Stuff

I promised to write stuff here, as the fancy took me, when I completed my last post in that generic Sao Paulo hotel last September. Seems like quite a while since we were over there in the southern part of the Americas, and so it is.

For an update of what's happened since then, here are the highlights, in no order whatsoever:

• We received a 100% payout from our benevolent insurers for all the stuff we lost in that fucking big fire.
  
• We spent a metric shitload of weekends shopping to replace everything we lost, and yes, we still remember stuff even today. Lucky for us most of it was entirely disposable and we are definitely no worse off than before. It sure did make moving house easy.
• We both got jobs.
• Our surfing fitness dropped back off to nothing, and on the extremely odd occasions when there are both surfboards and waves about, the knowledge that it is impossible to stand up after your arms have fallen off from the exertion of paddling into the lineup tempers the lust for the sea. The only way around this is to move nearer the beach, and that seems an unlikely proposition right now.
  
• I gave in to the myspace and facebook rages. Facebook does play a role in my life now though, and that is in the the low-cost ability to promote select gigs to people I know/ have met. It gives greater returns than sticking up posters in the dead of night.
• I bought an Apple and a copy of their Logic software and am really not much better than when I first plugged it all in. That is through lack of focus. Perhaps this is the little exposing-of-my-soul catharsis I need to devote more time to it. I made a tune, but it wasn't an original, more an exercise in sequencing.
• We bought a Subaru.
  
• The rollerskate of death lives on.
• I've played bundles of gigs, overwhelmingly in the funk vein.
  
• I am a part of Boxy Lucha (www.myspace.com/boxylucha)

That's probably enough for now. Having recently remembered that I know how to write during a little project I did for Dan F, and simultaneously noticing that my vocabulary hasn't progressed at all in several years, I have decided to exercise this ability so that it doesn't slip into a terminal decline.

Happy days.

Bikini Rave 2007

So Marto and Charlie did it again, only this time the Bikini Rave in 2007 was an all outdoor affair, and for the first time it was at a public venue. I'm amazed the Coppers didn't pay us a visit.

Download the film here: http://www.playtv.com.au/Bikini_RaveMk2.mov/

Can't wait for the 2008 edition

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.