What a wonderful week

The falls, Posadas, the heat and Buenos Aires.  And it hasn’t rained for the past four days.  This week just keeps getting better.  Iguazu falls meet with all the superlatives.  I won’t even try to describe them.  Scenes that I had previously thought were a photo-shopped collage appear before you.  The heat was incredible, we had a lovely bright day with fluffy clouds skidding across blue skies.   Kizzy pointed out at the first sight that it was very different from Niagara Falls.  Although the Iguazu falls extend a long way from one side to the other, the volume of water you see in the first glimpse from the Brazillian side seems a little underwhelming.  Then you round the bend and the sheer volume and spectacle take your breath away.  It was stunning, see the photos. 

We had been to the Itaipu dam the previous evening (the biggest dam in the world for a brief time) but Kizzy was not impressed.  She was still reeling from “the most amazing ice cream in the world” and for only 80p, that she had discovered at the bus station that afternoon.  It was pretty amazing – the ice cream was taller than the cone - but in 37 degree heat we had to eat it quick and missed the photo op. 

We ventured over to the Argentinian side of the falls on Tuesday and around the time we were passing through Brasillian border control the heavens opened with monsoonal rain … that continued for the next 6 hours.  We decided to wait it out in our hostel.  A friend of ours went to the falls that day and came back utterly bedraggled and with his camera completely waterlogged and now completely unresponsive.  The next day the clouds were still threatening so we took the bus 5 hours south to Posadas, in the Missiones region, in order to make the quick dash across to Encarnacion, Paraguay, and the ruins of the Jesuit mission at Trinidad the following morning.  We met a chap from Derry, Sean, coming off the bus and together navigated to the only hostel in town.  Posadas was a revelation.  We were only there for a stopover and yet we found a truly lovely little city.  A pleasant and well-ordered grid system.  Some nice bars and restaurants.  A wonderful hostel with a friendly manager.  And a pleasant and well-used waterfront, crowded with restaurants and people jogging and power-walking.  It helped that this was the first day in South America that we didn’t get rained on.  We had a pleasant dinner out with Sean, a few beers, and then the next morning the three of us hopped across the Rio Parana to Paraguay.  Sean to get a new camera and Kizzy and I to find the missions. 

Encarnacion was startlingly different from Posadas.  In Paraguay it is known as the Pearl of the South.  It was hard to see why: it’s fairly dusty and run down.  I was a little overcome by the heat and left Kizzy and Sean to struggle with the exchange rate (about P$7,000 to £1).  After a leisurely brunch in the main square we caught a bus about 30km north to the mission site, taking something of a risk as we needed to get back to Encarnacion, back into Argentina, across town to our hostel for our bags, and out of town to the bus terminal in time to catch our (quite pricey) 8:40 bus to Buenos Aires overnight.  We made it in the end, but cut it a little fine as it took us an hour and 10 minutes to cross the 600m bridge between Paraguayan and Argentinian border control.

Waiting around in Paraguay was another cultural experience.  Men with guns patrolled all the banks and public spaces.  Lots of men and women spent their time wandering around trying to sell the most random collection of unwanted household consumables.  A general sense of aimlessness made its way across the faces of most of the locals, although perhaps that was just the dry heat.  Then again, at the bus station there were all sorts of games going on between the drivers and the hawkers, some of them not at all pleasantly conducted.  One of the hawkers was allowed to sell on our bus on the provision that he kept all the other hawkers off.  He took that as an opportunity to nip out of the bus and clatter a smaller bloke over the back of the head before dashing back onto the bus and out of reach of retribution, laughing all the while at his fine joke.  Kizzy remarked that it had the feel of a developing country, but I’m not sure there was that much development going on.  I believe there are proposals to redirect the river course meaning that a good chunk of the Zona Baja region will be flooded and this seems to have halted any repair and restoration activity in the whole town. 

