ARGENTINA'S Iguazo waterfalls are more scenic, picturesque and unusual than Canada's Niagara. -- Photo by Peter Worthington

One of the big changes today from the past are travel agents and companies that specialize in adventure holidays.

They are institutions I'm uneasy with, and rely on my wife to plan and organize our periodic trips to far away places.

By far the most reliable travel company I've experienced is Butterfield and Robinson in Toronto, who pioneered bicycle tours to unusual places - Morocco, China, Russia - and now are starting their own visits to Antarctica.

Butterfield is pricey, but reliable, and mixes the lavish with the mundane.

In the old days, when I travelled the world on news assignments, I never relied on anyone but myself to book airline flights. I found airlines the best sources for arranging the most convenient flights to sometimes dangerous places.

I thought wistfully of those less complicated travel times on a recent trip to Antarctica, and visiting the astonishing Iguazu waterfalls in Argentina on the return flight.

Our Antarctic adventure was on a Russian research vessel leased by Peregrine Adventures of Australia (but run by Canadians).

Peregrine was excellent and rewarding - which is, unfortunately, a bit more than can be said for their agents in Toronto.

Our bookings were made nine months in advance to fly to the tip of South America to meet our ship, the Akademic Ioffe, in the world's most southern city, Ushuaia, Argentina.

The ship accommodates about 100 passengers and is usually quickly sold out. A smallish ship is a world of difference from the 1,000-passenger Marco Polo that travels Antarctic waters but cannot give the intimate land visits that Peregrine provides.

For some inexplicable reason, the travel agent booked our flight to Buenos Aires through Sao Paulo, where we'd have to change planes. Only an alert Air Canada agent corrected the oddity and booked us direct to Buenos Aires, with a brief stop at Santiago, Chile.

After 11 days on the ship we disembarked at 7 a.m. in Ushuaia, a frontier city at the bottom of Argentina, and discovered that instead of being booked to Buenos Aires on the 9 a.m. flight, or at noon, or early afternoon like most other passengers, we were booked on a night flight that reached Buenos Aires after midnight.

Our pre-paid transportation never materialized.

Ushuaia's population is around 42,000 and the city bills itself as Fin Del Mundo (The End of the World). It was once a penal colony (Argentina's Devil's Island?) but now depends on tourists.

A Zodiac from the Akademik Ioffe is dwarfed by an iceberg that is numerous storeys high. -- Peter Worthington, SUN photo

In the Terra del Fuego national park is the end (or beginning) of the Pan-American highway that theoretically stretches to Alaska. Two threats to the park are Canada Geese (messy and prolific) and beavers - 25 mating pairs of which were imported from Canada in 1946 to start a fur industry. It never worked.

The beavers multiplied by the thousands, and while their fur is poor, they've been so lethal to the local forest the Argentine government now pays 7 pesos ($3) bounty for beaver pelts.

National symbol

Argentines also find it quaint that Canada would choose a rodent for its national symbol.

Iguazu is truly spectacular - more scenic, picturesque and unusual than Niagara Falls. Iguazu is a series of 275 waterfalls (271 of which are in Argentina, four in neighbouring Brazil). They are higher than Niagara Falls, though far less volume of water flows at Iguazu.

Robert DeNiro's movie, The Mission, was filmed here, and won an Academy Award for photography.

From the hotel (the Sheraton, in which we were initially booked into the hotel's worst room, overlooking a construction site instead of the falls - until Yvonne behaved like a Tasmanian Devil and got it changed) you can walk through the jungle to the top and bottom of several of the waterfalls.

We also weren't told our flight home from Iguazu was from the airport in Brazil, not Argentina, with a one-hour time difference. That would have been disastrous had not the vigilant Yvonne checked and double-checked.

As it was, we were booked on a milk-run flight to Sao Paolo to make an Air Canada connection that took four hours instead of a one-hour direct flight. Why?

Yvonne had been told that these were the only available flights, which didn't make sense since we'd booked nine months in advance.

Overall, the Peregrine organization is efficient, professional and thoughtful, but something is lacking in their Toronto outlet. It may seem a small thing, but a 20-hour flight to the bottom of the Western Hemisphere is arduous enough, without unnecessary plane changes that simply add hours to an already gruelling experience.

Such casual scheduling doesn't befit Peregrine, whose Antarctic expedition is world-class and unforgettable.