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Published: October 12th 2009
Days 124 - 149: Bogota (Col), Jericoacoara (Bra), Rio De Janeiro (Bra), Paraty (Bra), Iguazu Falls (Bra/Arg), Itaipu (Bra/Par), Buenos Aires (Arg)
Executive Summary •
Status: Backpacking with my mum - how cool is that!
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Current location: Buenos Aires, Argentina
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Notable incidents: Kite surfed in Jeri, many Caiprinhas in Caipi Street, enjoyed the drizzle and concrete in Rio more than you might imagine, abjectly failed in Rio to meet mum’s sole pre-trip requirement, blended in seamlessly with the beautiful people on Ipanema beach, ‘what could have been’ in Paraty, two marathon bus journeys, got very wet at Iguazu and finally saw a Toucan.
Full Report Jules: So when I last wrote, I was literally on my way to the airport in Bogota to head to the north coast of Brazil to try my hand at kite surfing.
As I mentioned in the last blog, it was a somewhat protracted flight route, so after connections in Lima and Sao Paolo, I finally arrived in Fortaleza where I had arranged a 4x4 transfer to Jericoacoara (or ‘Jeri’ to the locals), where I planned to spend ‘a few days’ learning to kite surf. The first three hours of
the transfer was fairly uneventful but as darkness fell the road kind of ended and we spent the last two hours literally driving along the beach, but finally, 24 hours after leaving Bogota, I finally arrived in Jeri.
Given its location and the difficulty getting to it, I expected Jeri to be a pretty small town with a few hostels, a handful of restaurants and a couple of bars, so when I got there I was surprised to see that in fact it’s a bustling little town with loads of hostels, restaurants and bars. I had arranged accommodation beforehand through a Brazilian girl called Ana, and after such a long day’s travel I was extremely happy when I finally arrived at the Pousada whose name I still don’t know.
I must have looked pretty bedraggled when I arrived but as soon as I got out of the 4x4 Ana came out to greet me like a long lost brother and showed me up to my room, which was palatial to say the least. After a quick shower I went downstairs and met Jamie (the owner) and the only other guest, Gador, a Spanish girl who was in Jeri
for a month or so.
The ‘Pousada’ is actually just Jamie’s house, which he designed and built when he moved to Jeri from Spain three years ago. But for the duration of my stay I was treated like absolute royalty and I can’t thank Jamie and Ana enough for the hospitality they extended to me.
Even though I was pretty exhausted when I arrived, Jamie persuaded me to go for a beer with him and he gave me a quick tour of the town. After a couple of beers we went for some food and had delicious barbecued fish and shrimp before finally I had to go to bed.
Jeri is blessed with a 15-30 knot on-shore cross-breeze for 8 months out of the year, which makes it ideal wind surfing and kite surfing. The wind surfers congregate on the beaches around town while the kite surfers head about 10km down the beach to Prea. So the next day I was picked up at 11am for the half hour trip to Prea where I was introduced to my instructor for the next few days, Kara. Despite my initial misgivings about her a) being a girl, b) being
about half my age and c) being Welsh, she seemed to know what she was talking about so after I had been kitted out, we hit the beach.
Day 1 was spent mostly on the beach learning to fly the kite, which is definitely harder than it looks. I started with a 3.5 square metre kite and after I’d persuaded Kara that I had control of that one, despite a rather unfortunate affair where I broke my chicken dick (don’t ask!), we hit the water and did some body dragging - essentially flying the kite while in the water and using it to drag you along. That was fun!
Day 2 was more kiting on the beach, but this time with a bigger 5m kite. Then there was more body dragging but this time it was up wind body dragging which is a crucial skill when you lose your board and involves using the kite to drag you through the water but using your body like a rudder to head slightly up wind. This was by far the least fun part of all the lessons. The waves in the sea were really quite big and although I was
doing my very best impression of a filter feeder with the volume of water I was swallowing/inhaling, Kara didn’t seem interested and despite my very best puppy dog eyes/drowned rat look every time I got out, she kept sending me back in to do it again! Anyway, eventually she decided I’d had enough (although you could tell she still thought my upwind body dragging was rubbish!), and she ‘rewarded’ me by giving me a board and we tentatively tried a few water starts. They seemed to go ok so I had high hopes for day 3.