   The Trinidad mission was an impressive and well-maintained site.  There was no information in English, but having really loved the movie “The Mission” I felt like I had the right soundtrack to pick through the ruins.  The day remained glorious and sunny and thankfully we made it back to our bags and our bus on time, although not without making Kizzy run pretty much all the way from border control to our hostel!

   We’ve now been in Buenos Aires for two days and Kizzy is in love with our new home.  Two weeks here will be perfect to relax and settle down.  We start Spanish classes tomorrow and I’m looking forward to getting some communication skills – Brazil and Portuguese was a very big challenge for me.  Buenos Aires is beautiful and handsome and displays it particularly well in the sunshine.  Everywhere you look are attractive art-deco and colonial exteriors.  The public buildings are grand and set in spacious plazas dotted with public art and monuments.  The fine art gallery has free entry, as does the Recoletta cemetery (the eternal real estate of choice for BA’s finest) and there are extensive well maintained parks to the north of the city centre.  The climate and the scenery remind me a lot of Melbourne, where I grew up, but the buildings in the city centre are less conservative and it is all the more pleasing for it.  This sense of familiarity has served to emphasise some of the differences.  As we wandered through town on the first day we passed some of the central green spaces, small plazas and garden squares and the like, and there tents and other shelters dotted around them, under trees or in some out of the way corner.  One of them had a child’s tricycle.   In front of another was a boy of three or four sitting calmly on a mattress, watching us pass.  And elsewhere a young girl, five years old perhaps, was washing in a fountain. 

   It’s now Sunday afternoon, and we’re off to see the city on its day of rest, picnic lunch packed and with lush parks awaiting us.  School starts tomorrow – we have to leave home at 8am.  We’re also into serious budget mode with school fees replacing long distance bus travel as our number one cost.  We’re hoping to meet some new friends in class and perhaps some of those we met further north will join us in BA in the next week.

Cultural differences

A brief stop in Sao Paulo

   Paraty was a beautiful little town, it was only a shame we didn’t see its beaches in the sunshine.  Kizzy was well-pleased with her breakfast table though.

   We met up with another couple, Dan and Gita (Aussies, again, although they lived in Lime Grove in Shepherd’s Bush until recently) as we were waiting for the bus out to Sao Paulo.  That was quite fortunate as they were much better organised than us and knew where they were going and what needed to happen to make the transfer to Foz do Iguaçu.  It was also quite handy having company around when I inadvertently struck Kiz in the face with the cricket bat.  I bent down to pick up my hand luggage and the bat handle extending over my right shoulder made a beeline straight for her forehead.  I’m not sure how much longer it will be travelling with us. 

   While Dan and Gita travelled on the 17:30 bus to Foz do Iguaçu, we decided to brave the monster and head into central Sao Paulo, city of 18 million people, before following on the 20:00 bus.  I’m glad we did.  It was raining (it has rained every day that we have been in South America) but not too heavily and we found a tube map that looked a lot like London’s, making us feel very capable in navigating foreign mega-cities.  We headed to the Pinacoteca do Estado for our fix of contemporary art, and swung by the Teatro Municipal and Praça da Republica to take in some of the architectural delights. 

 

   I wasn’t overcome by Sao Paulo as a tourist destination and I’m sure that there are better ways to approach it as a visitor than to spend two and a half hours wandering around a small patch downtown.  What was startling was the very present reality of desperate and pitiful poverty that coats the surfaces of what our guidebook describes as “the gastronomic, fashion and finance capital of South America”.  Where we exited the tube at Luz we were surrounded by rundown buildings.  One office block, 20 stories high, was boarded up and no windows intact below the 10^th floor.  It showed all the signs of having been derelict for a decade, and yet it was crowded with people living there to the point that they were spilling out onto the street, sheltering in its cornices under sheets of blue plastic. 

