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Published: August 15th 2009
After spending some great times with friends and family in Europe we headed to a continent where we know absolutely nobody, don't speak their language particularly well (Jen) or at all (Jeff), but we're friendly people, we'll be fine right?
Rio de Janiero Our first stop on the mammoth continent that is south america was Rio de janiero. That's right, home of g-strings, samba, bossa nova and the biggest jesus the world has ever seen. Flying in to Rio at midnight was a bit daunting, having been told it was a city with one of the highest crime rates in the world. This was somewhat enhanced when we pulled up at the hostel we'd booked and it looked like a derelict building. But the taxi driver confirmed this was the address, so out we got and rang the doorbell. Luckily, this was a front, apparently it's better not to obviously look like a tourist place in rio...hmm. Too knackered at this point to sample the world famous nightlife, we topple into bed to face the city with fresher minds and bodies.
The next morning we headed out to stroll around botafogo bay, and saw the beautiful sugarloaf mountain. Rio
is really a stunning city, surrounded on one side by sparkling blue seas, and on the other by enormous mountains covered in lush green vegetation. And the absolute best place to get a good view of this is from right next to giant Jesus. We caught a great train up a massive mountain and got out to mill about with hundreds of other tourists, all trying to get the impossible angle that has them and big Jesus in the same photo. It's quite hilarious, having to step over people lying on the ground waiting for the crowds to thin so they can take a photo of their friends 'holding' jesus' hand... ha! It was spectacular though, and is a great statue. As jeff pointed out, it's nice to see jesus portrayed in good health, with his arms out in a blessing kind of way, rather than tortured and bloody...
The next day we donned our swimwear and headed to the famous copacabana beach. Apparently they only sell two styles of swimwear here, one for males and one for females, and you wear the same style and size, regardless of your style or size. Quite a lot of flesh on
display, sometimes pleasing, sometimes not so much. I do like the attitude though, where you just do what you want, and it's all about sunshine. A weird thing was that among all the selling of the usual trinkets and drinks on the beah there were guys walking around with whole cafe-style cakes, selling a slice at a time. We have since learnt that brazilians love their cake, they even serve it at breakfast, and one of the first words we both learnt in portugese was 'bolo' (cake). We also sampled our first real brazilian fare near copacabana, ordering a sharing plate which contained about a quarter of a cow, salty as can be, but tasty served with chips and rice. Another thing we've since learnt - every dish comes with rice and beans or chips or potatoes, and no vegetables. Good food though, and you can eat relatively cheaply as long as you like potato, beans and rice - luckily we do!
That night we made friends with some fellow hostel dwellers and got introduced to the infamous world of beer pong. Basically a drinking game involving ping pong balls and beer in many cups... to be demonstrated perhaps
upon our return. Apparently it's all the rage in America, we suspect among college kids. It was one of the girls' birthday, so we all headed out to a samba school she had a hot tip for. It was great! it wasn't in the usual nightclub region, but out in the burbs where they tell you not to go alone...but it was a massive hall, kind of like a school gym, where everyone gets together on a saturday night to samba in preparation for Carnaval - which is nine months away - they take it very seriously. There was a massive band, with about fifty people playing percussion in various forms, a horrible sound system that mangled all the music at top volume, and a group of women dressed in tight clothes sambaing like there was no tomorrow. The colours of this particular area are pink and green ('rosa e verde'), so almost everyone was wearing some shade or combination of the two. I was of course dressed in black from head to toe, and we've never sambaed (?) before, but we gave it a good hard go, and had lots of fun. It felt like a real brazil experience.
Ilha Grande The next morning we were feeling a little worse for wear, facing a 4 hour bus trip to travel a couple of hundred kilometres. nightmare. Luckily the buses are really luxurious here, and we soon found ourselves on the tropical island of Ilhe Grande (did i mention there was a boat involved?). It is a beautiful island, with plentiful camping sites, no cars and lovely scenery. Apparently most of the non-brasilian tourists stay in the hostels, but as we are stingy, we decided to camp. The downside was we couldn't really communicate with anyone, the upside was we made friends with them anyway. It all started when we were invited to join a couple in a game of Uno, which lead to much laughter and feelings of friendship, despite not really understanding what was said to us, and them having slightly different Uno rules here - we learned the names of colours pretty quickly though! A few nights later the same couple invited us to join them and another couple in buying a ton of meat and cooking a brazilian style barbeque. Needless to say we were all for it, and it ended up quite a drunken
night, strolling the streets of the island, chattering to each other and understanding a suprising amount. I've always thought that alcohol improves one's grasp of a language remarkably...
