What a waterfall!

But let’s start with Posadas, where I’m doing my soccer project.
I have been here almost two weeks now, and it’s been great. Posadas is a small town that reminds me of Fredrikstad in Norway. It has a small city centre with shops and cafes, bars, restaurants and a cinema. It is situated by the river and along the river there is a nice area with more restaurants and a man made beach (it’s not very nice, but is at least somewhere I can go sun bathing. Haven’t tried swimming in the river yet and doubt that I will). Across the river, Rio Parana, you can see Paraguay...

The project is pretty interesting! I help coaching three teams, all with boys aged 7-14. The boys are all from very poor neighbourhoods, but they are great kids (although they do not always listen to me).
I find coaching quite hard, but challenging. I kind of like blowing my whistle and have the kids doing what I tell them to, and of course, I get to play soccer a lot, which is great!
I love how this one little kid who, when we’re playing, is standing by the opposite goal and shouts: “Mira! Mira!” He is probably about 7 years old, and hardly ever gets the ball, but still shouts...

I have also been to the other projects here. I have been to the refuge a couple of times and played with the kids there, and to Puma, an animal shelter, where I saw jaguars, puma, emus, gators, turtles and wild pigs. It was really cool!

Veronica, the coordinator, and her husband, Marcel are doing a brilliant job taking care of us volunteers. They hang out with us a lot on their spear time and are always available for us if there is anything we need.

My first week there were only two other volunteers, Larisa (Romania) and Daly (Ireland). Now Heather (Australia) and Massimo (England) has arrived and today, two more are coming. But Daly, Larissa and I have had a great time hanging out together. And this weekend we went to the Iguazu Falls.

We went Friday morning and arrived in the afternoon, booked into the Iguazu Hostel Inn and hung around there in the afternoon playing pool and ping pong. In the evening, the three of us, our roommate Charles (South Africa) and an Israel girl went out to dinner at a really nice restaurant. We went back to hostel to party (our room was next to the pool bar so there was little point in going to bed early...)

The next day we checked out the falls (with a tiny little hang over...) with Charlie and Andrew (Australia). The falls were just incredible!!
There were lots of giant falls and we walked around for hours to see them all. They were so amazing!

We also went on a boat ride to get a close encounter with a couple of the falls. The experience didn’t beat Pulhapanzak, but was still pretty cool (got wet and hangover gone).
However, we missed out on the Devil’s Throat, the biggest waterfall. We arrived 15 minutes late for the last train to take us there. Oh well, I was pretty satisfied with waterfalls by then anyway...

The Iguazu Falls is a nicely developed national park with lots of animals. However, we mainly saw racoons, some birds and butterflies. The racoons were pretty cute in the beginning and we took lots of photos of them. But I suppose they’re a bit too tamed. They would hang around the restaurants and jump up on the tables and eat people’s food. Not very nice, but good entertainment...

Around the waterfalls were lots of butterflies and one of them sat on my hand for a while. It was so beautiful!

There was a bbq and samba show at our hostel. The bbq was all you can eat, and really good and the samba show – well it was pretty fun. They gathered everyone to dance and I had to put away my NISSE-syndrome (Norwegian Inherited Stiffness Syndrome) and “shake it”. It was good fun though. Larisa, Daly, Charles, Charlie, Andrew and I spent the rest of the night playing drinking games, doing handstands (!) and dancing.

Sunday we relaxed by the pool in the morning and went for what was supposed to be an adventure tour in the afternoon that was supposed to include canopying, hiking and abseiling down a waterfall.
We sat off in an army vehicle turned tour bus with 20 other tourists and made our way into the wilderness.
The hiking was a 20 minute walk where we stopped every 10 meter to learn about a tree...

The canopying was pretty fun; I have never done it before, and enjoyed it (although I wish I could go faster). I loved “flying” through the treetops though.

Then there was abseiling down a waterfall. It could have been fun had we been allowed to control it ourselves, but we were pretty much just hanging on the rope attached to us while two guys managed us down. I got a shower from the waterfall though, but the abseiling I did in Australia was better.

Then it was back to Posadas. We arrived 2 am Monday morning was pretty tired.

This week, there has been raining a lot and the temperature has dropped dramatically the last few days (Monday it was 26 C, today it’s 12 C). The soccer was cancelled the first few days of this week, but is back on, and with the help from a new volunteer I’m looking forward to my last week before I head to Canada.