Buenos Aires
The answer to the macchiato question was yes, and thus commenced a furious coffee binge. It was an all-round binge actually: we dined out in lovely restaurants, drank wine with abandon, and shattered our previously well held budget. Buenos Aires is a lovely but hectic modern city with wide avenues punctuated by huge statues of various liberators and fathers of democracy and tall obelisks and columns. We sat in famous cafes staffed efficiently by fleets of jacketed and vested waiters; almost every cafe waiter in the city is a middle-aged male. I am ignorant of the cultural forces creating this situation. We saw a tango show and even took a lesson, and can now tango very slowly for about six seconds without repeating any moves. We took a day trip to the pretty but sleepy Uruguayan town of Colonia de Sacramento and drank coffee there too. The best meal of the trip (opinion not necessarily shared by all participants) was at El Pobre Luis, a restaurant for carnivores with a gigantic grill called a parilla in the middle of it. Blood sausage, then little curly intestiney things with pate or something in them, followed by steak and washed down with malbec. I ordered one serve of steak which turned out to be two steaks, both of which were staggeringly tender. Steak knives weren´t needed. We saw Evita´s grave with a zillion other tourists, and I was moved in the opposite direction to them by the absurdly elaborate mausoleum and the atmosphere of mindless hero-worship.
Iguazu Falls
We travelled to Puerto Iguazu by luxurious bus, the best bus trip of the tour. They showed a decent movie in English and I was served wine with dinner and whisky after. The day after we arrived we headed out to the falls which are extraordinary. They make Niagara look like the contents of a toppled kitchen water jug pouring over the edge of a small table.They are right on the border with Brazil and from the Argentinian side tourists can get right up close to the walls of water and view them from above and below. A waterproof jacket is required. On the Brazilian side the view is more panoramic and we could see the whole wall, from the wild "Garganta del Diablo" horseshoe-shaped cliffs on the left along a white wall of falls that must be more than a kilometre wide. The water crashes down and it is impossible to tell how far due to the explosive spray. Every person (there were many) present looked thrilled except for one child (of at least four years and still sucking a pacifier) who screamed in fear and buried her face into dad´s shoulder. It was a major highlight of our trip (the falls, although the kid's tantrum was pretty amusing).
Seeing the Brazilian side of the falls required intense engagement with public transport. Below is a catalogue of our bus rides on the day of 10 April.
1. Bus from hostel to Puerto Iguazu terminal
2. Bus to Brazilian border, passport stamps etc.
3. Bus from border to Foz do Iguaçu urban terminal
4. Bus from urban terminal to rodoviario (bigger inter-city bus terminal); bus tickets and future tours organised
5. Bus from rodoviario back to urban terminal
6. Bus from urban terminal to falls park
7. Park bus from visitors centre to falls viewing area
8. Park bus back to visitors centre
9. Bus from park to urban terminal
10. Bus from urban terminal to rodoviario
11. Bus from rodoviario to unknown bus hub, where we changed buses
12. Bus from unknown hub to Campo Grande, our next destination
Anyone who has been on more than 12 different buses in a day is invited to make a claim for the title.
Campo Grande/Pantanal
Campo Grande is a city in Brazil´s south west from where one can travel into the Pantanal, a wetland populated by interesting wildlife. We paid for a cheap tour into this region and we paid for it, if you know what I mean. The staff were overworked and sour, the guide a smart arse, and the schedule loose and rarely inspirational. However! We caught piranhas; saw an armadillo, deer, jabiru (slightly different to Australian ones), some rodent called something like acucho, some other enormous rodent called capybara (that is oddly at home in the water), many birds, howler monkeys, and shitloads of caiman (little wimpy crocodiles).
Several Israelis were on our tour including Noy, a 22yo former Israel Army infantry officer enjoying his post-national service travel. Over lunch he confided that he and his travelling companion were a little anxious about crossing from Brazil into Bolivia, having heard rumours of banditry and other anti-tourist shenanigans. Noy said "It's not really a problem if there is just one guy with a gun, but if there is more than one guy it gets a bit complicated". "What will happen if it's just one guy?" I asked. Noy shrugged. "You'd take him down would you?". "Of course" said Noy, and then "And we would probably just shoot him and leave him by the side of the road. I don't think anyone would care about him". I made a mental note not to fuck with Noy.
The other Israelis were a female and a male (whose names escape me; let's say Jack and Jill) travelling together. We assumed they were a couple until we began to observe Jack's behaviour a little more carefully. He spoke Spanish; when Mel asked him about this he said he had learned Spanish so he could go to sell skin care products in Spain. At another point we saw a capybara while on a "jeep safari" (in a ute tray driving from the camp to a boat along a dirt road) and Jack leapt off the truck to photograph it from close up. Mel said "Blow it a kiss" and Jack did so with such a flourish that our doubts were sealed: Jack was not interested in Jill. Just to make sure, we asked Noy if they were a couple; he looked at us as he might look at a Bolivian bandit demanding he hand over his bags and said "Can't you see what is going on here?". I wanted to ask how that kind of thing went over in the Israeli army but had adopted a policy of asking Noy one question at a time.