Day 3 started off with more up wind body dragging (I knew I hadn’t convinced her the previous day!) but as it was low tide, the waves were smaller so after swallowing only about 20 gallons of water she was happy and again ‘rewarded’ me with a board. The rest of the day was spent actually trying to kite surf. Actually getting up is probably the hardest thing and it’s a painful learning process. It’s a delicate balancing act between flying the kite aggressively enough so that it has enough power to pull you up out of the water, but if you fly
it too aggressively it yanks you up out of the water, drags you through the air in a kid of superman position and deposits you back in the water face first. This happened a lot! But in between the face plants I did get up a few times and the feeling once you’re up is definitely enough to see you through another half a dozen face plants. One thing my early attempts did reveal was that I was a bit of a Zoolander when it came to kite surfing - much better at going right (out to sea) than I was at going left (coming back to the beach) - this obviously presented a problem and resulted in the need for a couple of rescues and a lot of swimming!
In all I spent 16 hours over six days on the water, although after Day 3, Kara unceremoniously dumped me for some leggy French bird who obviously showed more potential than I did and Patrick drew the short straw of the remainder of my lessons. By the end of it I was riding down wind pretty ok in both directions (I finally mastered the going left thing) but hadn’t
quite mastered riding up wind which meant that my days on the water consisted of me kiting down wind and then walking back up while Patrick kited back up. I loved kiting! It’s must less physically demanding than I expected but on the flip side, it’s technically more difficult than I’d expected. I will definitely be doing it again some time, I’m thinking Venezuela 2010 - any takers?
So as well as the kiting, what made my stay in Jeri all the better was the people I met. I’ve already mentioned Jamie, Ana and Gador, but I must also thank my instructors: Kara & Patrick, for their eternal patience and positivity, and the other people I spent the days kiting with and the nights drinking with: Andy (the first person I’ve ever met from Doncaster with a proper northern accent to match), Chris (whose family owns polo ponies and who packed a pair of chinos for his beach holiday in Brazil! - classic!), Kate (who is one of the most brilliantly straight talking people I’ve ever met), H (who must be an android underneath that human looking façade), James (who in a small world kind of way knows one
of my very good friends from school), Tom (the kite surfing surgeon), Mike & Karina (who cooked the most excellent barbecue for us all the night before I left), Andrew (the first tree surgeon I’ve ever met) and all the rest of the gang.
In summary, I had an awesome time in Jeri and would recommend both it, and kite surfing to anyone thinking of heading to Brazil. I only planned to stay a few days in Jeri, but ended up being there for eight. I actually cut it pretty fine. I was supposed to fly to Rio on the 23rd to give me a full day and a half to find a suitable hostel before mum arrived on the 25th. However, on the 22nd, Chris and Tom decided they were going to hire a professional photographer the next day to take some photos of them kite surfing on one of the lagoons around Jeri. They showed me some of his portfolio and I was so struck by how amazing the photos were, that I decided to stay an extra day and go to the lagoon with them the next day for the photo shoot and shadow Walter, the
photographer dude, to try and pick up some tips. This however, meant that I would only have half a day in Rio to find a mum-friendly hostel.
It was definitely worth staying the extra day. The lagoon was a stunning spot and I learnt a lot about action shooting from Walter and was pretty pleased with some of the photos I came away with.
However, the extra day meant that after a bus back to Fortaleza and a flight down to Rio, I didn’t arrive in Rio till 6pm on the 24th, just 12 hours before mum’s arrival!
I felt pretty confident though. I had done some online research and made a reservation for a twin room with private bathroom (which had been my mum’s only pre-trip stipulation) at a nice sounding hostel in Ipanema, When I arrived however, they had no record of my reservation and they were completely full.It was panic stations immediately. I spent
the next three hours trawling round the hostels in Ipanema but nowhere had a twin room with private bathroom - disaster!
I ended up with a choice: The Everest hotel which had a twin room with private bath, for $300 a night, or the Bonita hostel which had a twin room, but with shared bathroom, for a much more reasonable $60 a night. I opted for the hostel hoping that mum would consider it an adventure and part of the backpacking experience and agree that the price difference made it the right choice!
So at 4am the next morning I set off to the airport to meet her. The flight landed on time and she made it through customs in record time and we were on our way back to the hostel by 6am. In the taxi I came clean about the hostel/bathroom debacle and was relieved that she took it in the spirit I’d hoped she would.
After eight days in Jeri where everything is sand - the beaches (obviously), the streets and even the insides of some of the shops - and after even longer on my trip with nothing but sunshine, getting to concrete
covered Rio in the rain was actually very nice - and I never thought I’d say that! Well, when I say it was nice, it was nice for about an hour so, but when the sun came back out I was very pleased to see it.
