IGUAZU PHOTOS

OK, so I saw the amazing Iguazu falls from both the Brazilian and Argentinian sides, then hustled down to Buenos Aires where we partied up a storm for the weekend...

Some pics, am getting stuck in Spanish Classes again, once again I understand how little I actually do know as yet...

CARNAVAL!!!!Enough said homeboys, after a couple of days sunning it in Natal, Chris and I got on the bus gus to Olinda and neighbouring city Recife. Olinda offers everything that is good about Carnival in a small town, really intimate and parties on the street everywhere, while Recife is the third biggest jol in Brazil after Rio and Salvador... we loved it!

At one point on Saturday we just looked down the street... thousands upon thousands of people dancing and singing going apeshit. Never seen anything like it!


Highlights include some good local music, fantastic and friendly locals, a good travel crowd at our house (although we were sleeping on top of each other) and just having a ball. I enjoyed the days more even though temps went up to 40 degrees, but just did not wear a shirt the whole time and fitted right in!

Our last day was the best with me and my boy hooking up with French-English siren Claire to do a final casual stroll around town before we catch our evening flight... suffice it to say, as all the best parties go, Olinda was going OFF on this particular Sunday and we had the best time ever! We eventually made it onto the flight to Sao Paulo after midnight, dead as disco but content.

So I made it through Carnaval without being robbed (crowds gone wild though, had some hands in my pockets but was lucky), dancing up a storm and sweating out the beers as soon as we pack em in. Three days was a good haul and I am glad we are hauling ass outta Brazil now, it has been great but Argentina and those big steak and red wine dinners await.

Off to the Amazing Iguaza falls in a couple of hours, just waiting on that 20 hour bus... gotta become goal orientated again, we are heading back to Spanish country!

Amazon Warriors and Bus Riders

So four days cruising the Amazon in our luxury slaveboat went by rather eventfully, but there were some key highlights to report...

1. Check out the awesome sunset!
2. Met some great folks on the boat, the Portugese language barrier makes communication arduous with the locals, did not know how much I missed Spanish until we no longer could use it. Thank God for gringos, there was a fantastic mix of Aussies, Swedes, a coupla Brits and Irish folk and even a South African to have a few beers with, borrow a book off and just to hang out. Good fun!

Regan the Oz Chess champ kicked my ass, but he kicked everyone´s ass so I don´t feel too bad about it. They also had my back when some old dude tried to shift my hammock from it´s sweet spot to make space for his while I was not around, we had a bit of a shouting match when he tried it againbut years of cursing the Stormers and the Springboks backlines paid off and I won, he found another bloody spot.

Oh, and then there was Adam the jolly Irishman, who we got into a ton of trouble with his Aussie gilfriend for being his mandatory bad influence buddies and drinking all their Caparinha mix while the girls were not watching. Hehe, sometimes it is so good to be bad... In picture is Sarah, another Aussie, my English book dealer (I am out, plowing through Veronica decides to die in Spanish but is hard work, she lent me an hilarious yarn called `While I´m dead feed the dog`and it was like being on holiday from my holiday...) Adam and Magnus, the male-modelish Swede.
3. Grapple hooks and locals... Some excitement when the locals like true pirates through grappling hooks at our boat and fastened themselves to it for a while, peddling their wares and then dislodging again. Good fun, our little ship moves at quite a pace so some of them did not succeed and capsized in the process, but we were cheerin them on...

4. Most significantly, I guess, my boy Blue and me were good little nerds and spent many productive hours hitting the Spanish. Chris, thanks to two extra weeks of Spanish School and having a Nicaraguan girlfriend, has way surpassed me and helped me slog through my tenses homework, I think I am not a Jedi Master yet but damn I am getting better. So while the other folks were bored out of their minds we were just to glad tohit the hammock occassionaly to take a break from working the Imperfect tense...

5. Once we hit Belem, we bought our 25 hour bus ticket to Natal on the coast (1500km away) and went to a crummy local youth hostel for the night. I had developed the shits that day and it would haunt me for the next 36 hours, which just so happened to be the actual length of the damn bus trip. We stopped in every crummy bus stop between the two cities, even had a cleaning stop and got to Natal at 8 at night instead of 8 in the morning. On the way we nearly got left behind in Fortaleza (time works in different strokes here, you never know...) Next time we hire a car!

Chris should never have put on that Bus Driver shirt...

Currently we are hanging out in the sun city Natal, soaking up some sun and deciding whether we will stay only to do the adrenaline beach buggy tour or maybe try our hand at kite surfing as well. The Carnival awaits in Olinda in a couple of days, but we ain´t in no rush...

