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.

Down with everything!

Porto Alegre :: Brazil

And here I thought the Anti-Globalisation movement was deader than Kurt Cobain?

Places: Chuy, Chui & Porto Alegre.

Coolest thing I did: Stood in the middle of a road straddling both countries. And was nearly run over. Sorry, it's been a bit short on cool stuff the last couple of days.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Portuguese is basically Spanish but with everything pronounced wrong and written in wacky non-Latin characters. I just speak Spanish and most people seem to understand me. I just have no idea what they're saying back.

All the horror stories I'd been told about trying to go it alone across the border from Uruguay to Brazil (instead of getting a bus from Montevideo) actually set me in very good stead to make it easy. I managed to get both bus drivers to stop at immigration for me and get my passport stamped so the crossing was fairly painless. That should be a no-brainer, except for the fact Chuy/Chui is a town that spans both sides of the border and for some reason only beknownst to themselves both countries decided to put immigration like 3km out of town on their respective sides. I'd read about people getting all the way to Brazil before having to get a taxi back 6km into Uruguay, get stamped out, then get a taxi 6km back to get stamped into Brazil - by which time of course their bus was long gone. Nothing like forward planning, eh?

Due to my paranoia about this border crossing I found myself in Chuy with about 2 hours to spare and not much to do in them. This gave me time to contemplate many Brazilians and Uruguayans shopping their little hearts out duty free on the other side of town. It seems like the Brazilians mostly want electronics and booze and the Uruguayans mostly want Havaianas and other clothing, however I couldn't be sure as both groups seemed to be speaking a halted mix of both Spanish and Portuguese to try and get any business done. Like most border towns I had time to try and take a picture in the middle of the main drag so I could be in two countries at once, but had to abandon that idea when people made it clear they wouldn't be breaking for me.

I was glad I did get up early, because my options for the bus were 12.30 or 12.30 the next day. I'd have probably lost my mind by now if I'd had to spend another 24 hours in Chuy.

So the 6 hour bus ride took 9 hours (welcome to Brazil!) through a rapidly darkening landscape of farmland, dotted with either cows or plants I suspected were ma-te. It seems like ma-te drinking continues well into Brazil, with the locals of Porto Alegre spending Sunday wandering the markets in the park with a Thermos and gourd under one arm. From what I've gathered people drink so much of it because it makes you alert, relaxed, cures both impotence & cancer, gives you night vision and makes you impervious to bullets. These are some of the less wacky claims I've heard.

So Porto Alegre wasn't exactly what I was expecting, but I guess I'm not sure what I was expecting because I only picked it as it's about half way between Uruguay and Florianopolis. I showed up late on Saturday night to a pumping street of bars and pubs but due to having had about 3 hours sleep on my last night in Punta del Diablo I kind of needed sleep. I admit I also wasn't able to mentally bridge the gap between low-crime, Spanish speaking Uruguay and high-crime, Portuguese speaking Brazil so I piked out and went to bed. Turns out that was a bad move as Sunday night is pretty quiet. Due to the wiles of the bus gods I've also had to spend a Monday here too, as I'm waiting for a night bus that goes at midnight.

Porto Alegre is a proper working port, and is considered the town that Mercosur rebuilt. Mercosur is an attempt to create a free-trade zone to rival the European Union and despite only really consisting of the southern South American countries it does engender a lot of trade. Which means on the way in you see heaps of container ships and the cities waterfront is pretty much full of cranes and can't be walked on. Instead, taking photos of really old buildings is the order of the day. I hadn't done that for a while so I indulged. What I found more interesting though, is the leftie vibe in town, because it turns out since 2001 there's been a thing called the World Social Forum held here, which I never heard of and made me chuckle a bit when I did.

I'm of the tail end of Generation X, and I remember the 90s fondly. I recall that I wasn't supposed to believe in anything, but somehow also to believe that corporations were evil and stealing our future. I remember being happy when the anti-globalisation movement was born out of street fights at the WTO summits in Rome and Seattle (booo...Starbucks...booo...) but not entirely sure why I was. I guess it's because corporations punched kittens and killed Kurt Cobain, or so I'd been led to believe. By the turn of the century, when I moved to London they seemed unstoppable, I remember days after first arriving the May Day protests with their memorable image of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square with a Mohawk glued to it.

Well I remember seeing it all on TV.

Well we all grow up, or at least I thought we all grew up, until I got here. There's people who work for NGOs having meetings to discuss alternatives to neoliberalism (whatever the hell that is) and how they will give the people a voice, despite most of them being fairly white and rich. You want to help the poor? Give them your friggin' Macbook.

I'm going to not state the obvious fact I've drifted a little bit right since those heady days of the last 90s, but I will say that I'm surprised that after a decade of talking about alternatives to market capitalism these guys are still about as divided as ever on what any of those alternatives should be. It seems like they know what's bad in the world, but not what's good. My favourite bit of anti-globalisation graffiti ever I saw in Prague in 2003. Someone had written "Let's destroy capitalism and replace it with something nicer". Under which, someone had written "with what?". I suspect there's still no reply.

I have to admit that while I'm staying in a safer part of town I'm still fairly on edge about the prospect of violent crime here. Everyone I've met on their way from Brazil has a second hand story of muggings and I'm weary of the fact I see very large numbers of poor people living under PAs many bridges and overpasses (it's on a hill so they kind of make sense, but it's a maze walking around or trying to follow where the taxi is going). I've been told that describing Brazil as having a crime problem is kind of like describing Ireland as having a drinking problem - even if it's a bit racist it's tinged with a whole metric heap of truth. There's a huge mix of inequality living side by side, and to be honest the only real example of seeing the same thing before is in the US, another highly unequal society. When we smash capitalism and replace it with hugs, I'm sure this will all be sorted out.

So I'm waiting for a midnight bus to whisk me away from here to the beach. More tales of sunstroke and peeling skin to follow.

The North Coast as a foreign country

Punta del Diablo :: Uruguay

I may have sunstroke.

Places: Punta del Este, La Paloma & Punta del Diablo.

Coolest thing I did: Finally found a beach with warm water and surf worth swimming in.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The French have churros. Until this trip I thought it was just the Mexicans that liked these crazy Latin doughnuts but its seems like they're everywhere.

So far my decision to not spend more than 30 mins in Montevideo changing buses seems to have been vindicated: pretty much everyone I've spoken to who was there was very vague over whether they liked it at all and tend to say they think they could have skipped it themselves. I have no first hand knowledge of the place so I can't comment but I feel happy that I went directly to the beach, and made it to Punta del Este (PdE) in time for the weekend.

PdE would like to think of itself as the Miami Beach of Latin America, but for my money it's more like the Gold Coast of Latin America. It's set on a narrowing peninsula with a port that is home to "artisanal" fishermen (I'm not sure if they do wood work in their spare time), with uninterrupted beach down the Atlantic side and a massive port for mooring your yacht on the sheltered side. That alone should be a warning that there's some money floating about the place. Any ground on the peninsula that is capable of supporting the weight of high rise buildings pretty much already has a high rise building on it, apparently the population sky rockets from Christmas until early February, meaning it's necessary to have plenty of places to stay, rent or own on hand.

