A little bit jittery

Bogota :: Colombia

A cursed city, and coffee.

Places: Manizales, Salento, Cocora Valley & Bogota.

Coolest thing I did: Spent the evening playing tejo for real with the fine bunch of kids I went walking down the Cocora Valley earlier in the day.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Chiquita banana company got in big trouble for paying off both left-wing guerillas and right wing paramilitaries in the 1990s and 2000s to leave their bananas alone.

My trip to the coffee growing region of Colombia didn't start out very well. Due to a flight delay I arrived in Manizales wearing a t-shirt and shorts only to find the overnight temperature was below 18 and the airline decided not to bring my bag. That put off my going to Nevado del Ruiz, a snow capped volcano you can see from town, mostly because I had no clothes. So I decided to go the next day, but that night I got food poisoning, and just to add to the gayness all trips up the volcano were cancelled until further notice due to their being too much 'sulfur' and 'poison' in the air. I've decided that Manizales was cursed. There is no other logical explanation.

However, for a cursed city, Manizales is in an amazingly beautiful location. The main street of the city runs right along the highest ridge-line available and as you walk along it you can see the city sliding off down into the valleys on either side. I was particularly blessed that when I got to the hostel in a foul mood (due to my lack of bag) the guy at reception stopped checking me in so we could take a photo of Nevado del Ruiz behind the city skyline at sunset. He said he hadn't seen that since January, so that was kind of cool. Out in all directions are beautiful valleys where this countries second most profitable cash crop, coffee is grown.

There isn't that much to see in the city itself if I'm honest, the best bits are looking away from it from the natural vantage point the city happens to give you. Due it being a highly active earthquake zone (volcanoes tend to be a give away of that kind of thing) the cathedral is only a recent build, and is the highest spire in Colombia by virtue of the fact it's a Gothic structure made totally out of reinforced concrete. You only realise that when you're right up close, as you can see the rusted steel mesh sticking out of several of the saint's heads where the concrete has chipped away.

So due to the cursed nature of Manizales I decided to get into a series of minibuses and make my way to the much smaller Salento, which used to be a tiny little coffee growing hamlet but due to the actions of a single Pom, it's now firmly on the backpacker trail and it's hostel population is growing exponentially. I managed to arrive on a Sunday and that turns out to be a bit of a treat as it's the day when no-one does any work but rather hangs out about town in their best boots and cowboy hat. Not long after arriving in town I went into a small place where an older bloke in a serious moustache was pulling tintos (black coffees) from an ancient espresso machine while his daughter was waitressing. It had the kind of old school diner decor that every designer from Surry Hills to Newtown is trying their hardest to copy so it's crazy to see an authentic version made by simply not changing anything since the 50s. It was full of old men arguing about something my poor Spanish wouldn't let me understand, but one of the joys of people watching in foreign countries is you realise how universal people really are. I'm sure a large component of the conversation was about how young people are screwing up the world, and how it was different in their day.

As the afternoon bled into evening it became obvious that what you do in Salento on a Sunday is sit in a bar around Bolivar square and drink beer. So that's what I did. Again you can see human universals where extended families laugh and sing to the radio, kids run wild in the park and couple canoodle in the corner. I especially liked the old bloke with his face painted white who spent his time miming behind people walking around in order to entertain the patrons of each bar and get a bit of change out of each. Just like home some people have a sense of humour about it, and some people tried hard to punch him.

Besides the coffee Salento is right near the Cocora Valley, a highly green burst of farmland along the river north of town. You get up in the morning, haggle your way onto a jeep (quite often requiring some of you to hang off the back in a form of extreme car pooling) and start walking when you reach the top. It was a good 3 hour loop through a mixture of jungle and people's cow paddocks, with large sections of the hillsides cleared to make way for cows to graze and horses to run angrily at people who don't realise which side of the fence they are on. Like the Lost City I kind of just liked doing the exercise again, and being at a slightly higher 2,500m I feel like I'm getting a bit more used to thin air, which will be really important when I get to Peru.

The main drawcard of the valley, however is the fact Colombia's national tree grows there. It's a palm tree. I didn't think that would be cool either, except for the fact they grow something in the order of 30m high, and you can take very cool pictures of yourself as a dot at the base of one of them. You get a much better idea of just how tall they grow by the fact that so much of the ground around is cleared for cows to eat grass so they look taller than the very few of them that are still rising out of the smaller trees.

I ended up walking with a group of 8, who I met later on that night for dinner and after (rather surprisingly) smoking a Hookah pipe at one of the local cafes, and quite a few beers we decided to go looking for a tejo place. As I think I said earlier in one of these, tejo is a game that could only have come from Colombia. You throw 2kg lead weights across the room at little triangles of paper embedded in clay that contain small amounts of gunpowder. A direct hit by the weight results in an impressive explosion, and if you're really lucky a pile of burning paper landing somewhere in the middle of the people playing in the next lane. It's completely unsafe, and made more so by the fact you tend to be drinking heavily at the same time. We decided to play on the full lanes, where the target is about 20-odd metres away from you and predictably it took a full hour to actually get the weight to hit the clay, let alone make something explode. Even with a few direct hits only one of us managed it, but there is enough exploding going on around you to not matter so much.

So it was a hung over and early morning that had me on a minibus and the bus back to Bogota to make my flight for Lima on the Thursday before Easter. I was quite lucky that completely by accident there's some kind of cultural festival going on and Bolivar square was full to the gills with people waiting to see Manu Chau, who is apparently famous.

After a while you realise the main square & main street in every town in Colombia is named after Simon Bolivar, who was instrumental in getting the Spanish out of South America back in the 1800s. Despite dying on his way into exile he's had quite a resurgence as a historical hero of all the countries that he liberated to make a place called Gran Colombia (Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and parts of Northern Peru). He's a personal favourite of current Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has turned his country into a semi-communist kleptocracy under the flag of what he calls a Bolivarian Revolution, the idea being he's liberating Latin America from yanqui domination. No ego there.

Most of Latin America threw off the Spanish when they were a bit distracted in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars in Europe and really couldn't give too much of a crap what happened in their remote colonies. Bolivar was responsible for liberating pretty much everything down to Peru, but did so after Argentinian Jose de San Martin had already done the same in the south of the continent. They met in Peru during the liberation wars there and Bolivar basically told San Martin to bugger off home, he could handle things from here. Apparently San Martin did just that, quitting the military and politics altogether and living a content old retirement while Bolivar ended up a fairly hated military dictator who died trying to flee the continent (ironically) back to Europe.

So Manu Chao. I wandered into Plaza Bolivar and found half of Bogota waiting there for a free concert by said Mr Chao. Despite not really knowing his work I managed to follow along with the crowd, who seemed to know the words to every song and lose it and dance around like a fool in time with everyone else. There was something cool about seeing all the people filling the plaza and crashing like a wave up the steps of the cathedral (and quite often, climbing up on it) all singing and waving their arms together in time, even though I didn't know basically any of the songs. Well, it turns out, I did know one. When I was taking Spanish lessons the teacher used one of his songs Me gustas tu as a way of us getting to listen to spoken Spanish, and to drive into our heads by crazy repitition that me gusta something means I like whatever. It was kind of cool to be able to sing along to that one.

So tomorrow I leave Colombia behind to start a new life in Peru. The thing that has stuck me the most about this country is just how friendly and curious the people are. I guess we're in the early days of mass tourism here, and it makes me wish my terrible Spanish was a bit better so I could answer all their questions, a remarkable percentage of which seem to revolve around the death of Steve Irwin. You have to give the people what they want, so I learnt that "stingray" is la raya.

The Lost City

Taganga :: Colombia

Now with less kidnappings by Marxist rebels!

Places: Taganga & Ciudad Perdida.

Coolest thing I did: Managed to get clear of my tour group on the second last day and pretty much run down the trails rather than walking them. It's been ages since I did any running at all and I miss the endorphins.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Right up until 1903 there was no such country as Panama, it had been part of Colombia since independence from the Spanish.

