Chile to Mexico

A two year overland journey across South and Central America

Chile to Mexico
Architecture Paraguay 

Itaipu Dam

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One of our trips out from Foz was to visit the Itaipu Dam. It’s a monster of a dam – the second largest in the world (after 3 gorges in China).

You can do a ‘panaramic tour’, which takes you out in an open top bus to look at the dam – with 3 stops on the way for pictures.

But before that, you get a short film about the dam. You can choose between English, Spanish, and Portuguese for the film and they rotate every 10 minutes. When we were seated for the English version, we realised that most of the visitors here were from South America…..

PB waits for the film screening – he’s got the best seat in the house.

Yep – just us!

The tour itself is quite fun (in our view – others have described it as a ‘visit to see a big lump of concrete’), and the bus goes along the bottom of the dam, under the spillway to the Paraguayan side, and then back across the top of the dam. The dam is ‘Binational’, and is jointly owned by Brazil and Paraguay (the countries on either side of the dam). It was great as I could start to say ‘I can see Paraguay’ again and again which CC always likes to hear…..

Here are some pics:

Overall view of the dam.
The spillways – these would look better if they were spilling water. They are only open 10% of the time, to allow excess water to flow through.
They want to make sure that you know it’s a Bi-national project.
On top of the dam, looking over the spillways.
The lake behind the dam (Lake Itaipu) is quite pleasant and tranquil. This is the last stop of the tour, and you can stay here for as long as you want.
Like all good tourist attractions, they provide special plaques to hold up when you are taking selfies…. VISIT THE GREATEST GENERATOR OF ENERGY IN THE WORLD and  LOOK AT ME IN ITAIPU

 

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