The bus door hissed open and I stepped onto Brazilian asphalt for the first time. Ten minutes earlier I was still in Argentina, queuing at immigration with a passport and a backpack and a vague idea that this was how you were supposed to arrive. Cross the Tancredo Neves Bridge on foot, watch the Iguazu River turn from green to gold under the morning sun, and then—well, then actually be here. Foz do Iguaçu, Paraná, Brazil. August 1st, winter, dry season, and about twenty-one degrees with a breeze that smelled like river and wet leaves.
I stood on the curb for a long minute just letting it land. The bridge was still behind me, a steel curve over water that marks the real border here—not a line on a map but a river you can hear before you see it. And ahead of me, the city: low buildings, palm trees, a sky that was doing that thing where it can't decide between blue and grey. This is the classic overland entry point into Brazil, and I'd read about it a dozen times. But reading about a place and standing in it are different verbs.
First things first, because this show is going to be honest about logistics. You don't arrive in Brazil and just start living. You need a CPF—Cadastro de Pessoa Física—the tax ID that unlocks everything: SIM cards, bank accounts, rental contracts, even some bus apps. The Receita Federal office in Foz is near the centre, and I walked over with my passport and a photocopy of my entry stamp. The queue moved fast. Forty minutes, a form, a number on a piece of paper, and I was in the system. No fuss. If you're planning to stay beyond ninety days, you'll also need to register at the Polícia Federal for the CRNM. But that's a later episode. Today was about the first domino.
With the CPF in hand, I wandered up Avenida Brasil, the city's commercial spine. Shops, churrascarias, phone stores stacked on phone stores. I ducked into a Claro outlet and walked out ten minutes later with a prepaid SIM—around thirty reais for the starter pack, a few gigs of data, and a number that's now officially Brazilian. The clerk asked where I was from, and when I said I'd just crossed the bridge, he grinned and said, 'Bem-vindo.' Welcome. It's a small word. It landed anyway.
Hunger hit around one, and I stopped at a prato feito place near the terminal—rice, beans, grilled chicken, a little salad, and a glass of juice for about thirty-one reais. Six dollars. The kind of meal that resets your whole understanding of what lunch should cost. The place was packed with workers, not tourists, which is always the sign you're eating where you should eat. I sat at a counter, watched the cook move between pans with the ease of someone who's done it ten thousand times, and let the noise wash over me. This is the Brazil I came for.
After lunch I crossed the street to the Terminal de Transporte Urbano—the TTU—and bought a transport card from the Foztrans window. A single ride costs about five reais. Less than a dollar. The card is reloadable, and it works on the city buses that radiate out from here to the falls, to Itaipu, to the neighbourhoods where regular life happens. I tapped through the turnstile and caught a bus heading out Avenida das Cataratas, the strip of hotels and restaurants that runs toward the park gates.
The bus was old, painted yellow, and full of people doing ordinary things—a woman with groceries, a kid with a school bag, a man in a work shirt scrolling his phone. I watched the city give way to scrubby green, then to forest, and then the sound started. A low rumble, like a distant train that never arrives, growing as the road curved. By the time the bus pulled up at the Iguaçu National Park entrance, the rumble was a roar.
Entry to the park is about one hundred and fourteen reais. Roughly twenty-one dollars. It's not cheap, and I'll be honest—the falls are the reason most people come to Foz, and the price reflects that. But standing at the edge of the Brazilian side walkway, I understood the tariff. Two hundred and seventy-five falls. The Garganta do Diabo—the Devil's Throat—pouring water in a column that looks like it could erase the map and start over. The spray hit my face before I saw it, fine mist carried on wind that smelled of minerals and wet stone.
I walked the full circuit, about an hour and a half, stopping at every viewpoint. There's a catwalk that juts out over the river, and from the end of it you're close enough to the Devil's Throat that you can't hear yourself think. A toucan called from the forest behind me—a dry, mechanical rattle that cut through the water noise. I stood there longer than I planned. Something about the scale of it, the sheer volume of moving water, pushes everything else out of your head.
On the way back I stopped at Parque das Aves, right at the park gate. One hundred and ten reais, about twenty dollars. I almost skipped it—I was here for the falls, after all—but a friend had insisted. And yes, fine, they were right. Toucans with their absurd beaks, macaws in electric blue and yellow, flamingos standing one-legged like they're waiting for something that's running late. You walk through aviaries where the birds are free to come and go around you. A macaw perched on a railing two feet from my face and regarded me with the patience of a creature that has seen everything and is not impressed.
By late afternoon the light had shifted, that long winter gold hour, and I took a bus back toward town and then walked to the Marco das Três Fronteiras. It's in Jardim Eldorado, near the river, where the Iguaçu flows into the Paraná and three countries meet—Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay. There's an obelisk painted in the national colours, and a platform where you can stand and look across at two other nations at once. The sun was dropping, and someone was setting up for the evening music-and-light show. I didn't stay for it. I wanted to see it another day, properly, not as a tourist who just landed.
Instead I walked to the Mesquita Omar Ibn Al-Khattab, the largest mosque in Latin America, which sits in a neighbourhood that speaks to Foz's history. This city was founded as a remote outpost in 1910, grew slowly, and then exploded when the Friendship Bridge to Paraguay opened in 1965 and Itaipu Dam came in the 1970s. Today there are about eighty nationalities living here. The Lebanese community is big enough to build that mosque. The Chinese community has the Templo Budista Chen Tien on a hill above town. I passed a bakery selling sfiha and kibbeh next to a place advertising Paraguayan chipa. The border doesn't just run along the river. It runs through the streets.
Dinner was at a place called Baru Gastronomia, on Avenida das Cataratas. A local friend had recommended it, and I trust that over any app rating. I ordered pirá de Foz—the fish dish the city claims as its own—and a cold Brahma, which cost about five reais from the supermarket earlier, but I let the restaurant mark it up because I was too tired to argue. The meal ran about eighty reais, fourteen dollars, for a table outside under a heater because August nights here get cold. It was good. Not spectacular. But it was real, and it was mine, and I sat there with the sound of the falls still humming in my ears and thought: this is what the first day of a long journey feels like.
I'm staying at the Bogari Hotel, downtown, near Praça Getúlio Vargas. A single room, clean, with a fan and a window that opens onto a courtyard. About one hundred and twenty reais a night. The equivalent rent for a one-bedroom flat in the centre runs around nineteen hundred reais a month, maybe three hundred and fifty dollars, if you're thinking of staying longer. I'm not there yet. For now, a hotel room is enough.
One last note before I sleep. There's roadwork on the BR-277, the highway that runs through town, with lane closures and slow convoys at night between eight and five—I'm told it's the concessionaire resurfacing the pavement, and it should be finished by early August. Worth checking if you're driving. And apparently the Devil's Throat walkway on the Argentine side is closed indefinitely for dismantling after high river flow blamed on El Niño, so if you cross over to the Argentine side, check what circuits are open before you go. I'll verify both when I get the chance.
I stood on the hotel rooftop just now, looking toward the river where Brazil ends and two other countries begin. The wind was cold, the sky clear, and somewhere down below a dog barked and a bus horn sounded and someone was playing music from an open window. Tomorrow, Itaipu Dam. The Ecomuseu. The biological refuge. Another day of getting to know this place not as a visitor but as someone who is, one day at a time, becoming a resident. Olá, Brazil. I'm here. And I'm not in a hurry to leave.
That's the first episode. If you're thinking of coming to Foz do Iguaçu—or crossing into Brazil overland, or just wondering what it costs to start a new life in a new country—I hope this helps. The falls will be here. The paperwork won't wait. Get the CPF first. Everything else follows.