We spent the next four days in Rio, which really is a beautiful city and one I hope I’ll get to go back to at some point. We did all the highlights including the Christ Statue, Sugar Loaf Mountain and the beaches of Ipanema and Copacabana which really are outstanding for city beaches. I also got to go hang gliding which had been recommended to me by a few people. Somewhat controversially I thought it was actually pretty rubbish. The flight was very short (7 mins max) and after the initial rush of the take off, it was very nice but pretty boring. It was also very expensive - more than twice the price of the paragliding I’d done in Chile (which had lasted closer to half an hour) - and the final insult was when my tandem pilot, who’d already charged me a fortune for the flight itself, tried to sell me
the photos taken by the camera fixed to the wing of the hang glider for US$30!! I was outraged! US$30 for a SD of about 12 pretty low quality digital photos - no freaking way! I expressed my disappointment but was told that the price was justified because “memories are priceless”. Hmmmm!
Rio gets a pretty bad rep for being unsafe and although you can certainly see that there are sketchy areas, we felt pretty safe for the whole time we were there (well, I did anyway!) and despite the hang gliding and a very disappointing trip on the Bonde (street car / tram) up to Santa Teresa, we had a great time in Rio.
Anyway, next up was a short four hour bus ride down the coast to Paraty a small colonial town. After a bit of welcome rain on my first day in Rio we had been lucky and had four days of lovely sunshine so we were feeling quite smug when we woke up on our travel day to Paraty to find clouds and rain - what a great day to travel, we thought to ourselves. Well, it was a good day to travel but
what we hadn’t bargained for was for the miserable weather to continue through our entire trip to Paraty. Now Paraty itself is a pretty little town with pretty colonial buildings set around quaint cobbled streets but essentially it is a beach town and as I had discovered elsewhere (remember Huanchaco!?) beach towns are generally pretty crap when there’s no sun! Such was the case in Paraty. We did our best British tourist impression and ploughed ahead with our original plan of getting a Schooner tour of some of the beaches around Paraty, but the only thing we learned was that when the sun is shining, Paraty and the surrounding beaches must be really beautiful and I imagine the Schooner tour would be a fantastic way to spend a day! In all fairness, the weather could have actually been a lot worse and the boat trip wasn’t actually that bad in as far as it didn’t actually rain, much! And we did meet Raf and Erin, a couple of Californians in Brazil with one of the more elaborate cover stories I’ve heard thus far - they had been in Rio for a Materials Technology Conference - hmmm whatever guys!
So
after a day in Paraty we decided to move on and head south to the Iguazu Falls via a marathon 24 hour journey which involved a 6 hour bus journey to Sao Paolo, a 2 hour stop over and a 16 hour bus ride down to Iguazu.
Mum survived the journey impressively - her main technique being to sleep virtually the whole time! - and we arrived in Foz Do Iguazu (the Brazilian side of the Falls) in good spirits at about 8am. This was earlier than we had expected and we also felt decidedly more chipper than expected, so after checking into our hostel, which was in Puerto Iguazu (on the Argentinian side of the falls - much cheaper than the Brazilian side!), we decided to save ourselves a day and check out the Brazilian side of the Falls the same day.
Now I’m a big fan of waterfalls, in fact I’m a massive fan of waterfalls, but even I was a bit unsure about whether two days of looking at the same waterfall would keep me interested. Well, after paying the National Park entrance fee on the Brazilian side and getting the free shuttle bus to
the actual Falls, my first glimpse of the Falls left me in no doubt I’d be just fine!
Having not done Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, or Angel Falls in Venezuela, my only experience of big waterfalls has been Niagara Falls on the Canadian/US border, back in 1999. I had thoroughly loved the Falls themselves, although the town of Niagara is a bit of a dump, but after an hour of looking at them, I was pretty much done. Thankfully Iguazu, is like Niagara with a boob job, Botox and a ton of steroids. It’s actually made up of 275 individual ‘cateracts’ although the number actually flowing on any given day depends on water levels, which are dictated obviously by rain, but more significantly by the activity of the five damns that are upriver from the Falls. We were lucky during our two days there - the water levels were extremely high and although I will try not to bore you with stats, the one that struck me the most was that while we were there, the volume of water flowing over the falls was 4 million litres per second - that’s a freaking lot of water!! (Just as a
comparison Niagara averages about 1.5 million litres per second)
The Brazilian side is all about panoramic views as the walkways run opposite most of the Falls. Despite our taxi driver telling us we wouldn’t get very wet, we got drenched! The spray is pretty incredible and as soon as we got within a couple of hundred metres of the Falls, we were decidedly damp! The walkways are done extremely well and mum managed all of them with ease. I even managed to persuade her to come out onto the walkway that goes right up to the face of one of the biggest Falls, where we both got very wet indeed!
