You hear Iguacu a long time before the forest lets you see it. The trail on the Brazilian side is a paved mile through a wall of green, butterflies lifting off the path in loose hordes, and for the first stretch the falls are only a rumour, a low pressure you feel in the chest before the ear. The viewpoints come one after another, each better than the last, the way a good argument builds. Then the trees give out, the ground drops away, and the whole thing is in front of you at once: a green gorge with a river coming off the edge of it in a hundred places, and I did what I always do with a sight like that. I stopped counting almost at once.
There are around two hundred and seventy-five separate falls here, strung along nearly three kilometres of cliff. The tallest drops about eighty metres, half again the height of Niagara, and the whole run is more than twice as wide. Eleanor Roosevelt is said to have looked at it in 1944 and murmured only, "Poor Niagara," and whether or not she ever did, the line survives because anyone standing on this rim thinks something like it. Brazil keeps the wide view. Argentina, across the water, gets you out on top of the individual cataracts on far longer walkways; this side lets you stand back and take the whole of it in.
Everything on the trail bends toward one place. The Garganta do Diabo, the Devil's Throat, is a horseshoe where fourteen falls empty into the same slot, and the walk ends on a steel catwalk that runs straight out over the foot of it. I had been told to bring nothing that could not get wet, and I had ignored it, and a minute onto that catwalk I was soaked to the skin and regretting the denim, the mist driving up off the water as hard as the water came down, the whole structure shuddering, everyone around me laughing and useless behind fogged phones. You do not really photograph it. You stand there and let it hit you.
If the catwalk is not enough, and it was not, you take the boat. The Macuco Safari runs you a couple of kilometres down through the forest and out onto the river below the falls, and the pilot has one question, which he puts over his shoulder with the grin already on his face: how wet do you want to be. The answer does not matter, because he is going under a cataract regardless. He gunned it up the rapids, tipping the hull hard on the turns, and then drove us straight into the base of a fall, and for a few seconds there was no gorge and no sky and no falls, only white, and a great deal of shouting, and my sunglasses gone off my head into the river. It was the best thirty seconds of the trip.
The forest around the falls is protected, and it is busy. Coatis, long-nosed and shameless, patrol the trails and the cafe tables for anything a visitor sets down, and the park has hung up signs with photographs of what their teeth do to a hand; the advice, if one takes your bag, is to let it have the bag. The better company is overhead. Great dusky swifts nest on the wet rock behind the curtains of water, and toward five o'clock they come home in their hundreds, flying straight through the falling river to reach the nests, small dark birds cutting in and out of the wall of water as though it were a door left open.
You can see the Brazilian side in a morning, but it repays a longer day. Be on the first shuttle out of the visitor centre, around eight, before the coaches: the catwalk is nearly empty then, and the low sun is behind you, standing rainbows in the spray. Come in April if you can, when the summer rains still have the river near full and the crowds have thinned. And if you want the thing almost no one gets, there is a single hotel inside the park, and its guests have the falls to themselves for the hour before the gates open and the hour after they shut, which is the only way I know to stand at the Devil's Throat and hear nothing but the water.
I went back to the rim at the end, soaked a second time and past minding, and stood at the railing until the light went. The swifts came in as it did, hundreds of them dropping out of the last of the sky and into the water, and I watched them until I could no longer tell the birds from the spray.
