The end of the line... for now

Sitting in the lobby of this generic business-style hotel in Sao Paulo, it's hard to believe that 24 weeks ago today, we left Australian shores and made our way to LA and Miami. Tonight we leave Brasillian shores and go again to Miami, though this time without Beefa's guidance.

The past weeks since I last posted on Brasil, we have not done all that much in the way of actual travelling. Mostly it has been the sitting still variety of travelling. We are very good at this and ended up spending three weeks in Pipa which was just lovely. The days consisted of: Arise whenever we wanted, eat fresh breakfast of fruit and juices, wax new surfboard, catch minivan to Praia de Madeiros, surf for three hours, catch van back to Pipa, chill out for the afternoon, drink 80 cent beers in hammock while reading book as the sun goes down, find restaurant and eat dinner, drink more beers, go to sleep. And repeat, always repeat.

Mike and Anna told us one day that they'd be flying into Recife rather shortly so we made plans to travel down to Salvador and meet up with them. This worked perfectly and made it our second almost-chance meeting with them after our entirely-chance meeting in Peru three months earlier. We hung out in the Pelhourinho area for a couple of days. During this time I was robbed by some half crazed fuck who's opening salvo was to draw his finger across his throat and say with some degree of menace "I'm going to kill you". I handed over my money and was completely unnerved every time I stepped onto the street. So we decided to leave and go across the high seas to Morro de Sao Paulo, an island two hours south of Salvador.

Morro was ideal: wide beaches, cheap accommodations, good breakfasts, Jeri-style drinks carts, a party almost every night and a nice right hand reef break. Oh, and it had satellite TV which was really good for watching the opening rounds of the Champions League. Six days later though, we had to leave which is why we find ourselves in this generic business-style hotel waiting for a plane that leaves for Miami late tonight.

The best bits, in no particular order:

• surfing with Beto in Jericoacoara
• running into Mike and Anna in Peru, and again in Brasil
• drinks carts in Jeri and Morro
• views of mountains from our hostel rooftop in Huaraz
• attempt on the summit of Nevado Pisco
• hiking in the Cordillera Blanca, Peru
• Morten and Kirsten, our Scandinavian medical connection, in Peru and Bolivia
• mountain biking in Ecuador and Bolivia
• Bellavista hummingbird sanctuary in Ecuador
• getting a tan and not being afraid of an immediate outbreak of melanoma
• Rio de Janeiro
• The Westcotts
• partying in Lapa
• Hamish and Chris
• meeting up with Heather in Cusco
• Jack's Cafe, every single time
• understanding the Spanish language
• Nemo's for breakfast on Easter Sunday in Miami with Beefa and Rusty
• Beefa's MASSIVE boat in Fort Lauderdale
• Beefa and Jillian's house in Fort Lauderdale
• Caribbean cricket
• Barbados rum shops
• reading about England being beaten 0-36 in the Rugby World Cup
• travelling with Rusty for the first time
• turning 30 on an idyllic Brasillian beach
• Rob the Scouser's knowledge of Neighbours
• the falling value of the US dollar
• Culley
• crayfish, crab and white wine at the Coconut Bar
• 27 consecutive Mondays where we didn't have to go to work

I think that's enough of a list for now.

Whoever lives in Brisbane, we'll see you very soon. Some of you even have gifts. Whoever doesn't live in Brisbane, stay in touch on the electric email.

I'm going to continue using this blog, but will not be emailing every time I post something. For me, it's good to have a venue for writing whenever the feeling takes me.

Oh, and if you want to read some funny tales of travels in Thailand and that area, go check out http://doyunchay.blogspot.com/

Bye for now.

Fire

What a stroke of luck. Two weeks before the end of our lengthy journey through south America, a large fire came along and took all of our possessions on one sunny Saturday afternoon in Brisbane. This is what it looked like from the air.

Brasil

I was reading Charles Darwin´s account of his travels on the HMS Beagle from 1831-36 and came across a section early on where he wondered how large a population the abundent land of Brasil would one day support. Sir Charlie was right to wonder as today there are about 190 million of them, and in our past month´s experience here, a happier, more smiling bunch of south Americans you will not find.

