over the seat backs & out that open door.
A warm fuzzy feeling crept over me....by golly one had to get pretty far out there these days to encounter folks who still didn't comprehend the workings of a seat belt.
We were on our way to Iguazu falls up at the corner of Paraguay, Brazil & Argentina, & had touched down in Formosa for fuel. I was wondering if this, in fact, had been my seat mates destination, while I watched a greasy fuel truck crew attach gas hoses & grounding lines to the plane. Suddenly a great commotion arose, & with frantic waving & screaming the ground crew took off running...away from the plane in which about 25 of us sat stunned.
"PABLO!" I screamed to my traveling partner, photographer Paul Gallaher,who had again slunk into first class & now sunk low in the plush seat trying to avoid detection. In his road-kill fedora, beer stained Hawaiian safari suit, & draped in camera gear he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.
"SOMETHING'S WRONG!!" THE PLANES GONNA BLOW UP!!"
I believe those two words 'blow up' said with the correct amount of earnest, are pretty well understood by plane passengers of any launguage & I can dare say I had their attention when from out under the plane slithered a 6 foot snake, big around as a thin mans leg. The ground crew was scattering ahead of it.
"SNAKE!!!" I again screamed to my fellow passengers, to reasure them, you understand. Another universal word said passionately enough.
The slithering beast was making for the baggage cart, the only shade on that broiling tarmac. The crew seemed to understand the ramifications of this & raced to intercept the serpent. A half dozen crew gained the cart, clambered aboard & started, get this now, heaving our luggage at the snake.
"NOT THE CAMERAS!!" Gallaher, beat against the first class windows, his cover well blown now.
"THAT'S AN $8,000.oo LENS!! He was wailing like a teething two year old.
The huge reptile was finally subdued with a 50 LB bundle of the Buenos Aires 'Dispatch' (oddly enough). Proving once again the power of the press is mightier than the sword.
"Ah, they shouldn't have done that." said a Venezuelan architect 2 rows ahead of me, "Snakes are your friends."
Maybe so, I wouldn't have wanted it in my underwear.
Twenty years earlier, hitchhiking aimlessly around Bolivia, I chanced upon a South African traveler, just coming from the jungles of Brazil.
"I've bloody well been everywhere." He said "But I have never seen anything as beautiful as Iguazu Falls. A Canyon of mist & rainbows with irridescent Morphos Butterflies the size of pizzas floating around your head."
Well this of course sounded rather worth checking into but unfortunately a nasty family of amebas had cut my odyssey short.
Now I was back.
Iguazu Falls was discovered by Alvar Nunez Cabeza De Vaca , (or Al Head Of The Cow), in 1541 thereabouts. You'll remember Mr. Head Of The Cow, the original walking man. This is the guy that, shipwrecked in Florida, spent 8 years walking to L.A. Captured & escaping from a dozen Indian nations along the way. For his next venture he walked across the Amazon in three years, discovering Iguazu on his way.
What ever happened to Mr. Head Of The Cow? He 'spent all his fortune on women,' & died of malaria. A full life all in all.
The two & a half mile wide falls is located on the Parana' river. At 2700 miles long, & one hundred miles wide at its mouth one of the worlds mightiest. In the movie The Mission you'll recall a Jesuit priest, tied to a cross by Indians, being swept over this cascade. It's little wonder they had set the padre afloat, after all the Jesuits tried to run the Indians lives, right down to their lovemaking, for which the priests rang a bell to commence & another to cease.
We had purchased a package deal in Buenos Aires, plane flight, 5 star hotel, & private tour guide for 3 days...300.oo U.S.
Our guide, a bubbling Argentine lass named Martini now met us at the muggy Iguazu airport.
"You will go to your lovely Hotel & check in, yes?"
"Later today you will take a boat ride under the falls, yes?" Was this a test?
The Hotel Internacional, while not exactly 5 stars, is still pretty spectacular, its sweeping lawns surrounded by lush jungle. In the distance a cloud of mist from the falls rises above the vibrant green foliage. Toucans & parrots squabble from flowering tree tops. The cool dark shadows beckon. Like pilgrims to Mecca we were drawn through that chloroform labyrinth by the roar of the 'cataratas'.