   As we wandered 900 meters from the art gallery to the theatre, we passed countless homeless and also a woman in tears outside the police station, clinging to a cart with a meagre load of plastic carrier bags and a few sheets of cardboard.  It’s not that cold in Sao Paulo in January and I get the impression that the main change in climate is that it rains less from May to September.  However, the number of people bedded down under any shelter, be it viaduct, doorway or underpass came as a shock in this epicentre of the oft-referenced economic miracle of Brazil.  The favelas of Sao Paulo are a good deal further away from the city centre than is the case in Rio and that seems to have created a space in which those with little or nothing can be stranded between begging in the centre and somewhere to sleep at night.  Although that said, no-one asked for money.  To be truthful, there weren’t really many other people around on a wet Saturday afternoon to beg from. 

Beaches and body image

   Vincenzo asked for more pictures of all the beautiful people that Brazil’s beaches are so famed for.  There have been a number of men on the beach with a great interest in photography.  They stand out and look somewhat sinister.  I’m not trying to cultivate that look and Kizzy has refused to take the photos, so sorry to disappoint you Vincenzo. 

   There is a frank appreciation of the human form on the beaches, especially in Rio.  While we were lazing about on Copacabana there were two guys, dressed in bikinis and wigs, doing television interviews as they passed.  My Portuguese is terrible but from what we could gather they were interested in finding pretty girls in their early twenties and then discussing with their subject an appraisal of their boobs and bum.  The girls were mildly embarrassed but didn’t really seem to mind; they were possibly even flattered, judging by the reactions.  It was also surreal in sleepy little Paraty to see a car going down the main drag towing a billboard advertising the local sex shop.  But that seems the way of it here.  On the beach, it was very clear that Kiz and I were tourists, not just from my white or pink glow, but by virtue of us not wearing a thong and speedos.  They seem to be the national uniform, often accessorised with a large tattoo covering a shoulder or a calf muscle. 

   The young are indeed good looking.  Kizzy holds that the men are actually better looking than the women.  But there is a strange diet in the places we have been and it seems to take its toll on people past the age of thirty.  The five fruit and veg a day is actually eight a day in Brazil, but that is no doubt to make up for the other two food groups being stodge (doughy baked goods with any cheese or meat filling you might want) and grilled meat with an enormous amount of salt.  The men over thirty all seem to have developed beer bellies.  I actually hold my own quite well against my contemporaries, although perhaps not with my presently “bubbly” complexion – the sunburn has settled down into hundreds of mini blisters: not at all appealing.  The women over thirty have an almost universal furrow to their brows, as if they are regularly shaking their heads at the deteriorating state of the menfolk.

It's the journey, not the destination

   The hard thing with writing is that when you leave it a little while you fall out of the habit and by the time you sit down with intent you have too many ideas that should have previously been expressed in a much better order.  So I’m going to put one down up front that just came to me: mum, why haven’t you commented on our blog yet?

   We left Rio for Ilha Grande on Monday and since then we have been without internet or even a reliable power source so I’ve continued writing in my diary but it becomes silly trying to transfer daily prose into the past tense.  We spent our last full day in Rio ascending Pão de Açucar (Sugarloaf Mountain), after reinstating all of Kizzy’s bank cards that had seized up in the flurry of international transactions.  The views across the harbour to Corcovado and the Christo Redentor were spectacular but the day was a bit hazy for good photos (see photo, Panu).  We ended up strolling the beach in the afternoon where the atmosphere was more relaxed than on previous days.  It seems like Rio has a lovely family day vibe on Sundays, certainly along the beaches.  It was as though there were more women around and fewer young-ish men and that happened to relax things.  Occasional bars along the beachfront had live music and there were markets in the near side of the road which was closed to traffic for the day.  There were also three girls dancing suggestively to the live music at one bar and that was a trap that had drawn a certain type of men all into one discreet place that was easily circumnavigated.  Sadly we were too terrified of being mugged (guidebook: "do not take anything to the beach") that we left our camera behind on the first day with the lovely blue skies and sunshine.

   We journeyed to Ilha Grande the following day, by minibus and schooner, with our destination Camping e Cabanas Paradiso.  The camping is obvious – reserve a pitch by the beach, simple.  The cabanas?  We were in a tent.  I don’t mind but the booking was for a cottage.  There are no cottages so I didn’t make a fuss about the tent. 