LUXURY AMAZON RIVER CRUISE

Well, maybe it is more like a colonial slave freighter. Packed in like sardines, stacking the hammocks at different levels helps me not rub shoulders with Chris all night - but we have met some cool people, still looking for a place to stay for Carnival.

We are hitting the Spanish hard, there is not much to do all day on the boat, and my Boy Blue, like the schoolteacher he is, is grilling me big time, the Imperfect tense seems to be my kryptonite...

Another couple of nights and we hit Belem, then onward and southward to a week of partying it up with the locals...

AMAZON!

TIME ZONES MY ASS

The further adventures of jungle cat Geldenhuys commenced right after I touched down in Manaus, Brazil. Now first things first, after having a leisurely morning in Porto Velho with 3 o´clock ticket in hand, I got a bus with plenty of time to spare, but was shaken cold to realize that I had miscalculated and Porto Velho is an hour ahead of Rio Branco, which is where I had come in on the bus... nobody told me! Entonces, my flight had already left by the time I got to the airport, lucky for me there was no penalty and a flight two hours later... whew!

MANAUS

No supermodels next to me this time, just the first of many pudgy Brazilians that I was to encounter... I think these folks like their greasy food, they all dress two sizes too small and the love handles are all the rage, I will fit in fine. Sweltry city of Manaus is home a couple hundred thousand Brazilians, and I think they were all out partying on the street the night I arrived. Carnival is on!

There was no time for manhugs once I got to the hostel, old buddy Chris had several options for jungle tours lined up and was just waiting on me so we could choose... before you could say HOLY CROCODILE we had signed up for a four day expedition with a really dangerous looking character called Raymundo, who was to take us somewhere no gringo had gone before...

Chris and I proceeded to have some beers, have some locals try to get us to hook up with their girlfriends and ate a fine local streetmeal, with people dancing all around us, the Brazilians do like to live it up. We were off the next day early on our first grand adventure...

THE JUNGLE

Our trip was scheduled to take us out to who we came to refer to as JUNGLE GUY`s hut on the banks of a little side river. We got a small local barca and were on our way after stocking up on veg, fruit and chicken. Jungle Guy had a great family, likes to play the harmonica, has a kickass swing in front of his jungle hut and knows how to spot tarantulas, dolphins and caymans, plus he can spearfish a paranha like nobody´s business.

We spent a cool day at the jungle hut hanging out, goofing off on the swing and canoeing to the neighbouring inlets. Did not manage to catch any piranhas on our fishing lines, but the nets got the little bastards, we were eating them that night for a change. There is something to be said for using steak for bait...

Chris took a moment off from being all manly to sow up his longpants in prep for the impending mosquito attack once we penetrated deeper into the rainforest, good thing we did, as...

EXPEDITION TIME!
So we realized we were going off the beaten tracks when our guides kept asking directions from the increasingly scattered locals, we ended up going deep into some godforsaken marsh that I suspect only became accessible this year when the waters rose to create a new inlet. Either way, we pulled in and immediately Raymundo and Jungle Guy whipped out the machetes and started cutting down rainforest!
As trees tumbled right and left and Chris and I wished we had machetes too, the rough men of Brazil erected a shelter bar none in under half an hour. Put these guys on SURVIVOR! We resolved that now that we had seen them do it, we would be up for it next time... they strung up our hammocks and cooked up a kickass chicken for us, what a day!

DUDE WHERE`s MY CANOE?

We suspected something was up when jungle guy sunk our canoe. No, we are going back by river, but the locals might spot it and want to steal it while we are gone. Gone? Gone where? I like this spot, check out our camp! No can do, we were off to find another spot even deeper in, after all this is what we paid for.

We ended up setting camp just a half an hour or so away. It felt like further though, our boys were marking every second tree with their machetes on the way through all they while scaring the living daylights out of us with tales of French tourists stranded in the jungle for days because they did not mark their trail, living off ants and fetid river water.

Once we got to our new campsite, the real men from South Africa and Colorado took charge, we seized the machetes (well, actually, we politely asked for them) and started cutting down trees like the big hairy lumberjacks we were. Feeling absolutely no guilt at what we are doing to the environment or the problem of global warming - our testosterone levels impeded natural thought - we hacked and cut our way to sufficient beams to set up - admittedly with some minor help from our laughing guides - the camp, string up our hammocks and lie in them like the semi cro-magnons we were.
It does take away a little bit from our masculinity that our Spanish reading material were Veronica Decides to Die and Embrujadas - a novel based on the chickflick TV series Charmed, but that is neither here nor there.

