The following morning after our first of two ham and cheese toasties for the day, Anita and I took the 13:40 bus to Sao Paulo to the West heading toward the falls. It was a 6 hour journey and fairly comfortable as the seats went back to almost horizontal and they played the movie "Wayne´s World" on repeat the entire time.
We were lucky in that we arrived in Sao Paulo and immediately managed to jump on the 16 hour overnight coach to Foz do Iguacu. This journey was quite possibly the worst journey I have ever experienced in my life. When we left Paraty it was roughtly 30 degrees and hot, while we tried to sleep on the coach it was around 4 degrees outside and the air conditioning was blowing on us at full blast. Anita and I expecting sun and sea for our entire time in South America had at most a cardigan which was jammed at the bottom of our rucksack. Of course our rucksack was safely stowed away in the coach hold. We actually thought we might die from exposure on this coach. Grumpy, frozen to our marrow we disembarked in Iguacu 16 hours later where all the locals were in woolly hats, big coats and mitts and their breath misted the air. I walked into the bus station in my jean shorts and Anita in her t-shirt to bemused local stares. We ran to the loos and pretty much emptied our rucksacks clothing ourselves in vest tops and other inappropriate layers.
Our only salvation at this point would be to arrive at a warm hostel, have a hot shower and get into our sleeping bag liners. We rocked up at the only hostel we could find in town, one totally open to the elements with outside showers and no heating until 9pm. It´s ok, it´s ok, just a hot shower, that´s all we need... I shuffled out to the shower block shivering and turned on the shower. Stone cold. Oh My God. I was getting irrationally angry at this point and just wanted to cry.
The next day, no surprise, both Anita and I had a cold and felt like death warmed up. It was monsoon raining outside and about 5 degrees again. We managed to get dressed and head over to Foz do Iguacu, which actually in spite of all the pain, cold, rain and discomfort was worth it times a million. They were absolutely massive, thundering and beautiful. The rain made them all the more magnificent and we managed to walk our to viewing platform in the middle as the waters raged beneath us, we screamed and giggled in excitement and kept saying ´oh my god, oh my god!!´. A true thrill and absolutely terrifying. By the time we made it back to the hostel there was not an inch of us that was dry, our walking boots like puddles but we felt totally exhilarated by the experience.
The following day we mooched about the main town Foz do Iguacu, which was a weird mix between a Middle-America town, an Australian town and a Brazilian Town. Taking time out today, we were starting to see the pleasure in the small things, such as having dry socks and paper towels in the toilets. One of our happiest moments we were starting to notice is every time we came across the perfect size shape and consistency plastic bag. They can be used to separate stuff in our rucksacks, hold our ham and cheese toasties, store wet toiletries. There is no end to their usefulness! We salvage and hoard them in our rucksacks like candy, and get plastic bag jealousy when one of us gets a really good one. Ham and cheese toasties are beginning to become a luxury, this morning Anita said she was going to make a ´sandwich´, which actually turned out to be a peice of dry bread that she nibbled on like the little match girl. Endless hilarity.
That evening we then caught a flight in the evening up to Lima, Peru where we would gradually work our way back down the continent.
Wednesday, 24 August 2011
Ilha Grande and Paraty 16th - 19th August 2011
It was time to start feeling like a true traveller and work our way out of the city. Anita and I both agreed that although we had loved Rio, we were getting itchy feet. We took a bus from the Rodovaria (bus station) north of the city for Agra Dos Reis to the West, then on a boat to Ilha Grande. Approaching the island was very interesting, Anita and I paralleled it to watching the movie Jurassic Park with rolling hills covered in dense folliage and palm trees. The approach to the port at dusk was just like arriving at Utopia. Pretty lights lined the shore and rustic furniture spilled out of restaurants along wooden boulevards, and not a car in sight.
