We checked out and had a buffet breakfast, then got a bus that went to Parque National do Iguacu.  Handily, huge lockers are provided at the entrance to the falls, obviously for people in a hurry with places to go and little time to dawdle like Alex and I. In went our suitcases. Then we lined up to buy our tickets. As well as lockers, there are ATMs, souvenir shops, parking facilities….it’s incredibly well-organised. It felt like queuing up to get into a theme park, or maybe a zoo. Huge well-marked maps of the falls are everywhere. Designated paths have been built all around and wooden platforms. There’s no ‘off-piste’ here. It’s more like a theme-park attraction, with ice-cream stalls, toilets, restaurants and bars all around. I remembered visiting Angel Falls in Venezuela, a place so isolated it receives barely a trickle of the number of tourists Iguazu receives. Getting to Angel Falls requires an Indiana Jones style adventure of hiking, tractor rides, canoeing, climbing and more hiking. Nothing save a tiny wooden sign pointing the way in the jungle to tell you where you are. I like that. But then, Iguazu is much, much wider, and deserves to be appreciated by everyone. The Brazil side is the best – you see the falls head on. We got in and boarded the fun bus to the first stop, the ‘Trilha das Cataratas’ – the 1200m Waterfall trail, which follows the shore of the Iguacu river. You know you’re here because a loud recording on the bus announces it, and a huge sign at the bus stop has a map of it. You can hear the falls before you can see them. A distant roar that gets the hairs on the back of the neck standing up to attention.  Then I saw them, or some of them. They were quite far away, across the river, and the cascading water seemed frozen in time. It wasn’t just the huge number of massive falls as far as I could see that was impressive, it was the spectacular rain forest setting, that feeling of nature’s raw power and beauty. Alex had been here once before, and gazed at the falls with a distant look in his eyes. For him, there was no excitement, just a renewed appreciation perhaps. Various openings in the foliage along the trail offered more spectacular views, but the Chinese photography mafia were out in force today, and their 2 metre long lenses were being swung around dangerously, the whirring click of a hundred shots louder than the falls. “Move away” one of the more polite Chinese men commanded me as I was slouched over a railing taking in a wonderful rainbow that had suddenly sprung up from the river. “Move away”, he repeated. “You. Move away.” He didn’t need to demand again, his impatient family had already muscled in to my spot and clearly didn’t want a foreign presence in their photograph. I was not too perturbed.  Though the commands shouted at me sounded rude, the Chinese language does not accommodate the roundabout niceties of English, and thus the speakers of Chinese can appear direct, blunt, or even rude to those not accustomed to their way of using English, which simply reflects the linguistic conventions of Chinese.  I took a deep breath and marched ahead quickly so I’d get more time at another nice spot. Such is the problem with visiting a ‘famous’ place or a popular instagram spot – you’ll rarely get it to yourself -though I imagine if you stayed at the hotels around the park you would get the opportunity for some quiet time before the hordes arrived.