Having now passed through the town of Santa Marta a couple of times I'm glad I decided to base myself in Taganga, it really looked like nothing more than a big town, whereas Taganga has converted itself over the last few years from a sleepy fishing village to a full blown backpacker slum. It's in a lovely little bay but unfortunately, being a working fishing village the beach is covered in boats and the sand is stained by marine diesel and studded with broken house bricks and such. There is a much nicer beach about 20 mins and a "random" police search for drugs away, called Playa Grande where you can swim in water like warm glass. They have built a lot of restaurants on the beach, but it is shaded by a few trees and the menu in most of these places involves someone bringing out a tray of fresh fish for you to pick from. They then bring it back about half an hour later on top of fried bananas and coconut rice. It's pretty hard to beat. The only downside is the sand is also fairly dirty looking at Playa Grande too, so you shouldn't expect postcard Caribbean if you don't want to be a bit disappointed.

Despite about 35% of all buildings in Taganga being dive shops it's not considered a very good place to dive. The main drawcard is it's currently the cheapest place on the planet to get a PADI certification. The Irish people I was drinking with on St Patrick's Day were here doing their Open Water course (which is the beginners course, for you land lubbers) and they were telling me there's fish living in truck tires and stuff like that down there. Didn't exactly make me want to fork over my hard earned.

About another 30% of the buildings are selling treks to this area's other big draw card - Ciudad Perdida. This was traditionally a 6 day trek through the jungle but with improvements to the trail (things like bridges, and wacky stuff like that) it's now possible to do it in 4 days. I chose 5 days, mostly because it costs exactly the same amount to do it for 4,5 or 6 days, and all the companies that do it have set the same price by agreement, so you're only really competing on quality. I also liked the idea of being fed for an extra day.

Ciudad Perdida was the work of the Tairona people, who started building a series of stone platforms for their wooden houses and crops to grow on. I assume because they liked these things to happen on flat bits and the hills of the Sierra Nevada are pretty damn steep. They started about 500 years before Machu Piccu in Peru, and I assume things got way out of hand, as the site now is supposed to have 600 odd platforms, 200 of which have been fully cleared and excavated. The city was supposedly inhabited until the Spanish came, at which point the Tairona abandoned it and moved deeper into the jungle instead of taking on the conquistadors head on. It then stayed a bit lost, except in local myth and legend until grave robbers stumbled on it in the 70s and started pulling artefacts out of the ground to sell. During the next decade the grave robbers fought over the site (including a couple of shootings where the bodies are still out in the jungle somewhere) before one disgruntled grave robber went to Bogota and tipped off the authorities about a decade later. The government then sent archaeologists to excavate the site. No-one really knows how much loot was lost in that decade.

The hike itself, despite having some fairly hard core hill climbs in mud (due to the daily afternoon downpour) isn't as challenging as I'd been led to expect. These days you have campsites with hammocks (and occasionally beds!), mosquito nets and cold showers. They feed you very well, as the food is now brought up using donkeys you don't have to carry any of it yourself and vast improvements have been made to the actual path. In places where the trail used to have you clinging onto the side of the cliff they've concreted a new path and places that used to involve waist deep river crossings now have a bridge. This quite easily could knock a couple of days off. However, doing it over 5 days now involves swimming in rivers, reading and playing cards a fair bit, and also makes sure you're under shelter before the really heavy rain starts at about 4pm on the dot every afternoon and continues into the night. I was lucky to have a young group of top chicos y chicas who all went at pretty much the same pace and provided good banter in the evenings. We saw about 4 or 5 other groups on the trek, and some were so varying in age and fitness there couldn't help but be tension and frustration. There was also groups where you saw or heard someone and thought "yeah, I'd do the time for killing them, just for the peace and quiet".

The descendants of the local natives still live all along the trail, and they seem to in general be fairly happy these days with the tourists as the companies are making sure money goes into everyone's pockets. One night they came down to tell us about the local rituals, including every man being given a gourd like thing made of calcium to allow them to easily have something to chew coca leaves with, and the fact when a bloke turns 18 he spends 5 days married to an older woman (35-40) who is widowed learning how to be a husband before he then goes and gets married to his actual wife (14-18). The older woman is apparently picked by consensus of the village, with the blessing of the shaman, but all of the girls seemed to be a bit freaked out by that idea.

As the foothills of the Sierra Nevada used to be one of Colombia's prime coca growing regions the tour used to include a demonstration of how to turn coca leaves into coca paste - the first of 3 steps into making the powdered cocaine that has spent so many years turning Keith Richards into beef jerky. The government has banned that now, but the guide said he used to actually like doing it, as many of the tourists who see the process includes powdered cement, battery acid and diesel and decide that maybe cocaine is not the drug for them. Back in the 80s and 90s this used to be the way it was done, with smallholders from the Colombian coast all the way down to Bolivia processing their own leaves and selling the paste either directly to the Colombia cartels or to middlemen who dealt with them in bulk. However due to the successes of the mid-90s with the death of Pablo Escobar finishing the Medellin cartel and the extradition of the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers to the US bringing down the Cali cartel, the high end work of using solvents to turn the paste into the cocaine hydrochloride that goes up Aussie backpackers noses fell to the left wing rebel groups. By the year 2000 both the FARC and ELN had come to an agreement with the government that allowed them de-facto control of vast areas of jungle in both Northern and Southern Colombia and they operated drug labs there with impunity. The area the Lost City was in fell into use by both groups, taking it well off the tourist trail, especially after the ELN kidnapped a whole bunch of trekkers in 2003.

In 2005 the area came under the control of the AUC - right-wing paramilitaries who the government claimed not to control but seemed to be fairly comfortable doing it's bidding. The trail was reopened, but you had to hire AUC bodies to come with you, dressed in combat gear and carrying big guns. I don't know if this would exactly make me feel that much safer. That only really ended a couple of years ago, when the army took full control of the area to protect the tourists. When you actually get to the centre piece of the Lost City there's several soldiers there watching over you. They're happy to pose of photos, though I have one where I'm petting their dog, with the whole city spreading out into the jungle valley behind me.

Despite the fact that you end up being constantly damp or wet for 5 days, as the humidity means your clothes don't even dry overnight and you tend to carry a few kilos of sweat in your shirt everywhere you go, it was quite enlivening to actually be doing some proper exercise again. One of the days our group got mixed up with a slower one, which allowed me to get ahead of the guide and basically run for an hour or so down the trails instead of walking it, getting me to the camp a good half hour before the others. The runners out there will know what it's like to sit there in a pool of your own endorphins after a good bout of exercise and understand how much I've been missing that feeling.

So after a massive night out in Taganga to celebrate our return, and as a result a totally wasted day on the beach yesterday the time to make some tough calls about what to do next. The result is later today I'm going to fly back to Bogota and onto Manizales in the coffee growing region south of Medellin and then it'll be back next Wednesday to try and fly to Lima in Peru on Thursday in order to avoid trying to travel over the Easter weekend in any seriously Catholic countries. This means that Ecuador is now completely off the menu for this trip but something had to give. I think I'd like to come back for a diving holiday to see the Galapagos and then maybe also the Pacific coast of Colombia. That was one of the last areas the government regained control of from the FARC and supposed to be world class diving on live aboard boats that has just reopened as a result. That Next Time list is getting fairly long now.

It's just a flesh wound!

Cartagena de Indias :: Colombia

"This reminds me of a Caribbean beach" - Canadian backpacker on Playa Blanca, a Caribbean beach.

Places: Cartagena de Indias, Islas de Rosario & Playa Blanca.

Coolest thing I did: The boat ride back from Rosario and Playa Blanca, where the driver seemed to think safety wasn't that important and decided to see just how fast he could go over the massive waves. Better than any roller coaster.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Just to be different here in Colombia they don't use the word gringo to describe the whities, but rather mono, which I think means monkey.

