Nature's waterslide

Rio de Janeiro :: Brazil

The calm before the storm.

Places: Paraty & Rio de Janeiro.

Coolest thing I did: Saw local blokes "surf" down a natural waterslide/waterfall standing the whole way down. I did it on my bum.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Havaianas have now diversified into making canvas sneakers, kind of like rip-off Chucks.

Thankfully the rain stopped. I woke up to an overcast sky on my first day in Paraty and decided that was a good day to do not much except walk around the old town and take pictures of churches, cobbled streets and all that. Paraty was the Pilbara of the 18th century and it shows in just how many flash houses and churches they built. It's being lovingly restored these days, complete with brand new peeling rendering which looks like it's naturally aged over time. The morning streets are assaulted with the sound of a thousand camera shutters, with the day trippers being herded about the place, but come nightfall and it's left to the backpackers who almost exclusively populate the gringo segment on the population after lunch.

Probably the biggest sign out of the many big signs that we're not in America here was the fact there was a black man willing to stand on the dock in front of the church where the old slave auctions used to be and pose in chains. On what planet could you do that in any Western country?

You can tell a lot about how a people see themselves through the prism of the stories they tell themselves about others. One really revealing conversation I had with a bloke from Sao Paulo in Paraty had him asking about the ethnic ghettoes in Australia and America. It seems like one of the main narratives about Brazil is that it's a seamless mix of ethnicities and the social ills of the West come from not integrating their minorities well. It's a bit of a blind spot when you can say that with a straight face and still notice that all the people shopping in the Jardins in Sao Paulo were white, and the people serving there were light brown and all the people guarding the doors were black. One thing the government here apparently doesn't do is break down their poverty statistics by ethnicity, as everyone is Brazilian, so it's hard to say whether there's more poor black people than white people definitively, but it sure looks like it.

The reason so many people stay beyond the olden parts of town is because Paraty is situated in a bay that is ringed by jungle mountains that constantly seem to have clouds ringing them, and tropical islands that reminded me a whole lot of Fiji. I spent the first afternoon at a beach two north of town (as the first two kind of had a film of marine diesel hanging about due to being next to the docks) sitting on the sand in a deck chair drinking beer and swimming in water that was about the temperature you'd expect in Costa Rica. Even if the water was a bit murky around the coast it was a nice change from the freezing cold currents that seemed to not want to leave on my last few days in Florianopolis.

Despite myself, I did two day trips organised by the hostel and I'm glad of both. The first one was to get on a small wooden boat with 6 other people and get driven around to some of the most perfect jungle shrouded island beaches I've seen anywhere. Due to the fact my last two days had spotless blue skies you could see all the way down through water the consistency of glass to what I'm told was about 15 metres. I later found out people dive some sites in those islands and I can see why. We made stops to swim in aquarium quality water with innumerable tropical fish and another with little sea turtles. As an aside on cultural differences, the British and the Chileans both find it funny when I refer to turtles as "tasty" in a way North Americans do not.

The other big day trip was out in Jeeps to a series of waterfalls up in the jungle behind town. I could have done the same thing on a pushbike or a horse, but I kind of liked the laziness of being driven up there. I also didn't spend time wondering if I was in the right spot. Despite a pointless trip to a Cacacha distillery to taste rum ruined by being mixed with sickly sweet flavours the day got progressively better. You start with a deep pool you swing out on a Tarzan rope over and slowly make your way higher, jumping off things into deep water or sitting under little waterfalls until you make your way to their crown jewel: the waterslide.

The guides cleverly take you in via the back way, so you end up at the top of a massive moss covered rock with a thin film of water rushing over it. It's at a progressively steeper slope all the way down, so if you, like me do it sitting on your bum with your knees together and feet forward you accelerate to a steep drop off and a deep pool at the end. If you're been doing since you were a kid and have the head scars and missing teeth to prove it you do it standing up, like riding a surfboard with nothing but your bare feet guiding you down the moss. If you're really shit hot you do a forward flip at the end into the pool. I'm only sorry I spent too many goes going down the slide and got down the bottom with my camera too late to actually take any pictures or video of them doing it. It's hard to do justice to in words.