We started to quickly realise that the best way to get tips on what to do was to simply talk with other travellers. Two girls that we met in the Biergarten Hostel Lindsay and Jenny suggested the 2.5 hour trek to the Lopez Mendes beach on the south side of the island, which we did the following morning. On the way we passed these little monkey-rat-squirrel things on the way that on first sight looked quite cute, but we decided they looked like they wanted to nick your wallet so we shuffled along quickly. The beach was like paradise beach and we stayed lolling about swimming and sleeping for the best part of the afternoon before taking the boat back to the main port.
One of the best money saving ploys we had discovered in our short time in South America was to eat a ham and cheese toastie from the free buffett at breakfast, then make another one for lunch. So up to this point we had classified what we ate into one of two categories of meals: ham and cheese toastie or NOT ham and cheese toastie. This allowed us to splash out on dinner. By this point in the trip we calculated we had eaten at least a dozen ham and cheese toasties and counting. Today we made our toastie and headed back to the mainland and on a local bus to a little colonial town called Paraty a couple of hours away.
Paraty was so quaint you just wanted to roll it up and take it with you in your pocket! Cobbled streets, well maintained little squares with white washed colonial buildings lining the perimeter. Brightly coloured windows all around, pinks, blues, purples, greens, and matching flowered vines surrounding every entrance door. There was a strong European influence, and little trinket shops and well decorated little restaurants we around every turn. Just lovely! Our hostel was on the beach, but we were starting to see the downgrade in hostel facilities, and we were sharing a tiny room stacked 3 beds high with 8 other guys, who openly admitted they hadn´t done any clothes washing for roughly 3 weeks. Fortunately, however, we had arrived just in time for a samba festival that many locals attended each year. After a few drinks on the beach we got our groove on and watched all the live acts. It was great fun and interesting as there were many Brazilans who travelled to the town especially for the event.
We decided to stay another night for the festival and the following night had a barbeque with some other travellers and a few of the local guys Tomas from Argentina, and Eddie from Brazil. We all sat around the barbeque talking culture and football, mixing the Brazilian language Portugese with English. We ate melt in the mouth steak and listened to London Drum & Bass music from the sound system as the waves lap the beach. It was amazing how easy it is build bridges between cultures when food and football is involved!
It was then to bed after a late night as we tried to get our head around the fact we had a 21 hour bus journey west to the Iguacu Falls the following day.
We started to quickly realise that the best way to get tips on what to do was to simply talk with other travellers. Two girls that we met in the Biergarten Hostel Lindsay and Jenny suggested the 2.5 hour trek to the Lopez Mendes beach on the south side of the island, which we did the following morning. On the way we passed these little monkey-rat-squirrel things on the way that on first sight looked quite cute, but we decided they looked like they wanted to nick your wallet so we shuffled along quickly. The beach was like paradise beach and we stayed lolling about swimming and sleeping for the best part of the afternoon before taking the boat back to the main port.
One of the best money saving ploys we had discovered in our short time in South America was to eat a ham and cheese toastie from the free buffett at breakfast, then make another one for lunch. So up to this point we had classified what we ate into one of two categories of meals: ham and cheese toastie or NOT ham and cheese toastie. This allowed us to splash out on dinner. By this point in the trip we calculated we had eaten at least a dozen ham and cheese toasties and counting. Today we made our toastie and headed back to the mainland and on a local bus to a little colonial town called Paraty a couple of hours away.
Paraty was so quaint you just wanted to roll it up and take it with you in your pocket! Cobbled streets, well maintained little squares with white washed colonial buildings lining the perimeter. Brightly coloured windows all around, pinks, blues, purples, greens, and matching flowered vines surrounding every entrance door. There was a strong European influence, and little trinket shops and well decorated little restaurants we around every turn. Just lovely! Our hostel was on the beach, but we were starting to see the downgrade in hostel facilities, and we were sharing a tiny room stacked 3 beds high with 8 other guys, who openly admitted they hadn´t done any clothes washing for roughly 3 weeks. Fortunately, however, we had arrived just in time for a samba festival that many locals attended each year. After a few drinks on the beach we got our groove on and watched all the live acts. It was great fun and interesting as there were many Brazilans who travelled to the town especially for the event.