After seeing the Brazilian side of the Falls, which took a couple of hours, we went on to the Itaipu hydroelectric damn - a Brazilian/Paraguayan joint venture, 40km up river. It is the largest hydroelectric damn in the world and a pretty impressive structure but the one thing that did make me laugh was how much they stress the bi-National nature of it i.e. it’s half owned by Brazil and half by Paraguay. As such, each country receives half of the electricity it generates. However, Paraguay, being such
a small country, only uses 7%!o(MISSING)f the 50%!i(MISSING)t has the right to, so sells the 43%!i(MISSING)t doesn’t need back to Brazil. As a further comparison, the 7%!t(MISSING)hat Paraguay does use is sufficient to satisfy all of Paraguay’s electricity requirements, for the entire country, while the 93%!t(MISSING)hat Brazil uses (its own 50%!p(MISSING)lus the 43%!i(MISSING)t buys from Paraguay) only provides 20%!o(MISSING)f the country’s electricity needs!
That evening we went for a delicious dinner at a restaurant whose name escapes me and could immediately tell we’d left Brazil and entered Argentina - two main meals and a couple of beers cost us 42 Argentinian Pesos - about US$10 😊 - MUCh cheaper than Brazil had been!
The next day we visited the Argentinian side of the Falls, where we did a 4x4 trip through the jungle during which I finally saw a Toucan 😊 and then got a boat ride right up to the face of the Falls and then more walkways including one that goes right along the top of the Falls to the part where the highest water flow is, called the Devil’s Throat. It was a pretty amazing sight, and
I could have spent hours just standing there watching the water plunge down from all sides. The photos really don’t do it justice!
Anyway, after two days and seeing the Falls from both sides, it was time to move on and we got another overnight bus, 20 hours this time, down to Buenos Aires.
Again the bus was very comfortable and after her exertions of the previous two days walking round the Falls, mum once again had no problem sleeping virtually the whole way!
We spent five full days in Buenos Aires, and I can safely say I think it is my favourite big city on this trip so far. We did the tourist bus round the city (twice), visited the Recoleta cemetery where Buenos Aires’ upper crust get buried and wandered round the colourful streets of Boca. One of the things I wanted to see while I was in BA was some Polo so when mum’s eagle eye spotted a notice on the wall of the hostel advertising ‘Polo Lessons”, I was intrigued and signed up to do it on our penultimate day in BA.
At 1pm, me and mum were picked up and driven
about an hour out of the city by our host for the day, Fernando. On the way out there, he asked me if I’d played polo before, I said no, although I did mention that I’d seen Pretty Woman a couple of times (he didn’t laugh 😞). He asked me if I had ridden a horse before, I said yes, but quickly qualified the comment by saying it had been a good 15 years ago (or maybe longer) - I don’t count the horse riding we did in Ecuador because a) they weren’t horses, more like miniature ponies and b) what I was doing on the horse that day can certainly not be described as ‘riding’. Anyway, Fernando seemed unperturbed by my answers and once we got there, he handed me a hard hat and a polo mallet, pointed at a horse that was saddled up and said “Let’s go!”. I was kind of taken aback by this. I was expecting the first part of the polo lesson to maybe be a bit of theory, maybe I’d sit on some sort of fake ‘horse’ and get the hang of the mallet thing, but oh no, this was baptism by fire.
So I mounted my steed, who had given me a disapproving look as I walked over to him (even though I’ve lost weight, I’m still not a small chap!) and then gave a noticeable sigh as I climbed on board, sorted out the reins (two sets for some reason), the whip and the mallet (which took a while) and we trotted off to the polo field.
For the first ten minutes, we just gave the horses a bit of a warm up, trotting and cantering round the field as I desperately tried to remember where the accelerator and the break were. Next thing Fernando produced a polo ball, which was smaller than I had hoped, and showed me how to hit it. A couple of things worth mentioning here a) a polo mallet is quite long and much bendier than I thought, b) a polo ball is small - only slightly bigger than a baseball/cricket ball c) the polo field we were on was flat(ish), but certainly no billiard table. The culmination of these three factors makes it really fricking difficult to hit the damn ball, which invariably seemed to end up in a divot every time I did
manage to make contact. On top of this, my horse looked decidedly unimpressed each time I swung the mallet and it whooshed past his nose, or clipped his ankles. Anyway, after lots of whiffs, as I swung over the top of the ball, and lots of divot taking, as I over adjusted, I eventually managed to attain some sort of level of consistency and was feeling pretty good as I practiced the six different types of shot there are in polo. However, all this was achieved while the horse was walking and for those of you that have seen polo, the horses don’t walk, so we tried the same thing cantering. Whole different story!
