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Published: October 18th 2006
Praia Lopez Mendes
The best beach in Brazil, they say. We´re not arguingBad news, chaps: it´s definitely blogging weather in South America. Just when we thought all the stuff we´d heard about it being utterly miserable in Patagonia at this time of the year was wrong, the heaven opened, confining us to barracks and me to the computer for the first time in.... well, it´s been quite a few weeks. (You lucky, lucky people.)
We have landed in a small town called San Martin de los Andes which, as the name implies, is right on the edge of the Patagonian Andes. With impeccable timing, we seem to have arrived at a time when there is too much snow for trekking but not quite enough for skiing, so we will be making tracks (geddit?) soon; first thing tomorrow morning, to be exact. But first, we´d better fill you in on what we have been up to since our last entry, because we have been all over the shop.
Although we would quite happily have stayed in Rio for the rest of our lives, we eventually cleared out of our budget-busting room in Ipanema and headed three hours down the coast to Ilha Grande, a sparsely-populated, car-free island featuring Praia Lopez Mendes, reputedly
Body-boarding Rob
´That Keanu Reeves has let himself go a bit...´ Brazil´s best beach. That´s difficult to verify because we only had three weeks in the country and it´s pretty much the size of Europe, but Lopez Mendes was stunning - warm and clear water, beautiful golden sand, waves strong enough to indulge our passion for incompentent body-boarding but gentle enough not to kill us, and very few people around (you only reach it after an hour on a boat and half an hour hiking through a forest). Definitely the best beach we´ve been on by a long chalk.
Given this, the laid-back charms of Ilha Grande itself and the good company of our new Dutch friends Sander and Ilonka, there was a danger that our ´year of travelling´ was going to end up as´year on a Brazilian island´. But then - can you spot a pattern emerging here? - the weather turned, forcing us to reach for our waterproofs for the first time and, ultimately, persuading us to head for the Iguacu Falls - the world´s largest, straddling the tripartite border between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.
Iguacu was a pain in the backside to reach (about 27 hours on the bus from Ilha Grande, via Rio and Sao
Ilha Grande
Rob finally finds someone who smells worse than he does Paulo) but boy, was it worth it. Because of the time of year, people warned us that the falls were relatively dry and not as spectacular as they look in pictures... but my God, they were incredible all the same. The Brazilian side gives you the best overall perspective of how many different waterfalls there are (further downstream it also boasts the world´s largest hydro-electric dam, fact fiends), but the Argentine side is even more spectacular. Our favourite bit was
garganta del diablo (Devil´s Throat), where what seem like scores of waterfalls pour into a gigantic, seething cauldron of water. We got up early to see this bit and miss the video camera-wielding goons, and it was just mind-blowing; we felt so dwarfed and insignificant alongside it that it was really hard to drag ourselves away. Definitely one of the wonders of the world, and don´t let any so-called hardened traveller persuade you it isn´t so.
Because Iguacu was such an amazing place, we hardly noticed that we had crossed over from Brazil to Argentina while we were gawping at it (with hindsight, it would have been nice to pop over the river to Paraguay too, but we just
Sander and Ilonka
Our new Dutch friends ran out of time). Next up was another 19-hour bus marathon down to Buenos Aires - although compared to their equivalents elsewhere in South America, catching an Argentine bus is like stepping on board a Boeing 747. You get big, comfy chairs, proper air-con and movies that are (a) in English, (b) don´t feature Jean-Claude Van Damme and (c) aren´t cranked up to top-volume as you´re dropping off to sleep. We were even offered champagne on the way down to Buenos Aires, although why travelling by bus should be anything to celebrate is beyond me.
Anyway, I digress. I last went to Buenos Aires about eight years ago to cover the local grand prix, and was hugely relieved to discover that it is still one of the world´s greatest cities - particularly as I´d spent most of the previous three months going on about it to Adele. We liked it so much that we ended up staying for eight days - twice as long as we had intended to - soaking up the atmosphere in all its different suburbs, wandering the huge boulevards and watching impromptu tango and flamenco-dancing in the street. You could easily spend a couple of
Iguacu Falls
Don´t we look like tourists? months here without it touching the sides.