   To get there we walked for an hour and a quarter in the rain, up and down a very slippery hill.  In a way the rain was a blessing – it gave me an excuse for being drenched on arrival.  In actual fact I was dripping with sweat having carried 25kg (still too heavy!) up and down the hill.  Incidentally, some chap who writes for the Rough Guide tested this and the average backpack weight is 17kg, so between the two of us (Kizzy: 11kg) we’re not far off that.  I need to get more stuff into her bag while she sleeps.

   At “Paradiso” it really was quite lovely.  It’s a small campsite (let’s be honest) on a small beach just a short walk from a slightly less small beach (Palmas), a good hour from anything approaching a link to civilisation.  When we were in the cable car up to Sugarloaf Mountain Kizzy remarked that it was strange to have days in which your attention was focussed on the events before you and not on some more distant anticipation.  Lying on the beach in that remote-ish corner of Ilha Grande I could not think of a more apt thought.  After the rush and bustle of the last month in London, to be in a place where filling your day takes attention to each relaxing detail was a staggering change.  However, I must admit to also being staggered by the ridiculously alcoholic welcome Caiprinhas at that point.  I think I have a fair constitution but two of those at Paradiso (Kiz was gone on the first mouthful of hers) and I was struggling to walk straight. 

Am I not adventurous?

   Kizzy has something of a bone to pick with those who suggested that she might not be the adventurous type.  She has now braved the journey between Palmas and Abraão – one hour and 15 minutes up and down a slippery and treacherous clay track (see photo, Panu) no fewer than 5 times, one of those carrying a heavy pack in the rain.  On two occasions she braved the “rock of death” (again, see photo, Panu) and on Wednesday morning took a valiant role in the massacre of the invading ant horde (no photos – still dealing with post-traumatic stress).  She is very brave and I am very proud of her.  Incidentally, she managed to reconcile the massacre with her vegetarianism: “they’re invading our cottage!”, “It’s self-defence” and my favourite, “they’re like machines, they just won’t die!”

   We recovered from that ordeal with a lovely few hours on what felt like our own private beach with blue skies and morning sunshine topping up Kizzy’s tan and threatening to burn me through my factor 30 sunscreen.  In fact it did burn me (see photo) but on the bright side I have discovered that that my new sunglasses have a super-power: they can tell how burnt I will look in an hour’s time, long before it is visible to the naked eye.  I thought they were rose-tinted at first – I looked a little pink through the sunnies but without them I retained an unblemished pasty hue.  I stayed in the sun for another 30 minutes and then went for lunch, still luminous white.  Over the next hour the pink emerged, finally settling on a tender fuscia.  Lesson for the day – listen to the sunnies and stay out of the midday sun!

   We met a lovely couple at Paradiso, Wellington and Tachi, two missionaries from Sao Paulo travelling with Wellington’s sun Viktor and a friend Marcel.  Viktor must be about 14.  He’s a sweet kid who speaks English well and has an endearing habit of patting me on the shoulder every time we passed each other, although with the sunburn I had to stifle the winces for fear of hurting his feelings. 

   Yesterday (finally, almost up to date) we took the water taxi back to Abraão (no way were we doing that journey again with packs and sunburnt shoulders).  Although it was prohibitively expensive (£40 for a twenty minute trip) it was actually quite nice to see the island from offshore and Kiz was very excited at her first trip in a “speedboat” – it was a tinny with a 40hp outboard on the back.  

   Ilha Grande was lovely – we made new friends on the transfer there and then on departure too so I was able to give out the first of the calling cards (very exciting and self-fulfilling moment!).  It seems that couples naturally gravitate towards couples, and unsurprisingly the two couples we’ve met are both from Australia.  The cricket bat seems to attract them!  I knew it was a good idea.  We had a lovely dinner in Paratry last night: we’re cheap so we went somewhere (with our new friends Ben and Zac from Melbourne) that you pay by the kilo so we could load up on almost weightless salads and then treated ourselves to some Acai for dessert – thanks for the tip Farhan.  Paraty is a charming seaside village with cobbled streets and pretty little shops and lots of beautiful beaches.  Now that it’s stopped raining we might go visit some of them.