The final Pantanal insult was the way our driver continually performed calisthenics to avoid falling asleep all the way back to Campo Grande. I spent the whole four hours in a state of cat-like readiness to seize the wheel should we have drifted off course. We made it back alive but I decided to reject the tour agent's request to be my friend on Facebook (hopefully he interprets the subtext correctly and the tours improve; actually I don't care).
Sao Paulo
Well well well, little old me in the world's third biggest city! I guess this is more likely than me turning up in the world's third smallest city. Other tourists and residents we canvassed had provided mixed reviews of Sao Paulo, from "it has great nightlife" to "don't go to Sao Paulo" (actually, the same guy said both those things; our survey was not comprehensive). We went anyway and had a pretty good time. It is genuinely vast: we took the elevator to the viewing platform high on the Empire State Building-imitating Edificio Banespa and could not see the city's limits. It is flat and the viewing platform is in the most interesting building so the view is only memorable for the lack of nature.
This was our first real look at Brazil and it's people and we liked what we saw: they are friendly, energetic and musical. And they drink like fish. Beers are mostly served in long neck bottles in double-size all-around stubby holders and they arrive cold and stay cold. What they lack in variety (the beers, definitely not the people) they make up for in drinkability. The other local drink is the caipirinha, a cocktail made of the sugar cane syrup cachaca shaken with sugar, limes and ice. Research on this drink revealed that it is very potent, so potent that we lost our memories and performed identical research the following night.
Some other stuff about Brazil and Brazilians (the people, not the grooming method):
Many adults have braces on their teeth.
Lots of quite big kids (four, five years old) still suck on pacifiers.
Jeans are worn very tight, usually attractively.
Heels are very, very high.
Portuguese looks a lot like Spanish on paper but sounds like something else altogether; an impossible to understand and pronounce something else.
Porn is prominent in street magazine stands; magazine covers especially feature bottoms in extreme close up.
There are numerous evangelical churches, almost always full of people.
Paraty
If the jeans are tight in Sao Paulo the bikinis are minute to the same magnitude on the beaches around Paraty. Body size and shape have little bearing on the amount of the body left visible while swimming and sunbaking. Aside from this (perhaps in part because of this), Paraty is a lovely old World Heritage town perched on a magnificent series of beaches on rugged tropical coastline south of Rio. The best local dish is the moqueca: fish and other seafood cooked in coconut milk and other stuff in a clay pot. Superb with the near-tasteless beer Skol. We spent three or four days here lying on the beautiful beaches and dipping in the lovely waters and discussing the views, natural and human. We took a beach-hopping boat cruise featuring a live guitarist and a woman whose tiny bikini earned her the nickname "Tiny Triangles". Seriously, the bikinis are small. I could go on about it but it's late.
Rio de Janeiro
We lobbed in Rio excited but perhaps as much about heading to New York in five days as arriving in the "cidade maravilhosa". Our time in Rio was mixed. We stayed in Santa Teresa, a cool arty bohemian neighbourhood perched on a hill high above the city centre. Walking down the hill took us into Lapa, a party neighbourhood where alcoholic drinks were cheap and plentiful and samba music played from nearly every bar. The walk down could be a little fraught: the smallest wrong turn took the foolish tourist from a respectable set of steps into a very unpleasant ghetto with unconscious bodies lining the streets. Another small detour led us to the beautifully decorated steps that some would remember from a Snoop Dogg and Pharell Williams video clip of some years ago (falsetto: "Beautiful, I just want you to know, you're my favourite girl"). Rio's guide book "city of contrasts" reputation is earned.
The favelas are interesting (we took a safe guided tour mum): guarded by heavily armed scouts, they are police no-go zones where a whole other system of law and order exists. The tiny streets are covered in trash but the people mostly looked healthy and happy and (aside from the mountains of cocaine) there is a fairly normal economy operating. The city's beaches are beautiful and probably earn their places in their respective songs, although the high rises behind don't help the situation. The competitive but friendly energy of the Brazilians prevails as they heckle and applaud amateur beach volleyball players and try to out-strut each other in their tiny swimmers. On the beach you can buy beer, iced tea, snacks, sarongs, and even bikinis. has anyone ever arrived at the beach and realised they forgot their bikini?
We partied in Lapa with some other Aussies from the hostel and their local friend. It was a long and heavy night, really the first bender of the trip, and I paid the next day with a headache and the horror of hearing about how I behaved. I will leave the details out as my fiance's mum might read this. The next day we tried to take the cable car up the Sugarloaf mountain for the magnificent city views but it was broken down. We were successful the next day and the views were worth two trips as the sun set over the city and it's surrounding mountains.
The breakdown of the cable car, the hectic and hot city streets, the high price of everything, the apparently rife alcoholism; all these things got in the way of our total enjoyment of the great energy of the people, the football (see Maracana entry), the music, the beaches, and the physical beauty of the city (from a distance). Adding insult to injury, Spain and Netherlands-themed Havainanas were widely available but no Australia version could be found. It was a sweet and sour bite of the Rio apple. The Big Apple awaits.
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