Carnaval!

I ended up being stuck in BA for a further week, which wasn´t all bad. Got to see my friends a little longer and do some things I never got round to before.

I flew from BA to Rio, and was supposed to fly to Colombia for a few days but when I went to check in at Rio for my Colombia flight, they had no record of my booking. It was a good thing - as soon as I thought I'd booked my flight to Colombia, it struck me that forking out so much to have only 10 days there was no good idea. So it was a relief. And being stuck in Rio for Carnaval turned out to be fantastic.

To my surprise, I managed to find a hostel online from the airport. To no surprise, they'd crammed the punters in for Carnaval. Lining the walls of my dorm were hazardous looking 4 decker bunks, and air from the overworked and ancient fan in my dorm didn't reach my bed on the bottom level. And if I thought my room in BA was hot..... If you want to lose weight in your sleep, this is the place for you. Sleep wasn't too high on my agenda for the next few days, so no problema. The location was great - Ipanema. I'm not sure whether I saw the legendary Girl From Ipanema, On that section of the beach there were however plenty of Gays From Ipanema.

The word Carnaval is derived from carne (meat) and levare (raise), and owes its origin to the traditional practice (for some) during Lent of giving up meat. Nowadays, from what I gather, it's customary (for some) to give something up for Lent, whether that be a specific meat, red or white meat, meat in general or something totally unrelated to meat. Whatever, when you know you're going without something you're not used to going without, for 40 days, you have a blowout. Rio's is by no means the only festival. Salvador's is said to be better, and it's celebrated all over Brazil and throughout South America.

My friend Laura works for a tour company in London and they had a group in Rio as part of their tour around South America. A big group and a BIG party. Hard as it was to match the fun I had in BA, this was pretty out there. Rio´s a crazy city during Carnaval and a shock to the system after BA. I had a great time here but I don't know if I'd come back. On my first night, Laura and I were robbed as one guy stood over us with a broken bottle and his mates went through our pockets and emptied them. There was no point getting sliced or worse for the sake of a few bucks, and it happens. This is Rio at Carnaval. A lot of Cariocas get out for Carnaval, while there's a temporary influx of criminals and opportunists from outside the city. A hostel down the road from Laura´s hotel was taken over by a gang with guns and grenades and all the guests were made to open their safes and relieved of all their valuables. Apparently there were 3 places in Copacabana that had the same thing. Mental. In that context, for us it wasn´t so bad.

All the neighbourhoods have street parties ("blocos") all day, dancing and drinking and the occasional truck inching down the street blaring out music. The thing Rio´s Carnaval´s best known for is the Sambadrome, which is a huge competition involving teams from all different samba schools who design costumes and elaborate floats, some of them staggering in size. The samba schools spend months putting these together and working on their outfits and moves.

It´s an incredible spectacle and exceeded anything I thought might be the deal here. Our stand was at the end of where the procession finishes, and at the end of the parade all the performers ditch their costumes, so for the next couple of days and nights you see gringos all over the place in these weird costumes.

There is of course more to Rio than Carnaval. I'm getting some much needed sleep, going to Paraty to relax and recover for a few days, and coming back to see the sights before I go back to London.

Stranded!

It had to happen some time, but the timing was pretty bad. I was due to fly to Rio last night and on to Bogota in Colombia this morning. Checked out of my hostel yesterday morning and went to an internet place to write to my brother, and while I was there someone took my bag from under my seat. Inside it were my passports among other things, so I´m stuck in BA until I can get a passport replaced.

Getting a police report was harder than it needed to be - the police stations keep trying to pass you off by claiming it falls just outside their jurisdiction, but eventually I found one that gave me a report thanks to my amiga Valeria, whose Spanish is perfect. The Embassy said I should have a replacement in 4 days which is pretty impressive. So I might get to see some of Colombia after all, and for now if I could pick any city in the world to be stranded in, BA would probably edge it.

Having my valuables stolen was and is an arse, but it's only stuff, and I´m more pissed off about my notes than anything. But I´d expected something like this to happen to me at some point on this trip, and at least I wasn't knifed or anything. And at least my wallet wasn´t in my bag, then I really would have been totally screwed...

Iguazu Falls

So finally I struck out on my own again and took a bus for the first time in 7 weeks. It´s weird to be travelling again and being solo again. It was around 17 hours north on the bus, and again it was comfortable and easy to sleep (though it would have been easier if I´d taken the trouble to get up and go for a piss when I started needing to. Why do we ever think we can win?)