From the Hilton to Che Lagarto

Yesterday

   Four hours after landing in Rome we were happily ensconced in our room at the Hilton, having washed and refreshed both ourselves and our belongings.  This was to prove an unfortunate contrast to Rio where it took four hours just to check in to the hostel.  We reassured ourselves during the wait that at least this way we had successfully managed half a day in Rio before being mugged for our backpacks with all our worldly belongings (good luck running off with my backpack – still too bloody heavy!).

   Rome on Thursday was a joy.  We had a leisurely stroll from the Piazza Campodiglioni to the Trevi Fountain.  Beautiful blue skies and sunshine – I was in shirtsleeves for the entire January day.  We took in the Spanish steps, the Colliseum and the Roman Forum as well before heading back to the Fountain for dinner and then off to the hotel to pick up our bags and check in for the flight to Rio. 

   Landing in Rio was marvellous.  Patchy clouds prevailed but it just looked hot and the in flight information forecast a high of 36 degrees.  At the airport, amidst the wreckage of torn and broken luggage that emerged at baggage reclaim, our bags appeared pristine and unharmed – a minor miracle by the look of everyone else’s.  The bus into Rio took us past the Macarana stadium and between Sugarloaf Mountain and Christo Redentor.  We found our way from the bus stop to the hostel without any drama and assumed the self-congratulatory airs of a couple who had successfully navigated what the guidebook implies is the most beautiful and also the most dangerous city you are likely to encounter. 

   At the hostel it turned out they had no record of our booking but this did not come as a surprise to the girl at the desk, it’s a regular occurrence evidently.  Although they had no space at Che Lagarto, she found us an apartment near another hostel, which would be ready for us “soon”.  Needless to say “soon” is a flexible notion.  As for the apartment, we travelled to various places in Copacabana looking for an address that didn’t exist.  At one point we talked our way into a seedy looking tenement block and knocked on the door of suite 504 to be greeted not by the manager but by three young men in various states of undress trying to escape the midday heat.  The confusion playing across all five faces in that doorway was something of a relief – it was nice to know our response was a universal one and that we weren’t going nuts. 

   Having booked into a single bedroom with shared bathroom facilities, we are now settled into a two bedroom apartment with our own kitchen, bathroom and separate toilet.  We are not entirely sure if this has anything to do with the hostel where we were booked (and have already paid).  But the chap who let us in and gave us the key seemed pretty happy to leave us to it until Segunda-feira (Monday) so I’m sure we’ll work it out then.  If not, we’re leaving early anyway.

Today

   We’ve just spent another day in Rio.  I say day but it’s only 12:45, we just made a mess of our clocks and thought it was nearly 5pm.  It wasn’t until we were walking back to our apartment that we realised every single clock in the city couldn’t be wrong by precisely 4 hours.  There we were, lying on the beach and taking pleasure that for the predicted 38 degrees, it wasn’t actually unbearably hot.  We marvelled at how it wasn’t that busy for a weekend, and the madness of people jogging past in the midday sun. 

   The two glorious expanses of Copacabana beach and Ipanema beach must take at least two hours to walk from one end to the other.  Two deep bands of sand, each curving away in a gentle ark from Ipanema point, which divides the two.  At what it seems was 8:20 this morning, Copacabana seemed ridiculously large and empty.  It’s only the crowds of tourists and Brazillians that put the beach into perspective.  I don’t know how many people it takes to make 5km of beach look full, but there were that many people down there today.  On the beach, in the cafés and ten deep in the water for most of Ipanema and the more sheltered stretch of Copacabana.