For some reason when I heard that Cartagena was on the Caribbean sea I assumed it would also have beaches you could swim in. This wasn't a great assumption. However, what you do get from Colombia's second oldest surviving Spanish settlement is a whole heaping spoon of colonial history and old buildings. Due to the rise of tourism in the wake of Colombia's newfound security the old walls and buildings have been lovingly (if not historically accurately) restored to their former glory. This is really about looking at a town that has been living within it's history for centuries and is now going about using it for something useful. Instead of trying to dress everyone up in costume and pretend it's the late 1500s the city walls have been converted into working markets, bars and nightclubs and you don't get the same feeling of total sanitisation I got in central Salvador.

This leads to interesting accidents, like Cartagena being home to what must be the world's most beautiful welfare office, so the people who come to collect their dole cheques do so in the courtyard garden of an old colonial casa. A far cry from Centrelink at Blacktown.

In order to show there is some new culture as well as the old a fair proportion of the world of local sculptor Edgardo Carmona has been dropped into the squares either side of the Naval Museum (which I didn't go into). He seems to be into flat surfaces and hard lines, but his subjects, like the bunch of old guys playing dominoes or the fruit seller with the basket of pineapples on her head have the look of rusty robots. There is also a single lone Botero gorda who is nude and lounges on her side looking directly into the entrance of one of the many city churches. It's a nice, irreverent contrast.

Of all the history probably the forts are the bit I found most interesting, mostly because I hadn't seen them anywhere else on these trips. The most impressive of these is Castillo de San Felipe, whose cannons now point menacingly out at the high rise apartment blocks of the rich peninsula Bocagrande. It's massively thick walls are filled with tunnels that are designed in such a way that shouts are amplified along their length (a good design feature before walkie talkies and mobile phones) and was part of a fire signal system designed to warn of attack to sister forts all up and down the coast. All this became necessary due to the fact that Cartegena was shipping massive amounts of gold plundered from the interior and the English had a fairly lax tolerance of it's nationals becoming pirates and taking said gold.

One of the most notable was Sir Francis Drake, a favourite of the first Queen Betty. Having already made himself unpopular with the Spanish by doing such things as plundering Panama for it's gold and silver, Frank (as he was known to his mates) became a large part of the English defeat of the Spanish Armada. As part of this first actions in this fracas Frank sailed to the New World, put Cartagena to the sword and ransomed it back to the Spanish crown for as much gold as he could carry. It was a direct result of this kind of chicanery from the English that Castillo de San Felipe, with walls sloped to deflect cannon balls like a stealth bomber deflects radar, was built.

In the 1700s the British tried to take Cartagena for good, and it's forts were under the control of one Don Blas de Lezo, who was already the veteran of many battles. This showed mostly due to the fact that Donny B had already at this point lost one arm, one leg and an eye. For some reason this brings to mind Monty Python and the Holy Gail and the Black Knight yelling out "It's just a flesh wound!". So the British fleet of 180 ships attacked and despite Donny B being wounded in this thigh and remaining arm the Spanish managed to ward off the British until they had no choice but to retreat back to Jamaica. There's a statue out the front of the Castillo that makes you assume that every pirate in fiction is somehow based on Donny B.

So my day trip out to find salt water I could swim in was to the Islas de Rosario, which are about 2 hours from Cartagena by speed boat, a bit quicker when driven by the complete lunatic we had. When you get there the options are to visit the aquarium (which all the old people did) or to go snorkelling in some of the clearest water I've ever seen. Despite the fact the Caribbean sea breaks directly over the reef there's still large schools of colourful fish to see. I was lucky enough to spot a barracuda, but beyond that it's only little fellas. The coral, unfortunately has been heat bleached and also seems to have taken it's fair share of tourist kickings. For some reason you never get to rent fins out here, which means the many tourists who can't seem to swim end up standing on all the coral and breaking it. People do dive here too, but I hear it's had many of the same problems. Still, it's nice to get out there and swim with the fish in bathtub temperature water.

The other story worth relaying is the fact that there's lots of little islands big enough for a single house, one of which is the ruin of the mansion once owned by Pablo Escobar. It's apparently still ransacked in the hope of finding a modern day version of the pirate legend, for many still say that somewhere on the island is Pablo's Gold. Of course, most of that went into numbered accounts in Panama (apparently a key factor in Papa Bush invading Panama in 1989 was to cut off the money laundering done there by the Colombian cartels) but that doesn't stop the chancers.

Landing on Playa Blanca you get the feeling you've found the most perfect stereotype of what a Caribbean beach is supposed to look like, with it's white sand, palm trees and water so clear it looks like the boats are embedded in the surface of someone's coffee table. What also becomes clear is that during the peak of the high season it must be absolutely rammed, with huts and shacks selling food lining the entire beach. Being there on a Tuesday most of them were closed, but it's also dawned on me that they probably aren't all open on a weekend at the moment, as someone I've drifted out of high season and into spring. While I wasn't looking the needle on my tank of time on the road has drifted well past half way. I'd say this could me my last stop on the beach. With hindsight I could have slept overnight at Playa Blanca, but I only realised that when I got there so it was a little late.

That would have been a good idea because after spending a morning people watching the extreme heat has forced me back indoors in the middle of the day. This last day of just lazing around the place drinking coffee has given me time to watch what the Colombians sell to each other, rather than what they try and sell to us. In all the cities have been people carrying around boxes of bashed up looking old Nokias and a sign "llamadas celulares 200", which I've since worked out is why there aren't any payphones left in most places here. It seems these people rent out these phones by the minute to anyone with 200 pesos (about 10c), but in the big cities they take the precaution of tying the phones to their wrist first. It also seems the guys that sell cigarettes and gum (and usually can source bad quality cocaine) to the monos also sell single cigarettes to the Colombians with free use of a lighter. I guess it's like the poorer parts of the US, where people buy loosies so they don't have to have everyone bludge cigarettes off them if they buy a whole pack, even though it's much more expensive to buy them one at a time.

So my plan now is to head 2 hours to the north tomorrow to Santa Marta and it's little beachside suburb of Taganga. The idea is to then arrange to go on the six day trek to Ciudad Perdida (the lost city), which used to be quite dangerous in the early 2000s (see this bloke who got kidnapped by the ELN back in 2003) but is pretty must standard fare now. It was funny, but when I was looking for that article Google also threw up an early article in the Guardian (same newspaper) travel section telling people about the trek only a few months before the kidnapping took place. I wonder if the kidnappees read it too...?

Ski Instructor

Cartagena de Indias :: Colombia

Only one of the many euphemisms used to sell gringos Bolivian marching powder in this country.

Places: Medellin & Cartagena de Indias.

CoolestStrangest thing I did: Had my picture taken behind the window bars of one of Pablo Escobar's old city pads with his only surviving brother, Roberto.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The yellow stripe on the Colombian flag is bigger than the others, to represent just how much gold they have (or possibly had, as I guess a load of it is busy decorating churches in Spain these days).

Coming into Medellin by night (you know, because your bus journey is 5 hours longer than it was supposed to be) you can see nothing but a constellation of lights consuming both sides of a steep valley, which is only a hint at just how far from it's centre up the valley walls it's grown. During the daylight hours you can see the same terracotta and concrete cinder block construction that characterises the favellas of Rio, showing that urban slums are pretty much a common feature of all growing developing world cities. I'd been told to expect Medellin to be a much easier city to love than Bogota but outside El Poblado, the swankier part of town holding the shopping centres and nightclubs I found it a fair bit more threatening and unattractive than the capital. The thing is, you can see the area around the centre where some more of Botero's best statues of gordos/gordas (fatties) might have been nice if it wasn't overrun with dudes forcing panama hats on you using standover tactics.

Botero is a Medellin native and some of the best work of the cities favourite son (as opposed to it's more famous sons for the wrong reasons) is dotted around the place. I especially liked the fat Roman soldier, and the fat Sphinx. The most famous is the Parrot of Peace (the man was once obsessed with parrots), which used to stand on it's own but now has a twin that is twisted as if it's exploded, in memory of victims of one of Medellin's many car bombs. During the late 80s and early 90s Medellin spent over a decade at the top of the world league tables for world's most dangerous city and though that title has since moved on to Central America (Honduras now holds the title) along with the pointy end of the drug trade violence has left it's mark on the popular image of the city.