Entonces, our boys took us for a couple of hours field trip where we hacked our way through some more virgin rainforest, a trail of destruction behind us and machetes flying. Man we got to get us a pair of those! We spotted a big hairy tarantula, otherwise it was just the five zillion mossies, killer bees and ant colonies that were the real dangers. Something about being in the middle of the Amazonian jungle with no clue of how to get back to civilization that gives even the smallest critter an air of menace...
After an uncomfy night´s sleep - toilet breaks not a good idea, the jungle under our hammocks was crawling with ants - we went back to the canoe, after a bit of searching, resurfaced our vehicle and we were off! We had such a fun time and got back ahead of schedule to Jungle Guy´s place on day four, so decided to stick around for another day and some more chilling on the river banks. Raymundo assured us that we would be back way early for our boat ride to Belem on the coast, and true to his word, we had a 5h30 start this morning and were back in Manaus by 8h30.
JUNGLE CRUISE
And now, we go from our semi submerged little local boat with just us and our two guides helping to spoon out the water that kept leaking in to a big fat cargo ship four days to Belem... I am expecting hammocks strung up all over the place and possibly feeling a little bit like slave cargo, but hey, it is all part of the Amazon experience. Am having a blast!

Bye bye Bolivia Hallo Brazil!

Right... so let´s see...

 

COCHABAMBA WRAP UP

My last week in Bolivia was once again awesome, taking Spanish, having good late nights with a bunch of cool girls from England and Aussie. There were hugs and almost tears saying goodbye to travel companion Emma, but now I have an excuse to go visit Bristol. So I studies up the subjunctive tense, translated some tarot cards and had some more good meals in the local market - that ice cream rocks! Cochabamba is a seductively tranquil city with amazing plazas, friendly but highly politically aware locals and awesome food - my jeans feel a little bit tighter...

 

REALLY REALLY RIDICULOUSLY GOOD LOOKING

After a final lovely afternoon in Cochabamba chlling out all by my lonesome, I got on the plane to the northern border town of Cobija. My original plan to fly straight to Manaus in the Brazilian jungle was derailed because of immigration difficulties, so I had to opt for air-ground-air options instead.

 

Imagine my surprise and delight when I sat down next to an absolute living doll, a six foot beauty with flawless features and manicured to the tee. Her hair looked amazing! She was no great conversationalist, and I picked up that she was in some way part of Carnival.

 

It only dawned on me that I was sitting next to the Northern Province´s Carnival Queen when other passengers started to come up for photo opportunities. My Spanish abilities suddenly failed me, and eventually she dozed off and I got stuck back into Sudoko. Still, the way I will tell it to my mates is that we ended up dating.

 

PLANES TAXIS BUSES

My taxi driver from the jungle airport took me to both immigration offices in Cobija and Brasilea, the town is on the border but the offices are at disparate police offices, after a lot of driving I had all my stamps but sill no local currency, no problem, he even got me another taxi to my next destination - Rio Branco, 4 hours away.

 

Taxi driver turned out to just be a guy on his way there who was happy to give us a lift at a price, he drove like a bloody maniac or a Joburg local, and before we knew it we were in Rio Branco in under 3 hours. For a tight sum extra, he took me to the airport as it now looked like I might still be able to catch a flight that night, but once there they would not accept my dollars or credit card, the bank wasn´t giving me nothing and we ended up going back to town. Damn flight was too expensive anyway!

 

I had determined at the airport that a flight from Porto Velho to Manaus, my ultimate destination and springboard to the Amazon, would be halfprice from Porto Velho, only 7 hours away by bus... my friendly taxi driver gave up on trying to get me to stay with him and his wife and then go to the local brothel with him and dropped me off at the bus station, just in time for the 11 o´clock bus to Porto Velho. Holy shit, I need a cigarette, I felt like I was in the Amazing Race but in due course I was on my way again...

 

And lo and behold, upon arrival this morning at the sweltry mudstreaked city of Porto Velho at 8 this morning, there not only was a friendly travel agent at the bus terminal, but she got me the plane ticket for even less and EARLIER than I thought I would have to wait, so I will be in Manaus by 5 tonight. Good stuff!

 

To celebrate, I checked myself into a nice hotel for the morning, had a shower and a shave and watched the Gilmore Girls. Now I feel ready to brave the Amazon!

 

MANAUS HERE WE COME

The central city of Manaus is where the trip down the Amazon takes off from, not only is that another grand adventure to look forward to but I get to enjoy it with my boy Blue, also know as Christobal, the Lake Walker or at Medical School in Colorado as the missing Chris Warner... let the good time roll!

--
Pieter

www.coveyfan.blogspot.com

The length of the journey doesn't matter... it is only the first step that is difficult!