Travel

After Iguazu, we jumped on a 17 hour bus ride southwards to Buenos Aires, a city that we longed to see, and travelled south into Argentina proper. Argentina is the second largest country in South America (behind Brazil) and is the eighth largest country in the world by land-mass, stretching all the way down to the southern tip of the continent at Cape Horn. It lies between the Andes mountain range along its western border and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. It‟s bordered by Paraguay and Bolivia to the north, by Brazil and Uruguay to the northeast, and by Chile to the west. It has around 40m people and around 86% of which are of European heritage (mostly Spanish and Italian), 8% of Mestizo stock, 4% of Arab or East Asian and nearly 2% are Amerindians.

We planned to be in Buenos Aires for around ten days before jetting off to Australia. The city is well known for its epithet “The Paris of South America” It certainly has that Parisian feel, with its huge, wide avenues (some at least ten lanes wide one way), its plethora of statues, museums, cafes and for its undoubtedly European style of architecture. One of the first things you notice in Buenos Aires is the frenetic pace of life; it‟s full of traffic, smog, noise and people who just don‟t seem to work! The various districts or barrios are clearly demarcated and each has their own distinct feel: Palermo is bohemian with cafes, art galleries, book shops and wide open spaces; San Telmo is historic and largely unchanged from its origins as the first settlement area of Buenos Aires; Puerto Madero is the business district of the city on the waterfront in a regenerated dockslands area; La Boca is the largely working class neighbourhood with the world famous stadium, La Bombanera, home of Boca Juniors; and San Nicolas is the commercial, administrative and cultural hub of Buenos Aires. All these barrios combine to make Buenos Aires a hugely lively and invigorating place to be. Add to this mix the ever-present and generation-crossing magic of the tango and the beautiful women that Buenos Aires is famed for and you have a great city to see with masses to do.

One of the very first things I did, in the very centre of Buenos Aires off the Plaza Mayo, was to try that Argentine staple: mate (pronounced ma-teh). This is a type of tea, a blend of yerba (a small tree or shrub related to the holly family) leaves packed into a gourd (a guampa), a small, spherical vessel that fits satisfyingly in the hand. This mix is covered with hot water and the resulting liquid brew is sucked through a thin metal straw (a bombilla) with a filter in it, acting as both a straw and a sieve. It‟s very bitter and has mild caffeine and tobacco elements; not surprisingly, it‟s very meditative and relaxing, and the experience is not unlike smoking cigars. The Argentines are obsessed with the stuff! Everywhere you look, people have their flask of hot water and mate. The practice is considered conducive to strong social bonds with friends and family gathering for a drink of mate and the experience has strong accompanying ritual elements; people will share the same guampa and bombilla. One person is designated the server, who is responsible for packing the guampa, and will take the first drink, considered an act of kindness because you‟re testing the quality of the overall brew before anyone else. Passing the drink to another without tasting it first is considered to be very poor form.

Because we had so much more time in Buenos Aires than we’d had in other places, we could take our exploration a little bit more slowly than our usual quick-fire sightseeing. For instance, we spent a whole day just strolling through the magnificently colonial barrio of Recoleta, with its impossibly wide, Parisian-styled boulevards, boutiques and elegantly imposing white houses. It‟s here in Recoleta that Buenos Aires’ famous cemetery is located, housing the late great and the good of Argentina. This is an extraordinary place; a mini-town of huge mausoleums, in a grid system giving the effect of real streets and avenues. The likes of Evita, Sarmientes and Borges all rest here in the town of the dead.

On a Sunday, we walked to the San Telmo district to see the popular weekly market that runs for a kilometre along Defensa. The place was packed and it was an almost perfect afternoon: hot, sunny, ice-cold beer, the novelty of a new town, pretty, sexy girls, free tango shows and an air of merriment and delight.