It's a well known fact that South America has some of the highest concentrations of cosmetic surgery recipients in the world, and there would have to be a fairly high percentage of those on display on the beaches of PdE. There are innumerable women in their 40s and 50s shot full of botox and collagen in tiny bikinis supporting totally improbable breast implants. It does, however, only seem to be the women, as the beaches are also heaving with fat, ugly middle aged men, and the numbers would dictate some of their disposable income is being pouring into physical maintenance of their wives/mistresses.

The beach culture here is very different to Australia, or practically any other Western country I can think of. Instead of everyone lying down, feet pointed at the sea and ignoring each other (which is some feat on Bondi in summer), there are groups set in circles, women sitting back and chugging ma-te while their kids run wild around the place, and the men all standing in circles arguing with animated hand gestures that reach back to a forgotten Italian heritage. Everyone is talking to everyone, and generally having a good time. I can't understand why even the slightest glance at another person in Sydney on the beach is going to cause offence, when you see these people actually enjoying themselves. This is true whether it's the rich folk on PdE, the family friendly La Paloma or the hippies and backpackers of Diablo. Much like Tango night I feel like we might be missing something at home.

All the beach towns I spent any time at in Uruguay had a fairly good nightlife, mostly due to it still being peak season, but PdE takes the cake. After spending all day lazing around the beach getting tanned all the girls get made up to the nines and make their way to the bars and clubs. Even the backpackers in the hostel seemed to put in extra effort. Of course, all the blokes make barely effort at all, and when you've been out a couple of nights you tend to work out why - the blokes have all the money. I was taken aback by the fact that every girl out on a Friday night looked like she was about 21 and every bloke looked like he was over 40. It seems like the guys get in anywhere if they have money to spend, and the girls get in anywhere if they don't look like they've just been dragged backwards through a hedge.

The Brazilians that adopted me on the first night out told me that nearly all of PdE is owned by either rich Argies or Brazilians who are looking for somewhere more solid to stick their money than their home countries, and for some reason Uruguay seems to be one of those places they feel safer with. With past histories of military dictatorships and even more recent financial calamities in both countries I guess it would seem prudent to have a bolt hole over the border somewhere.

My next stop along the coast road towards Brazil was La Paloma, which isn't really high on the list of most of the Lonely Planet crowd but it does seem to be a hit with the Argie student or family crowd. The hostel was almost exclusively Spanish speaking, with the thankful exceptions of 3 Swedes speaking better English than mine, and a few words between some of my BA native room mates. It's a lovely little town, but if PdE is the Gold Coast of Latin America then LaP is the Forster Tuncurry. Most people are staying in camp grounds on the road into town and it's very big with families on their summer holidays. It's kind of like of Northern NSW and QLD were in a different country to Sydney and Melbourne. By this time it had been a week and I'm pretty sure I still hadn't met an actual Uruguayan - even the staff working in the bars, restaurants, supermarkets and even at the bus station ticket window are from BA or Argentina somewhere. They seem even a little bit more friendly in Uruguay (must be that sun putting people in a good mood) but I still can't say for sure if the people from Uruguay are nice, simply because I don't think I've met one.

So after a quiet couple of full days in LaP where I mostly tried to get over the head cold I seem to have acquired through mostly lacking sleep and proper food in PdE (my attempts to sleep on the beach ended in sunburn, rather than rest) I decided to move on. While I toyed with the idea of going to Cabo Polonio just for the laughs of going to a town only reachable by 4WD it was starting to get into my mind that Carnival in Rio was only 3 weeks away (and I'm still in Uruguay) I decided to get a move on and get to the closest beach town to the border, Punta del Diablo (PdD) where you find me now. Cabo Polonio is famous for having the second largest sea lion colony in the country/continent/planet (can't remember which) but seeing as I have just seen sea lions begging, and usually getting (from the size of them) fish scraps on the docks of PdE I chose to skip it.

Diablo is probably what Byron Bay looked like in the 80s, before the hard core Noosa-fication took hold. The bus drops you at a sandy square 4km from town and then it's a minibus into the beating heart of a town that swells from 200 in winter to something in the order or 10,000+ in summer. It's all sandy streets, hostels and cabins, with lots of Argies in dreadlocks trying to find themselves. You get this kind of nonsense in many foreign coastal towns (Germans with dreadlocks and piercings are deep down, still Germans) so I try to ignore all the people selling hand woven trinkets and concentrate on the fact that the surf just out beyond them is the best I've seen anywhere so far on this trip. The water in by PdE and LaP was a few degrees below bloody freezing so it was a vast surprise that here, only two hours north of La Paloma there was water you can comfortably wade into and spend a long time swimming about in. My Swedish mates got a little bit worried when I didn't return from the surf for a good hour or so, but I was having way too much fun just body surfing.

The crowd that Diablo attracts is quite similar to the kind that Byron once attracted - young kids who want to be hippies and the hard core surfers who despise them. You can tell the difference right away, with the former decked out in baggy parachute pants in Inca woven patterns, possibly playing reggae and the latter wearing boardshorts and a singlet for all occasions, mostly staring out at the waves for hours when not actually on them.

So despite the occasional short bursts of torrential rain and a summer cold I've been trying to offload for a few days I've thoroughly enjoyed my detour into Uruguay and I'm really glad I've had some extra time to relax on the beach. We're a few days past the end of the second month now and I needed a bit of downtime after those couple of months of relentless seeing-cool-stuff but tomorrow morning it's off to Brazil, which I don't suspect will be quiet in any way this time of year.

The Luxembourg of Latin America

Colonia del Sacramento :: Uruguay

A testicle in the vice of history.

Places: Colonia del Sacramento.

Coolest thing I did: Went to a beach that faces the actual sea for the first time on this trip. Pity the water was rather brown.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Uruguayans seem to have won the best steak sandwich so far with an artery cracker called a chivito. Apparently your steak sandwich needs at least two hard boiled eggs on it.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of Uruguay yet, because I'm having trouble not being surrounded by Argies at the moment - it seems like the fact Colonia is quicker to get to that some BA suburbs there are more Argies here than anyone else. I've been told the people are noticeably friendlier and more laid back but I'm starting to suspect I'm just being quoted verse and chapter from the Lonely Planet. Like many other tourist-centric towns in South America so far this one seems to be full of people who somehow seem to forget tourists are their source of income. The girl at the bakery who got frustrated I didn't speak good enough Spanish really doesn't deserve to sell a whole lot of empanadas. I'd think it was just me, but speaking with a few people who haven't read the Lonely Planet it seems like there is an agreement that a lot of the people who work in the service industry here are dicks. It could also be that everyone is just snappy at everyone because it's still so damn hot here.

