So after our lovely time in Puerto Madryn and Gaiman we decided to head up to the Iguazu falls. We had a simple plan – we would fly from Puerto Madryn to Buenos Aires and then take a bus from Buenos Aires to Puerto Iguazu. This way we would avoid having to take two long distance buses in a row.
Booking the flights was easy enough, as the airline had an office in town. Booking the buses was a little more difficult – everyone wanted to sell us tickets to Buenos Aires, but we had difficulty finding anyone who would sell tickets that left from Buenos Aires. Eventually we found a company that had a bus leaving a few hours after our flight arrived, and everything seemed to line up perfectly.
Our flight wasn’t until late afternoon, so we decided to spend our last day in Puerto Madryn on the beach watching the whales. At first it seemed disappointingly quiet but then two whales started trading jumps. One would jump, making a huge splash, and then the other seemed to try to out do him. This was incredible to watch, as they were by far the biggest whales we had seen.
We arrived back in our hostel to pick up our luggage only to be told our flight had been cancelled. Apparently all flights from the area had been grounded due to a volcano in Chile. This sounded like an airline’s equivalent of the dog ate my homework excuse, as the sky seemed perfectly blue. We were a little stunned, and then started to run around frantically trying to unbook everything we had booked. First was the hotel – this was relatively easy, and they cancelled without charging us anything which was nice. We then sprinted down to the bus company to cancel our Buenos Aires – Puerto Iguazu bus. Of course when we arrived it was siesta time so we had to sit and wait for two hours while they slept through the 5 degree heat of the day.
In the end we got our flights refunded, but not the bus which we couldn’t make. We then had to get an 18 hour bus to Buenos Aires in order to get another 16 hour bus to Puerto Iguazu…
… but that’s a story for a later time.
