January 5: Where Insanity Manifests Itself In A One Day Up-And-Back Visit To Iguazu Falls
And The Tale Is SO LONG, I’m Breaking It In Two
Part 1: Booking Iguazu
Iguazu Falls National Park is in the very north of Argentina with the border of Brazil. Thinking that this might be our one and only chance to see these falls, we decided we’d figure out how to do it.
Similar to Niagara Falls having an American side and a Canadian side, Iguazu Falls has an Argentinian and Brazilian sides. Many people do an overnight stay to see both sides. This was not going to work for us, because:
- By the time of our visit in early January, we will have been gone from home for almost three weeks. We knew we’d be running on fumes. And it would just be time to go home.
- The logistics of arriving in Buenos Aires and staying in a hotel, then packing up and schlepping all the bags onto a plane to Iguazu (with no tour guide to help), stay at a hotel in Iguazu, visit Iguazu, then turn around and schlep all the bags BACK to Buenos Aires – well, that sounded exhausting just typing it.
- We didn’t want to deal with getting a visa to visit Brazil for one day.
The challenge was finding a tour company who would provide a private an all-in-one up-and-back package. It wasn’t easy, but I found one through Get Your Guide. They, of course, contract it out to somebody else. The somebody else is BATourguide.com.ar.
August 2025
I reached out to BATourguide to begin the conversation. The challenge always is: my mobility issues. For walking long distances, Andy drives me in a transport chair (a wheelchair with 4 small wheels).
The person I was dealing with was Maximo Yedid. The description of the tour said: “Not wheelchair accessible”. I needed to know exactly what that meant, especially since the Iguazu Falls website said explicitly that wheelchairs are available.
Obstacle #1: As in many cases, Maximo said the cars used to transfer people around do not have a wheelchair lift. I said, no problem, I don’t need a wheelchair lift. I have a small chair and it folds even smaller to fit in most trunks.
Obstacle #2: Maximo brought up was the supposed scarcity of loaner wheelchairs, and it would be up to you to get one; that’s not the guide’s job. I said, no problem, I’ll bring my own. {Note: in 20/20 hindsight, it would have been good for Maximo to tell me the surface of the trails are metal slats that are a bit of a problem for a wheelchair with little wheels, but I digress}.
Obstacle #3: the tour guide is not going to push you. No problem, I said, my husband will do that.
Obstacle #4: I won’t be able to do the lower circuit, because it requires climbing down a very long flight of stairs. No problem, I said – if there’s a cafe where I can get something to eat, access a bathroom, and sit in a shady spot, I can wait for Andy and the tour guide to do the lower circuit and I’ll just see the photos later. We do this ALL THE TIME.
Obstacle #5: We won’t have time to do the boat ride. No problem, I have zero interest in this boat ride that takes you right into the falls and you are soaked. Nope, no thank you.
I’m guessing he was concerned about the liability of dealing with a customer with mobility issues. But at this point, Maximo ran out of obstacles. I booked the (non-refundable) excursion for January 5, 2026.
Maximo booked the flights and sent me the info. I asked him if he told the airline about my personal wheelchair. No, of course not, I had to do that. {I was beginning to sense a bit of passive/aggressive stuff going on here}. No problem. I called the airline (JetSMART, an affiliate of American Airlines) and set it all up. Easy peasy.
November 3, 2025
JetSMART sent me an email in early November to notify me that our return flight was cancled and rescheduled for 10:30 p.m. Maximo rebooked us on an Aerolineas Argentina flight instead at 7:30 p.m.. I was able to add “wheelchair assistance” to the reservation via the website. No problem, good to go.
December 26, 2025
We are on our cruise. I receive an email from Maximo regarding an email Aerolineas Argentina sent him asking for information about my chair. The phone interface created a jumbled mess.
Fortunately, on my computer it appeared fine. I used google translate to make sure my understanding of the Spanish was correct.
They wanted to know whether the chair is motorized or is manual (manual), its dimensions, weight, etc. PLUS they wanted photos of the chair folded up and a photo of brake locking mechanism.
AND they wanted something called a “sworn statement” that supposedly is in the chair’s user manual. The chair’s user manual is in Maryland and there doesn’t seem to be an online version of it. I have no memory of seeing a “sworn statement” in the paper version.
I sent an email to the airline asking what a “sworn statement” was, but I never received an answer. Google said it was a form needed for motorized wheelchairs guaranteeing the battery was safe.
Except there is no battery because this is a manual wheelchair. I couldn’t figure out why they included this requirement in a form for a manual chair. It made absolutely no sense.
I filled out the form as best I could and sent it in 5 days before the excursion asking for confirmation of receipt of the email. No response.
January 4, 2026
Part 2 Getting To Iguazu
Maximo checks us into the morning flight and sends us our boarding passes. I have no way to print them off, so the PDFs will have to do.