We decided to stay another night for the festival and the following night had a barbeque with some other travellers and a few of the local guys Tomas from Argentina, and Eddie from Brazil. We all sat around the barbeque talking culture and football, mixing the Brazilian language Portugese with English. We ate melt in the mouth steak and listened to London Drum & Bass music from the sound system as the waves lap the beach. It was amazing how easy it is build bridges between cultures when food and football is involved!
It was then to bed after a late night as we tried to get our head around the fact we had a 21 hour bus journey west to the Iguacu Falls the following day.
Rio de Janeiro 11 - 15 August 2011
Rio was just a fantastic city, and it was the people we met that just made it a million times better. So lucky on the first day we met a lovely girl called Laura, same age as us at 27 and Anita and I immediately hit it off with her like a house on fire. She had been working in Hong Kong for 5 years as a teacher then had decided to up sticks and go travelling around South America on her own. It was so refreshing to see a girl confidently forging her own way in life who was interesting, open minded and a laugh too. Books Hostel was then descended upon by a group of 13 lads from New Zealand, who would you believe came all the way over for a couple of weeks on a stag do, they were a real laugh and when we weren´t out and about sightseeing or taking our lives in our hands on the local buses we were hanging out with these guys.
On the first full day Anita and I went for a long walk through the city, the place has got serious style and the people a real sass, graffiti is everywhere but purposeful and artistic and seems to be very much embraced as part of the culture in Rio. We stumbled upon a "weight and pay" buffett in the north of the city, which was our first intro to Brazilian food. We poked and proded and sniffed the food, sampled some and spent the whole meal not in conversation but saying ´hmmm....mmmmm.... interesting.... that´s nice... what´s that? It looks like chicken has the texture of potato but tastes like tofu?" Whatever. In it went.
In the evenings we went down to the hostel bar, which was basically a table with caprinhas on it. Caprinhas, wow, if I knew that there weren´t mixer cocktails but actually just a glass of pure alcohol with some fresh lime on top I would not have drunk so much! We headed out in our local area Lapa, which had a fantastic street party on every friday and saturday with samba music playing and dancing.
As we decided it was time to be like true backpackers Anita and I decided to cook our own food in the hostel so went and bought some pasta with veg and salami to make... some kind of dish. We´d been students before, it´d be fine. The hob in the hostel had a flame the size of a lit match so after a bit of rough guessing decided to leave the pasta and sauce on for 30 minutes instead of 10. Mistake. By the time it had cooked it looked more like green porridge. But we sat down and ate it in silence and at the end we just looked at each other and burst out laughing, which got more hysterical when we salvaged an old ice cream tupperwear box from the bottom of the cupboard under the sink, spooned the mush in and put it in the fridge for later. I actually ate it cold the following day, a true trooper! Anita warmed hers up and literally slapped a whole pack of ham over the top to give it some flavour, it pained me to watch her take each mouthful.
We spent a few days touring the city, down to Copacobana beach, which although beautiful and hot I sat there in my hiking boots clinging to my bag for dear life because of the mugging horror stories I heard, much to Anita´s amusement. The Christ statue was a real highlight, the people of the city have a real pride for it and I had seen men on more than one occasion with large tattoos in its honour. Santa Teresa was also a very pretty little spot, and not unlike the winding streets of Italian villages, with cobbled streets and bright flowers spilling over weather-worn shop fronts.
The event that really made Rio for both Anita and I was the favela tour. A favela is the poorest part of the city, slums that seem to organically grow up the sides of the Rio hills. We went to the largest one in Rio, 200,000 people. We had mixed feelings about it to begin with as surely it was just asking for trouble, wealthy looking tourists dropped in the middle of an area organised by drug lords and criminals. All of us got off the tour bus and we must looked quite the sight huddled together entering the mouth of the slums. We had to get to the top by motorbike, which was actually a taxi service and the best way to get through the winding streets of the favela. We would then walk down, stopping a various places along the way. Now THAT was real fun, both our first time on a motorbike. We sped up the main street of the favela, weaving in and out of traffic, skimming buses with the skin of our knees and dodging people on the way and the taxi drivers shouting "go faster faster for the girls!" in Portugese, no helmet of course!
