Sunday – a day of rest, appropriately enough as my balcony overlooks a Jesuit mission founded in 1609. The roofs are gone but the solidly built sandstone and laterite walls remain and it’s a handsome site – all orderly rows and neat organisation, with sundrenched terraces where once the fathers of the Jesus Company would’ve looked out over fields of corn and yerba maté. You can walk amid the lines of workshops that once turned out iron and glassware and carvings of saints, their floors now carpeted with lush grass and little yellow and scarlet and mauve flowers. Scattered amongst them are orange and pomelo trees, heavy with fruit that drops to rot on the ground, and long tailed lizards dart in and out of cracks in the walls.

It’s been a lazy day so I’ve tooled around the streets of the town – all two of them - sat on the net, dozed a bit, had a steak and mash and a coffee and flan (that’s crème caramel to you, served as a slice from a great big round), read the papers and a bit more of Pico Iyer’s ‘The Lady and the Monk’. I realised this morning that I’d been on the go for six days, more or less, including one bus journey of 23 hours, and it was time for a break.

The same road that got me here had also taken me to Iguazu a couple of days earlier, in the opposite direction, an undulating highway which traces the Paraguayan border where a thumb of Argentina inserts itself between Paraguay and Brazil. The guidebook – and possibly everyone else, for all I know – refers to it somewhat clumsily as Argentinian Mesopotamia, because of its rivers, the Parana and the Uruguay. (Is there a hanging garden I’ve missed? Is someone thinking of invading?) The province is called Misiones and there are orange orchards and pine plantations, and thin farms. This is clearly not a rich part of the country, and many of the houses are simple timber cabins with wooden shutters for windows, painted in reds and yellows and blues, while others are cubes of brick, looking as if they’ve been plucked from the simplest kind of suburbia, floral curtains and all. In between is forest festooned with creeper, and olive rivers flowing between banks of red volcanic rock, and a rusty dust coats the road.

On the bus we had the inevitable video show, and this time it was ‘Australia’. The sun was bright outside and the locals like to close the curtains when travelling, so I took a look at it for the second time in nine months, hardly able to believe someone once convinced me to part with $15 to watch this tosh. Reading the subtitles, NT became Territorio Nordeste, and Hugh Jackman’s frequent ‘crikey’s became ‘Oh caramba!’, and 1,500 head of cattle had been translated into 15,000, possibly the fantasy of some overenthusiastic Gaucho subtitler. Happily, Drover and ‘walkabout’ remained unchanged. For once I would happily have identified myself as a Yankee, or a Royal Marine, or even, God forbid, a Chilean, than associate myself with such a king size pile of crap.

I’m starting to understand Spanish, a bit. I still can’t speak it to save my life, but when people tell me things I more or less get it. Simple things, that is. Like what time the bus leaves. No need to overdo it. The Argentinians, for their part, don’t seem to have much trouble with my name – not the surname, which needs no introduction (I remember it even induced snickers of recognition in Tajiks and Turkmens), but the first. Either they know the Angus cow, or more commonly, they know Angus Young of AC/DC. The Argies are great devotees of classic rock, and plenty of big acts come to play here – apparently the accas are on their way out later this year. One fan who saw them about ten years ago said he thought they were better live than the Rolling Stones. The radio and restaurants churn out a constant soundtrack of yesterday’s hits, and it’s been a pleasant voyage of rediscovery of the likes of Kate Bush, Meatloaf, Midnight Oil, Credence and, er, Rick Astley. On other points, though, they’re not quite so cosmopolitan. One subtitle slip I noticed was when a reference to Mickey Rourke was translated as Ricky Martin. Um, no.

Iguazu was stupendous. Everyone you meet tells you it’s great, and the guidebooks say it’s not to be missed, and it’s supposed to be a wonder of the world, but then you think, well how good can a waterfall be? Well, good enough to invest in a 23 hour bus trip from Salta to Puerto Iguazu, enduring three egregious Hollywood b-graders, Burt Reynolds and Jim Carrey, a double decker that stank like a backpacker dorm on a day of particularly sweaty sneakers, and nothing but sugary flour to eat and sugary nescafe to drink. Only to arrive in a town that featured little more exciting than a travel agency named Turismo Dick and a burger joint called El Willy. (Made me wonder if the Clintons had ever been guests here.) The day I arrived it was overcast and cold, but on asking Diego at the hotel what the weather would be like the following day, his response was, in effect, well it’s a bad day today, so it’ll probably be good tomorrow. And that’s how it turned out. That’s the way it’s been in Argentina, I’ve noticed – sunny except for the occasional chilly one-off. The weather is as easygoing and companionable as the people.