"Only the thousand moods of the Grand Canyon can match Iguazu's variety", said one writer of the falls, as suddenly you round a bend on the cement jungle path to behold a sight that sucks the breath from your chest, for surely you are viewing heaven, without following the proper procedures. Before your eyes bursts a vision of every pleasing color & motion in nature. Waterfalls, some no more than a pencil thick stream, to cascades of earth shaking proportion, seem to be droping from the jungle everywhere you look. The gleaming water launches from overhanging foliage 250 feet above, falling through mists of transparent rainbows & bursting into glistening diamonds on orchid ringed pools. All about your head float butterflies, some flashing like neon with the beat of their wings. Flocks of hysterical parakeets screech by. Swallows sweep through the shimmering curtain of falling water to cliff hanging nests behind. The soft, damp breeze created by the fall of water still a mile away, sways palm & bamboo. Around your feet sniff un-afraid Cotamundies, those friendly little pig snouted, ring tailed, ant-eating, cat looking creatures. The undergrowth rustles with the antics of 4 foot blue Iguanas. Like prehistoric poodles, they romp past in persuit of reptilian entertainment.
We boarded a inflatable raft pushed by a huge jet outboard & raced toward the main volume of water, a roaring cascade aptly named "The Devils Throat." At the base, but still a quarter mile away, the wind is hurricane force, carrying so much water you need a snorkel to breath. The sky is blocked grey with swirling mists. You suddenly realize, you & everyone else, are screaming at the top of your lungs...some primal call being wrenched from your soul by the sheer power, the noise, the force of nature unleashed. Your mind is blown, you are suddenly a ant in a flushing toilet, a fly in a typhoon, you are nothing....and everything, for the experience. And you are soaked.
"On the right you will see the beautiful jungle, yes?"
It was the next morning, Martini was careening along a dirt track.
'"On the left you will see the river, yes?'
Yes, there was little doubt about it, the river being 10 feet away from the bouncing van & two miles wide.
"Today we will take a boat to the top of the falls, yes."
The van went quiet. This Martini was pretty dry.
"Excuse Me?" someone squeaked.
"Yes, there used to be a walkway to a viewing platform at the top of the falls, yes?, but it washed out in the flood, yes?, so now they will take you out to the platform in boats, yes?"
"Ahhhh, how long have they been doing this boat thing Martini?" asked Paul.
"They have just started today, you are very lucky, yes?" Martini beamed.
Mabey yes....mabey no....I was thinking as we shuddered into a clearing & there, sure enough, a small group of anxious tourists were being herded like mindless lemmings into flat bottomed 20 foot launches powered by tiny outboard engines.
"That's a mighty small Johnson you've got there!" I suggested to the stone faced captain as we boarded.
"Oh boy....this reeks of havoc, stinks of disaster", I was mumbling to myself moments later in the middle of the river.
You could have heard a bead of sweat hit the deck had it not been for the thunderous roaring coming from the abyss now 500 feet away. The entire universe was being sucked into that hellish cavern 'The Devils Throat'.
At the last second, stareing in the face of certain doom , the captain jerked his tiny Johnson about, & we swept along side a 20 foot square platform, clinging to a hurricane buffeted rock directly above the door to hell.
Somewhere around 85 people were clinging to each other on this precarious perch. Soaked to the bone, & screaming their heads off, the tour had turned into a wet T-shirt contest. But even the splendor of that, paled in the cataclysmal surroundings. The volume of water dropping out of sight into swirling mists below was so tremendous it seemed to be trying to suck the world inside out, & we clung like shipwrecked rats to the very edge of that howling purgatory. Unless your big on live volcanos, or lucky enough to live through a tidal wave there are few other places on earth where man can witness the power of nature unleashed, & walk away soaked but un-scathed.
"THIS IS NOTHING!! YES??" Martini, looking like a drowned cat, was screaming over the deluge. "THERE USED TO BE FALLS TWICE AS BIG AS THIS UP RIVER BUT ITAIPU DAM DESTROYED THEM!! YES??"
Yes, Martini, that is belivable....
Later, we drank.....a beer or two on the verandah of the Hotel Internacional, Argentina. There might a more beautiful place, I was musing, but not on this earth. The sun had turned Brazil pink across the river, Paraguay in the distance was 'slipping into darkness.' A mile away the mists were rising golden from the falls. They floated like spirits across the emerald forest & disappeared in "the place where the clouds are born'.
to be drug on,
ITAIPU DAM : BRAZIL
She poured herself another Scotch. It didn't seem to affect her any more than water affects Boulder Dam.