My best intention was to average 10+ hours of sleep a night and eat very well before Carnival destroys me. Only the first one was fulfilled, as I have become strangely addicted to things made with Acai berries. I like it in orange juice but the Brazilians like to buy take away muesli with an acai paste on it. It's crazy to see people sitting on the side of the road eating muesli at 4pm as a snack. However, due to the fact that my entire dorm room decided to go drink at Paraty's only beach bar that happens to be open after midnight last night I'm now in Rio on about 4 hours sleep. The Carnival officially kicks off tomorrow, but it's already feeling pretty rowdy around here at 3pm on a Thursday. Since getting into town I've seen both Christ the Redeemer and Sugar Loaf Mountain on the bus ride into Ipanema from the bus station, and the view has me questioning whether Sydney does indeed have the most beautiful harbour in the world. It may also be sleep deprivation.

I'm staying one block back from Ipanema beach and have only looked at it for about 10 minutes but I have to say I'm already highly smacked about the gob by it. This place feels like the exact opposite of Sao Paulo: it takes zero effort to start liking it.

So I have my exit strategy to hit Ilha Grande next Wednesday after the Carnival to recover so I suspect that's the next you'll hear from me. It also marks the midway point of my trip, which is just crazy to think about.

Life in the endless city

Paraty :: Brazil

Now this is the Brazil I'd been led to believe in.

Places: Sao Paulo & Paraty.

Coolest thing I did: Stood on the observation deck of Edificio Italia and watched a storm tear through Sao Paulo's endless highrise.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Karl Stefanovic is a world wide Youtube sensation. A girl from Atlanta told me about the time he interviewed the Dalai Lama and told the joke "The Dalai Lama (that's you) walked into a Pizza shop and asked if they could make you One with Everything". I don't know if I'm more amazed by the fact an American told me that, or if the Dalai Lama agreed to be interviewed by Karl Stefanovic.

There's no way to start except to simply point out that Sao Paulo is truly massive - the only thing I can think to compare it to is a low rent version of Tokyo with terrible concreting. It's a city that has come along through various booms and busts, all the time struggling with the fact no-one expected it to completely overtake the very small valley it once inhabited and sprawl over all the nearby hills and crevasses, making it a total nightmare to get a handle on. It's a maze of streets running into streets and funny angles, with the occasional out of place garden or viaduct to make things really interesting. The downtown seems to be composed of claustrophobic narrow streets all lined with massive buildings, with poverty being thrust firmly in your face. I imagine if you only saw that part of Sao Paulo you'd hate it and never want to come back.

But that would be a shame.

Thanks to Gerry's awesome advice I found myself staying in Vila Madalena, an area that has been overtaken by the trendy set of SP and is now chock full of cafes, bars, places to eat and the little art galleries I never go into but make a place feel like it's cooler than you. It's amazingly low rise when compared to the rest of the city, and has some kind of street life that isn't tied totally to the car. You can whiff the smell of gentrification in the fact the empty spaces are being filled up with high rise apartments that have cleverly designed fences with spikes topped with electric fences and a guard out the front. This shows you how clearly divided the rich are from the poor in this city, even an area that feels as safe as Vila Madalena shows it doesn't trust it's neighbours.

The slope running from the skyscrapers of the business district of Avenue Paulista down to the Jardins shopping district shows this even more starkly. It runs from a whole lot of shops selling knock offs and cheap clothes from China to a grid of boutiques that have enough swank and European cars gliding down the streets to make you feel like you could be anywhere richer people than you live in the world. It's like an oasis of calm from the grit of the rest of the city - it's one of the rare places that it looks like the footpath was laid out all in one go instead of per house.

Practically none of those kinds of places really do it for me, but if you live anywhere in the flip-flop wearing world then you can't help but have noticed the Cult of Havaiana that has made all other thongs irrelevant. For some reason Brazil has spawned a brand that has become the world power of thongs, and in Sao Paulo you'll find one of those crazily over the top architectural flagship stores brands like that tend to make. You can buy Havaiana's in the petrol station in Brazil, but there's nothing like seeing about 1000 different kinds all lining the walls of this temple to rubber footwear. There's Americans walking around with a stack of them about a foot high looking for cash registers. You wouldn't have believed it 10 years ago. The only real slap in the face is the fact they're about 1/3rd of the price as you'd get in Australia.