You simply can't tell the modern story of Colombia in general and Medellin in particular without talking about it's most famous export: cocaine. Just the same, you can't tell the story of cocaine in Colombia without talking about the countries most famous corpse: Pablo Escobar. During the rise of cocaine as a glamour drug in the US in the 70s, but especially with the rise of crack in the 80s Escobar headed the Medellin Cartel and pretty much controlled most of the supply side, making Forbes once estimate he would be the world's 7th richest man on their Rich List. He dabbled in politics (mostly to avoid being extradited to the US on trafficking charges), funded right wing paramilitaries to stop the FARC from kidnapping his people and kept Medellin under his violent thumb right up until his untimely death in a hail of bullets in 1993. His cartel gave the world such inventions as the Colombian Neck Tie, the creative use of chainsaws in punishment of their enemies (that gave rise to a fairly gruesome scene in Scarface and gave a market to the uniquely Colombian trade of motorcycle pillion mounted hitmen, who would ride up to a target in Medellin's terrible traffic and put 3 bullets in someone's face for about $30. They controlled the drug trade simply by the face they were willing to do what their competitors would not.

The Pablo Escobar tour is now run by his younger brother Roberto, who due to a letter bomb incident in prison now has replacement corneas and is pretty much deaf so you're not always sure he knows where he is. After Pablo's grave they take you to one of Pablo's old city houses where Roberto now lives full of blown up pictures of his brother in jail and getting out of his private jet so tourists have something to take photos of. It's an entirely strange setup, but apparently he wanted to stop other people using the family name so despite not actually needing the money he does it to fund the Escobar AIDS charity. Years ago I read the book Killing Pablo which is about how the end came about and based on that alone I think the tour gives a slightly sanitised version of the truth, but it's at least not totally one sided or tries to pretend Pablo was a misunderstood Robin Hood figure. He did fund housing for the poor, and was instrumental in funding the Colombian football teams' rise to the 1994 World Cup, (which unfortunately led to the death of team captain Andres Escobar, who is no relation, after an own goal) but that hardly makes up for turning a country into a war zone for 25 years.

After the death of Pablo Escobar things got really, really bad in Medellin, as the Cali cartel took over the drug trade every part time hood tried to claim the crown of King of Medellin and the streets ran red with blood. There is footage of drug traffickers fighting the police in armoured cars - only it's the traffickers with the light tanks. It was that bad. It's hard to imagine just how bad it was when you're able to walk the streets now and the worst you have to experience is poor people shoving their babies in your face as you walk by.

The only other seriously touristy thing I did was to get out of town for the day to the town of Guatape, which spreads over a whole load of islands in a beautiful lake and climb La Piedra de El Penol which is a rock strangely similar to the Sugar Loaf in Rio to get a view over it all. Instead of a cable car they have some fairly utilitarian looking stairs that seem to have been built by the same people who make all the slums on the hills of Medellin. The view is spectacular over the lakes, but you're constantly reminded it's a militarized town by the fact Blackhawk helicopters keep buzzing you the whole time.

What most tourists are in Medellin to do, however, is party. I was told legends of it's nightlife from far and wide since I've been in South America but to be honest, with the honourable exception of the rooftop pool bar I ended up in after St Patrick's Day I found most of the clubs and bars to be full of under-age kids and prostitutes. I'd also heard of the legendary beauty of Medellin's women, but unless you're really into improbable feats of silicone engineering I wouldn't expect to be bowled over. I do suspect it is vastly improved by two things: local knowledge and a lot of cocaine.

Despite the fact Colombians seem to want nothing to do with cocaine themselves, probably due to the havoc it's wreaked on their country throughout it's modern history, coke is both readily available and cheap. If you don't want to buy it from the guys selling gum at 2am (hmmm) then you simply have to sit in any tourist friendly hostel or cafe looking vaguely gringo-ish and someone is sure to come and give you a card advertising something along the lines of "snowmobile repairs". While most of the gringos dabble in it I've found the young Aussie kids to be by far the consumption kings here. I suspect that may be due to the fact the price for a gram is $10 rather than $350, which also explains the zombie like behaviour you see around the hostel pool every morning as people are trying desperately to come down enough to sleep. That alone makes me not want to have anything to do with it, not to mention having the high chance of coming into contact with a totally corrupt foreign police force or the moral argument that you're also helping fund violence in both Colombia and all through the trade route to the US via Mexico and Central America.

This kind of neatly exposes the view of the drug trade from the view of places like Colombia, and now especially Northern Mexico, which is experiencing something like a low level civil war at the moment for control of the export routes into the US. The growing and transit countries seem to be fully aware that while the Western world consumes all the drugs, it's the growing, processing and transit countries that suffer most of the violence (with the honourable exception of New York and LA during the Regan era when the crack epidemic got way out of hand). The Presidents of several Latin American countries have recently mused openly about what their countries would look like if the US legalised drugs, even though they know there's little hope of that ever happening. The simple truth is cocaine became the most valuable commodity in the world mostly because it's illegal in the places 90-odd% of it is consumed. It's not an easy problem to solve.

So after spending St Patrick's Day with Irish people trying to kill me with beer I've moved on the night bus to Cartagena, one of the oldest cities in the Spanish New World as the gateway to the Colombian Caribbean. I've mostly spent today wandering around feeling like I'm jetlagged so I'll write on that once I've given it a fair shake.

Broken windows theory

Bogota :: Colombia

Now with added safety!

Places: Bogota.

Coolest thing I did: The most unconventional bike tour I've ever been on, where the guide points out where to buy your mobile phone back from if it gets stolen.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Shakira is actually of an Lebanese background.

If there's one country in the world that has been in the papers for all the wrong reasons for my entire lifetime it would have to be Colombia. It's endured civil wars, several leftist insurgencies, drug lords, right wing paramilitary death squads and just about every other trapping a semi-failed Latin American state can expect to have. Given the fact the two largest Marxist armed groups until very recently had a lucrative stream of funding kidnapping both rich locals and tourists Colombia was hardly a place people considered a good place for a holiday. That's probably why arriving in Bogota these days feels like you're entering a city that's just woken up after a long coma.

About a decade ago, when the two biggest rebel armies (FARC & ELN) had total control over vast swathes of the country and were levying taxes directly on the narcotraficantes the government decided enough was enough. In the intervening years the numbers of soldiers and police have grown exponentially and speaking to people who were here even three or four years ago the visible police presence in Bogota has made the place feel much safer than I ever did in a big city in Brazil. While this almost certainly came at the cost of civil rights and a lack of due process it's hard to argue with the fact the city has gone from none to about 50 hostels in the space of half a decade. Even though the tourist industry is still mostly older backpackers and low rent coming here wasn't something you would have thought of when cocaine funded violence was the order of the day.

You get the best idea of the scale of the city (a mere 8 million souls) by taking the cable car or funicular (depending on the whim of the drivers that day) up the Cerro de Monserrate and see the city filling the flat plain surrounded on all sides by the Andes. You tend to forget you're over 2000m altitude until you try and climb steps too fast and feel your heart trying to escape your chest between deep panting that seems to resist all attempts to fill your lungs. In an imitation of Rio the slums are starting to escape the plain and are growing steadily up the mountain sides. If you want a 360 degree view there's also the viewing platform of the tallest building in the city, the Torre Colpatria Building which opens up on a Sunday, and which also reproves the cast-iron law that the tallest buildings in any city in the world will probably be owned by a bank or oil company.