It was here that I bought a panama hat, the second I‟d ever owned. I know that panama hats originate from Ecuador but something of the elegance of Buenos Aires had rubbed off on me. Everyone dresses well here; shirts and flannels for the men; and dresses for the women. There’s a refinement to the people of Buenos Aires, the portenos (“People of the Port”) that’s not overdone, effete or starchy; it’s relaxed and worldly. I was reminded of a Hardy Amies quote: “A man should look as if he has bought his clothes with intelligence, put them on with care, and then forgotten all about them” – a maxim that portenos seem to follow unconsciously. From the trekking gear of Peru and Bolivia to the Bermuda shorts and flip-flops of Brazil, here in Buenos Aires, we’d started to wear proper shirts, trousers, and, on one occasion, in an absurdly fancy bar, a blazer I’d brought with me that up until now was stuffed in the bottom of my backpack. That evening, after another excellent parilla, we saw an open air milonga, an impromptu open-air tango dance floor in a gorgeous public square surrounded by trees and revellers. It’s a place where anyone can dance, and the dance floor is demarcated by crowds of spectators. Tango is a mesmerising dance form. Unlike the Chamame we saw in Puerto Iguazu, the man and the woman maintain almost full body contact throughout the dance. It’s hypnotically beautiful, searingly elegant and is just the expression of sex (with clothes on!).

We also visited the La Boca barrio, known as the slightly rougher end of town and, of course, famous for La Bombanera, home of Boca Juniors, who along with River Plate, is the most famous team in Argentina, and of course legendary for being the first team of the incomparable Diego Maradona. In a clearly poor area, the team’s legend and global fame clearly provided a palpable sense of pride.

Nearby are the colourful streets of Carminito around the harbour-front, a garishly coloured mish-mash of houses, shops and restaurants. We found a fantastic hole-in-the-wall restaurant a few blocks away with superb empanadas and salsa, a couple of bottles of lip-pursingly rough red wine and, of course, the ubiquitous Quilmes, all combining to help make this one of my favourite barrios in Buenos Aires.

As expected, the food in Buenos Aires is excellent. One evening, I went to dinner on my own (one of the rhythms of travelling with other people is that you’re still able to find important alone time, whether that’s exploring on your own, finding quiet time to write in your journal, emailing friends and family etc) in an outdoor restaurant called Tabolango in a tree-lined lane off Peru street with a grill of offal (kidneys and intestines), steak and a bottle of malbec, all finished off with a stunning dessert I’d never had before, port salud (a sweet, creamy cheese) and a small block of sweet morchilla (a quince-type jelly), which worked brilliantly together.

Here in Buenos Aires, we also saw the phenomenon of “it’s a small world” in action: we bumped into Rhodine, a friend of ours that we met on the Inca Trail, randomly, in a bar in San Nicolas. We’ve given up trying to work out the odds! She was on a mammoth tour group going around South America that would last 56 days! We all ended up going to a club called the Crobar, a huge space where it seems that ploddy, progressive house music is very much alive and popular in Argentina.

One chance meeting is random enough, but a few days later Grant was out to dinner when, who should be at the next table, but Michel and Leonie from the Salar de Uyuni tour! We had a superb, languid meal with them in San Telmo; fat, juicy steaks with lashings of delicious red wine. What are the odds, on a continent this size, to bump into people you know, when the margins are metres and milliseconds? Absolutely mindboggling odds! These are the kind of odds that don‟t sit too well with our usual conceptions of what constitutes luck. We don’t balk when an 80/1 shot horse rides to victory; “It’s just lucky!” we rationalise. But what about a 1,000,000/1 shot horse winning? I think we‟d call it something different: Fate. Destiny. Concepts with their own complications.

Buenos Aires is a fantastic city; it’s romantic, elegant and probably the first place I’ve been in South America that I could see myself settling down for an extended period of time (apart from possibly La Paz). Even so, I wanted to see a bit more of Argentina before leaving for Australia.

   