I'm starting to wonder if my time in England somehow predisposed me to whinge about hot weather all the time? That should go away when there's a beach nearby. There is a beach here that faces the mouth of the La Plata, but the water is really a bit brown for me to swim in and I'm kind of conscious of the fact I can just make out the skyscrapers of BA on the horizon. That, however, does make for a rather cool sunset as BA is directly west of here.

So Colonia, like Uruguay itself is a little bit of a historical oddity with a story that reminds me of all those wacky micro-states in Europe that don't make rational sense either. It all started with the Pope drawing a line through the middle of a blank page.

There was a bit of a problem when the New World was discovered in that everyone wanted it because it had heaps of cool stuff like gold, silver and natives to enslave. In order to sort this out the Pope of the time drew a line down the middle of the world and said to Spain "you have this bit" and gave the rest to Portugal. If you've got Foxtel and watched the historical drama The Borgias then the Pope who did this is played by Jeremy Irons. Who I only really remember as being the baddie in Die Hard 3. Anyway, Jeremy Irons divided the New World between Portugal and Spain with a Papal Bull called the Inter caetera and as a result Brazil speaks Portuguese and practically everyone else here speaks Spanish. I skipped some big bits but that's basically the gist of it.

With that sorted out the Spanish took hold of the south bank of Rio de La Plata and founded Buenos Aires in order to handle the trade coming up the river from Paraguay and whatnot. The Governor of Rio de Janeiro wanted to challenge that so sent some people with guns to found what would become Colonia del Sacramento, a fortress right across the river delta. Then it changed hands about 6 or 7 times, including for a short time when the Brits got it to further their policy of letting pirates plunder Spanish ships at will, before the music finally stopped. After independence from Spain it was originally part of a confederation with the other Plata colonies but went it's own way to form South America's smallest Spanish speaking country.

So when the centre of gravity in the country shifted out to Montevideo what was left was a quaint little colonial relic an easy day trip from BA. The streets don't at all conform too the grid pattern the Spanish imposed on the Argies, making me suspect that at least the old part shows it's more chaotic Portuguese roots. It's got cobbled streets, old churches, the walls of the fort and all that other good stuff you expect from a historical town. Probably the best bit is by the historical accident of it having to point at BA in order to shoot cannons at people it also has a nice Rambla that faces out at sunset and people have put nice cafes on it so you can watch the sun go down while drinking cold beer.

I do also like the fact you can hire golf carts from Hertz here to get around town. That would have been cool but then I saw a beach buggy with a Thrifty logo on it but all my attempts to find one of those to rent have come to nothing.

I've actually made the concious decision to skip over Montevideo and head directly for beaches on the Atlantic Coast I can probably swim in. Uruguay is know for having lots of nice beaches that are packed with Argies this time of year so I'm not expecting it to be cheap, but after a couple of months of hard core touristing I'm kind of looking forward to the break. I might even finish that copy of Catch-22 I've been carrying since Sydney.

Filling in the gaps

Colonia del Sacramento :: Uruguay

Buenos Aires wakes up from it's holiday slumber.

Places: Buenos Aires & Colonia del Sacramento.

Coolest thing I did: Spent a lazy Monday night watching people with drums go crazy at La Bomba del Tiempo.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Tango was probably the result of their being way too many blokes in BA when it was expanding in the 19th century so being a crazy good dancer was a way for the very few women around to pick between all the men on offer. I'd have been doomed.

Just to mix things up a little bit I chose to base myself in the barrio of San Telmo this time as a change from the awesomeness of the streets of Palermo. It's an area south of the centre of town which has heaps of cobbled streets and bars and restaurants decked out in a traditional style. That alone should have been a warning it was probably going to be a bit touristy for my taste, but I assumed that my body would probably thank me if it was a quieter part of town than Palermo, but somehow I still managed to find a way to stay out way to late for the 4 extra nights I ended up spending there.

So really everything I still had wanted to do in BA was a night time activity so I spent most of my days staying out of the sun and mooching around town. It was nice to not feel like I had to see anything in particular, and just wandering around different parts of the city I'd already been to I kept uncovering new and interesting things to see. That's one of the primary reasons I think I tend to like big cities to base myself rather than out in the country - there seems to be a never ending supply of new and interesting things to see in a city. One accidental gem was stumbling across the El Abasto shopping centre on my way to see something else. This used to be BA's fresh food market however it's been gutted and restored in order to house a shopping centre, but it's been done with such respect for the original building that you can't help but be taken aback when you first see it towering over you when you exit the subway station.

I spotted that one on the Monday night I went to La Bomba del Tiempo, which if you've spent any time in a hostel in BA you'll not only have heard of, but more than likely gone to. It's in the Konex centre, which is an old factory with it's roof ripped off to house cultural events, and every Monday about a dozen percussionists of various musical backgrounds take to the stage as they have been every Monday for years and smash out some highly infectious tunes. This tends to turn the crowd of somewhere like 1000 people who have been drinking beer out of litre plastic cup for well over an hour into raving lunatics. It's hard to get a good feel of how many people there are tourists due to the high concentration of non-Argentinian Spanish speakers but there's definitely a high concentration of Anlgo and Euro backpackers about the place. I liked it because you can basically dance like you're having a brain hemorrhage and everyone thinks it's normal. Well recommended.

I was quite happy to slip out of BA having only seen the Tango performed on the street for the tourists. It's a big draw in La Boca for the daytime crowds, and one of the benefits of being in San Telmo was on Sunday I got to see the antique markets spill out and take over the street. Towards the end of the day, once the tourists have had their fill of buying tat the stall holders give way to the performers, and there is quite a few couples dancing Tango as a kind of busking. That would have been enough for me, I didn't need to go and see a hugely expensive Tango show, however I was told the thing to do, even by other Australian males so I knew it was probably not too So You Think You Can Dance, was to go to La Catedral on a Tuesday night.

La Catedral is a dance club which takes place under the high arched ceilings of an old converted factory that on it's own is probably a more hip place to have a beer than practically any bar in Sydney. They do lessons every night of the week, however it's somehow become an accepted fact that Tuesday is the night that all the foreigners who have no rhythm at all show up and embarrass themselves in front of an equally poor group of dancers. The lessons are mostly in Spanish, with a smattering of English, but that doesn't really matter because half the crowd speaks not much of either. Being a single male you're generally outnumbered 3:1 to single girls so it's a good way to meet girls who speak practically no English, are all 5 feet tall and get a bit miffed when you're crap at dancing. Well, that's what seemed to happen to me anyway. Thank God there was a group of about 5 French girls who couldn't really dance at all either so you could spend most of the time you're stepping on each other's feet laughing.

