For, believe me, the secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities under Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors, as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you lovers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live like shy deer, hidden in the woods! At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due: it will want to rule and own, and you with it! Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science FROM RIO DE JANEIRO, we took an 18 hour bus journey south-south-west to the Iguazu Falls, a mighty set of waterfalls on the border between Brazil and Argentina. To access the Falls, we stayed in the nearby town of Puerto Iguazu. Here, in a …[Read More]
Rio de Janeiro
After a couple of days in Sao Paolo, we headed eastwards to Rio de Janeiro or as the locals nicknamed it with incredible self-confidence, A Cidade Maravilhosa, or “The Marvellous City”! We arrived at a hostel in Botofogo that was determined to make obscene profits out of New Year’s revellers; trebling its normal rates. Botofogo is in the centre of Rio, and from here, one can see the famous Pao de Acucar (Sugarloaf Mountain) and, high above the city, the immense mountain-top statue of Christo Redentor or Christ the Redeemer; it‟s also only a short bus ride to the iconic beaches of Ipanema and Copacabana. Rio is an unbelievable place that defies comprehension. It is a place of sharp contrasts; such as the gaping chasm between rich and poor; from the extreme beauty of the landscapes to the ugliness of the favelas (the shanty towns around Rio); from the absolutely …[Read More]
Sao Paolo
From Campo Grande, we jumped on an 18 hour bus ride overnight eastwards to Sao Paolo, the first major city since our arrival in Lima. It was like being back in the developed world; well, the Mediterranean part at least. Sao Paolo is one of the world’s biggest cities and, with more than 11m people, has the most inhabitants of any city in the Southern Hemisphere. Sao Paulo residents (called Paulistas) often seem to get a bad press from the people of their fierce rival city, Rio de Janeiro (who are called Cariocas) for being dull and obsessed with work. Paulistas instead see themselves as the hardworking architects of Brazil economic ascendancy and view their rivals as self-obsessed, lazy slackers. As with most things, the truth is somewhere in between (I certainly saw more people dressed in suits striding around purposefully in Sao Paolo than I did in Rio, where …[Read More]
Campo Grande
Campo Grande has its seductive charms; low-rise buildings and a lazy, relaxed atmosphere. We immediately got to work practicing our non-existent, phrasebook-butchered Brazilian Portuguese on an unsuspecting and long-suffering bar staff. Having just acquired embarrassingly rudimentary Spanish, Portuguese was like gibberish. Brazilian Portuguese, despite having a slight overlap with Spanish, has an incomprehensible pronunciation to its words (frequently finishing with an “ow” sound). We found a great bar that played recently released DVDs such as Never Back Down (think Rocky meets The Karate Kid) and where the friendly bargirls treated us to bitter, cold drinks which I would later discover was like the Argentine drink, mate (pronounced “mat-eh”). It was here in Campo Grande that I tried the Brazilian national dish for the first time; feijoada, stewed Brazilian black beans eaten with rice and greens; hearty and delicious. There’s plenty of debate as to the origins of feijoada; some say …[Read More]
Brazil – Corumba
Don’t ask (it’s forbidden to know) what end The gods will grant to me or you, Leuconoe. Don’t play with Babylonian Fortune-telling either. It is better to endure whatever will be. Whether Jupiter has allotted to you many more winters or this final one Which even now wears out the Tyrrhenian Sea on the rocks placed opposite; Be wise, drink your wine, and scale back your long hopes To a short period. While we speak, envious time will have already fled Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next. Horace, Odes EL TREN DE LA MUERTE pulled in at a border post not far from the town of Quijarro on the Bolivian border and we crossed by foot into Brazil at the city of Corumba. Any minimal Spanish we’d picked up in Peru and Bolivia was going to be useless for the next couple of weeks; …[Read More]