Arriving in Montevideo, Uraguay, was something of a reverse culture shock with a feel of Europe about it, but not quite. In fact it was all a little odd really!
The country has just over 3 million people, and is somewhat smaller than New Zealand. It has a great soccer team who won the Copa America once again only yesterday. The population is predominantly white, they speak Spanish and have a layed back attitude amply demonstarted by the way they sip a ´mate´tea mash through a silver straw from a hollowed out gourd which young and old alike typically carry around the streets with them. They build roads like the Romans - dead straight.
Montevideo is a large cosmopolitan city with a great bus network, little traffic and amazing architecture - there are plenty of amazing eclectic and pre neo-classical monsters mixed up with aweful 1960s concrete and glass - a bit like Gotham City meets Croydon! Occaionally a horse and cart clip-clops down the main street.
While in a cafe having chicken curry (a hunk of roast chicken with 2 pots of spices on the side) Sarah learnt that there was a choir and concert in the amazing recently renovated Teatro Solis that night and the tickets were nearly sold out. Being starved of classical culture for so long, she dashed across to the box office and came back with 2 tickets for a private box! The theatre was grand with 5 high rows of boxes and plush red velvet everywhere. Our little box was simply amazing. We were treated to a great concert from the Montevideo Philharmionic and a 70 strong choir from the USA. Sarah then told me how much the tickets were - 7 dollars each!
We stayed in an ancient hotel with our tiny bedroom having an enormously tall doorway and incredibly high ceiling with a distant fan in the middle. It was just like sleeping in a giants cupoard, as Sarah put it, and felt most odd.
One afternoon, starving, we opted for the famed Parrilla (a super juicy BBQ cooking method) in a huge warehouse full of dozens of smoking grills near the port. We had The Works and slogged through endless meat, then through the black puddings but gave the ´guts´and ´artery´ a miss. They certainly like to use every bit of the beast. The hide is used for handbags, purses, footballs and shoes but is chiefly used to hold the cow together. (as they say!)
Feeling a little exhausted we bused west and rested up in Colonia for a few days - a lovely old Portuguse fortified settlement where we enjoyed the company of a fair share of nutters in the hostel. There was an American guy, Osiris, who was gathering seed and exploring the coast by kayak to find land to establish the New Jerusalem colony, and there was an older couple who´d quit good jobs for 6 months to travel the world. After a few days rest the older couple were ready to board the ferry to cross the River Plate and face big, brash Buenos Aires. Eeek!
Monday 25 July 2011
Monday 18 July 2011
Ronnie Biggs
Full of trepidation we dropped into Paraguay´s capital city, Asuncion, and wish we´d arranged to stay longer! Although it cost us a staggering 290,000 Guranis (eek) for the night at a mid range hotel (okay, it´s only about $40NZ) the place seemed very civilised and refreshing after the last 2 months in the poverty and thin air of the altiplano. The place had many obvious German influences - surprise-surprise. It supposedly also has alot of Mennonites. Some sort of cave formation we think!
Next day, arriving in Rio de Janeiro airport we were gutted to be met by thick cloud and drizzle...the first rain we´d seen since leaving NZ ....and it continued for the next 3 days or so. We waited patiently, riding the ricketty trams in Santa Teressa through crumbling mansions and overgrown gardens, and had a quick look at Ronnies old place. Rather nice, and more than ample reward for a darring train robber.
Eventually the hot sun burnt through the cloud and we could see what we´d come for. Rio de Janeiro is a fantastic city with amazing scenery and relaxed locals - but what a terrible language to get your head around - Portuguese is very hard to learn with strange vowels and different enough from Spanish to leave us totally adrift. Attempts to arrange a guided rock climb for the day, or to find out about hang gliding came to nought....we struggled to even buy a bun in a bakery the ´correct way´.
All the sites, Christ the Redeeemer, the Sugar Loaf and the beaches are amazing and exceeded expectations - and the width of those thong bikinis has to be seen to be believed! We also dined in the cafe where Jobim wrote ´The Girl from Ipanma´ and swam and surfed in the cool waters. (The ´girl´still lives in Rio and has 4 children!)
An unexpected highlight was in escaping the glitz & glamour and visiting a ´Favela´or slum. Stuated almost adjacent to Copacabana Beach it houses 300,000 and is entirely lawless - a total police no-go area. The guide and 4 of us walked past guys touting machine guns and rifles and spent 4 hours amongst wonderfully friendly people who are ruled only by drug-lords and the gun. (One ´big´lady woudln´t stop kissing me and I daren´t fight her off for fear of upsetting someone.) All quite a deep experience to say the least! 2 days later we read the world headline that 60,000 unsolved murders remain in Rio over the last 10 years. What a place - and what problems under the surface for a country that now has the 8th largest economy in the world!