When the horse is walking you have lots of time to prepare for your shot, the horse is relatively easy to control and you stay at a pretty constant height above the ground. None of this is true when you start cantering. On top of this your hands are pretty full of reins, whip and mallet, which very easily get mixed up which makes the whole thing extremely difficult! Anyway, after more whiffs and more divots, I slowly began to get the hang of it.
However, my legs and arse were beginning to protest so we had a break!
During the break, we watched some other people at the polo club having a pick up game - seems like a funny thing to do, have a ‘pick up’ game of polo - and I got an idea of how it should be done!
After half an hour or so, we started up again, with a different horse (the previous one had obviously had enough!) and spent another hour cantering round the polo field, missing more than hitting but nevertheless having a good time!
A couple of things I didn’t realize about polo are that you hit (or try to hit!) the ball with the side of the mallet (not the end), which does make things slightly easier, and also I was surprised at the rate they get through horses (or ponies to more correctly call them). A polo match is made up of between six and eight chukkahs (periods) with each chukkah being seven minutes long. In the pick up game we were watching there were six chukkahs and each player used a different pony for each chukkah. However, Fernando told me
Colourful houses in Paraty
(and a random Jack Sparrow lookalike)that at the professional level, players will use on average two ponies per chukkah and as there are four players per side and eight chukkahs, that adds up to 128 horses for a game of polo!
Anyway, it was a great day and although I won’t be entering myself into the Argentinian Open or the Hurlingham Cup just yet, I definitely had fun!
The other thing we did in Buenos Aires, was eat … a LOT! Argentina is famous for its steaks and given that the food on this trip has, in general, not been one of the highlights (with a couple of notable exceptions) I was determined to make amends in BA. So we had steak every day and experienced the full range. Two of the best were probably lunch at La Islas Cabanas, which reminded me a lot of Capital Grill in New York (full of business types) which was delicious but expensive (US$45 per person for starter, steak, sides, beer and desert), and dinner at Las Dos Nivelas which was much more ‘rustic’ and only cost US$20 a head for a similar sort of spread. But I think the undisputed champion was the lunch we
had at La Cabrera, which had been recommended to us by numerous people. After we’d finished our starter of olives, sun-dried tomatoes, bread and a couple of non-specific dipping sauces, an enormous bit of meat came out on a carving board together with 13 different side dishes. It was full on delicious and I may very well be making a return visit when I am back in BA for the last day of this trip.
So with that, came the end of mum’s two week trip. I can’t tell you how impressed I was with the way she slipped into the backpacker lifestyle. She took on the whole hostel experience with enthusiasm and showed incredible stamina during what was a pretty non-stop 14 days! In all fairness, I suspect that when she gets back home she’ll spend at least a couple of days recovering but she did me proud and definitely left me feeling how lucky I am to have such a cool mum 😊
So this brings me to the last leg of my trip - 17 days in Patagonia - before its back to New York for some much needed replenishment of funds, some different footwear
GOTCHA!!
I finally see a Toucan on the approach to Iguazu Falls and a whole wardrobe of ‘new’ (well ‘different’ anyway) clothes!
Adios!
Jules
This week’s likes • Caipirinhas and Maracuyoskas on Caipi Street in Jeri
• Drizzle and concrete
• Ipanema beach
• Annika Ballerina - great name!
• Finally seeing a Toucan 😊
• Playing Polo - and I never thought I’d say that!
• La Cabrera - believe the hype!
• Backpacking mums 😊
• Buenos Aires dog walkers - minimum 10 canines per walker but the most we saw was 17 dogs with one dude!
• The days getting longer as we travel south - it’s 7pm and the sun is still up!
This week’s dislikes • The Brazilian Reai - how dare they have such a strong and stable currency - it makes Brazil very expensive! What’s wrong with a corrupt government and a bit of hyperinflation? Brazil should definitely look at Argentina as a role model!
• The Santa Teresa Bonde
• Hang gliding - over rated and over priced!
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