   The other thing we noticed walking back from the beach is the security situation.  Every apartment block almost without fail has what is effectively a cage around the entryway, as though expecting a hostile visitation.  These high metal railings and enclosures aren’t threatening or ugly, necessarily.  They are striking by how matter of fact they are.  Not an afterthought or an addition sparked by some unfortunate disturbance.  These features are part of the building design.  It’s one of a number of characteristics that suggests an undercurrent of insecurity within relatively prosperous beach-side neighbourhoods that back on to the edgier favelas. That said, my highlight has been the traffic cops.  I’m not sure they’re actually police, I think they just direct traffic, but somehow in their baggy trousers, flouro vests and sunglasses these guys manage to make the job look pretty cool.

The start of a very big adventure

   We are in Rome and I am calling this the end of the first day, although it’s 1am in the morning now.  It feels like a full day of travelling even though our flight only left London four hours ago and already I’ve bathed and shaved and washed some clothes and Kizzy has fallen asleep watching the market indexes on NBC World.  

   Our departure was like so many things this past year: visible from a long way off yet such a surprise as it happened.  We stayed in Brighton last night and from the moment the kids bounced in at 6:15am it was action all the way; except for a very pleasant and relaxing 40 minutes in the Laundromat for our last wash before we left; a new experience for me, but not really “travel” yet, is it?  It was lovely to have Rob see us off in Hammersmith as we tried (and failed) to get some US currency.  And lovely too to see Rabea at Heathrow for our last meal before we left.  Thanks so much both of you for the lovely send-off. 

   With Kizzy having taught me the art of coin-operated washing AND drying, it was only fair that I shared my secrets for backpack travel.  Duty free have samples of your favourite cologne and also a lovely Clarins eye gel to help refresh you for the flight.  And once your bags are in the hold there’s really no fuss if you turn up at the gate about 20 minutes after the screens tell you the plane is “boarding”.  Everyone knows nobody gets on the plane until they switch to “final call” and you’re still ok to board for the five whole minutes of “gate closing”. 

   What we both learnt was that like drink bottles and any other closed vessel with some air in it, a fountain pen should be handled carefully at 20’000 feet.  We’ve also learnt that washable ink is not bothered by being washed.  This lesson is an easy one to remember when you have only one pair of trousers for 7 ½ months.  

10 days to go

   It is 1st January 2012, I don’t have a hangover and we are only 10 days away from departing on our “big adventure”: 6 months overland from Argentina to Canada.  So far Kizzy has booked the flight to Rio, arranged the travel insurance and visas, sorted out accommodation for the first seven nights and packed up our entire flat.   I have thought a lot about the itinerary and read several history and travel books on Latin America.  We have the next week to organise thoughts on a possible route map and to finalise the list of things that will go in our backpacks.

   On those two questions, does anyone have any pearls of wisdom to offer? 

   Our route will roughly go from Rio overland to Buenos Aires, via Ihla Grande and Iguazu Falls, then a flight down to Tierra del Fuego, before heading north to Columbia up the West coast of South America.  Things on our list include a couple of days in the Torres del Paine National Park, some time in Bariloche and the Argentine lakes district, La Paz and Lake Titicaca, Machu Pichu, the Amazon basin in Ecuador and finally Cartagena on the Carribean coast.  After that we will fly to Panama City and drift up to the US border with a decent amount of time on a beach somewhere in between.  From the US border we will buy or rent a car and drive to Vancouver via Grand Canyon, Yosemite, San Francisco and Seattle.  Then we will take a quick flight over to New York and mooch on up to Boston and Toronto.


   In terms of what to take our current points of contention are:

• Sleeping bags - yes or no?
• Cricket bat?  (I think this makes so much sense – good talking point at customs, surely)
• Should Kizzy take proper walking boots or walking shoes?  The default position is that she is taking flip flops, sandals and a pair of trainers.  (I’m taking hiking boots and sandals)
• Should I take the lightweight trousers that are still a fraction too small or should I stop banking on that first bout of gastro helping my figure, bite the bullet and by a new pair?

   Any advice gratefully received!