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 superb open-air restaurant called El Patio, I enjoyed my first taste of that Argentine classic, the parrilla, essentially an enormous barbecue for an asado, a South American technique for cooking cuts of meat, usually consisting of beef alongside various other meats, which are cooked on a grill (parrilla) or open fire. Asado is the traditional dish of Argentina, as well as Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile and southern Brazil, and is a choice of meats such as chorizos (salamis), morcillas (black pudding), chinchulines (chitterlings or intestines; chewy, smoky with a faint taste of liver), mollejas (sweetbreads) and other offal. The meat isn’t marinated; it’s just seasoned with salt. This is classic slow cooking. It’s served with chimichurri, a sauce of chopped parsley, dried oregano, garlic, salt, pepper, onion, and paprika with olive oil. I’m happy to report that Argentine beef is excellent! Here, it’s like in Santa Cruz de la Sierra where people enjoy nose to tail eating. So it’s tripe, snouts, kidneys, intestines and hearts, all the off cuts – really delicious stuff! The local beer is called Quilmes and it’s easily the best lager I’ve had in South America: it‟s clean, smooth and actually tastes of lager! This region is called El Litoral and is famous for the musical genre chamame. This is a catchy and bouncy music and it’s great to watch the locals dance to it. We saw this in the same restaurant where we were enjoying the asado, where people just seem to eat steak, drink good, young wine and get up and dance. Chamame dancing is almost the opposite of the tango because the man and woman never touch during the dance; they simply mirror each other’s movements as close to each other as can be without contact. People here in El Litoral just randomly get up and dance in front of a packed restaurant without a moment‟s thought for embarrassment and showing none of the reserve of Northern Europeans; things should be more like this. I’ve loved the music I’ve heard on this trip so far, from Bolivian pan-pipes to reggaeton and I looked forward to the tango in Buenos Aires.

The Iguazu Falls (Cataratas) are waterfalls of the Iguazu River on the borders of Brazil and the Argentine province of Misiones. Legend has it that a god planned to marry a beautiful indigenous woman named Naipí. Instead, she fled with her mortal lover Tarobá in a canoe. Enraged, the scorned god sliced the river creating the waterfalls and condemning the lovers to an eternal fall. We visited from the Argentine side, part of a national park, the Parque Nacional Iguazu. We headed first to the falls known as the Garganta del Diablo (brilliantly named the Devil’s Throat), an absolutely huge waterfall; it’s semi-circular, a massive 82m tall, and a mindboggling 150m wide. It‟s impossible not to break out into grins just looking at it, wiping the spray from your face. The ferocity is unimaginable; truly awesome! The rest of the Falls are equally spectacular: the whole waterfall system consists of 275 individual falls along nearly 3km of the Iguazu River and these can be seen very close up because of an intricate network of bridges and platforms that crisscross the falls. The views are simply too spectacular to fully take in, the noise of the falls are deafening, and you always have the awareness of the butt-clenchingly, ferocious power of these natural wonders.

     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 delicious caipirinhas to the surprising blandness of its food. (Caipirinhas are Brazil’s national cocktail, made with cachaça, sugar and lime. Cachaça is similar to rum and is the distillation of the fermentation product of sugarcane juice. It‟s a bit like a mojito and is prepared by putting lime and sugar into a glass and mashing the ingredients. Add crushed ice and the cachaça.)

However, Rio is also a place of exciting fusion; from the wide ethnic variety of the people (meaning that it‟s difficult to describe a typically Brazilian face) to the music (samba, reggae, bossa nova) to the ever-present feeling that absolutely anything goes. Rio is a place whose reputation is airmailed before it: a mercurial city of violence, of beaches, of favelas, of classic views, of the beautiful people and the desperately poor. It‟s a melting pot of influences as vibrantly displayed in its people, its music and its food. It‟s a place of beauty and a place of menace: it‟s utterly unpredictable, and perhaps because of this, it‟s impossible to feel 100% at ease.

One of the first things we did in Rio was to head straight for the beach. The main beaches in Rio, Copacabana and Ipanema, stretch for around 12km and are divided into sections (postos). We followed the guide book and headed for Posto 9 on Ipanema, supposedly the spot for the beautiful people; well of course! Normally, I‟m not really one for the beach (I get bored) but, in Rio at least, it‟s a good time. The views were spellbinding; just another occasion where we were sitting in a place that we had previously only known from pictures, and yet here we were – just sitting here; to our right were forest clad mountains (Dos Hermanos – the Two Brothers), to our left was Copacabana Beach, in front was the tropical Atlantic Ocean with small forested islands not far from the coast and above was a merciless sun, who had become our god. We later found out that it hit 36 degrees that day, and the six hours I foolishly spent without sun protection meant that I burned for the first time in my life (I didn’t think that I could burn! I didn’t stop peeling for weeks! It was disgusting! I’d be in the shower and suddenly I‟d peel a huge single sheet of skin from my chest; horrific). On Rio‟s beaches, you just pick a refreshment stall that you like the look of and, with a nod, a guy will pull up two lounge chairs and a large parasol. He takes your drinks order and you start a tab. So for hours you just sit in a chair drinking from icy coconuts, gulping cold lager (Skol – which was discontinued in the UK for being rubbish; but somehow, amazingly, it‟s the most popular lager here!), going for a cooling swim and, mostly, looking at everyone around you! The internationally famed Brazilian women seem to have a certain look; I think over here, they look for a certain amount of booty, and big „Shake it! Shake it!‟ asses are highly prized. In the spirit of Rio beaches, I had my eye on buying a pair of sungas; these are the miniscule trunks that the men wear here which, to be honest, are nothing short of obscene. When in Rio and all that…! They are, however, eye-wateringly tiny! I shrank from the challenge!