Once the tourists have had their shot (there's two classes so I was able to spend a couple of hours drinking beer and feeling like an accomplished dancer watching the later class stumble about like I had been earlier) the real show starts. La Catedral is a serious dance club, which tends to attract a young, non-traditional crowd who just want to dance and it's hard to explain just how good some of these people are. None of them are paid, they're simply on a night out. At midnight. On a Tuesday. There's a large part of me that was sitting there wondering what went wrong with our culture when we'd rather sit at home and watch reality TV than go to something like this. A few of the Argies I spoke to said they never really come to dance, it's just to watch other people who are really good and sit around talking crap with your mates. If you've ever seen the crowd at a pub that happens to be open at 2am on a Wednesday morning then it's hard not to be stuck by the contrast.

So back in the day Argentina became independent from Spain and decided that what they needed to do was go on a massive expansion spree to try and make use of the mass of natural resources on hand. To do that they needed blokes, because back then stuff like tractors and cars hadn't been invented yet, and a good source of those were the struggling countries of Mediterranean Europe, most importantly for the culture of Argentina one of those was Italy. Not only did they get decent pizza and pasta, but they also got heaps of macho blokes in a town with practically no women. They theory used to be the tango originated in the brothels of BA, due to the fact there was a shortage of women brothels were a good business to be in. However it seems that it's more likely that the dance originated in the tenements of BA, where all the women were and the blokes needed to stand out from the crowd by being top notch dancers. And it's likely there would be more buskers annoying you in La Boca, because all those people silently dancing the Tango for your money would have had to find other work.

I'm glad I went back to BA and stayed a bit longer in the end, I got to do a few things that I wasn't able to do due to the holidays last time and it only added to my opinion of the place. I'd really love to come back on day in Spring when the city is in full flight and see it in all it's glory, but I get the feeling from what I saw that it would be one of those rare places I could actually see myself living in, which is unique in Latin American cities I've seen so far. Despite having lovely bits much of Mexico City looks like a war zone and Santiago would be a bit too dull. If it's wasn't for the hyper-inflation and the lack of vegetable content in my diet making me feel a bit woozy all the time it would be almost perfect.

So my trip today was a 1 hour ferry ride over Rio del La Plata (the river of SILVER!) into Uruguay. I'm in a former colonial outpost called Colonia del Sacramento which is a manageable little pueblo (town, gringos) whose story I shall tell next time.

Mucho agua

Buenos Aires :: Argentina

1800 cubic metres of water per second!

Places: Puerto Iguazu & Buenos Aires.

Coolest thing I did: Took a jetboat ride right into the wash of some of the medium sized falls at Iguazu and looked like I'd swum there.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Iguazu falls were the ones that Roger Moore nearly goes over in Moon Raker, which aren't really at the end of the Amazon River like the movie says.

There's times I feel like I might have become a bit jaded with all these years of travel and am finding it hard to be impressed by the really high volume tourist sites that are considered must sees. I kind of shrugged at the Sphinx, thought the Mona Lisa was a bit small and Chitzen Itza was probably my least favourite pyramid site in all of Central America. However, every now and then I go somewhere that completely exceeds all expectations, and I threaten to bore the pants off everyone I meet for weeks after extolling it's virtues. Iguazu Falls is one of those places.

For those of you who have been to Niagara Falls, imagine that multiplied by about a factor of 10. Rather than one big waterfall it's a series of falls coming off the edge of load of cliffs around the face of a sheer valley, with massive jagged stone breaking out of jungle in between. By sheer luck I happened to view the falls in order of size, from the smallest upwards, so by the time I saw The Devils Throat (you'll note the Argies like calling things The Devils Throat) which is the biggest I'd already been smacked about the gob several times during the day. Apparently the view of Diablo is better from the Brazilian side, but the Argentinians have built a series of catwalks so you're standing pretty much right on top of them and the sheer volume of water flowing down the face of it plays tricks on the eyes. I could have watched it for hours, only I was sharing the catwalk with about 3 thousand of my closest friends.

The Argentinian Dream is a camera and a step ladder over Iguazu Falls - there were about half a dozen guys there cleaning up by taking portraits of families and couples from a slightly higher vantage point.

I loved spending the day walking through the jungle and all of a sudden getting a different perspective on the falls - I think I took roughly 1000 pictures so I'll try very hard to cull them before inflicting them on anyone. Some of the catwalks take you along the rivers at the top of the falls and it always amazes me just how slowly the appear to be flowing up until the point where they drop off into a massive wall of white water. Again, I could spend all day just watching the water disappear off into the crowd below.

So just to give the park more of a Disneyland feel there are companies that do adventure tours inside the park. My mate Claudio in Salta had told me the one to do was the jetboat up to the face of the medium sized falls (once you see Diablo you know why they don't try and get close to that one) so I made sure I gave up an extra 100 pesos or so to do that. The boat seemed to be filled mostly with the rowdiest family I'd seen in the park so they pretty much treated it like a roller coaster - hands in the air and screaming and shouting. I couldn't help but join in. I loved it when the boat tore right into the falls and then swung back out and the whole boat was changing Otro, otro, otro,...(again! again!). Despite the fact you get soaked right down to the bare skin it was well worth it. I felt sorry for whoever had to sit next to me on the plane that night back to BA with my walking shoes that had slowly been drying with my feet in them all day.

Nothing much could take the glow of the day away from me, not even the Saturday crowd. I'd been warned to get there early, and even arriving at about 8.30am was probably a bit too late. By lunchtime the park is packed any you spend a very long time lining up for things. To anyone trying to do the Argentinian park in a day I'd suggest trying to go on the very first bus at 7.20 am if lining up for things irritates you as much as it does me. Then go back to town and sleep the afternoon away. The only other thing worth doing was walking to the end of Puerto Iguazu and seeing the confluence of the rivers, the only place you can get Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina in the same photograph.

Doing Iguazu in a day was not a cheap experience - I took my bags to the national park and put them in storage and instead of going back to town I got a taxi the 4km to the airport. That cost 90 pesos, which is about $20. I also had the misfortune of only being able to fly back to EZE, the international airport which is also a money sink. The shuttle back into town literally passed by the door of my hostel and I couldn't even bribe the driver to let me off early. There's nothing like landing at 8pm and not getting into the hostel door until 10pm. I did consider sharing a taxi with some other whiteys on my flight but they're priced the taxis at 200 pesos, meaning even 3 people sharing it would be cheaper to get 3 tickets on the shuttle bus. I've not seen a scam for fleecing tourists so blatant since Macquarie Bank found a way to charge for the train ride from Sydney Airport into the city using 2018 prices.

So back in BA in time to catch Gerry before he has to fly back to Oz tomorrow night. Hopefully I'll get to do another couple of things I wanted to do last time that I couldn't due to the New Years shutdown before I shuffle off to the beach in Uruguay.

Red & Yellow & ...

Puerto Iguazu :: Argentina

I haven't had a good human sacrifice story in ages.

Places: Salta, Quebrada de Humahuaca & Quebrada de Cafayate.

Coolest thing I did: Three words - Red. Wine. IceCream.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Llamas will hold still long enough to take a picture of with self portrait mode on your new camera. Man I love my new camera.