I was in bed by 8:30 the night before. We were up at 3:00 a.m. We had our backpack packed and our clothes laid out. We were downstairs in the lobby waiting for the driver at 3:50 a.m.
Our driver arrives right at 4:00 a.m. It’s a 15 minute drive to the local domestic airport. The driver drops us off at departures, and we’re on our way!
Because we have nothing to check, we head straight to security. They kinda notice Andy is pushing me in the chair, so they sorta scoot us around to the priority line. We send the backpack, my purse, etc. through the machine. My chair and I go around the metal detector for the manual inspection. A woman security person pats me down. All this is perfectly routine.
And this is where the fun begins.
Suddenly, it’s apparent that I must be The First Person In Argentina to ever bring my own private wheelchair to this airport. This is a major sticking point. They couldn’t believe it. This is yours? Yes, it’s mine. Your personal chair? Yes, it’s mine. Not the airport’s? No, it’s mine.
Mind you – all this is in Spanish, and I’m proud to say that my barely awake brain was able navigate the “This is my chair” sentence as many times as I needed to say it.
The woman security person is now poking at my chair (seriously poking it), looking at my name tags as if they held nuclear secrets, opening the name tags to see the bits of paper in them, and the Apple air tag in one of them. Multiple times, touching the tags opening the tags, looking at the bits of paper, looking at my Airtag.
What in creation is going on here?
Then another security guy asks for my passport. Of course, if a security guy asks for your passport, you give him your passport. This is a non-issue.
He proceeds to examine my passport literally page by page – I am not making this up – holding each page so close to his face I thought he would eat it. Both sides of each page. The whole passport. Every page. Multiple times. Over and over and over again. I sure hope he enjoyed seeing all the stamps from all the places I’ve been!
I’m not saying a word at this point. Nor am I showing any emotion at all. My inside voice is going crazy with all sorts of scenarios, but outwardly, I show nothing.
Security guy continues to hold my passport and randomly look at pages, the dates, the scan code, etc. Many supervisors are contacted. As one supervisor is brought out, that one contacts the next one up, and the next one up, until there are at least 2 if not 3 supervisors involved.
My guess at this point:
- Somebody decided to randomly give a 72 year old grandma from the US a hard time for reasons completely unknown. Maybe they were bored.
- That person questioned the chair as some security something-something.
- Typically, once a low-rung security person commits to something, even if it’s 100% wrong, all the security people up and down the food chain will back the low-rung guy.
It seemed like hours, but I’m pretty sure it was about 10 minutes, when finally a supervisor high enough up takes one look at me in my chair and tells everybody to give me back my passport and let me go on my way.
Still with me?
We go to the gate, which is, of course, as far away as possible, as is tradition. The gate staff show up, and we ask about the gate check of the chair. No problem at all. They put a baggage tag on it.
While we’re waiting to board, I get another email from Maximo saying that he can’t check us into the return flight. He suspects it has something to do with the chair. He says our tour guide will come with us to check in and figure it out for us. Sounds like a plan
Andy and I are first to go down the ramp – to find out that we are taking a bus to the plane! Ok, no problem, we get on the bus to go to the plane. I position myself in the chair in an open space for wheelchairs.
It’s a very crowded bus. Out of nowhere, another security guy in an yellow vest literally shouts at me:
“JOO! What joo doing here!” It’s obvious his English doesn’t particularly exist.
I said, “Going to the plane, why else would I be here?”
“Joo no be here!”, he said.
“How else do I get to the plane?”, I said. I’m beginning to think that the gate staff should have called for assistance to get me to the plane instead of me taking the bus, but I don’t know how I would have known that.
Yellow vest guy disappears for a few seconds, then comes back and says, “Joo OK!”
The bus takes us to the plane. We get to climb up a flight of steps. Mr. Yellow Vest is there and now he’s all concerned. He motions for me to stand in a certain place and tells me when to start climbing the steps. “Joo ok? Need help?”. No, I’m fine, thank you.
I’m halfway up the steps with Yellow Vest behind me (which is fine, always good to have a spotter), and he occasionally asks me “Joo ok?”. I guess he, too, is feeling guilty for plaguing an 72 year old grandma who just wants to get on the fricking plane.
Fortunately, the flight itself is fine. Though what’s weird is when the flight attendants offer food for sale, Andy and I are never offered anything, as if they don’t see us. We’re sitting in the first row.
It’s only a two hour flight, and it’s fine. We arrive in Iguazu. What we didn’t realize is they actually checked my chair into luggage under the plane, and now we need to retrieve it from the carousel.
Finally, finally, we walk out looking for somebody holding a sign with our name. There’s a guy there holding a sign, but the name is completely wrong. Eventually he asks us if we were there for a one day tour, and we say yes, and I give him my name. AH HAH, he finds us, he had looked at the wrong booking, it’s all good.
He introduces himself as Emmanuel, and now the good part starts.
Maryland Meshugas 