I've been strangely drawn to museums here, probably mostly because it's also been cold and raining a fair bit. Due to it's height Bogota seems to be a year round 19 degrees with drizzle, which is a shock when you fly here from Salvador in Brazil and a 7am temperature approaching 28 degrees with 100% humidity. They have a Gold Museum, which is the continent's best collection of pre-Colombian gold, due to the fact the tales of El Dorado (the city of gold) that spawned many of the Spanish conquerors explorations of the interior of South America came from stories told of the Colombian indios being decked out in gold. The museum is modern and tells a good story, but the best bit is the trippy 5 minutes in a dark chamber surrounded by hundreds of gold carvings to the sounds of shamanic chanting and running water. Not sure what that was all about.

There is also a Police Museum, which I'd normally not given a thought to, except for the fact people kept telling me to go there. While the highlight was all the Pablo Escobar paraphernalia (more on him in Medellin), including a blood stained roof tile that was taken from the scene of his untimely demise in a hail of bullets, the thing that struck me was the possibly senile commander stationed there who seemed intent of making sure I was enjoying Colombia. He was very serious about the English speaking cadets who guide you around telling a good story, and on leaving wishes you long life and health to your family and friends in slow but very precise English. The cadets did tell me later they thought he was a bit mad, but it's better than being stationed out on the streets in the slums.

Probably my favourite museum here was the Museo Botero, which houses the art collection and works of Colombia's most famous working artist, Fernando Botero. One of my Spanish teachers in Sydney was a Medellin native who told me to look out for the Botero statues when I got to Medellin, so I thought it worth a look at the museum here in Bogota. It turns out his work consists almost entirely of statues of chubby people and animals. He seems to have a wicked sense of humour, with his fat version of the Mona Lisa a bit of a stand out. You can't help but smirk at some of the paintings and sculptures where you see them, which is the kind of thing that you simply don't do when looking at most serious art. He is also a bit of a collector, and his donated collection includes a whole art history lesson of Impressionist painters and 20th century sculpture.

I took probably the most different bike tour of my life on my first full day here, which takes in all the major sites like cathedrals, churches and government buildings and mixes them together with the seedier parts of town in a totally matter of fact way. I liked the bit where our guide told us where to buy back our camera or mobile phone if they were stolen, and told us about when one of the tour bikes got stolen and the owner managed to get to the second hand bike shop and get it back before it got sold on. You also take in alleys lined with political graffiti you'd never dream of coming to yourself, and the cities' main market where tourists are still rare enough that people openly stare at you. There I tried to introduce my hung over stomach to the local custom of topping their fruit salad with icecream and salty cheese but only managed half of my small salad, which seemed to weigh about half a kilo.

My favourite part of the tour though, was Tejo. Only in Colombia could they make up a gentle pastime involving gunpowder. You take a big wooden box full of clay and stick little paper triangles filled with gunpowder in it. They you take 5kg metal weights and toss them at the box from across the room. If you score a direct hit the gunpowder explodes. Add to this the fact you tend to also buy a 24 crate of beer before you start and much hilarity ensures. The place they hold it is a total man cave, with a bloke cooking big slabs of beef on an open fire in the doorway and tables of blokes sitting around drinking beer and singing karaoke (with no TV to show you the words). Ok, that last bit doesn't make sense, but it's also negated by the TVs showing football at a volume that tends to drown out the sounds of exploding gunpowder.

The thing that will always overshadow my time here is the fact I got here on a weekend and the Colombians like a party. While the Saturday night out in the posh Zona Rosa could have happened anywhere in the world, Friday night was something different. After a minibus ride out from the hostel about an hour north of the city where part of the ticket included all the premixed rum and coke you can drink in a packed minibus on Colombia quality roads (about half ends up on your rather than in you) I ended up at Andres Carne De Res, by some accounts the best club in Colombia. Only it's more of a steak house with a couple of dance floors. It's probably best described as Oktoberfest on mushrooms, with the same kind of big communal tables that have been improved by the addition of things like neon windmills and bright flashing lights. The crowd covers all age groups and we got there when the eating was over and the partying was under way. I didn't know what I expected, but that certainly wasn't it. The Colombians, however are quite forward and friendly and speak a fairly high standard of English so you tend to make new friends pretty quickly. The all you can drink rum I suspect was because the drinks are really expensive by Colombian standards and tend to be sold in bowls and jugs rather than by the cup.

The fact you can get so highly drunk safely is probably on of the bigger testaments to just how much the security situation must have improved in the recent past. You do get your fair share of the you-should-have-been-here-x-years ago crowd, but so far I'm liking Colombia above anywhere else I've been to in South America thus far, and I'm still only in the city everyone told me to skip. So after 4 nights instead of 2 I'm packing my bags for Medellin in the morning, which used to be the most violent city in the world, but is the place they've been warning me I may never leave now.

And the drums, the drums, the drums

Salvador :: Brazil

There's enough culture here to make you feel like a proper tourist looking at it.

Places: Salvador & Morro de Sao Paulo.

Coolest thing I did: Flew into Salvador on a clear enough day to see the whole expanse of the city and bay on the way in (it's been a slow week for cool stuff).

Coolest thing I didn´t know: It's estimated during the whole Atlantic slave trade the US imported only 10% of the number Brazil did.

If I look back at the last few weeks in Brazil with the hindsight of having now been to Salvador I'd say the thing that was lacking from the rest of the country was a historical culture that can be shown off to package tourists. Salvador more than makes up for that. It wasn't the first place the Portuguese landed in what would become Brazil (much like Captain Cook in Australia, they looked at it and then left), but it was the first place they finally set up a colony. They then proceeded to grow the cash crop of the time, sugar and like the southern states of the United States imported slaves from Africa to do all the back breaking work involved in growing the stuff. For nearly three centuries, until the rise of mining and coffee around Rio and Sao Paulo, Salvador was the capital and most important city in the Portuguese New World, and the second most important city besides Lisbon itself.

This influence of having massive amounts of Africans around the place manifested itself in different ways than it did in places like Haiti, but it did produce it's own unique religions, foods, music and even a martial art. It's this culture, and the ways it's manifested itself over the following centuries that you find tapped for the tourists all over the city of Salvador itself. There's an old historical centre with ornate churches and other restored civic buildings that I've been told has been ethnically cleansed of locals and pacified by the inclusion of military police checkpoints on many corners to provide one of the only parts of the city that it's practical for tourists to walk around and be safe at night, which apparently was a big problem back in the day when old town Salvador still was inhabited by actual Salvadorians. There is still a fairly strong effort by the police to deter you from walking too far outside this cobble stoned Disneyland of colonial splendour.

The city has beaches that are worth swimming in only a bus ride from the centre, with Barra at the very point where the bay meets the Atlantic doubling as a serious backpacker ghetto, with hostels spread all down the beach. I hear that during Carnival it was practically impossible to escape the blocos in either the old part of town or Barra as they were outside your door 24 hours a day, unlike Rio where you had to go looking for them. As far as I can tell Salvador's Carnival may have been even more manic than Rios.

Even though it does seem to jump out on you everywhere I do quite like watching capoeira, which is the only surviving indigenous martial art in the Americas, and is practised with varying skill levels anywhere you might accidentally see it and be asked to contribute money to those doing so. It's set to percussion and a single stringed instrument (much like the ones the Chinese use to play only miserable songs with) and has been heavily ritualised into a dance, with alternating kicks and flips making up most of the proceedings, only stopping when one party manages the trick the other into showing enough shin on the ground to be swept with another shin. I also have discovered there are a crazy amount of Israelis who seem to have done capoeira for years and the Brazilians humour them by letting them have a go too.

In order to have not spent my last few days in Brazil in town I decided to get the ferry out to Morro de Sao Paulo for a few days, which is confusingly nowhere near Sao Paulo. It's a stomach churning 2 and a half hour ride out of the bay and down the coast, which for some reason I can't quite get my head around is worse on the way back than the way in. I still managed to keep my no-motion sickness record for South America intact but even I was dry mouthed a little bit on the way back in. I think most of the boat was doubled over sick bags for most of the way in and out.

