It was going to take something spectacular to make the Brazilian side of the Iguacu Falls as mind-blowing at the Argentine side, so we decided to opt for something extreme. I was allowed to pick because it was my birthday, so I chose abseiling because we'd seen some people rappelling down the cliffside and it looked pretty cool.

The Brazilians refuse to be outdone when it comes to Iguacu excitement and their adventurous offerings include rapid rafting, abseiling, rock climbing and a ropes course - in addition to their own wonderful ways of viewing the falls if you're not into these things.

Having bungy jumped off the Harbour Bridge before I was quite cocky about abseiling until we found the platform off which we would have to step. Eek. It was really high and my stomach dropped the second I saw it. Just as I was considering backing out, a salesman came along and offered to halve the price, which seemed like some sort of sign that we should throw ourselves off a cliff.

The platform is 50 metres above the Iguacu River and seems to a novice to be sitting rather precariously on the edge of the cliff. My legs turned to jelly as the guide, Rafael, told me just to step back and let myself flop off. He'd shown me the secure rope and the strong caribinas, but that didn't matter at all to my freak-out factor and neither did his insistence that he had hold of me.

Stepping off was terrifying and I clung madly to the rope while Rafael made my beloved step off the platform beside me. Tim and I hung there next to each other, both too scared to take our feet off the bottom of the platform for awhile. Then Tim reminded me to look back as well as down, for there were the waterfalls spilling around in our view. It was really quite amazing and I ended up slowly abseiling down to the bottom, enjoying the landscape.

My fingers were aching from clutching the rope and the walk back up the spiral staircase was flipping tiring, but it was quite a fun birthday. Itīs going to be a hard one to top next year.

Check out more photos from my trip in my Flickr album.

Read more about Brazil and Argentina.