Sao Paulo started out as a Jesuit (them again) foothold in early Portuguese Brazil and didn't really ever stop growing from there. The very small cluster of old religious buildings are located right in the middle of SP's rapidly expanding Metro system, but seeing them can be a bit scary, with this also seemingly like the epicentre for SP's many poor and homeless to congregate. I guess if they keep them all out of places like the Jardins then these people have to go somewhere, but it's kind of scary climbing the steps to the Cathedral while you weave your way up the steps trying not to step on anyone sleeping on them. It thins out a bit when you go to look at the cluster of 1930s skyscrapers nearby, complete with a building that looks uncannily like the Empire State Building gone to pot, but not completely. You get the feeling that this is the part of the city you would want to do up if you ever wanted to attract tourists but that doesn't seem to be how things work here - the money that does up the classy parts of town is probably private and the rest of the city kind of makes does.

Next to the Edificio Italia, which is where you're able to go up to the observation deck of a highly swank restaurant for one hour a day to see the skyline, is the work of Brazil's architecture heavyweight Oscar Niemeyer, the highly curved Edificio Copan. This is a guy they loved so much here they let him design the entire capital city, Brasilia, from scratch and looking at this kind of thing, you can see why. Despite the fact he obviously liked concrete as much as everyone else in the 50s (and it's starting to show the wear and tear of that choice) it's an amazing looking building, complete with a shopping centre on the ground floor where they've made no attempt to level out the natural slopes of the ground, just for something different. As a bonus there is also a tiny stand up cafe in the basement that makes by far the only really good cup of coffee I've managed to find in Brazil, and probably the best one I've had in South America.

If you actually want to enjoy Sao Paulo this is the kind of thing you want to be out there enjoying - you're not there for the beach. You'll find little gems everywhere, but you'll also spend a lot of time on the subway avoiding the mass of dodgy areas in between. Back up stuffed between the highrise banking headquarters of Av. Paulista were two gems - the Livraria Cultura bookshop and the MASP art gallery.

The MASP is one of those buildings you're probably going to have an opinion on right away, if only because buildings made out of massive concrete slabs on stilts tend to have that effect on people. It seems like it was built at a time of less fear in Brazil, with a shady spot underneath with standing pools that have now been converted into security barriers to keep most of the population out. I have no idea how they managed to collect a room full of big name impressionists and Renaissance Masters but it's strange being in a gallery that could be in London or Paris while people living out of shopping trolleys congregate underneath. It feels like the rich here have subscribed to the theory that they've got to keep this kind of culture alive to stop the barbarian hordes below destroying it, but you do wonder if acquiring a Picasso is the best use of money in Brazil.

The Livraria Cultura is a bookshop that took over a whole shopping centre - when they ran out of space they just rented out another, often non-adjacent shop and put another section of books there. Like the best ones in BA it's got the kind of selection that simply no longer exists in a bookshop in Australia, and it's a calming experience to sit in the cafe and see just how many people are escaping the madness of the city outside simply to read in peace.

Saturday in Sao Paulo saw the heavens open for pretty much an entire afternoon, which happened to coincide with the street parades that are a warm up for next weekend's Carnival celebrations. At first people tried to ignore this and stay out at the street parties around Vila Madalena but pretty soon they'd been pushed into the many bars and cafes to sit it out. I'd been spending a very hung over afternoon wandering aimlessly around the markets of Benedito Calixto and not paying very much attention when I decided to go back to the hostel. Which has a bar that is open to the public. There was about 30 Brazilians hiding out from the rain downstairs and trying to keep the party going, so being 4pm I decided to take them up on their offer to share a beer with them. What followed was probably one of the better nights out of my life, ending at 4am in a club that decided they would only play indie music from the 90s, the decade that rock music attained perfection (it's been scientifically proven - look it up!). If this is a taste of what Carnival is going to be like then I imagine Rio is going to be nothing short of mental.

So I've moved 6 hours up the coast to Paraty as my staging point for the assault of Carnival. It's a lovely old colonial town with perfect jungle beaches nearby, so I'm hoping to get in about 12 or 13 hours of sleep a night before the big show starts.

More on Paraty next time - my fingers are raw with typing.