We flew from Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia at some ungodly hour over a month ago to Sao Paulo, where we did not crash on landing. This was a good thing. We hung out for a couple of days there and somehow we ran into Jonathon, the Paulista we met at Paracas National Park in central Peru a couple of months earlier. We still boggle at the likelihood - or unhlikelihood - of running into the sole person you know in a city of 20 million. Still, Jon was his usual helpful self and his missus told us that Brasil was not entirely full of gun-toting banditos waiting for the next unsuspecting tourist to wander down their street. We had no problems in Sao Paulo, but the weather was crap so we hit the bus station and made for the coastal route to Parati.

Parati was an old gold and coffee port on the Costa Verde founded by the Portuguese about 400 years ago. It grew rich and the merchants built fine houses. A little more than a hundred years ago the trade in coffee and gold from the mines in Minas Gerais slowed to a standstill and the town fell into disuse and was eventually abandoned. Thanks to this, the merchant´s houses lay untouched for a little under hundred years until, in the 1960´s, it was ´rediscovered´ and restored. These days it is a truly beautiful piece of colonial Brasil. We spent three days there.

Rio de Janeiro was as it looked in the postcards, but it was far cooler down on the streets. We lobbed at first into Botafogo and were good tourists and checked out the Pao de Azucar (Sugarloaf), Cristo Reventador (Christ the Redeemer) and the neighbourhood of Santa Theresa. We also managed to head out to one of the seediest bars I have been to since a squat party in Hackney and got rather trashed on cheap beer. It was fun. But we decided after visting Ipanema one day that we should move across town, so this we did and began to enjoy our time in Rio even more. Ipanema is an uber cool part of Rio, close to the beach and with loads of things to do every day. I ended up meeting with Mr and Mrs Westcott at the northern end of the beach most afternoons for a chat and a few body waves, initially to plan our assault on Lapa on a Friday night.

We hit the streets of Lapa well after midnight and the scene that greeted my eyes reminded me immediately of the late Sunday session at the Notting Hill Carnival. Every bar was teeming to overflowing, every street was full of people, all with a bottle. Guys walked around like waiters with trays selling shots of tequila complete with fresh lemon while others cooked chicken skewers over hot coals and others still sat on massive eskies containing beer, beer and more beer. I was in my element. Our mate Leo, a local lad, was showing us all the nooks and crannies of Lapa and we finally decided on a club to get into, which we did: 5 Reais for women, 10 Reais for men. While not everyone in our party was overwhelmed with the music, I thought it was ace. The deejay played a mix of garage and dubstep and breaks-that-weren´t-breaks and it sounded top class to my ear. Think Bucky Done Gun and Sergio Mendes and heaps of other Brasillian funk and you´re somewhere close to getting it. But 6:30am rolled around and we made it back to our room. We missed breakfast.

We bought a flight and flew from Rio to Fortaleza on the northern coast a few days after the Lapa episode. Fortaleza gave us both the creeps but we were only there to catch a bus a few hours further north to Jericoacoara. We planned to spend five days in Jeri but ended up spending 10. Jeri is a town with streets made of sand, surrounded by fixed sand dunes and two large beaches. One was a haven for windsurfers and kite surfers while the other was more suited to regular surfng on it´s light, easy wind waves. We did have the pleasure of watching Pepe, the Brasillian national kitesurfing champion, practise his moves in the waves; What that kid can´t do on a kite ain´t worth doing. We also met Beto who taught us to surf. For me, I´d ridden bodyboards from a very young age - about four from my recollection - and petered out at about 20 or so, but for some reason had never tried standup surfing. Amy and never ridden a surfcraft of any kind but was very determined to learn. So we went out every day with Beto on our soft-top mals and surfed surfed surfed. We are getting better.

We left Jeri and travelled down to Canoa Quebrada which was about three hours south of Fortaleza and spent two nights there. The high sand cliffs backing the beach and the profusion of barracas (beach bars and restaurants) combined well with the gentle sea and went spent the day getting some sun and drinking beer. But we decided to move on to another beach further south, this one called Ponta du Mel. Ponta du Mel was hard to reach and when we got there, we discovered that we were the only tourists in town. All of the barracas were closed and there appeared to be nothing to do. So we stayed there for the night and ate the delectable food at our pousada and made tracks the very next day. Only one taxi comes to Ponta du Mel each day so we waited and waited for it and got on board for the journey back to Mossoro. Then we waited some more for the bus to Natal. We spent the night in Natal and caught the short bus to Pipa which is where we are right now.