After a week in Rio we bused east along the stunning coast where we swam and sailed and then spent the night in Sao Paulo. This city is a monster - 19 million people and, to be frank, I would rather have put my head in a lions mouth than lug our packs through hot streets and the underground to our hostel near the centre....but it had to be done to make a bus connection. Sarah was a such a star slogging through the busy hot streets! It ended up being a remarkably slick, clean and sophisticated place that was of course to be expected of the largest financial centre in the S hemishere. But it was great to finally fight our way out onto the 15hr bus trip to Foz de Iguazu on the Argentinian border.
At Iguazu we have just spent 3 days looking around what are said to be the most spectacular waterfalls on earth...and the biggest hydro dam down river, so are feeling a bit loose-jawed after all the bombardment of superlatives and ready to move on. It´ll be good to leave Brazil with our aweful language problems and high prices, but we have enjoyed it hugely...and met the most pleasant, polite and honest people so far. Not quite what we expected....and we´d love to explore it more.
Uruguay tomorrow - on the early flight to Montevideo....we are running short on time and having to pick up the pace to get to the other places on our list!
Next day, arriving in Rio de Janeiro airport we were gutted to be met by thick cloud and drizzle...the first rain we´d seen since leaving NZ ....and it continued for the next 3 days or so. We waited patiently, riding the ricketty trams in Santa Teressa through crumbling mansions and overgrown gardens, and had a quick look at Ronnies old place. Rather nice, and more than ample reward for a darring train robber.
Eventually the hot sun burnt through the cloud and we could see what we´d come for. Rio de Janeiro is a fantastic city with amazing scenery and relaxed locals - but what a terrible language to get your head around - Portuguese is very hard to learn with strange vowels and different enough from Spanish to leave us totally adrift. Attempts to arrange a guided rock climb for the day, or to find out about hang gliding came to nought....we struggled to even buy a bun in a bakery the ´correct way´.
All the sites, Christ the Redeeemer, the Sugar Loaf and the beaches are amazing and exceeded expectations - and the width of those thong bikinis has to be seen to be believed! We also dined in the cafe where Jobim wrote ´The Girl from Ipanma´ and swam and surfed in the cool waters. (The ´girl´still lives in Rio and has 4 children!)
An unexpected highlight was in escaping the glitz & glamour and visiting a ´Favela´or slum. Stuated almost adjacent to Copacabana Beach it houses 300,000 and is entirely lawless - a total police no-go area. The guide and 4 of us walked past guys touting machine guns and rifles and spent 4 hours amongst wonderfully friendly people who are ruled only by drug-lords and the gun. (One ´big´lady woudln´t stop kissing me and I daren´t fight her off for fear of upsetting someone.) All quite a deep experience to say the least! 2 days later we read the world headline that 60,000 unsolved murders remain in Rio over the last 10 years. What a place - and what problems under the surface for a country that now has the 8th largest economy in the world!
After a week in Rio we bused east along the stunning coast where we swam and sailed and then spent the night in Sao Paulo. This city is a monster - 19 million people and, to be frank, I would rather have put my head in a lions mouth than lug our packs through hot streets and the underground to our hostel near the centre....but it had to be done to make a bus connection. Sarah was a such a star slogging through the busy hot streets! It ended up being a remarkably slick, clean and sophisticated place that was of course to be expected of the largest financial centre in the S hemishere. But it was great to finally fight our way out onto the 15hr bus trip to Foz de Iguazu on the Argentinian border.
At Iguazu we have just spent 3 days looking around what are said to be the most spectacular waterfalls on earth...and the biggest hydro dam down river, so are feeling a bit loose-jawed after all the bombardment of superlatives and ready to move on. It´ll be good to leave Brazil with our aweful language problems and high prices, but we have enjoyed it hugely...and met the most pleasant, polite and honest people so far. Not quite what we expected....and we´d love to explore it more.
Uruguay tomorrow - on the early flight to Montevideo....we are running short on time and having to pick up the pace to get to the other places on our list!
Friday 1 July 2011
So what´s it really like?