The most stark different I found coming from the flatlands of central Argentina up to Salta was to find just how different the people are physically in the North. The Incas made it this far south and everyone looks a lot like they do (or so The Discovery Channel tells me) in Peru and Bolivia. There is a much stronger native influence in the gene pool than is evident in places further south, with people being shorter, broader, darker and having almost Asian eyes as a result of the Americas being peopled by dudes walking across the Bearing Straight during the last ice age from Mongolia. For the first time in South America I felt that same kind of traditional culture that was so prevalent in Southern Mexico and Guatemala, even if the locals will be the first to tell you not much of that traditional culture remains.

The town of Salta itself is set in a river valley and is surrounded on all sides by green mountains, a contrast yet again with both Patagonia and Mendoza. It has it’s standard square, bloke on horse, church and town hall so as a result I didn’t plan on spending a whole lot of time in town. The rain on the first day forced me to do more of it that I had planned, and it turned out to be quite a stroke of luck. The one museum I went to on the town square had the remains of children that had been sacrificed by the Incas, and because those wacky Incas sacrificed their children by getting them smashed on booze and then putting them on top of really high mountains, those kids are nearly intact. In 1999 some archaeologists found 3 bodies on top of a volcano that had been there for over 500 years and all 3 are in near mint condition, with the exception of one young girl who was struck by lightning sometime since and shows the burn marks. They rotate the mummies on display so only one is on display at a time, but it is seriously eerie that you’re looking into the face of someone that looks like they could have been alive a week ago.

It’s very hard to work out exactly why the Incas were sacrificing these children, apparently something to do with bonding disparate parts of the empire together or some such, but the English translation seemed to be one page to every 5 of Spanish so I think they might have been skipping large parts of the story.

In order to get out of Salta by Friday and onto a plane for Iguazu to see the falls I sent myself on a gruelling 48 hours of day trips, which are generally my least favourite things in the world. I didn’t really get to experience much of Salta’s nightlife simply because I was getting up at 7am every morning to go somewhere. My first day was out into the Quebrada de Humahuaca (I think that means gorge, or valley?) which involves going down into a gorge where the erosion has exposed multi-coloured stone and then locals have gone and built their villages in the shadow of these technicolour mountains making them lovely places for tourists to stop and take pictures of. They also all have town squares, churches and town halls for you to pretend to be interested in, and various knickknacks you probably should buy for people at home to pretend to like and then stick in shoe boxes at the bottom of their closets.

Now I love quaint native cultures as much as the next Western Imperialist but I’ve documented in many places before how much I find the Disney-fication of these places at best uninteresting. From the hand woven llama poncho I’d never wear to the blokes playing the pan pipes while you’re having lunch I get the feeling I’m not their target market. The most interesting conversation I had with a local was probably the guide, who comes from one of the villages but moved to Salta because that’s where all the jobs are. That circular situation where people are keeping their local traditions alive simply so the tourists can feel they’ve seen something authentic kind of makes no sense to me. These guys wouldn’t be living in adobe huts and trying to hide their satellite dishes from view if we didn’t pay to go and see them living like it was pre-Colombian days.

Yep, for me it was all about the scenery, and it’s simply one of those unique places in the world. The various hues come from such phenomena as fossilised algae (green) to oxidised iron (red) to make, in some places cliff faces showing seven different contrasting colours. Even the subtle colour change between the late morning when we were driving into the gorges and late afternoon when we were coming back meant you constantly got a different palate to look at. If it was up to me we could have spent all day in the gorge and far less time in reconstructed Inca ruins, eating llama meatloaf or the half hour in Jujuy on the way back to see yet another town hall, even if this one did have a rather cool French Baroque feel to it and independent Argentina’s first flag in it’s front room.

My other day trip was to Cafayate, which is Argentina’s other major wine region, even if it is dwarfed massively by Mendoza. Again, the best part of the day is going through the almost desert landscape of the Quebrada de Cafayate, which we did far more stopping at and photographing than the day before. You’re constantly being told this formation is an iguana, and this one is a frog, but my favourites were the big dramatic ones, like the two dry waterfalls The Devils Throat & The Amphitheatre. The latter is even cooler because you can walk right inside and find acoustics so good that some of Argentina’s best loved musicians (I’m told) have played there. You got the feeling this is true as there were some buskers taking advantage of the many, many tour buses by playing right in the middle to make the most of the sound. I wondered how it would have gone down had I bought one of those pan pipes and played the first 3 bars of Three Blind Mice (the only music I actually know) repeatedly.

I have to grind an axe with the wineries I’ve so far been to in Argentina. Does no one understand that when you get a lot of white people in you may have the best marketing opportunity you could possibly have? Why on earth bring out your bottom of the barrel wines and treat everyone like some criminal that’s out to eat into your profit margin by drinking a thimble of your wine? Seriously, it should be a cost of doing business. Not one of the wine’s I’ve had so far would have been something I’d actively go looking for, but I also guess that might be because the servers somehow have the art of making half a bottle stretch to 40 people and despite selling wine that costs 100 pesos a bottle you’re serving the stuff that cost 18 in the supermarket. Even if most people are tourists who can’t tell their wines apart and will never remember the name anyway, what’s that compared to the 1% who might know what they are talking about (I’m not in that category, by the way) and might buy a whole case right there.

When I’m in charge, things will be different.

So the thing that Cafayate had going for it that was kind of unique was the heladeria (or ice-cream parlour, gringo) that made red and white wine ice cream. There are several places that now sell a wine based ice cream in Cafayate, but the original isn’t easy to miss – they literally only sell it out of a window that is lined with the reviews from the Lonely Planet, Rough Guide and other travel guides blown up in 40 point font. Strangely enough the LP reviews were in French, German and Spanish, but not English. Anyway, the woman will give you a scoop of Torrontes & Cabernet ice cream, and from the first taste you can tell there is a whole crapload of actual wine in there. I’d say if you’d opted for the 1kg tub you’d be fairly sure you wouldn’t be driving home afterwards.

The way back was almost a write off, after a couple of wine tastings, lunch and wine icecream it was about 5 mins out of town before the whole bus was asleep. The only thing that actually got us all out of the bus on the final stop of the day was the excited squeal of the 9 year old girl who had spent the whole day doing grown up stuff and simply wanted to feed the llamas. On the side of the road someone has tied up about 5 or 6 llamas that you can feed with something that looked like rabbit pellets. After seeing my mate Claudio (a BA native on holiday in the North) take a self-portrait of himself and a llama I decided to do the same. Luckily they held of spitting on either of us, which I hear is a common enough problem.

So after a surprisingly painless flight from Salta to Iguazu I find myself with 24 hours to go and see falls that allegedly make Niagara look like a sprinkler and then get on another plane to BA. I’m not feeling a sleep in tomorrow.

Next time, Spring

Salta :: Argentina

Summer in the 'doze.

Places: Cordoba, Alta Gracia & Cabalango (via Carlos Paz).