Pipa is a well developed town (it has cobbles in the streets instead of sand) with loads of places to eat and drink. But better than all that are the three beaches nearby. We spent all of yesterday on our sunchairs at Praia do Madeiro, a coconut palm lined curving bay with a great righthand longboard wave rolling off the point and water filled with dolphins and turtles. Throw the plates of fresh fruit and hand-delivered caipirinhas into the mix and you have what we have been seeking in Brasil: Paradise. And the reason we decided to come here is that I am 30 years old on this 26th day of August. We booked into very a nice pousada and are enjoying ourselves immensely.

The cold land that is Bolivia

Today in Santa Cruz de la Sierra it is 23 degrees and sunny. A decent wind blows and the local punters stroll about the Plaza 24 de Septiembre eating ice cream and looking fabulous. BMWs and Porsches roll along the streets and there is boutique shopping to be had all over the place. We are both finding it hard to believe that we are still in Bolivia. There are no llamas in the streets, no beggars, actual trees grow forth from the ground and the air is sweet and humid. We left La Paz from its El Alto airport at 4,010m yesterday wrapped in our fleeces, thermals and beanies which is basically the way we dressed every day while in Bolivia.

Leaving Peru was not as simple as it should have been. We were aware that strikes were taking place in the general triangular area between Cusco, Arequipa and Puno. We asked around and researched as far as we could and were assured that if we took one particular bus, they would take a slightly different route to avoid the strikes and arrive in Puno for a connection which would take us to the border at Desaguadero and on to La Paz. We thought we'd made a good decision as there were a lot of locals on the bus with us - surely a sign that this time we would not be purposefully lied to by another Peruvian. The bus left at 10:00pm and stopped in sub-zero darkness at around 4:00am. Nobody knew where we were and the locals who had paid for their service to Puno were a tad irate (welcome to our world). We drove a little further until the sun came up, then after the driver and his helper fucked around and failed to make a decision of any kind for an hour, we grabbed our bags and walked for two hours in the freezing post-dawn light across the physical roadblocks, somewhere a long way from Puno.

The remainder of the trip went like this: 11-seat Combi with 23 passengers from that place to Juliaca, 11-seat Combi with between 11 and 20 passengers from Juliaca to Puno, taxi with a girl from the mid-west United States (Greenbay Packers fan) from Puno to Desaguadero, passport control and so forth, taxi with US girl to La Paz. Total expected travel time - 12 hours. Total actual travel time - 18 hours. Thank god we were out of Peru!

We dropped our passports with the requisite paperwork into the Brazillian Embassy as soon as we hit La Paz so that we could plan our route out of the Andes and onto the East Coast of South America. We got them in on a Friday and had to wait for the weekend to pass and pick them up on the following Tuesday. This meant that we couldn't go to either Lake Titicaca or Rurrenabaque as we would need the passport on both of those journeys. So we took Chris and Hamish's advice and booked a day's mountain biking on the 'World's Most Dangerous Road' with B-Side Adventures. These folks were a darn fine outfit: dual suspension bikes, good food and a top guide who made the ride go from feeling like it could be rather dangerous into a thoroughly enjoyable and safe day.

Back to the Embassy and we picked up our visas with no hassles. We're going to Brazil!

Our next stop was to follow Mike's suggestion and go to Rurrenabaque for a visit to the Pampas. We also took his suggestion to avoid the minimum 20-hour bus journey there and to fly instead. Far more expensive, far more enjoyable. We wanted to check out the jungle too, as it would be our only trip to the Amazon.

The pampas was absolutely top shelf. Loads of animals and birds including alligators, caimans, pink dolphins, red pirhana, macaws, monkeys, anaconda, kingfishers and many many more. Cruising up and down the narrow muddy river on a long boat with the alligator-, caiman- and pirhana-infested waters every day was a real treat. We decided not to swim with the dolphins because as with a lot of Australians, we have read accounts of the stupid tourists going for a dip in the cool clear waters in the Daintree and only to be swallowed by a big nasty croc. When there are 'gators and caimans on the banks and flesh eating pirhana in the water, you just don't go swimming. Three days of pampas down, two day of jungle to go.

