Brazil page 2
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The Itaipu power plant is the world's largest hydroelectric power plant. When you see it, it is not difficult to believe... I couldn't get the whole thing in one shot. The visitors centre is very spiffy and the tours were free (including bus trip and short video!). Here is a scale model of one of the turbines in the dam. There are 20 of these in total, generating 700MW each. Phwoar... powerful!
Each one of those tubes is 10m in diameter. Those are big buses... it takes big tubes to make those buses look small. The dam actually runs across the border (the river) between Brazil and Paraguay. It generates about 90% of all the energy that Paraguay uses and about a quarter of all of Brazil's energy. Interestingly, about 92% of all the energy generated by the dam is actually used by Brazil (figure that one out!). Construction began in 1975 and the plant began generating electricity in May 1984. When did construction finish? The last generator came online early this year.
Click the picture! The dam itself is quite an achievement of engineering. Now, I grew up in Hong Kong, site of the Chek Lap Kok (make a joke out of that one smartass!) airport, itself a grand feat of modern engineering... and I was more than impressed with this. Here are some interesting stats:
The rate of construction of the dam was equivalent to building a 20 storey building every 55 minutes
The total volume of concrete used in the dam would build over 200 stadiums the size of the MCG
There is enough iron and steel in the dam to build 380 Eiffel Towers
The spillway can handle a flow of water 40 times that of the average of the Iguazu Falls
Now I'm going to take a short break from Brazil (but stay tuned, we're coming back!) to check out the Argentina side of the falls.
Now the area around Iguazu falls is interesting, it is on the border between Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina. When one visits the falls, it is not unusual to cross frequently from one side to the other. Brazil only requires stamps in your passport if you are going to stay for more than 24 hours (technically, they require stamps for every entry, but they're not fussed). The Argentinians, on the other hand, insist on a stamp every time. My passport now has lots of Argentina stamps...
Towards the end of keeping these pages better-organised, I am not going to start the Argentina section just yet. I am going to include the Argentina portion of the Iguazu falls in the Brazillian section so that people don't have to keep jumping back and forth between pages to follow my journey. Here is the logo of the Iguazu national park on the Argentine side the bird is the Swift, very similar to the swallow. It was chosen because the swifts here have the unusual tendency to nest inside the falls... yes, that's right, and it makes sense if you think about it because nobody would be daft enough to invade your nest if you plonk it inside waterfalls such as these.
A wild guinea pig... does anyone else find it a little bit wrong that, when I saw this little fellow, I suddenly got quite hungry?
Owing to the fact that most of the actual waterfall is on the Argentine side, the Argentine park is much larger in area necessitating these quirkly little tourist-trains to take people around..
As in Brazil, a system of walkways snakes through the parks to minimise the environmental impact of visitors (and also to help us cross rivers like the Iguazu... ) .
The Iguazu river begins in Brazil somewhere and by the time it gets here, it is very very wide. Curiously, it is actually very shallow, being only just over 1m in most places. At the moment, though, there was recently some heavy rainfall in Brazil which meant that the river was unusually high - almost 2m in places. Good thing for those causeways. This photo is included for the benefit of the occassional professor of fluid mechanics who may find occassion to occassionally peruse these pages.
A litte reminder of the power of mother nature. In 1992, there was some really heavy rainfall... some would call it a flood. Anyway, it destroyed sections of the old walkway leaving these...
We approached the section of the falls called "devil's throat" which you may remember from the Brazilian side. As we approached, it looked like there was a hole in the lake... with steam rising up from within it.
And here it is... almost 100m high. At the moment, I'm told that the flow of water is about five times what it normally is due to heavy rain. I asked if anyone had ever fallen in, to either the river or the falls, by accident. My guide said that there had never been an accident like that in the history of the park. There have, however, been two non-accident incidents. Very early on, one of the original park rangers was shot and killed by some hunters who didn't like the idea of a national park taking over their stomping ground. Three years ago, a troubled 20-year-old girl commited suicide by jumping off the platform into the devil's throat... I asked innocently "did it work?". My guide gave me a very "John McEnroe - you CANNOT BE SERIOUS" look, paused, then said quite calmly, "yes, she died".
Even though this is only a small section of the falls, I was so impressed that I thought I would gift the readers of my website with yet another panoramic stitched shot... click the photo.
These are Jays. They are curious birds who will approach anyone for food... they obviously haven't figured out that people aren't permitted to feed the wildlife here according to national park rules.
"What are you looking at?" (photographic note: this is not a zoomed photo, I haven't bought a spiffy new SLR just yet. This bird really was as close as it looks).
The "88" butterfly, as they're known.
Everyone thinks Tobey Maguire is a darling... but spare a thought for all those who auditioned for Spiderman and didn't make the cut.
I wonder if the lower trail has an infreriority complex.
Another (failed) attempt to capture the scale of the falls. Notice in the upper, left-hand corner of the shot, the plume of mist which emenates from the devil's throat...
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