New Year‟s Eve in Rio is a huge deal – apparently 2 million people were expected to descend onto Copacabana that night. We were expecting great things; after all, Rio is supposed to be one of the greatest New Year‟s celebrations in the world. This was one of the things we were most looking forward to; a big, spectacular fiesta. Families and friends set up their camps on the beach with chairs, tents, makeshift bars and barbeques; everyone eats and drinks until midnight waiting for the huge firework display. It was raining gently that evening which did little to dampen revellers‟ spirits. Music was pumping out of huge speakers. We‟d move from arena to arena, polishing off beers and caiprinhas. Unfortunately, in the early hours, after a few too many rums and beers, I had a little nap on the beach whilst waiting for the sun to come up. I woke up to find that an audacious and enterprising urchin had actually cut through my jeans and stolen my camera – bastards! I mean, who the fuck brings scissors to a New Year‟s Eve party?! Right I‟ve had a shower, clean shirt on, bit of wax in the hair, phone, wallet, keys, what else do I need? Oh yes! Can‟t leave the house with a pair of scissors to go on the rob! Silly me! On reflection, it was my fault really for being daft enough to fall asleep on a beach in Rio at night, but it was the sort of thing that tarnishes memories somewhat. I‟d been warned by the manager of the hostel where we were staying not to bring anything valuable with me. All the advice is to be on your guard in Rio, but you never think anything will happen to you. To be fair though, if the only bad thing to happen to me in Brazil was losing my camera, with most of the pictures backed up, it wouldn‟t be that terrible; it could have been a lot worse. I bought a new camera the next day.

The rest of our stay in Rio was spent sightseeing. We went to the Maracana, once the biggest stadium in the world. The final of the 1950 World Cup was attended by a record 199,854 people. Today, its capacity is a much reduced 88,992 and, despite capacity being more than halved since those heady days, it‟s still the largest stadium on the continent. We took the tour of the stadium but it was slightly disappointing; it‟s not in good condition and there were no games on; unfortunately, the season was yet to start. Outside the stadium lay the impressions of famous Brazilian players‟ feet cast in bronze. I stood in my namesake‟s footprints, the Beast himself, Edmundo, and also those of perhaps the greatest footballer of all time, Edson Arantes do Nascimento, otherwise known as the legendary Pele.

I had to visit the Pao de Acucar, the incomparable and iconic Sugar Loaf Mountain, only a short bus ride from Botofogo in the district of Urca. The summit is only accessible by a cable car which stops halfway before continuing to the peak. Unfortunately, that day it rained, something I‟ve been told only happens a few times up in summer! At 396m, the view from Sugarloaf over the city and sea is mind-blowing! When I was up there, there was a huge thunderstorm adding to the spectacular views. You can see Christ the Redeemer on Corcovado Mountain in the far distance; to your left you can see Copacabana and below, the bay of Urca. It was dark and, from here, Rio looked like one giant, lit-up, forested, urban island, and, from this height at least, a glimpse of paradise.