Our tour guide Marco was full of beans, a real charasmatic, funny and interesting guy and with a real passion for the favela. The only thing I can compare these overhung higgly piggledy streets to was a concrete rabbit warren. There were electricity wires and pipes everywhere, the residents just tapped in as and when they could. Men walked past us with pistols slung around their hips. We stopped at a gallery and a look out point near the top while Marco explained the history of the favela, the conflict between police and the drug lords in the favela, how the area is run much like any government would run its people with adminitrators and accountants and security and recruitment, which did baffle the mind somewhat. The favela´s "soldiers" would do military training through the streets with their Uzis and AK 47s while kids walk past on their way to school, it´s quite surreal.
The people here loved it, they were proud to show their home to the ´gringos´ (us tourists), which made us all feel a twinge of shame that we thought it might be like looking at animals in a zoo coming into the slums. As we weaved our way down the streets it became apparent to us that actually this was the safest we had felt so far in Rio. As Marco points out, there is no petty crime in the favela as the leaders here would not tolerate it and in the past have apparetly burned people alive in the streets for such crimes to set an example to the others in the community. Extreme of course, but having come from the UK where teenagers were smashing in shop windows and looting I couldn´t help thinking the UK government could learn a thing or two from the way things were operated here!
So after feeling very humbled by the experience in the favelas we left Rio no a reflective note and headed on a 2 hour bus journey west to Ilha Grande.
On the first full day Anita and I went for a long walk through the city, the place has got serious style and the people a real sass, graffiti is everywhere but purposeful and artistic and seems to be very much embraced as part of the culture in Rio. We stumbled upon a "weight and pay" buffett in the north of the city, which was our first intro to Brazilian food. We poked and proded and sniffed the food, sampled some and spent the whole meal not in conversation but saying ´hmmm....mmmmm.... interesting.... that´s nice... what´s that? It looks like chicken has the texture of potato but tastes like tofu?" Whatever. In it went.
In the evenings we went down to the hostel bar, which was basically a table with caprinhas on it. Caprinhas, wow, if I knew that there weren´t mixer cocktails but actually just a glass of pure alcohol with some fresh lime on top I would not have drunk so much! We headed out in our local area Lapa, which had a fantastic street party on every friday and saturday with samba music playing and dancing.
As we decided it was time to be like true backpackers Anita and I decided to cook our own food in the hostel so went and bought some pasta with veg and salami to make... some kind of dish. We´d been students before, it´d be fine. The hob in the hostel had a flame the size of a lit match so after a bit of rough guessing decided to leave the pasta and sauce on for 30 minutes instead of 10. Mistake. By the time it had cooked it looked more like green porridge. But we sat down and ate it in silence and at the end we just looked at each other and burst out laughing, which got more hysterical when we salvaged an old ice cream tupperwear box from the bottom of the cupboard under the sink, spooned the mush in and put it in the fridge for later. I actually ate it cold the following day, a true trooper! Anita warmed hers up and literally slapped a whole pack of ham over the top to give it some flavour, it pained me to watch her take each mouthful.
We spent a few days touring the city, down to Copacobana beach, which although beautiful and hot I sat there in my hiking boots clinging to my bag for dear life because of the mugging horror stories I heard, much to Anita´s amusement. The Christ statue was a real highlight, the people of the city have a real pride for it and I had seen men on more than one occasion with large tattoos in its honour. Santa Teresa was also a very pretty little spot, and not unlike the winding streets of Italian villages, with cobbled streets and bright flowers spilling over weather-worn shop fronts.