Morro is a tropical island fringed by coral reefs and covered in jungle that is slowly giving up the goods to large scale tourism. It's main town is still reassuringly small, but that's changing as the concrete takes over sand paths and the quality of lodgings keeps getting better. Also, for some reason that remains a mystery to me it's the Bali or Costa de Sol of post-military service Israeli younguns. There are hostels where the signs are in Hebrew, and you can't help but be taken aback by the packs of young Israelis roaming the beaches. Why this particular island and none of the others in Brazil I've been to escapes me, but fair power to them I guess.

Due to choppy conditions the snorkelling wasn't at it's best, with the water visibility pretty poor, but taking a boat around the whole island one day it's pretty hard to relax when there's like 20 other boats doing the same trip, so there's about 1000 people (ok, I'm exaggerating, but it felt like 1000) in the water with you. The coral is in pretty poor shape, but when you see everyone standing on it and kicking big bits off you kind of see why. It's a pity watching places like that loved to death. Thankfully there's a lot more reef out there they don't take the tours to, but I wouldn't think diving would be worth it.

Really the best thing to do is walk all the way around to the imaginatively named Beach 4 (while crossing Beaches 1 to 3) and see an expanse of white sand and turquoise water stretching away from all the development. It's a nice place to put the subtle paranoia of crime the big cities in Brazil tend to induce in you and sleep off the fact Morro is also a big party island. At night Beach 2 is lined with fruit stalls that make about a million different combinations of fruit and booze, and on the big nights they put a DJ booth at the end of the beach and everyone dances. I bumped into 3 young English blokes I'd been in the same hostel in Florianopolis with and helped them dispose of all the left over booze they had before they had to leave the country. Now at home I had thought a Caipirinha was a fairly posh drink, and cachaca (Brazilian rum) must be something exotic, but I've since found out it costs about $3 a litre in the supermarket here. Whatever you do don't try and help students with no money polish off a bottle with basically no mixers beyond Sprite. The hangover that resulted was probably just short of a nose bleed.

So I'm back in Salvador for one afternoon before flying out to Bogota in Colombia tomorrow, sitting here listening to people playing drums down the street and yelling at each other at the top of their lungs (for some reason the discreet mobile phone use that has infected Rio and SP hasn't quite reached Salvador yet - it seems to save you time and money to just yell everything down the street). I've spent much longer in Brazil than I expected to, but due to it's sheer size I feel like I'm constantly hearing about more things I should have seen. Apparently there's this big river here somewhere, called the Amazon? Anyway, that'll have to wait for next time.

Sound of the police

Salvador :: Brazil

Even the slums here are beautiful.

Places: Ilha Grande, Rio de Janeiro & Salvador.

Coolest thing I did: Not satisfied with just going up the Sugarloaf once by cable car I spent my birthday climbing up the back side of it instead.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The guy who made the Lapa stairs (the ones covered in tiles in the Snoop Dog video shot in Brazil) is not only alive and kicking, but most days you can see him still cutting tiles and adding them to the steps.

Let's get it out of the way with: Rio is a stunningly beautiful city. Like all the other big Brazilian cities I've seen it's defined by a challenging geography to put an actual city into, in this case there being massive, pointy stone mountains sticking up all over the place. You get a glimpse of this when you're travelling around the place, but you only really appreciate it from up high. The two big name locations to look at it are probably also the only two Must Do things in Rio: The Sugar Loaf and the Corcovado, topped with an Art Deco wonder of the world: Cristo Redentor. From both you can see the city fighting it's way through the jungle mountains, with road tunnels cutting under the massive favelas (illegally constructed slums) instead of trying to go through them, and even those seem to add to the unrealness of the place. It's a quietening moment to look down over Copacabana & Ipanema in the hazy sunset, with the city abruptly stopping at beaches ended in pointy hills. Even Sydney seems a little less beautiful by comparison.

So my plan to come back to Rio got shifted around, with Ilha Grande being a nice place to go to the beach at but a terrible place to try and organise things over the internet from. I ended up spending a far less relaxing time than I thought (including a 9 hour boat cruise with all you can eat BBQ, and probably more importantly to the outcome, all you can drink Caipirinhas) but I did spend every alternate day hiking across the island to find more remote white sand beaches sticking out of the jungle. I'm glad I didn't stay in Rio past the end of carnival, but Ilha Grande was kind of like Paraty, but without the cultural relics to look at.

So my time in Rio was spent trying to get some serious tourism done, and man did I do some. It was interesting to see places like Lapa, with it's arches and the downtown theatres and old colonial buildings without them being surrounded by hurricane fences to keep revellers off them like they were during carnival. The highlight of that area being Escadaria Selaron, an in-progress outdoor work of art. Called The Great Madness, they started when the Chilean artist Jorge Selaron started tiling the steps outside his house in 1990. He's still going. It started out with some kind of rhyme and reason to it, but has since morphed into a monster, with a policy that people around the world can contribute a tile and he'll find a place for it. One Dutch girl at the hostel actually found a pattern so familiar that she asked about it and it turned out a friend of hers from home and contributed it 3 years ago, after seeing the steps. While I'd only seen it before on the way to a non-existent block party in Santa Theresa during carnival, it was nice to not only see it at leisure, but also to see the man himself cutting tiles and talking to the tourists. He claims he'll keep going until the day he dies.

You've seen the pictures, I know I had, but there's something magically about actually standing at the feet of The Cristo Redentor statue while all of Rio stretches out behind you. A tribute to the artist that it's possible to give a statue that gigantic such a serene expression that you feel instantly at peace looking up into his face: even surrounded by about 9 or 10 bus loads of people. The most popular poses for pictures are (of course) both arms stretched out, but just to show how inventive people are, there were a fair few angled in such a way to make it look like you're dancing with Jesus, giving him a high five or even (quite disturbingly) patting him on the crotch.

I'd already been up the Sugar Loaf by cable car before the carnival, but someone got it into my head that it's possible to actually climb up it and I made it a bit of a mission to find out how. That's how I ended up spending the afternoon of my 35th Birthday clearing a hangover by clambering up the much easier, back face of the Sugar Loaf. They do it in the afternoon so it's all in shadow, which is nice when it's 35+ degrees out. It's fairly steep, but there's only one section of about 30 or 40m where it's actually necessary to use ropes and climbing harnesses, so I went up with a guide and a 40 year old Korean guy who basically had to translate everything between the non-English speaking guide and the non-Portuguese speaking me. Even the bits the guide was describing a "trekking" involved using both your hands a lot of the time so you really do feel like you've earned it when you finally get to the top, and feel superior to everyone who took the cable car up. The looks on everyone's face when you emerge from the jungle, covered in sweat and dirt and climb the back fence to the viewing platform are worth the price of admission alone.

Things have been changing in Rio with the lead up to hosting the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016, and once priority of the government is that the police should actually have control of all of the city by then. Up until three months or four months ago the favelas, the large illegal slums that have gone up all over Brazil but are most prominent in Rio for being visible on the mountain sides where no-one else would build, had been totally under the control of drug gangs for decades, with the police never being able to enter them. The government has decided enough is enough so the police and various military units were sent in to secure the larger favelas. You've been able to do tours of Rocinha, the largest in Brazil for years, but it somehow feels a lot safer when you're not doing it that the behest of a local druglord.

The favelas are the result of poor people from regional Brazil coming to the big cities to find work and having nowhere to live simply starting building houses one against the other, usually in concrete or with whatever they could get. Plumbing and other such amenities are totally unplanned and it shows. In Rocinha this has resulted in something that looks almost like a Greek village or Moroccan medina, spilling down the hill with winding footpaths and the occasional road carved out of it. That adds to the spectacle of getting up the hill the same way as the locals: by paying a bloke 2 reals, riding pillion on his motorbike as he tears up the winding road with little fear of passing between buses, trucks and military vehicles along the way. That was probably the best part of the tour, and I'd have happily paid another 2 to see what it's like going downhill the same way.