We jumped back in a larger boat after a night in town at Rurre and went in the opposite direction to the pampas and into the jungle. Our arrival at the lodge in the trees some hours later was not quite as exciting as I had hoped, because the jungle looked very, very similar to the rainforest on Fraser Island. Sure it's pretty, but not the impenetrable stuff that makes the use of a large and sharp machete 100% necessary and that which I had been hoping for. We saw one monkey and one bird in our two days, and both of those were from a large distance away. Our guide was crap too, but it was still nice to get out amongst some trees.

No sooner had we made it back to La Paz for the night than we were on another bus out to Lake Titicaca. It's high up there, 3,810m to be precise. Nadine had said that the views from the Isla del Sol reminded her of the Cyclades in Greece, a place I had visited twice in the past. And fair play to her, but there were echoes of Greece to be found there. Actually the landscape views may have been more impressive with the gigantic range of the Cordillera Real lined up from left to right, though here was no resemblance to be found in the architecture. After two nights on the Isla and with only a few days left before our departure to Brazil, it was time to move on. So this we did and were lucky enough to run into and dine with our Danish pals from the Canon de Colca trek out of Arequipa a few weeks ago.

We have a plane booked to fly us from here in Santa Cruz to Sao Paulo, Brazil tomorrow morning. Any city with a population larger than Australia's should be a genuine blowout. We will try not to get mugged.

Bye-bye Peru

A month is a long time in footy. And a second month in Peru is even longer. Since I last wrote, we have escaped the land of the thief, the liar and the truth-twister and reside at present in the tranquilo city of La Paz, Bolivia. But I won't elaborate on any of our hijinks in Bolivia today as there is plenty to tell of what happened between the descent of Nevado Pisco and our transit to La Paz. Sorry that there are no photos with this post. I've tried many places over the past week that have DVD readers, but have had no joy.

We had a beer with Mark in Huaraz just before he jumped on a bus to meet with a mate in Lima. We were in a good state of mind after out hikes in the Cordillera Blanca and were in no mood to deal with a teeming city of 8 million, so we caught a bus more or less straight to Ica and spent only two hours in Lima in the hours just prior to sunrise. Ica was nothing to speak of, another dry and featureless city on the central coastal plain of Peru, but the oasis at Huacachina looked in the flesh the same way it does on the back of a 50 sole note. The only oasis in Peru, Huacachina is surrounded by a sea of sand that looks similar in my mind's eye to the Sahara desert. All the tourists who pass through here (and there are many) do so to take a dune buggy trip out into the dunes, try a little sandboarding and drink heaps of booze at the few bars around the lake. We spent three days there and felt very much like Bill Murray did in Groundhog Day. It was good to move along.

We did take a short trip to the Paracas National Park which is a 35 minute speedboat ride out into the Pacific. A variety of birds, sealions and crustacea inhabit these islands that make up Paracas, and we saw them all. We also visited what was an interesting precursor to the Nazca Lines, a giant candelabra imprinted on the side of a hill. Naturally, modern science has no clue as to how or when it was made or by whom. But crusty sea pirates, fishermen and the like have been blowing out to it for centuries. At around 170m high, it was impressive.

Nazca is the capital town of the driest are in Peru. Rain comes to Nazca and its surrounds once every decade. If you look good in brown, this is the place for you. Similar to Huacachina, the tourists come to Nazca for one thing: To catch a morning light-plane flight over the Nazca lines. This we did and we saw all of the main lines as instructed. However, to call these things 'lines' is to misrepresent what they really are. I've seen pottery from other ancient cultures and also from the Nazca, but to see these intricate designs blown up to a size that only allows them to be viewed from 400m in the air is rather impressive. Commercial flights started crossing the Nazca plain in the early 1950's and you could imagine the surprise of those first pilots as they crossed the figure of the monkey or the hummingbird, the whale or the spaceman. Our photos were quite crap, and we should have bought the postcard set.

A note to all of you planning to take the flight as we did - Don't eat breakfast before you go up. It makes concentration on the lines harder than it should be.

Next stop was Arequipa. This town, like EVERY other one in Peru has a main square called Plaza de Armas. Back in the day these squares were typically surrounded by the governmental buildings and a military armoury, hence the adoption of the name Armas. Anyway, the Plaza in Arequipa is beautiful, the best in all of Peru in my opinion. I did not however take a photo of this plaza because I'm stupid.

From Arequipa we took a few days to hike in and out of the Canon de Colca (Colca Canyon), the world's second deepest at 3,126m. Mike had strongly suggested that we go further afield and hike the deepest (by an additional 161m), the Canon de Cotahuasi, but we were lazy and opted for the road more travelled.