The event that really made Rio for both Anita and I was the favela tour. A favela is the poorest part of the city, slums that seem to organically grow up the sides of the Rio hills. We went to the largest one in Rio, 200,000 people. We had mixed feelings about it to begin with as surely it was just asking for trouble, wealthy looking tourists dropped in the middle of an area organised by drug lords and criminals. All of us got off the tour bus and we must looked quite the sight huddled together entering the mouth of the slums. We had to get to the top by motorbike, which was actually a taxi service and the best way to get through the winding streets of the favela. We would then walk down, stopping a various places along the way. Now THAT was real fun, both our first time on a motorbike. We sped up the main street of the favela, weaving in and out of traffic, skimming buses with the skin of our knees and dodging people on the way and the taxi drivers shouting "go faster faster for the girls!" in Portugese, no helmet of course!
Our tour guide Marco was full of beans, a real charasmatic, funny and interesting guy and with a real passion for the favela. The only thing I can compare these overhung higgly piggledy streets to was a concrete rabbit warren. There were electricity wires and pipes everywhere, the residents just tapped in as and when they could. Men walked past us with pistols slung around their hips. We stopped at a gallery and a look out point near the top while Marco explained the history of the favela, the conflict between police and the drug lords in the favela, how the area is run much like any government would run its people with adminitrators and accountants and security and recruitment, which did baffle the mind somewhat. The favela´s "soldiers" would do military training through the streets with their Uzis and AK 47s while kids walk past on their way to school, it´s quite surreal.
The people here loved it, they were proud to show their home to the ´gringos´ (us tourists), which made us all feel a twinge of shame that we thought it might be like looking at animals in a zoo coming into the slums. As we weaved our way down the streets it became apparent to us that actually this was the safest we had felt so far in Rio. As Marco points out, there is no petty crime in the favela as the leaders here would not tolerate it and in the past have apparetly burned people alive in the streets for such crimes to set an example to the others in the community. Extreme of course, but having come from the UK where teenagers were smashing in shop windows and looting I couldn´t help thinking the UK government could learn a thing or two from the way things were operated here!
So after feeling very humbled by the experience in the favelas we left Rio no a reflective note and headed on a 2 hour bus journey west to Ilha Grande.
Tuesday, 23 August 2011
Rio Newbies - 11 August 2011
After an 11 hour plane journey we finally made it to Rio, absolutely shattered. Our first introduction to Rio was on a local bus, and was the most terrifying white knuckle ride I´d ever experienced. Weaving in and out of traffic and screeching around corners, I actually thought I was going to die before even starting the 10 months. Anita found it hilarious for some reason. We struggled to figure out the correct stop to get off on the only map we possessed, whilst simultaneously rattling around inside this bus like nuts in a maraca attempting to put on our rucksacks. We disembarked in the middle of a traffic island at 12am in the heart of the city and the first thing I realised was I had managed to leave the map on the bus, which by this point was a mere dot on the horizon. Our immediate reaction was to just burst into fits of ironic laughter, sods law is transatlantic. All our worldy possessions in tow we set off in search of our first three nights accomodation, Books Hostel in Lapa. After wandering the streets and attempting to mask our fresh-off-the-boat look with a sense of purpose, we hailed one of the city´s hundred of yellow taxis. I showed the taxi driver the map and quickly realised charades would fare far better than an Portugese I knew; I pointed to the address I had written down before leaving the UK. The taxi driver squinted for all he was worth and held the paper so far away from him it was actually outside the window of the car. Nerves started to kick in. After a bit of dab handed negotation we agreed 10 Brazilian Reais to go what turn out to be two blocks drive away and was not a bargain at all, unsurprisingly the taxi driver managed to crash into a concrete bollard like a dodgems car in that time, scaring us witless. Anita handed him the 10 Reais and in our fluster of disorganisation he handed us back 5 reais saying it was the wrong amount. Anita handed him another 10 Reais. Our first experience of being ripped off and it had been less than an hour in the country. It was straight to sleep in our 14 bed dorm.
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