Broken windows theory

Bogota :: Colombia

Now with added safety!

Places: Bogota.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the drums, the drums, the drums

Salvador :: Brazil

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

Places: Salvador & Morro de Sao Paulo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sound of the police

Salvador :: Brazil

Even the slums here are beautiful.

Places: Ilha Grande, Rio de Janeiro & Salvador.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am the egg man

Ilha Grande :: Brazil

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

Places: Rio de Janeiro & Ilha Grande.

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nature's waterslide

Rio de Janeiro :: Brazil

The calm before the storm.

Places: Paraty & Rio de Janeiro.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life in the endless city

Paraty :: Brazil

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

Places: Sao Paulo & Paraty.

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

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

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

But that would be a shame.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the other half lives

Sao Paulo :: Brazil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead I’ll talk about P12.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.