Iguacu Falls - Hotel falls de Iguacu - memorable stopover

Foz de Iguacu is a one attraction town. 

It gets its prime income from the closeness of the world famous falls. This means it is fully geared for tourists - churrascarias and Quilo restaurants, bars and nightclubs, bank and exchange bureaus, car rentals and tour companies and anything else a tourist could want.

But it is primarily a place to lay your head. Part of the package I bought was an overnight stay at the Hotel Foz de Iguacu located at the centre of town at Avenida Brazil. This is a large three star hotel which caters mainly for tour groups, most of them from Argentina. The lobby is OK with rather seventies brown furniture but a very helpful and busy desk staff and its four floors are reached by elevators. I worked the price out to be £20 (80 reals/$35 a night) which is quite reasonable and will get you a double room. 

One thing I seriously remember are the corridors. These are of immense length and rather gloomy, so to find your room you wander a warren of darkened tunnels. The rooms, however, are rather good. They are a nice size with double bed, average decor, a warm shower and a TV. I love watching TV in Brazil as I can pick out certain words and when I was there in September they were getting gloomy as it had rained in Rio two days on the trot. Two days on the trot! In London we call that summer!

Part of the package was breakfast and dinner in their large restaurant. One of the most memorable experiences of the entire trip was wandering into the restaurant and finding it full to the brim with mature tourists of a certain age. I tweaked my ears and all I could hear was Spanish and it dawned on me that these must be the Argentinean tour parties that the guide was telling me about. Dinner and breakfast are generally ''help-yourself'' buffets and I joined the queue. As we are so near ''the land of the gaucho'' there was plenty of meat on view. I helped myself to rice and vegetables but also to the most delicious braised lamb I have tasted in a long while.

I took my food and squeezed onto a table full of Argentinean old ladies chatting away. Being British I kept my head down and prayed that no one mentioned ''the General Belgrano'' or Margaret Thatcher. it was certainly an experience I will never forget.

Staying at a hotel isn't just about room size and price it is about people and memories. The Hotel Foz de Iguacu had plenty of those