Rocinha was one of the first favelas cleared by the army and the presence of tactical police units and special forces are felt as they are still trying to find drug labs and traffickers hiding out in the jungle above the slums. The tour guide seemed ambivalent about which would be worse, as the police in Brazil aren't exactly corruption free, or predictable. Despite the rule of drug barons being as capricious as you'd probably expect, people had gotten used to it and the place is a bit of a state of flux. However, they seem quite comfortable with small groups of gringos walking down the laneways and taking pictures of life threatening wiring. I wonder what the first one of these tours was like: I'd say there would have been a certain disbelief at seeing gringos walking the streets of somewhere the police are scared to enter. Now of course, it's proper tourism. You go and visit overpriced art galleries, people's shops and are press ganged into paying local buskers to a point where you know tourism has arrived. The locals are probably more comfortable with tourists putting a bit of money directly in their pocket. I was a bit disappointed they don't take you to a meth lab or crack den though. Maybe that's coming later.

I think what I'll take with me most, however, on my second visit to Rio was just how manic it actually was during carnival. I walked the streets to Ipanema on Monday nigt to an all you can eat BBQ place (Brazil does love it's meat) and was the only person on the street. Compare that to carnival where there would be about half a million people on the same street (and probably a standing lake of urine in the street by lunchtime) it was hard to get your head around. To be able to find somewhere to put your towel down on Copacabana was something I'd never experienced before, and despite some good efforts the nightlife seems to be post-carnival retreat at the moment. I guess what I was seeing was a collective hangover on a massive scale, which isn't hard to get your head around when you've spent a week drinking with millions of people. That has to come to a pretty nasty end at some point.

So I've just flown into Salvador in the north after making the non-decision of taking a 2 hour flight rather than a 28 bus trip. I've done very little, having slept 2 hours last night but I did pass some very nice looking beaches and heaps of old churches and whatnot are right outside my door so I'll be basing myself around here for the last week or so of my time in Brazil, if all goes to plan I'll be flying to Colombia and the cheaper side of Sudamerica in a week or so.

I am the egg man

Ilha Grande :: Brazil

"Sorry, I was kissing a clown"
- girl I failed to recognise through all the red make-up smeared all over her face.

Places: Rio de Janeiro & Ilha Grande.

Coolest thing I did: It's really hard to pick, but I'd right now say sitting on the grass between two guys dressed as Mario & Luigi (Fidel Castro was also there) in the middle of like 100,000 people while the band plays "I am the walrus" in a thick Portuguese accent.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The samba parade was once on the streets of Rio, but it got so big they got Oscar Niemeyer to build them a kind of Samba arena (the Sambadromo). These people really like their samba.

To be honest, by Sunday night I was getting ready to believe that the Carnival at Rio was completely over-hyped. After days of following block parties that were really just a couple of trucks driving past and everyone milling around looking menacing, going to block parties that didn't exist and going out with a group that were involved in two camera thefts and an attempted mugging inside 30 mins (Lapa at night, eh?) I was ready to write off the whole thing. If anyone plans to follow in my footsteps, here is some advice I'd give:

• If you get given a list of blocos (block parties, gringos) by someone who actually lives in Brazil, actually pay attention to it.


• If you're on a subway full of Brazilians losing it, and they get off at a different subway stop than you were going, follow them. You almost certainly don't know of a better party than them.


• Don't stay out late, rather get up early and expect to drink all day instead. The best blocos were all during the day.

I started following the list on Monday, and that saved Carnival for me. I got out of Gloria subway station and just started following the crowd. By the time I crossed the lip of Av Infante Dom Henrique (which on any normal day would be suicide as it has like 16 lanes of traffic) to see what must have been over 100,000 people crammed into a natural bowl (and on the pedestrian bridges over the road) to see a truck basically made out of speakers and a crowd in front completely losing their shit. The reason for this, was mostly because they were in the middle of playing Lucy in the sky with diamonds and the crowd were all singing it too. I'd been advised not, under any circumstances to miss this bloco, called Bloco Sargento Pimenta and it didn't disappoint. Crowds dressed in costume, people singing and dancing together: this is what I'd envisioned the Carnival to be like.

In possibly the cutest moment of the Carnival, I lost a thong (flip-flop to those who were wondering why I was wearing more than one) moshing to Yellow Submarine played at triple the normal speed and was ready to write it off because I was having such a good time. Then a little girl who couldn't have been more than 7 (yep, that permissive South American parenting again) started pulling on my shorts leg and saying something to me in Portuguese that I had no hope of understanding. She looked at me like I was an idiot and came back two mins later with my thong. It's that kind of place.

Tuesday was probably on par, with another bloco following the same road from Flamengo to Gloria all afternoon which consisted of what must have been a 50 piece New Orleans big brass band, heavy on the drums and basslines. It seemed like everyone had come out in costume for the last day, with Amy Winehouse being a very popular choice. My favourite Amy had to be the one with a tampon up her nose; I could have quite easily believed she was on a metric crapload of drugs for real. The band played for 4 hours moving slowly up the road with people trying to get out in front of them to sing and dance as they went past. They were accompanied by many people on stilts, including several dressed as the Wilt Chamberlain era L.A. Lakers.

As this was the last night of Carnival, and no-one wanted to go home when the band broke up at 6pm many of them formed informal circles and started to play together. We'd been sitting on the grass to hear what happened next, and it slowly started to dawn on me they were playing Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes. That set us off to dance right near the band, however the border between band and crowd was very hazy. I was once hit on the head with a trombone. They kept mixing Brazilian and Western favourites until well into the early hours of Wednesday morning, and you simply haven't lived until you've heard Smells Like Teen Spirit played like that.

One thing that I thought would have gone horribly right, but in the end went horribly wrong was finding a broken megaphone on the street on the first big night out and spending the next afternoon fixing it with gaffa tape and new batteries. At first I was a bit overawed by the power I was entrusted with, but pretty soon I was having a good time yelling stuff like "has anyone got change for a 50?" and "all the condoms made in November have holes in them. Please check yours now", inbetween singing big rounds of "I know a song that will get on your nerves". That last one caused me a fair few problems, with one particularly drunk Brazilian trying to take a swing at me and his girlfriend having to drag him away. At that point I thought Brazil might not be ready for me at 10x volume. I did get some random applause for my spoken word versions of songs I wouldn't have dared sing at that volume. AC/DC sounds almost like poetry when it's read rather than sung.

The random events were nice little touches, the kind of things you expect from Carnival. I was on the subway back when I could make out the sound of the entire next car singing and pounding on the roof in sync, at which point my car started singing the same song and banging away. The songs would then move up and down the train. There's also things you'd normally only see on the Internet, like that group of 25 hot teenaged lesbians playing Spin the Bottle for a cheering crowd. Or that guy painted orange who came up to us and after confirming we spoke english started singing Nirvana's Jesus don't want me for a sunbeam. That's the stuff that will stick with me.

One night of the week it's a must to pay a stupid amount of money to go to the Sambadromo, Rio's purpose built samba arena and watch probably the most impressively organised thing you're ever going to see in Brazil. Every hour from 9pm until basically dawn a samba school comes out with thousands of dancers, floats that blow the mind in their complexity and a single song on loop for about 80 mins that the crowd all know. The crowd wear their samba school's uniform and fly flags like it was soccer, which I totally didn't expect. I assume there must be samba hooligans out there somewhere looking to fight people who bandmouth the footwork of their school, or call their floats substandard. I admit to liking samba about as much as any hetro white Anglo Saxon male, but even I lasted for 4 schools, which took like 6 or 7 hours. If you were really keen you could pay to buy a costume and be in the parade, which quite a few tourists do. There was a girl in the hostel who was wondering what she was now going to do with the giant icecream cone hat she's going to have to carry with her for the next 9 months. I suggested it would become her default bus wear. You'd never be lonely showing up to Bolivia dressed as a giant ice cream.

So despite my best efforts I did manage to see some touristy stuff in Rio. My first afternoon I took the cable car up to the top of the Sugarloaf and watch the sunset. As predicted the Christ the Redeemer statue was covered by cloud, but in a very nice moment you could see it clear slowly - first his head sticks out, then an arm and if you're quick you can get your tourist happy snap with him in the background before the clouds roll back in.