A quick aside for our early attempts at Portuguese.
Jen: Feeling confident that my Spanish would translate quite well, I approached the corn stall for the first time and asked for 'maize por favour'. The lady smiled encouragingly, but gave up no corn. I eventually got the corn and later found out that I had been asking for 'more please'... Turns out Portuguese and Spanish aren't quite that similar.
Jeff: Saulo had asked Jen in Portuguese whether English was the official language of Australia. Much to my disgust Jen replied with 'Yes'. I protested "no way, our sausages are heaps better than English sausages". Language = 'lingua'; sausage = 'linguica'... Fair enough... Besides fun and friendly brazilian folk, Ilha Grande offered much in the way of natural beauty. We spent one day walking from our side of the island to the beach on the other side, lazed around for a couple of hours, then wandered back. Another day we took a boat trip to various spots around the
Streets of Ilha Grande
Saulo (underarm view), Marc (smoking) and Josa (?)island to snrokel. It was lovely, and we spotted a sea turtle as our boat putted along....great! However, out of about five days on the island, it rained for three which is not heaps of fun when you're camping, and going to the beach or walking is your only entertainment, so we decided the time had come to head to Paraty.
Paraty Paraty is a beautiful old portugese colonial town, right on the water with cobbled streets leading you through the old town. We stayed at a lovely hostel right on the beach, dried out our tent, attempted to dry out our clothes in the rain and humidity (this saga lastest about 3 weeks!) and in general did a lot of lazing around. We used the time here well, making friends with an odd German, and interesting Czech scientist who specialises in fungi, and made the most of swimming in saltwater for the last time in quite some time...
Sao Paulo Our next port of call was Sao Paulo, said to be the cultural capital of Sao Paulo. We stayed in an excellent hostel that used to be a share house for students, but they decided one day
to turn it into a backpackers hostel...nice. It was also located in what must be the guitar shop capital of the world. There were guitars everywhere - which was somewhat bittersweet for jeff, who obviously loves guitars, but hadn't been able to play one for quite some time. The city itself had a very cool feel to it, but for me was a little frustrating. I felt that there were most definitely all these excellent things going on all around us, but because we were just visiting for a few days we didn't know what, or where they were. I'm sure there's heaps happening though... One night we did manage to get to a cool pub/bar type thing, difficult to describe as it was a mix between a garage painted with whitewash and a cool somewhat alternative bar. There was a band in the corner playing, we have been told, "new samba". Well, whatever the name of the music, it was great, and we whiled the night away drinking beer and dancing a wee bit.
Foz do Iguacu Foz do Iguacu....i'm somewhat stuck for words here, as it's just amazing. I have never seen so much water gushing out
of every crevice, over every cliff and plummeting into such a massive river before. For the hydrologists out there, 2 million litres falling off every second of the day! There are waterfalls everywhere you look, and still when you round a corner there are more! It's never ending. The story of how the falls were created goes that back in the day the local indigenous folk used to sacrifice virgins to the river god (nice...). One day, a young warrior took affront to this, and putting the virgin in question into his canoe, began to paddle downriver away from the sacrificial blades. Unfortunately, this angered the river god, and he opened up the ground in front of them, creating massive and deadly falls. But rather than just letting them die, he transformed the woman into a rock to sit under the falls and be hammered on the head by the falling water for eternity. And the man was transformed into a tree that looked over the rock, so he could watch her torture for eternity (as i said before, nice...). Despite this rather nasty origin, the falls are spectacular, and when you get close to them you can really feel
the power, and get completely saturated. In order to see the falls properly, you need to see both sides, which means crossing the border into argentina. Unfortunately we were at the falls all day, so our proper experience of argentina will have to wait a few months. It's still fun to be able to say you've been there though! At the falls we also had our first run in with a cute, but pesky animal called a Coati (pronounced kwa-chi). These are great looking mammal things with really long noses, but they get into all the rubbish bins and steal food from tables and so on. They get away with it though, because they're so cute. Foz is also the place where we met Daan, the Hollander, who joins us for some of our future adventures....
Stay tuned for the paradise that is the pantanal......
j n j
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Berneice
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Glad you liked the view from Christ the Redeemer Statue - I thought the view of Rio gave Sydney harbour some competition. Also Iguacu Falls - absolutely fantastic.