Coolest thing I did: Saw the motorcycle they used in the movie version of The Motorcycle Diaries.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Child rearing practices seem to coddle the kids too much - in Argentina it seems normal to have your kid sleeping in a pram in a bar at 2am.

Much like my experience with the ‘doze, my time in Cordoba (hence forth known as the ‘dobe) is totally overshadowed by the fact it spent all the daylight hours I was there absorbing heat into it’s surface all day in order to make you imagine you’re walking around on the sun. Which is a pity, because Argentina’s second city does seem to have a vibrant cultural life, which is probably the result of having a long history of being a centre of learning (and more importantly drinking) for university students. The only problem of course with when I was there is there is said students had cleverly buggered off to the beach or mountains and left the streets to Europeans frying alive wondering why they are walking around the centre of a deserted city during the 5 or 6 hour siestas the locals have this time of year.

Now if you spend any length of time in the northern half of Argentina you’ll get to know fairly quickly that all the colonial centres are pretty much a central square with a town hall and a church of some kind on them (neatly dividing church and state by, usually, a statue of a man on a horse). The ‘dobe, being the first colonial capital of what would become Argentina (it’s complicated, don’t ask) lays down the blueprint for this, including the cathedral with Jesus in his pointing-to-his-own-chest pose, which I’ve taken to calling “I’m the Jesus” pose. In Thailand you see Buddha in about 4 or 5 common poses, which all have names, so I don’t see why Jesus can’t have his standard poses named too. He’s also well known for the peace sign pose, which I call “Japanese schoolgirl Jesus” and the one with his palm out, which I call “Gimme five Jesus”. You may get the feeling I’ve seen way too many colonial churches lately.

During the morning hours, and post-siesta every space in the pedestrianized streets is filled with people selling junk made in China off blankets. There seems to be a serious amount of hustling of pots and pans, baby clothes, socks, and even one bloke we saw selling hunting knives off a blanket. People keep telling me the hyper-inflation here is causing the middle class to pretty much have disappeared and I do wonder whether it’s causing a new breed of entrepreneurs who are somehow capable of sourcing 150 different baseball caps and a blanket are simply making up for the steeply rising cost of shop front rents.

The inflation, in fact, is pretty much the topic of conversation you end up with in the occasions you find yourself speaking to an Argie who speaks enough English to hold a conversation with someone with Spanish as woeful as mine. The restaurants draw their prices on the menus in pencil, no-one can leave the country for anywhere because their currency is worth less by the day, and despite the fact a good steak and beer costs well over 70 pesos people don’t keep enough change to let you pay for it with 100 pesos. Even McDonalds won’t change a hundred (or as Gerry has awesomely dubbed it, a hunjee).

Where were we? Oh yeah, Cordoba.

Despite the heat kind of getting everyone down during the day, the ‘dobe is a totally different town at night, even in summer. We only really managed one proper night out while we were there, but it didn’t take very long at all to find a strip of bars and nightclubs in town. After downing a 400g steak each (which is becoming a disturbingly normal size meal these days) we made our way along the canal that runs down the edge of downtown to Guemes, a barrio (suburb or neighbourhood to you gringos) named after some figure or other in Argie history. It’s not important who he was at this point, for some reason he made it possible for there to be heaps of bars that are also restaurants, and quite often nightclubs that span two or more streets. You have to get used to this eating at 11pm malarkey simply because you’ll be eating on your own if you don’t, and you’ll think the town has rubbish nightlife because no-one shows up before 2am.

If you’re a spirits drinker I strongly suggest that you try and make a mental switch to beer and/or wine before coming out to the A-Zone, they may have a book with pages of spirits as a menu, but quite often asking for 99% of the things on it will result in a series of ‘no lo tenemos’ (we don’t have it). They always have beer.

Inside the ‘dobe itself you’re supposed to go and look at heaps of old buildings left by people called Jesuits, who built churches, monasteries and universities. I know I’m usually good at this kind of thing, but to be honest it was way too hot to read up on any of it so I have no idea who the Jesuits were or why they were so important. From all the crosses on their rooves I suspect they were somehow related to the Catholic Church, but that’s just a wild guess.

What I mostly did is try to escape the city to see other stuff. The day trip out to Alta Gracia is supposed to include a look inside another important Jesuit but to be honest it was even hotter there than in the ‘dobe. Instead I saw the childhood home of Che Guevera, which was way cooler.

I’d forgotten the reams of captions I’d read in the temples to Che that pass for museums in Cuba and misplaced the fact that he was actually and Argentinian. The house in Alta Gracia is a nice change from all that because it’s mostly about how sickly a kid he was with asthma (which he never kicked), his time in medical school and his two epic journeys as a young man, first around Argentina and then more famously around Latin America, which he recorded in the Motorcycle Diaries, which I’ve read but never seen the movie that was made about a decade ago. They have the motorcycle they used for the film in the museum, which is kind of cool. They also dedicate a very small portion to the same photos you see in Cuba, but only the most famous ones of the post-revolutionary government and his adventures in Africa and, fatally Bolivia. They also have the obligatory blow up of the photo that launched a billion t-shirts. My favourite bit, however was the fact that the family bathroom has a sign on the toilet that says something like “don’t use this, it’s part of the museum”, which I guess means there’s been past incidents of tourists weeing in Che’s childhood dunny.

I liked the fact the hero worship, while still apparent in the one-sidedness of the political segments of the museum, is nothing like as prevalent is it is in the museums in Cuba. I still have my doubts that Che ever had x-ray vision or killed Godzilla with his bare hands. Communist dictatorships tend to have issues with balanced journalism.

One thing I didn’t notice in Cuba, but was blatantly obvious in Argentina was in lots of the pictures Che has a mate cup in hand. Mate (the ‘e’ should have an accent – not may-te, but mah-the) is what Argentinians do to while away bus trips, work days, routine traffic stops and pretty much anything else that allows you to have one hand free. It’s basically a kind of tea that you fill a special cup with, then you keep refilling that cup with hot water from a 1.5 litre thermos you carry with you everywhere and drinking the tea through a pipe that stops the tea leaves from getting in your mouth. Seeing Che do it probably fills the Argies with the same pride as I’d imagine Aussies would get seeing photos of Donald Bradman batting 322 with a stubbie in hand.

My other day trip was an exercise in being Argentinaed for pretty much an entire day. The owner of the hostel told us that in order to escape the heat the best thing to do would be to get a minibus out to a place out of town where the river is actually nice to swim in (the river through the ‘dobe has a kind of storm water drain quality to it) called Cabalango. So off we trudge, far too late in the day to the minibus station, just as the temperature is topping 40. When we arrive we find out the bus goes every hour and we just missed one by like 10 mins. So we buy tickets and wait for the bus, which is about 20 mins late and has a broken door. There’s a fair bit of faffing around with the door for another 20 mins or so, until we’re allowed on. This catch is there were 4 of us and by the time 3 of us have gotten on they say they’ve sold too many tickets and the bus is full. So we get off and get told to take another bus which comes in another 20 mins to a town called Carlos Paz which is on the way and get onto another bus there. Needless to say, by the time we actually got to the mythical land of Cabalango we had about 45 mins before we had to get back on the bus and go back, because I was in danger of missing my 9pm bus to Salta.