The other big one was by accident. I was on my way back from getting my Sambadromo tickets when I noticed a big concrete cone sticking out from behind the station. This turned out to be the metropolitan cathedral, and standing inside there with the four rows of skylights meeting at a cross in the roof totally changed my opinion of what is possible for exposed concrete as a building material forever. It's probably the most beautiful building I've seen where they've made no attempt to hide the fact it's totally grey.

So after 7 straight days of parties (8 if you could my unfortunate lapse on the last night of Paraty) I got to Ilha Grande a wounded man. I couldn't speak, I was irritated by absolutely everything and I managed 14 hours sleep on the first night. This is a staggeringly beautiful island, and I spent yesterday walking 2 hours a direction through the jungle to white sand beaches and avoiding beer, which I suspect right now would actually cause me physical scars. I feel like I've taken on the Carnival spirit, which seems to be to sin as much as possible so you'll have something to give up for Lent. I suspect if I was Catholic at this point I'd be going into Chapter 11 to seek protection from my creditors - there would simply be enough time to do repenting and remain viable as an enterprise.

So it's a few more days of sweating out the booze in like 180% humidity before I go back to Rio to catch a plane north to Salvador. It's getting to the point where I'm going to have to make a choice as to how much more Brazil I have the time and money on this trip to afford, and then use that to decide when to fly over to Colombia and go down the cheaper side. The mining boom here has done nothing to bring down the price of Caipirinhas, that's for sure.

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.

How the other half lives

Sao Paulo :: Brazil

Places: Florianopolis, Ilha de Santa Catarina (Barra da Lagoa, Jurere, Lagoa, Joaquinia, Mole & Mocambique) & Sao Paulo.

Coolest thing I did: Went to the best night club. In The World.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Brazil’s racial mix comes from the fact they were the last country to officially abolish slavery and then panicked because they couldn’t’ get their coffee planted and had to import Italians, Japanese and Lebanese people.

After the gritty mix of Porto Alegre it was interesting to cross the bridge that separates Ilha de Santa Catarina from mainland Brazil, which divides reality from what rich people live like in Brazil. Besides the pockets of backpacker slums that exist in a few choice parts of the island you are seeing a part of the country that I suspect very many Brazilians never will get the chance to. After thinking the beaches in Uruguay turned out all right, I was quite amazed by just how much beautiful coastline this place had. It took a couple of buses to get from the stupidly big bus terminal to Barra de Lagoa on the far side of the island, and along the way you’re treated to sweeping vistas of lakes and jungle as the suburban bus struggles to not lose it on hills.

Barra sits on the end of Mocambique beach, which starts off heaving under the weight of umbrellas and food vendors but pretty quickly turns into 14km of deserted sand, most of if too far for people who want to just lie there on beach chairs and be brought cervejas and Caprihinas. This leaves it for those crazy people in inexplicably like to jog along the beach on holiday, and if the swell makes it that far up the beach the hard core of proper surfers. There is a constant beach break at the populated end of the beach which looked simple enough, so due to the fact the first hostel I stayed in had fairly stable looking mini-malibu’s to borrow for free I decided to get on a surfboard myself.

Sometime at the tail end of my teenage years I could actually manage to stand up on a surf board pretty much every time, and I did so without ever having being taught to. So about once a year I decide to try and get back on it, and about once a year I totally overestimate my ability, tire myself out and get frustrated with the whole thing. I think it’s so much easier to learn something new than to try and relearn something you’re muscle memory has totally forgot, simply because you’re more open minded. I did manage to finally catch a few waves right into shore and stand up, but due to the fact Brazilians believe in total chaos on the waves and just swimming in front of surfers I managed to wipe out and smash my 8 foot board into someone’s kid. I thought that time to exit stage left, but just to show the difference in child rearing, the kid’s dad came out into the waves and started yelling at him and apologising to me. It’s like backwards world here sometimes.

My other board sport adventure for the week was totally new, and again, totally unsupervised. Somewhere in the past someone saw these giant sand dunes and decided to ride a snowboard down them. Then they probably modified it and ended up with a shorter, narrower board you ride barefoot with velco bindings and thus sandboarding was born. It takes a snowboarder a little while to realise turning is useless, and that the candle stub they give you when you rent the board needs to be applied every time you go down the dune to gain any momentum at all, but after that you simply point the nose south and let gravity do the rest. They rent the boards by the hour, which is good because by the time you’ve climbed up a sand dune for an hour you’re sick of it. I reckon you’d also want a dune buggy, so you didn’t have a 20 second ride followed by a 3 minute climb in soft sand. I also liked the ride back on the bus, covered in sand and saying “pah!” and basically seeing a cloud rise out of my mouth.

So besides getting a tan and riding boards, what do you do in Florianopolis? Well mostly get drunk it seems. Most nights I went to the standard backpacker beach bars, which are unsurprisingly mostly full of dudes and a bit rubbish, but it breaks up the monotony of having no TV at night. I’ll spare the details.

Instead I’ll talk about P12.

I don’t know how this place came into existence, but it’s hands down the best “night” club I’ve ever been to. It starts and 4pm and runs until 10, and everyone basically shows up in a swimsuit. There’s a DJ booth right in front of the massive pool and people tend to start by lounging on one of the many lounges or beds, sitting in a spa bath or taking a dip in the beach that the club backs right on to. For some reason I can’t quite fathom the water the rich people swim in at the beach is like 25 degrees and the water we’d been swimming in for the rest of the week was about 18. The mind boggles.

So by 6pm the crowd is thoroughly ready to lost it’s mind and dances in front of the DJ, or in the pool, or on the lounges or wherever really. It’s a mix of western backpackers, Argies and rich Brazilians, and it’s fairly easy to tell the first two from the last. The non-Brazilian men strictly wear boardshorts, which the Brazilian men seem to think is far too unrevealing, and instead go for tight trunks. The non-Brazilian women are the ones with bikinis that cover their arse. There’s a ratio of arse:bikini that seems to match how much Brazilian blood you have, so 3rd generation immigrants have less coverage than 2nd generation. Or so it works in my mind. There’s also something in the water in Brazil contributing to the improbable breasts on the women, but I suspect that something is plastic surgery.

As a side notes, the Brazilians are nuts about tattoos. Not only did every bloke have a full sleave minimum but for the girls full back tattoos were quite common. I thought this might just be the idle rich, but since getting to Sao Paulo I’ve seen office girls walking back from lunch with the head of a tiger or Buddha poking out the top of their dresses.

So after hours of drinking, dancing and losing my sunglasses (the count is now 3 towels, one head torch and one pair of sunglasses) we decided it would be a top idea to get dressed and go to the local Pacha franchise and take the 5.30am transfer instead of the 10pm one. As we had two hours to kill we got dropped off at a hotdog stand on the highway outside the club and proceeded to amuse the hell out of the hotdog guys with out drunken antics and eat hotdogs the size of Subway footlong sandwiches squashed flat, that for some reason had corn on them. There was also a bloke with a van and a whole bunch of liquor bottles selling drinks at totally unreasonable prices, which of course we paid. By the time we actually got into the club I didn’t really care who Sean Kingston was (apparently he sang Beautiful Girl…God knows he played it enough times) and did struggle a bit to make it through to home and bed at 6am. Perhaps I’m no longer built for starting the night out at midday and ending at 6am.

So I’m a very big fan of Florianopolis, and I’d seriously come back if I’m ever in Brazil again. It might be nice to see it from the other side though – apparently Ronaldinho has become a big fan of P12 since he came back from Europe to play club football for Corinthians, but he shows up in his helicopter. I’ll have to get a helicopter I guess.

So after a much better night bus ride that cost me a fortune (the one from Porto Alegre involved me mostly avoiding my crotch or arse touching the belly of the fat man that was spilling out of the seat next to me) I find myself in Sao Paulo, mostly on Gerry’s recommendation. People who had spent about 24 hours here told me to avoid it. I’ll speak next time about why those people are all idiots.