Now I guess it’s my turn to wax lyrical in terms that are meaningless to anyone who hasn’t been to Iguazu. Wonder of the world? Definitely. It takes a day to see the falls properly, and that’s only from the Argentinian side, and that’s if you don’t mess around. There’s an upper path and a lower path (known offputtingly as the Circuito Inferior), and a boat across a raging torrent to reach an island in the middle of it all (not running, unfortunately, due to high water levels), and a little railway to transport visitors between the various points along the cascades which run for a total of about five kilometres. You do the upper path first, crossing what looks like a placid brown stream beneath overhanging branches, aware of a persistent roar all around. You come to the first fall, 50m or so deep, which is impressive enough until you realise you’re in the midst of a massive arcade and that you’re crossing tumult after tumult of thrashing white water, each one of which would be a river and a waterfall worthy of its own name and national park anywhere else in the world. Dozens, scores, probably hundreds of the things. When a panorama emerges it is sheer rock, jungle and water, vast and unapproachable. Then the lower circuit takes you via the bottom of the falls, where you feel utterly overpowered, and occasionally soaked. Along the way there are toucans (well there was one) and little creatures called coatis, furry tree climbers with long snouts and striped tails who stand cutely on hind legs to pester tourists for food. Hundreds of butterflies flutter about, tiger striped or lemon yellow.

Finally, after a ride to the head of the falls on the propane powered toy train, a catwalk takes you across 1.1km of mud coloured river and fragile, parrot infested islands to view a bowl of boiling spume known as the Devil’s Throat where the spray is so dense you can barely see the top, let alone anywhere further down than a few metres. Torrent isn’t an adequate word. Nothing is. It’s raw power and sheer volume, an unstoppable, obliterating force, punching its way downwards in a 180 degree arc. The spray rises to a height of about ten metres, and when the wind decides to blow in the direction of the platform, a sudden shower drenches all the onlookers. Sensible tourists bring raincoats, or buy them from stalls for 20 pesos. Some just shove their camera in a plastic bag and get wet.

There are all kinds of creatures in the park, including 430 bird species, and one of the best places to see some of them is on the Macucu Trail, which I did last. It wends its way through about 3km of forest until it comes to – surprise – a waterfall, but this time a twin drop that is almost delicate, at least compared to the behemoths up the road. On the way there for a while I tailgated a couple of Valley Girls, buxom backsides busting from their leggings, who kept shrieking at their own hilarities and once asked me to take their photo (‘It parps from the tarp’), and a young French couple who chased each other swinging lengths of bamboo, giggling loudly. Surprisingly, there wasn’t a lot of wildlife to be seen (or heard) on this stretch, so I stuck the legs in fast mode and left them behind, and on the return journey let them pass. Soon enough I spotted a massive chestnut coloured rodent lingering casually on the path; it trotted back and forth a couple of times, at its leisure, then disappeared to forage in the jungle. I waited for more, but only managed to catch the cries of about half a dozen birds before a young Argentinian biologist wandered along whom I’d noticed earlier clutching a guide to the park’s wildlife. She said she’d seen plenty of kingfishers, but was surprised I’d seen a toucan (me and twenty other tourists, that is, beside the kiosk). Apparently they’re endangered, and rare around the park.

She was in the process of completing her undergrad degree, where she’d been doing research into bee and fly distribution. She told me vast swathes of Argentina are given over to the cultivation of soybean for export to Asia, and that the industry is controlled by Monsanto, who supply the seeds, the fertiliser and the pesticides. Because of this monoculture the bees and other pollinating insects are disappearing – as elsewhere in the world – with serious consequences for the propagation of plants and forest. We ambled back towards the road discussing the life cycles of butterflies, bees and flies, and before too long what looked like a chocolate coloured antelope crossed the path right in front of us. She spotted some birds, which I barely saw, and I took some photos of butterflies in the last of the golden light, but she being a bee person was a bit dismissive of butterflies. We passed a sign which I had noticed as I came in that said to be wary of dangerous animals. Unnervingly, the dangerous animals weren’t specified so I asked her (I never did get her name) what they might be, and she said that the coutis sometimes bite people to get food. Apparently, though, there is still the occasional jaguar, and the wildlife guide had plenty of pictures of cats. A baby was taken from a ranger’s house about three years ago.

The next day I had hoped to cross into Brazil but discovered that, along with the Yankees, Aussies aren’t welcome in Brazil unless we’ve got a visa. It’s a shame because it’s only from there that you can get the full panorama of the falls. You’d think they’d have some $10 for a day pass kind of scheme going on, but apparently not (I didn’t bother schlepping all the way to the border to find out). I mean, it’s not like we’re about to disappear into the cities and take jobs from the locals or anything. And while I’m in whinge mode, I’ll say that if you’re going to charge foreigners more than locals to see sites, then you really should provide comprehensive information in English. Iguazu was fine – as it should have been, considering we pay three times what an Argentinian pays – but the Jesuit mission leaves a bit to be desired. There were various little machines with recorded information around the site, where you could press a button to hear a spiel in your own language, but I have to say it was a bit of a relief that none of these actually worked. The diagrams on top weren’t bad, showing the mission as it would’ve looked in its prime.

Oh, and before leaving Puerto Iguazu I wandered up the road to see the spot where two rivers and Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil meet. There probably aren’t that many places in the world where you can actually see three countries, at least from ground level. I have to say they all looked pretty much the same. Beneath a large spreading tree was a map of the Malvinas, enamelled in the white and sky blue of the Argentinian flag.