Having travelled in India some years ago, I thought that public transport could not possibly be as crowded as it was on local trains in Kolkata. I was wrong. On the six hour journey from Arequipa to Cabanaconde, the Peruvians squeezed nearly 120 people onto a 48 seater bus. It was a fucking joke. Descending a moutain pass of 4,840m with that much extra weight cannot possibly be safe and I had a low, gnawing sense of doom for the majority of the bus ride.

We hiked down the canyon wall, stayed a night in comparitively salubrious accommodations on the canyon floor, met some cool Danish folks, hiked along the floor some more the next day, took a dip in some nice pools and hiked back up that afternoon. During the ascent, we were lucky enough to see four male Condors at very close quarters. The largest bird in the world is impressive when it flies very close overhead.

The following morning, waiting for the bus, Amy spotted someone she used to work with at the Indooroopilly Pig 'n' Whistle about seven years ago. Small world. We all stopped at the Cruz del Condor to, you guessed it, spot Condors, and talked about all sorts of stuff and agreed to drink beer in Arequipa the next day. As it happens, the Condors we did see were a very long way distant and instead I got a shot of the tourists scrambling to see these birds. We'd already seen them the day before as I said, so we left on the earliest bus we could back to Arequipa. We met with Anna and Mike as planned and drank an awful lot of beer in the lovely afternoon sun.

The 'classic' Inca Trail to Machu Picchu is booked out for three or four months ahead, so if you want to hike this trail you need to nominate a date before you leave, pay the money and turn up in Cusco in time to start the hike. With such a flexible itinerary, we did not want to nominate a date as it may have meant that we would have to skip places of interest to make the trek. Besides, it is bloody expensive to hike the classic trail, and we were sure we could save a few bucks by turning up and taking one of the alternative routes.

We had heard a great deal about the Salkantay route to Machu Picchu. It was over twice as long as the classic route (75km instead of 30km), has less people on the trail, goes over a higher pass (4,850m instead of 4,200m) and has two gigantic mountains to view for a few days, Humantay at 5,917m and Salkantay itself at 6,271m. After our efforts in Huaraz we thought that these statistics added up to a more challenging trek, so off we went.

Of course, because all tour operators in Cusco are pathological liars, very little of what they promised us or any of the other 11 people in our party was actually true. Sure if you bent the truth and viewed it from their skewed angle, some of it was kinda true, but mostly we were all sold a pack of lies. Rather than delve into specifics here, let me summarise it by saying that the trek, the guide, the helpers and the overall ambience of the trip was crap. We did however meet a bunch of top people. I guess you'd rather have met good people and shared an ordinary experience with them than have had the best trekking conditions with a pack of assholes.

Machu Picchu itself was an impressive site and I believe it has been voted as one of the New Seven Wonders by anyone who has access to the internet. Around 90 million people voted which is a far more representative sample than the one guy who decided the original seven wonders all those years ago.

Getting out of Cusco was more challenging than it ought have been. People resident in the triangular area between the towns of Puno, Cusco and Arequipa had decided to strike or blockade the roads between these towns to protest against poor social conditions. I have no idea of the specific reason behind these blockades, and neither do the Peruvians or Bolivians we've spoken to. We bought a bus ticket to La Paz via Puno on the assurance that the bus would take an alternative route. When the bus pulled up at 4:00am in sub-zero temperatures at who-knows-where and the driver told us we would have the start walking, I couldn't say I was surprised. Luckily, we stayed on the bus for a while and we drove for another hour. There were indeed physical blockades and at about 7:00am we started walking.

By the time we made it to La Paz our 12 hour direct journey on one bus had turned into 18 hours by way of one bus, one stint on foot, two minivans complete with spewing small children, and two taxis for the final 350km of the journey. Initially I was pissed off, but it actually became kinda fun. We were happiest when we received our stamps from the stern Bolivian border guards. We had ben in Peru for 49 days. That's seven whole weeks. I would say that the scenery in Peru got a grade of A. The people unfortunately got a big old F.

We have a lot of things coming up in Bolivia, with one completed yesterday and the next starting tomorrow, and we plan to get out of the mountains on around July 24 when we'll fly to Sao Paulo, Brazil. We have high hopes for Brazil and rely on Jo and Nadine's assurance that Brazil is all that we hope for and more.