Philip Marlowe
Don't mess with mother nature.
Butter commercial
In the movie the Emerald Forest, the son of an American Engineer working on Itaipu, is kidnapped by Amazon Indians. In the true account the boy is finally returned to his father forever altered by his mystic encounter with the Indians.
The Indians, forever altered by the dam themselves, were the Guarani their lives turned upside down by the greatest construction project in modern times.
"The largest hydroelectric dam on earth was started in 1975 after almost 15 years of negotiation between Paraguay & Brazil. It would end up costing 25 billion dollars, employ 50,000 people, & take 17 years to complete. Everything about the project was huge, the initial construction bid for just the first phase weighed 220 lbs. There is enough concrete in Itaipu to pour a 4 lane highway across America. The Dam is eight kilometers across, 1000 feet thick & 75 stories tall. The eighteen turbines, 100 feet in diameter, have foot thick walls which house 6000 ton turbine wheels, & 2000 ton rotor blades, developing over 12.6 million kilowatts....."
"ZZZZZZZZZ"
"HUH!!" Martini jabbed a pointed elbow in my ribs.....we were in a small dark theater...it was very warm, I was drooling.....oh yeah....Brazil...touring the worlds largest Dam...an indoctrination film...it was very warm...
"Virtually all of Paraguay.." the canned voice continued, "And 70 percent of Brazil, gets their electricity from Itaipu...(marching band sounds) that's 100 million people!" Voice excited now...."Before the damning of the river 82 thousand animals were relocated, then returned to their natural home..."
"Yeah after 17 years in a cage waiting..." I was mumbling to myself...
ZZZZZZZZ"
"HUH!! Wha?..Snort!..
''Almost 1000 species of plants collected & studied... ''
"ZZZZZZZZ"
"Employs 7ooo people per day, a 10 billion dollar per year business..."
"ZZZZZZZZ" I was gone now, snoring like a logger in the stuffy theater....no matter, the company film was only telling half the story.
The 'rest of the story' is pretty grim.
Building Itaipu Dam has put Brazil billions in debt to the world bank. With no way to repay, Brazil has threatened upon numerous occasion to just default. This of course, would be a nasty little problem if everyone else just followed suit.
The Dam created a tidal surge backwards upriver for 125 miles. It has formed the largest man-made lake in South America, covering 1350 sq. km, 1000 feet deep, covering the falls at Sete Quedas, the largest waterfalls in the world, more impressive than even Iguazu, which as we learned last week, is the most beautiful place on earth, gone forever.
The Dam has been called an "aquatic bomb' for if it ever should break, Buenos Aires 900 miles downstream would be wiped out.
Itaipu employed 50,000 people all right, & with them came another 50,000.
Now it employs 7000 with 93,000 people & a considerable amount of misery left over. the 'Company' , during construction, supplied 14,000 free meals per day, now it supplies nada.
15 years of research and almost none of that went into environmental impact studies. Now after only 2 years of operation a once eradicated deadly strain of Malaria has returned, brought on by the miles of stagnate water behind the dam. The reservoir is literally changing the local weather pattern. They may have saved '1000' species of plants before flooding but how many millions were lost? The power lines that reach across the Amazon from Itaipu swing from towers 300 feet tall, humming unnaturally above a quarter mile wide swath through the jungle. What other horror's of an unbalanced nature have been created by......
"HUH!!"
Martini jabbed me awake again, we stumbled through thick air to the van.
Our van fell in line with a dozen others, a police car led, another followed.
"There is no stopping allowed, yes? asked Martini.
"On the left is the river below the Dam, no one is allowed on it 10 miles from the Dam, yes? On the right the reservoir, no one allowed within 10 miles there too, yes?? asked Martini.
"Over 100 men killed while building...."
Martini was rambling on as we passed an entire city of vacant warehouses & shops. Once used in construction of the dam, the 50 sq. blocks of rusting metal buildings looked post holocaust. Tons of spare nuts, bolts, re-bar & machinery rotting in the fetid air
We drove onto a four lane highway on the bottom of the Dam, cement towered 70 stories above, 5 miles ahead.
"Crane buckets big enough for VW Vans to fit in, used to dump cement...
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