Iguazu Falls sits on the border between Brazil and Argentina, on the river Rio Iguazu. You access the falls from Foz do Iguacu in Brazil or Puerto Iguazu in Argentina. My hostel was on the Argentine side. I pulled into town at lunch time and headed straight to the hostel for a swim. I didn´t get up to much for the rest of the day as it was too hot to be getting up to much.



I woke up early after a mammoth sleep and took the bus to go and see the Brazilian side of the Falls. From that side you get a more panoramic sight whereas on the Argentine side there are more walks close up. On the way to Brazil there was an Irish lad and his English girlfriend on the bus. You get out to get passports stamped into Brazil, but when we emerged from the passport control building the bus had gone. It was no big deal for me as I thought I had to change buses there for the falls. These guys had left their backpacks on the bus as they were pushing onward with their travels and weren´t on a day trip. We jumped in a cab and went in search of the bus, but it was too far ahead. We pegged it to the city of Foz do Iguacu, where the bus was headed, and somehow found it, and their bags. Luck of the Irish...



I don´t think anything could have prepared me for my first view of the Falls. I´d seen pictures, but there´s something about being there that leaves you in awe. You hear them before you see them and there´s an elevated walkway which comes out to one of the heaviest flows of the Falls - the "Devil´s Throat" or "Garganta del Diablo" - where a further platform juts out to give you a better view close up.



There are 275 waterfalls spread out over a 2.7 km stretch of the river, two thirds of them within Argentina, and the Devil´s Throat is the point where Brazil meets Argentina. At the moment Iguazu has the highest average water flow of any waterfall in the world, though at peak flows it loses in a flow-off to Victoria Falls. When something combines this much power and beauty, you have to admire it. I was looking forward to getting to the Argentine side in the next couple of days.



Next day I went on a tour styling itself "a day in the jungle". It involves a walk through some jungle, where the guide tells you a little about some of the trees and shows you some of the traps that the Gurani used to trap animals of various sizes. Next up we did a rock climb, then a zip-line, climbed up a rope ladder, to another zip-line, then an abseil to finish. It was fun and would have been fairly taxing anytime, but we did all this in a tropical storm which made it pretty tasty. I remember looking through the swinging rope ladder at a raging river as I was climbing up, and wondering what the fuck I was doing. After that they took us on a boat trip along the Rio Iguazu to the confluence of that and the Rio Parana. This is where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay meet. It was a shame the weather was so bad; that part of the tour you needed sunshine to make it better.



On the Argentine side, you get up close and personal with the falls. My mate Toby introduced me to a phrase on our roadie in NZ for when you see something there aren't enough words to describe: "reach for your thesaurus..." and it was very much a case of "reach for your thesaurus" here. If there were a paradise on earth, it would look a lot like this.

There were a few big lizards running around, with those exaggerated limb movements like a child who hasn´t yet learned to run properly. There are all sorts of mad butterflies but they don´t sit still long enough to make good models.



And some interesting birds, this one looks really evil... Check the eyes...



It´s a magical place. You wouldn't want to lean over too far though. I swear I read recently about a guy falling in and surviving by sheer fluke. When you get up close you really get a sense of the volume of water moving through the falls. It isn´t just the noise, you can see how much water is rushing through. Have a look at the video clips below to see what I mean.








Last night I got back on that 17 hour bus and came back to BA for a couple of days. It´s my birthday tomorrow so I wanted to spend that with friends rather than on the road. On Wednesday I´m off to Colombia for 3 weeks before I head back to London.

Here´s a few sights in BA I haven´t put in the blog yet....

This is Casa Rosada (literally translated as "Pink House") or the Presidential Palace. From the balcony here presidents have addressed crowds in the past and it´s where Eva Peron did likewise famously.



This street - Avenida 9 de Julio ("9th of July". being Independence Day) - is said to be the widest street in the world. As with any claim to fame like this (usually it's a city claiming it has the biggest shopping mall, as if that's something to be proud of), this might or might not be true.



Don't get me wrong, it's fricking wide. With 16 lanes to cross, the signs even tell you to run, not walk:



In the middle sits one of BA´s most recognisable and iconic landmarks, the Obelisk ("Obelisco"). It was completed in 1936 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the founding of BA. It sits where the Argentine flag was first driven into the soil of this city. When Boca won the football league just before Christmas it was going mental here. Apparently it´s a bit of a spot to be when people´s teams win big matches, be it club or country.



Whenever you buy a paper, you´d likely buy it from one of these newspaper stands.



You never have to walk far, there must be 3 or 4 on every block of the bigger streets. They also tend to boast such glamorous titles as