Well after nearly 2 months ¨on holiday¨ we are well into uncharted waters in so many respects. Certainly it is not all easy going with many aspects being quite demanding.....arriving at a seedy bus station at 5am, or accidentally heading down a dark street to get cash from an ATM instantly switch the survival instinct onto full alert! It is a real rollercoaster I suppose, with great highlights and amazing experiences mixed up with occasional hardship and near exhaustion! We try to stay at least 2 nights in any one place so as to pace ourselves, but it doesnt always work out....last week we stayed at 6 different places in a row. Am so glad we didn´t leave all this for another 10 years!
Keeping fit and getting enough exercise is a challenge - going for a jog around the city streets means gulping in hideous diesel fumes and negotiating crowded pavements, while when in the rural areas I have found that as soon as I break into a trot all the local dogs are are onto me like a shot. Sarah and I will generally find a local hill or some place to walk around but there hasn´t been much to go at recently. In fact the most exercise I have had in the last couple of weeks has probabaly been tearing pieces from the un-perforated toilet paper once a day! ( and once a day is a good sign in these parts!)
We seem to have done pretty well with the stuff we have brought in each of our single backpacks with only a couple of small extras that we could have done with, but particularly regret not having any spare space to buy some of the loveley local crafts and sweaters etc which are so nice and sooo cheap. We are, needless to say, getting totally fed up with wearing the same old clothes week in week out, but minimalism is good... isn´t it??
We are certainly missing all our friends and idyllic life back in Nelson and think about it often ( you really appreciate how wonderful it is when you haven´t got it ) but we still have so much to look forward to on our mad schedule!
We are currently in Sucre in southern Bolivia which is a beautiful old world heritage city and our favourite so far.Last week we had 5 full days on a bus and 4X4 jeep as we explored the worlds largest salt flats in the SW of Bolivia aswell as skirting the Chilean border at 5200m (17,000 feet , 1033 perches or 614,173 barleycorns) amid towering volcanoes, snow and red lakes with rare flamingos feeding on the micro-organisms....all quite overwheling but bloody cold at night in some very basic accomodation, with one place made entirely from salt....even the tables and chairs. We also stopped off at the worlds highest town, Potosi (815 perches - you work it out!) where some 8 million people are said to have perished in the local silver mine over the past 200 years.
Needless to say we were well and truely knackered after all that so have been blobbing out here for several days in a lovely hostal and over-eating at the rather splendid restaurants...the best being run by a local couple who discovered the fine olive oils in Blenheim (NZ) which influences their great food.
Tommorrow we are on the move again and will work our way into Paraguay and should arrive in Rio on Monday. Yahoo!
Keeping fit and getting enough exercise is a challenge - going for a jog around the city streets means gulping in hideous diesel fumes and negotiating crowded pavements, while when in the rural areas I have found that as soon as I break into a trot all the local dogs are are onto me like a shot. Sarah and I will generally find a local hill or some place to walk around but there hasn´t been much to go at recently. In fact the most exercise I have had in the last couple of weeks has probabaly been tearing pieces from the un-perforated toilet paper once a day! ( and once a day is a good sign in these parts!)
We seem to have done pretty well with the stuff we have brought in each of our single backpacks with only a couple of small extras that we could have done with, but particularly regret not having any spare space to buy some of the loveley local crafts and sweaters etc which are so nice and sooo cheap. We are, needless to say, getting totally fed up with wearing the same old clothes week in week out, but minimalism is good... isn´t it??
We are certainly missing all our friends and idyllic life back in Nelson and think about it often ( you really appreciate how wonderful it is when you haven´t got it ) but we still have so much to look forward to on our mad schedule!
We are currently in Sucre in southern Bolivia which is a beautiful old world heritage city and our favourite so far.Last week we had 5 full days on a bus and 4X4 jeep as we explored the worlds largest salt flats in the SW of Bolivia aswell as skirting the Chilean border at 5200m (17,000 feet , 1033 perches or 614,173 barleycorns) amid towering volcanoes, snow and red lakes with rare flamingos feeding on the micro-organisms....all quite overwheling but bloody cold at night in some very basic accomodation, with one place made entirely from salt....even the tables and chairs. We also stopped off at the worlds highest town, Potosi (815 perches - you work it out!) where some 8 million people are said to have perished in the local silver mine over the past 200 years.
Needless to say we were well and truely knackered after all that so have been blobbing out here for several days in a lovely hostal and over-eating at the rather splendid restaurants...the best being run by a local couple who discovered the fine olive oils in Blenheim (NZ) which influences their great food.
Tommorrow we are on the move again and will work our way into Paraguay and should arrive in Rio on Monday. Yahoo!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)