We also set about exploring the local nightlife. Rio has a strong culture of botecas, a kind of bar/pub/drinking-hole-in-the-wall serving tiny snacks such as deep-fried pastries and the coldest draft beers, called chopps (pronounced show-pe). My favourite boteca was in the district of Urca, a peaceful counterpoint to the frenetic bustle of downtown, where this ultra-traditional boteca, with its polished tiled interior and bow-tied waiting staff, opened out with views of Urca bay. It‟s an example of something that‟s been playing on my mind as I‟ve travelled: it‟s an example of things just being done right. I don‟t like bashing things in England but when you pay 4GBP for an okay pint in London or 4GBP for a scotch egg (I kid you not!) in a pub with average service, it tends to leave a bad taste in your mouth. By contrast, in this boteca, there was ice-cold beer, great décor, it was well-priced (leaving aside questions of purchasing power parity), had a good atmosphere, a great staff, fantastic views across the bay and seemed to serve a broad cross-section of society as well. This boteca just did things right. It‟s nothing ground-breaking or pioneering; it‟s just something that has been done right, clearly something that the proprietors and staff take pride in and take pride from. It‟s not only botecas; I’ve been thinking along similar lines along my travels whenever I’ve come across anything that‟s done well, properly or right, such as particularly good coffee or excellent service or people who take care of their appearance or bars that don’t serve spirits by the measure or decently sized portions or fresh food cooked simply or clean hostels and so on. It‟s a feeling and a recurring thought that‟s been reinforced the further on my trip I go.

The best night out I had in Rio was in the districts of Santa Theresa and Lapa with samba, hip-hop, salsa and live bands dominating the playlists. Wherever you turn in Rio, there‟s always a party, great views and a cold beer!

We took a tram up to Santa Theresa, which takes you up over the Arcos de Lapa, a huge viaduct. We hit a bar with awesome live bossa nova and excellent feijoada and rice. It was rampantly busy with tables seating up to around ten with people crowding the bar to try and get seated. We sat out at the back on a balcony looking over a thickly forested hill and crumbling houses at its foot where children played and women did their washing. We then found a great open-air bar outside an enormous, dilapidated but magnificent house perched on a hill with the friendliest waiter in the world, serving splendid beer, delicious fried chicken wings and ferociously strong caiprinhas. From quiet beginnings, it quickly became more crowded and, as a large live band with huge bongos started crashing out the music, became a hedonistic, sweaty mass of revellers. After a few hours, we headed down to Lapa where we eventually got separated in a pool hall and the rest of the night was a lost memory. The next morning, we discovered that Grant had lost his sunglasses, his camera and his flip-flops!

From Rio, our next stop was Argentina, at the Iguazu Falls. We bought a bus ticket to our next stop at the rodavario; I was keen to get out of Brazil. Five days in Rio is quite enough as a tourist and I had an itch to get out of the city. It’s strange; I really thought I was a city boy at heart and yet I had a burning need to see the Falls. I missed Bolivia and Peru, their mountains and their wildernesses, their deserts and their snows. I was unexpectedly and strangely pleased to be leaving Brazil. I suppose when travelling, there’s a certain pressure to love and be excited by every country you visit, but I was left cold by Brazil, which I suppose is slightly odd given its reputation for all things „passion‟. However, there’s a lot more for me to see within Brazil, not least the eastern coast and, of course, the Amazon, the greatest river in the world. That‟s another trip for sure: down the Amazon from its source at Iquitos in Peru to its end at Belem on the Brazilian coast.

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 people mostly seemed to wear tiny shorts and flip-flops, but then again, that could be because I was in Rio over the New Year period).

Sao Paolo lacks a certain magic. We started a day of sightseeing on the Avenida de Paulista, a long street of uninspiring high-rise buildings and advertising boards. Sao Paolo is huge and sprawling, with nothing, bar the massive Gothic Catedral Metropolitana in the city centre at Se, of any beauty or elegance. It was in the square at Se that the chasm between the rich and poor in Brazil is at its most stark. This square is Sao Paolo‟s equivalent of London’s Trafalgar Square but at Se there are at least 200 people living permanently on the square; the people who live there don’t seem to disperse during the day and many have built cardboard shacks to live in. We made our way to Vila Madelena, supposedly the hip part of town to go drinking. Unfortunately, most of the bars we found were unjustifiably pretentious, particularly given how lame they were. We did, however, find a decent bar, one with thousands of bottles suspended from the ceiling, with excellent cold chopps (a half pint of lager) and pastels (tiny little parcels of meat and vegetables).

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 it was brought over by African slaves who made the best of the cheap cuts of meat. Others say that it’s similar to European dishes such as cassoulet which also uses fatty cuts of meat such as pork belly cooked with beans. I can see the similarity; every culture seems to have a version of the slow-cooked pot dish. Feijoada uses black turtle beans, salted pork cheap cuts, at least two types of smoked sausage, all cooked over a slow fire in a thick clay pot. The final dish has an unctuous finish, with beans and meat in a thick, dark broth; it’s delicious.