After a 19 hour bus ride, which was surprisingly ok (as we had aircon and spongy seats) we made it to sparkling Rio. We´re staying in Ipanema with favelas behind us, and the beach in front. We´ll put a photo on in a few days of the favelas and the new lift that they have built from the street up to them. It´s pretty cool. The weather has turned unforch and the rain has been coming down so we haven´t made it to Sugarloaf mountian or Christ the Redeemer as yet, so lucky we booked in for 8 days! So what are you to do in Rio when it rains? well we´ve been exercising - after all the cheese, and fried food we´ve been eating (South Americans seem to dislike vegetables!)and long bus rides it was certainly time to start pounding the pavements. We´ve even been pumping iron with the locals on the beach - check out the photo below.....
well we´ve been doing a lot of relaxing since the craziness of carnival. We cruised down the coast in a few very bumpy non airconditioned buses (it was VERY hot!) to a beautiful surfy beach town called Itacare. Here life is slow and relatively crime free which helps, you can in fact walk around with your camera and not feel as though a guy might jump out of the bushes and rob you. Always nice! We spent many days here, eating BBQ haloumi sticks by day on the beach and caipirinhas by night and chillaxing on the hammock in between. As appears to be the way in South America though, nothing tends to run as smoothly as you anticipate in fact we were without running water for nearly 48 hours, yep no flushing toilets, running water...the place was humming! The most amusing thing was the reaction of the hostel owner, a bit of shrug and a comment of ´it happens´, so we relaxed a little more into the South American way and forgot about the stench!!
Wow what a whirlwind the last week has been since leaving Argentina.... Last Tuesday we arrived into a very hot and steamy Salvador (Northern Brazil). The Carnival had not officially started when we arrived in Barra which is the beach area of Salvador, however there were people everywhere. In fact people from all over Brazil had decended on the city to either party in a bloco (a roped off area around the trio (big bus that has a bar on board with the band on the roof)or being ´popcorn´ on the street - basically jumping up and down and getting slightly crushed!! We couldn´t quite get over the cost to join a bloco - you´re looking at an average of $200, so we politely declined joining in and instead opted for the ´popcorn´ option.
A massive 2 million people decended on Salvador over carnival - and I hate to think how much Skol beer would have been consumed, at only 75c a beer and always only an arm reach away, they were free flowing during the 8 days of carnival. You´ve got to feel for the thousands of Brazilians who slept on the streets in make shift tents to make a few dollars from selling beer. I can´t put into words how much the place was stinking after a few days of so many people living in such a small space!
Oh yes and of course, we can´t forget the mugging on the beach incident! On one of the nights we were slightly trapped with crowds so we chose to take a shortcut along the beach. There were people everywhere so we thought it would be safe. We took only a few steps and there must have a gringo alert that went off as straight away 3-4 kids surrounded us screaming in our faces in Portuguese and thrusting a big shiny rambo knife in Tom´s face. Scary stuff, but luckily no harm was done and we only lost $15!
The Pelo (old Colonial town area)was our fave for carnival as it was more traditional African and with drummming, samba and a lot of booty shaking. It´s also a stunning area, with multi coloured crumbling buildings and cobbled streets.
We´re now in Itacare, an awesome little surfing town with seriously heavenly beaches and $3 Capoeirinhas!! Now we´re talking....
BA is a city that doesn´t sleep - dinner is at 11pm and then the partying starts...in fact many clubs don´t open till 4am! Unforch due to limited funds and major jetlag we have not participated a great deal in ´la marcha´. We have however been experimenting with some of the food and pounding the streets. The Argentines love their Parillas-BBQ´s and believe in not wasting one little bit of the cow - in fact they all love cow intestines and kidneys. And poor Tom had to taste them when challenged by the locals. The look on his face was a sight as he desperately tried to swallow. I think the worst thing about the intestine was the puss that spirted out! yeeeukkk. Interestingly though is that they completely destroy their steak by cooking it well well well done. The locals were laughing at us eating our medium rare steak announcing that it was still ´moo-ing´...funny funny! Couple of fotos of BA life below...
Hola chicos y chicas We´re now at day 9 of our stay in Buenos Aires and head off to Carnival in Salvador tomorrow. BA is a fabulous and very vibrant city and it´s been great spending so much time getting to know it. We´ve got a little flat in San Telmo, which is the old colonial area of BA, with cobble streets, antique shops, plazas and tango! It´s also next to La Boca which is the poorest neighbourhood in town. La Boca is the port area and is full of slums but also the home of La Boca Juniors futbol team. So of course we couldn´t miss out on a football match while we were here....Despite wanting to go it alone and not give into booking with a ´tour group´ we were advised by local friends that it was not safe to go alone. So we reluctantly took their advice, which in retrospective was a good one, given that we saw a number of people lying on the ground covered in blood at the end of the match! The footy hooligans in this part of the world are like no other. So we arrived at the grounds a massive 2 hrs before the game started ´for safety reasons´ and took our seats, well we thought they were seats, that was until the locals were standing on our feet and kicking into our backs! Yes there was no sitting down at this match, in fact as soon as the players entered the pitch the crowd started swaying and jumping and punching their fists in the air...hmmm and we were in the quiet safe area. Across from us was where the hard core footy hooligan fans sit- they´re called the ´number 12´ as they consider themselves part of the team. There was a 20 piece band in the crowd that hardly took a breather throughout the game, flares were being thrown, and even 10 year old kids were singing and shouting ´blood vessel bursting´ hard. All in all it was the most crazy football match we have ever been to! Check out the short video of the match and a few fotos..... The bus took us to a club house type of place near the stadium for as much free beer as we could drink and some pizza to fire us up for the game. After about 4 security checks we reached the stadium. There were thousands of these guys around.