Buenos Aires differs from the other big South American cities we´ve visited in that it feels quite European; perhaps as a result of this, we both felt pretty homesick for the first time, but made ourselves feel better by pretending that we weren´t on a budget, buying ourselves lots of presents during the day and dining out on fat steaks by night. (As a result of this, our dodgy-looking finances have taken a proper turn for the worst, so it´s back to eating dung for a couple of weeks.) The
portenos, or Buenos Aires-dwellers, are reputed to be so up themselves that they make your average
Parisien seem like Bruce Forsyth, but we found them the complete opposite: warm, accommodating and a relief after several weeks in Brazil where - as Adele neatly put it, and contrary to expectation - the locals we met were ´almost nice´.
We also took a day-trip to Uruguay, like you do, taking the ferry to a little town called Colonia del Sacramento - totally different to Argentina and a real step-back in time, with deserted streets and 50-year-old cars in everyday use. I would have
More Iguacu
Doesn´t really do it justice loved to see what the rest of Uruguay was like (the Switzerland of South America, so they say), but by then it was time for us to hit the road again - this time down Argentina´s Atlantic coast to the town of Puerto Madryn, one of the gateways to Patagonia.
As the name suggests, Madryn has Welsh heritage, being one of the places originally settled in by emigrants in the 19th century. We tried not to hold that against it, and spent a really nice day visiting the nearby towns of Trelew (amusingly pronounced ´Trel-yeuw´ by everyone) and Gaiman, where the locals proudly cling to their roots by serving what they call cream teas - in reality, colon-blocking piles of cakes - and (praise be!) a Proper Cuppa. But the real draw is Madryn´s proximity to the Valdes Peninsula, a natural wildlife haven that´s also breeding ground for Southern Right Whales at this time of year. Together with fellow travelling Brits John and Jemma, we spent the most amazing morning there on a boat surrounded by literally scores of whales - often mothers with their calves. Our boat was circled by a couple on one occasion - awe-inspiring but
Iguacu
Like we said, doesn´t do it justice... a little bit frightening at the same time - and we actually saw a ´breach´, when they fling themselves fully out of the water and crash back down below the surface; hard to describe, but a bit like watching somebody stunt-driving in a double-decker bus. There were penguins and elephant seals (the really ugly ones) knocking about too, but we´ll remember the whales for a long, long time.
After that, we headed west across the country (more bus hell) to the Andean side of Patagonia. We started in a place called Bariloche, a really nice little town that feels uncannily like an Alpine mountain village, where we did a single-day trek to a lodge in the mountains that was more like skiing than walking, and then spent a day trying to go skiing at the World´s Most Closed Ski Resort. This involved getting out of bed at the crack of dawn, taking up a bus up the mountain and then freezing our backsides off for an hour and a half while we waited for somebody to come and open the lifts up. As there was only one run open, we gave it up as a bad job and headed
Adele and the Devil´s Throat
Why not insert your own caption here? first down the pub, and then to San Martin, where you find us now. This place makes the closed ski resort look like Manhattan, though, so we´re off in the morning.
Right: it´s time to buy some waterproof trousers. By the time you read this, we will have well and truly entered the World Budget-Knackering Championships by hiring a car for 10 days and driving it to the place they call The End Of The World. If we live to tell the tale, you´ll hear all about it next time. Like I said, you lucky, lucky people.
Adele and Rob x
CATCHPHRASE OF THE WEEK
No.9 Adele: ´NO, NO, NO! That´s not an amuse-bouche, IT´S THE BUTTER!´ (Sophisticated Rob is narrowly saved from an embarrassing faux pas in a swanky Buenos Aires restaurant)
IDEA OF THE WEEK
When we finally come home, we are going to make our fortune by devising a Playstation game with the working title of ´Stranger in Town´. Players will be forced to negotiate a busy downtown Buenos Aires street on foot, avoiding myopic pedestrians, moronic leaflet-hawkers, homicidal bus drivers and heaps of steaming dog output without getting hopelessly lost and/or inadvertently
Buenos Aires
Lovely place, but they do make you run when you cross the road ending up beside some sort of Falklands war memorial. You know it makes sense...
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