Having said all that, it was a very nice spot and with the day’s stupid heat it was very nice to actually sit in the rockpools above the river for about half an hour. We were also lucky we got told to go the last stop on the bus and swim there, because half of Cordoba seems to be in the river all want to go home at the same time. I’d have been totally Argentinaed if we’d been one of those in the massive queues the bus driver ignored on his way back to town.

Much like the ‘doze, I think I have to reserve judgement on the ‘dobe due to the massive caveat that the heat has pretty much scarred my view of the places. From what I saw they’d both be very nice cities to spend a few days in during spring or autumn, or even later summer but in the heat they aren’t that pleasant. Funnily enough I spent a lot of time explaining myself to people that just because I’m from Sydney it doesn’t make me some kind of mutant crab man who is impervious to heat. The only reason we actually have less of an issue with 40 degrees in Sydney is because we also have heaps of beaches, swimming pools and (out West) air conditioned shopping centres to hide out in. Stand on the platform of Wynyard station at 5pm in the middle of summer in a suit and see if Sydney is any better than these places in the heat.

So Gerry and I parted ways for a little while as he wanted to spend some time on the beach before he has to fly back on the weekend and I was keen to still see Salta and surrounds while I was already in the North of Argentina. It was with strange relief that I got off the bus to find it 25 degrees and raining.

How hot is it?

Mendoza :: Argentina

Summer in the 'doze.

Places: Mendoza.

Coolest thing I did: Stood at 4000m on the border of Argentina and Chile and had my picture taken with the Christ the Redeemer of the Andes.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The highest mountain in the world outside the Himalayas is in Argentina. At 6900m Aconcagua isn't even in the list of the tallest 100 mountains in the world, but it's the largest in the Americas.

Getting off the night bus before 10am you can already tell that the interior of Argentina is far hotter than BA could ever hope to be. The one thing I'd really wanted to do while I was here was head off to the little hamlet of Maipu just south of Mendoza itself in order to hire a bike and ride between wineries and get slowly more drunk. I'd been told that if you got too drunk you just left the bike in the grass on the side of the road and they came and got it later. That was the first reason. The second reason is I've made it my lifelong mission to do anything this whinging fool complains about. Seriously, how do you get a travel blog with a nationwide audience and spend all your time complaining. Man, that column makes me mad.

Anyway, the bloke in the hostel did say you could still hire bikes in the heat of summer but practically no-one does it for the obvious reason that once you've ridden 10km to a winery in near 40 degree heat the last thing you actually want to do is drink red wine. That kind of could have been pointless. So instead we got on what was going to be a "minibus" which in the A-zone means "massive bus full of old people". I was ready to be mad at this latest round of being Argentinaed, but then I remembered I wasn't supposed to be whinging and enjoyed myself instead.

Mendoza is basically situated in a desert that leads up to the foothills in the Andes and has extremely low rain fall according to the guide, who was telling us this as the wind shield was being pounded in heavy rain. The only reason it's a good wine growing region is people have been artificially irrigating here since the Incas and the soil is good for growing various grapes, stone fruits and olives that mostly get mashed into extra virgin olive oil. As you look out over the endless rows of grape vines you're given an awesome view of them ending with the snow caps of the Andes in the background. It's an amazing sight, especially as we were given the dramatic effect of storms coming out over the mountains as it seems to have been raining up there almost constantly since we got to the 'doze.

The tour took us to the Chandon factory (they have one in a few places outside France apparently, including Oz), an olive oil press and a smaller boutique winery, Vistandes, which was in a building designed by someone who obviously majored in airport design at architecture school. I didn't mind the wine, it tasted about as good as any bottle I've gotten from the supermarket here at 40 pesos (about 9 AUDs) but it was actually the olive oil that was a revelation. I knew nothing about how that stuff gets made and when they lay out all the plates with bread drizzled in different oils I probably smashed my fair share. Which you had to be quick on because it seems the Argies and Chileans who were on the tour don't hold back - be it wine or oily bread it's every man for himself and elbows at the ready.

The coolest fact I learned from the day is when there is hail it smashes the grapes so the government has funded the bigger vineyards to install devices that emit a frequency undetectable to human ears but smashes the hailstones into little bits so the can't do any damage to the grapes. I thought that was awesome if it's true.

Mendoza itself seems like a lively looking town, however due to this being the height of summer and many of the 'dozers off at the beach in Chile or Uruguay it's also mostly dead in the middle of the day. No-one really wants to be out in town when it's that hot so most of the shops in town shutdown for a 4 and a half hour siesta at noon. It's enforced a whole load of lazing about during the day when not doing things. I like it here, but much like BA I don't get the feeling I'm seeing it at it's best. Next time I'll come to the North of Argentina in spring I reckon. The nice thing about here as opposed to BA is they've managed to avoid the urge to put roads with 18 lanes through the middle of town. You don't often feel like you need to plan the next 20 minutes crossing the road.

The other big day trip we did, which didn't involve wine for a change, was to hire a car and drive up into the Andes to see some mountainous stuff. The scenery is so dramatically different to the south, with much drier, rust coloured mountains and mostly dry river beds at this time of year. The main thing you go to do is look at Aconcagua, which is the highest mountain in the Americas. Before you do that, however, you end up stopping at something called Punte del Incas, which has nothing at all to do with the Incas as far as I can tell. It's a natural limestone bridge that the Argies have unfortunately built stuff under, however it's still quite amazing to see. Until 2005 you could even walk over it and up a path to a church they also inexplicably decided to build on top, however for some reason my Spanish wasn't good enough to glean from the sign that's not on any longer.

Aconcagua is climbable by amateurs but not in a day trip, funnily enough. A guy in our hostel from Quebec was going to climb it, and told us he was going to hire a donkey to carry his stuff. The level has now been set at if a trek requires a donkey then it's probably too far for this trip. Instead we went to the national park and looked at it, after a gruelling 10 minute walk we were promised would take 45. Even with a halo of cloud it was still an impressive sight to behold. It would be a fairly standard trip to and from the lookout, but two things stand out. People must molest the ducks so regularly that there's a sign telling them not to (and funnily enough there were no ducks near the sign to be molested), and when you hear a big yelp from behind you, get off the trail. At the end of the day the cowboy dudes that hire out donkeys send all the unhired donkeys back down the trail by just setting them loose and hoping the tourists get out of the way. I guess in the A-zone it's not like you can sue them if you get trampled to death.

