El gran viaje 2007

Well, we´re not in Bolivia just yet. Brazilian immigration is closed on Sunday, so we´re stuck in Corumba until tomorrow. Which is a good thing because Sergio and I are exhausted after three days in the swamp, and it´s a bad thing because there´s not much to do in Corumba, especially since it´s not just immigration that´s closed on Sunday but everything else too.

We had a really good time in the Pantanal. On Wednesday we got up bright and early to take a bus from Bonito a place called Buraco das Piranhas (which basically was a roadside bar that served as a bus stop) in the middle of the Pantanal. From there someone from our tour company picked us up in a truck to take us to the lodge.

The next morning we got up really early to take a boat trip on the Miranda River, followed in the afternoon by horseback riding through the swamp. Sergio and I are city kids and we´d never been horseback riding, but we really enjoyed it. The Pantanal is supposedly the best place to see wildlife in the South America, and we did see lots of animals. Mostly we saw alligators, though-- they were all over the place, by every single patch of water. We also saw lots of capybaras, the world´s biggest rodent (like a rat´s cute cousin). We also saw LOTS of birds.

The next day we went on an all-day Jeep safari and hike through the swamp, which we didn´t realize when we left that morning was meant literally. After about an hour of bird watching, the guide informed us that we were to take off our shoes and actually walk through the swamp (gators and all). The walk through the swamp turned out to be alternately not so bad and really awful, but we made it out eventually with no more than a red ant bite for me and a cut on the toe for Sergio.

Our last day in the Pantanal was far more relaxing. We started out the morning fishing in the river outside our lodge, pretty succesfully too I might add (I even caught a piranha, which I then had for lunch, of course). Then we floated down the river on inner tubes (again, gators and all).

Because the Pantanal is right on the border between Brazil and Bolivia, almost everyone we met at the lodge had just come from Bolivia, so all their stories and recommendations got us really excited about the next leg of our journey. Hopefully we´ll be on our way tomorrow, staring with the 16-hour train ride to Santa Cruz de la Sierra. If Brazilian immigration ever opens, that is.

Sergio and I finally made it to Rio last Sunday, and we immediately felt at home there. Our hostel was a mere four blocks from the beach in Copacabana and it was cheap, clean, and friendly. We spent a week there total, and we managed to do most of the requisite touristy stuff like visit the colonial churches and take pictures from the Christ the Redeemer statue, but we definitely spent most of our time hanging out on the beach.

Besides the beach, the highlight of our time in Rio was the Favela Tour we took on Friday. It seems a bit weird to go on a tour of a favela (translated usually as ghetto or shantytown), but our hostel and guidebook both recommended it so we decided to go. It turned out to be one of the best experiences of our trip so far, certainly one of the most educational. Plus the company donates some of the profits to the schools there.

We visited two favelas in total. First we went to Roçinha, the second biggest favela in Latin America with about 150,000 residents (like a city within a city). We visited a community art project there where local kids go to sell their artwork to tourists on favela tours. Then we drove around Roçinha a bit, looking at how houses were constructed, and how people got electricity, water and satellite TV (of course).

Then we went on to a much smaller favela called Vila Canoas where we visited a school the tour company helps sponsor and walked around the unbelievable narrow alleyways (reminded me a bit of Fez in Morocco, but with more graffiti). In the end, we felt like this had been a great chance to see something of the way so many people in Latin America and really in the world live. It was definitely a view you don´t always get as a tourist. The contrast between the favelas and some of the richest neighborhoods in Latin America,which are just minutes apart walking in some cases, was really amazing.

Anyway our time in Rio came to an end on Sunday when we boarded an executivo-class bus for Campo Grande, way out in the West of the country. After 21 hours on a VERY bumpy rode, we bravely boarded another bus (regular class, unfortunately) for the five hour trip to Bonito, a tiny little town in the Brazilian state Mato Grosso do Sul known as a great eco-tourism destination.

And that´s where the most expensive day of our trip so far comes in, which would be today. We hired a taxi for the day to take us first to the Blue Lagoon Cave, where we climbed down into a cave with an extremely deep, pure blue lake. Then we headed to the Sucuri River for a little hike and some snorkeling in the icy cold rain. The water was warm though, so the cold wasn´t so bad, and it was fun to just float along the river and look at some amazing huge Amazonian fish. All of this did not come as cheaply as I´d hoped, but we felt it was worth it.

Tomorrow we get up before dawn to take a bus to Buraco das Piranhas in the heart of the Pantanal for a 3-day stay at the Hostelling International lodge there. The guy who I booked the tour with told me three times that the lodge was "very basic", so I´m not exactly sure what to expect but that´s for the next entry, which I´ll probably write from Bolivia!

It took me three days at the beach to get a real sunburn, a record for me I think. Anyway, it´s just as well because after three days of perfect, clear blue skies it´s rainy and cool today in Florianopolis.

Before leaving Brazil´s sunny coast in a few weeks to head inland for Bolivia and the Andes, we needed to take advantage of our best chance for a few days at the beach on this trip. It´s been a lazy few days for us. We´ve got a little apartment in Barra da Lagoa, a little fishing village on the island of Santa Catarina in southern Brazil. Having a kitchen and being near the beach gave us an excuse to do basically nothing for a few days. But after an intense visit to Iguazu, we needed a vacation from our vacation.

After miraculously getting our visas for Brazil in about an hour in Puerto Iguazu on Wednesday morning, we headed to the waterfalls. We started out our tour with a boat ride that took us close enough to the spray to completely soak us and spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the park, checking out the falls from different angles.

On Thursday we headed back to the park to do the Macuco Trail, a 4 mile easy walk through the subtropical rainforest where we saw giant spiders and ants, more butterflies, strange unknown birds, lizards, a monkey, and a deer. The hike ended at a little waterfall where we went swimming. Then it was one last look at the falls before heading back to our hot and crowded hostel.

On Friday we crossed the border into Braziil and after buying our bus tickets to Florianopolis and stashing our backpacks in the bus station´s lockers, we headed straight for the Brazilian park. The views from the Brazilian side were amazing, but visiting this side wasn´t as exciting as the Argentinian side, where you´re pretty much actually in the waterfalls.

Brazil is very beautiful, at least from what we´ve seen so far. The beaches here in Floripa are surrounded by low, green mountains and the water is clear and blue. But we´re feeling anxious to get back to speaking Spanish, and Brazil is expensive. The plan now is to zip up to Rio and then head West.