Beautiful Brazil

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Ah Brazil, the land of beautiful bodies, crazy parties and many, many people.

Rio de janeiro
After two long flights and a seven hour stopover at Sao Paulo airport, finally made it to my hotel in Rio de janeiro. Up to my airconditioned room where I was greeted by my new room mate, a great aussie chick, Liesel, who was to become my future tent buddy and a great friend on my up and coming 7 week tour of South America. The next few days in Rio were a blur of street parties, dancing, men on buses wearing nothing but jocks, locals on the beach wearing skimpy bikinis, crazy football games, urine smelling streets, homeless people sleeping on cardboard boxes in every nook and cranny, transvestites in mini skirts, keeping money safe in bras and avoiding being mugged.

Paraty
Started my Budget Expeditions tour, a big yellow
truck filled with 35 mostly Aussie and English
people (including the guide and driver) and headed for a coastal town, Paraty. We arrived at our camp site, along with 5 other trucks from the same tour company, and set up camp. A family camped next to us had some bad Brazilian music playing at full ball. Our tour guide asked him to turn it down. The response from the father was to go into his tent returning with a big knife saying no, he wouldn't turn it down. Welcome to Brazilian machismo. Went for a sailing trip around some islands, swam in the tropical water and snorkelled, drank caipirinha and sangria, ate seafood, what a life.

The Pantanal
One of the stops on the tour was to visit the Pantanal, an area renowned for its wildlife. We arrived at our lodge, log cabins built on a boardwalk over a swamp, and prepared ourselves for all the jaguars and anacondas that we would see. A few days later it became apparent that the closest wildlife encounters that we were going to get involved mosquitos, which if you didn't douse yourself in 100% deet repellent, cover every single part of your body, then spray another layer of repellent over your clothes, you were guarenteed to make friends with the little buggers. While at the lodge we did catch some piranha fish and then fed them to the caimen that were always nearby.

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