The final stop on the trip is a 9km winding rocky road (which sorely tested our crappy Chevy hire car) leading to the original border crossing between Chile and Argentina which was marked in 1904 after some war or other by a statue of Jesus giving the Japanese schoolgirl peace sign. The view is simply stunning into each country, and it's well worth the effort of getting up there. The only thing we found out is the climb from 2900m to 4000m you do in that 9km also means that instead of a nice 28 degrees like it was down the bottom it was a balmy 12 degrees at the top. We were both in t-shirts and shorts, which I cleverly topped off with a hoodie, which Gerry didn't even have. The pictures are mostly of us looking cold but happy.

So tonight is another nightbus, this time to Cordoba (the 'dobe) to get even more scorching heat in the Argies original colonial capital.

I'm finding the Argies a bit easier to deal with outside BA, which isn't to say they were all rude there, but people are definitely friendlier out here in the smaller cities. I guess if you had a job where you got to sleep for 4 hours in the middle of the day you'd be happier too.

Feliz ano nuevo

Buenos Aires:: Argentina

New Years Eve in BA, or how to get blood from a stone.

Places: Buenos Aires.

Coolest thing I did: Went to what would probably be the best bookshop in the world, if they had anything in English.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: There are blonde Argentinians. Heaps of them.

Even though half the town appears to have decamped to the beach to escape the heat there is still an undeniably busy vibe to Buenos Aires (BA to it's mates). We're holed up in the highly hip Palermo Hollywood district (separated by train tracks from the equally cool Palermo Soho) and you could just spend weeks just drinking coffee, eating meat and drinking wine from cafe to bar to parrilla around here - even in this slack time between Christmas and New Years there's endless options. It's also full of furniture shops that have one chair in the middle of a room made of glass and polished concrete, a sure sign that an area has been crowned as cool.

The whole town here was once meant to look like Paris, with streets of low rise buildings done in what I'm reliably informed is a Baroque style. During a resource boom starting in the 1800s and lasting until the Great Depression they then added Art Deco and Art Nouveau to the mix, and after more modern buildings done in in that every-flat-must-have-a-balcony style, only with cages all over them, I guess to stop Spiderman robbing you on the 7th or 8th floor. You look down any street and see this mix of styles running into each other, but for some reason they've resisted the urge to build proper highrise, narrow the footpaths to make more room for cars, or to break from the grid pattern (each block is numbered for 100 buildings, even if there's less than 50 on each side) making the whole thing very walkable and easy to get around. I'm promised that once you go to the poorer suburbs this all breaks down, but generally I feel like you could easily live here.

My favourite building so far has been the El Alteno bookshop, which is a converted theatre with shelves down in the old general seating and more all around the galleries. On the old stage is a cafe and people can bring stacks of books with them and sit in the opera boxes and read them. If this shop was all in English I'm sure I'd be able to waste days in there. It may be the nicest bookshop I've ever seen. This is a city that prides itself as readers, and every block seems to have at least one bookshop of some size. With the death of book retail in Australia it's a refreshing thing to see. We quite often blame our climate for making us dumb, but it's just as hot here and it doesn't seem to stop anyone reading.

My other favourite tourist site here was the La Recoleta Cemetery, which seems to be mostly an open air sculpture park. Though a lot of the themes obviously revolve around angels or the military, nearly every row you look down there's another statue begging for a photo. Like the buildings surrounding it the many artistic styles of the last 150 years are represented in each tomb, making it a kind of art history lesson. What you want to avoid is Americans talking loudly about how they are clever enough to know the difference between a Doric and Ionic column. There is a surprisingly large number of them populating the cemetery at any given time. The big draw here is the Duarte family tomb which houses the remains of Eva Peron, who was a major figure in Argentinian politics no-one in the English speaking world knows much about because she had the misfortune to have been played by Madonna in a musical movie of her life. Tragic.

If you want a different view on how people live in BA and a bit of an adrenaline hit at the same time then totally ignore the LPs advice of getting public transport to La Boca to see the Boca Juniors stadium and instead walk the streets through the projects to get there instead. There's a very sudden line between the swanky parts and the not so swanky parts of BA, and La Boca lives up to it's blue collar, docklands reputation. There's a lovely street that leads from the waterfront (which smells like an open sewer and has a nice black murky sheen) up to the Boca Juniors stadium which includes many houses painted in bring colours and an open air art gallery along the old train tracks, but veer even a street too far in either direction and it's becomes a whole lot poorer and lest touristy very quickly.

La Bombonera (the chocolate box) is the home to Club Atlético Boca Juniors, one of the world's best known football teams, and former club of the man they call God here, Diego Maradona. As you walk up from the waterfront you can see the blue and yellow terraces start to rise up over the streets and standing in front of it you can only imagine what it's like when the crowds are shoving themselves in for match day. This is home to what is considered by some the best fixture in all of world sport, the Superclasico where Boca plays cross town rivals River Plate. However, there is no chance at all of seeing it this year, due to the fact River were relegated and there will be no match-up at all for the season. Apparently it's the local derby to end all local derbies, with the whole city coming to a standstill to watch.

So the goal of being in BA at this time of year was to try and be in what is considered one of the biggest party towns in the world for New Years Eve. What we've since discovered is the Argentinians generally all leave BA and go to the beach at this time of year, and the ones that stay go to family parties, because that's what they do. Some of the younger ones go out at about 2am to the clubs but generally speaking BA starts being a ghost town about 8pm. The only way to avoid being stuck in a hostel with a lot of other drunk Aussies was to go to the internet and get tips.

At 25m high the Planetarium is the highest park in BA and we were told a place people go to have picnics and watch the fireworks. What we didn't know is pretty much no-one shows up until 11pm, so we had a whole bunch of us sitting in the pale glow of a building that's lit up like a 1968 acid trip and trying to mostly eat and drink in the dark. It was good we managed to get a group of about 8 of us, so it didn't matter so much that it was totally dead, we could make our own fun. Which if Gerry had found out about 10 mins earlier he could buy fireworks could have meant setting off our own fireworks. The guy at our hotel told him to go to the shops and just pick some up (something Australians haven't been trusted to do in years) but by the time he got there they'd cut off selling any more. This would have really helped us get into the spirit, because after midnight everyone seemed to be letting off their own fireworks pretty much everywhere - at ground level, into the sky, at eye level. Which was good, because the official fireworks being let off from the newishly redeveloped docklands were safely hidden behind a row of trees.

After we'd had our fill of drinking in the park we came back to the hotel, drank some more and then made our way down to Niceto, a fairly large club at the end of the street. The girls in our group managed to skip the 30 minute line up and get us in quickly, and in true nightclub style we found it about 50% empty when we got there (I'm a club half empty, not a club half full kind of guy), but by about 3 or 3.30am the place was starting to heave. At home I'd pretty much never have gone to a club but I had a stellar time and I suspect every one of us did.

So today I discovered New Years Day in BA is deader than disco. Even McDonnalds & Starbucks were shut. We're hoping something opens for us to get some kind of steak refill before heading off on the night bus to Mendoza and wine country tomorrow night.