Bountiful Brazil and Perilous Paraguay

Brazil & Paraguay

In this episode, Ryan…
-Roars through a favela on with a machine gun-toting band of motor cyclists
-Battles to the death with an army of hormigas in his hotel room
-Competes for the record of “whitest dude” at the beach in Rio

Getting to South America

“Only senior citizens use travel agents,” claims Scot Paterson, a buddy of mine who’s driving me and his parents into Winnipeg for a morning flight. His folks are going out west for holiday, I’m going slightly further afield.

In my experience, I’d have to agree with Scot. I haven’t had found much use for travel agents since I learned the art of Internet flight booking though I do feel bad for them (they’re just trying to make a living out of traveling, can’t blame them for that), but the reality is I can almost always (actually I can’t think of a circumstance where this wasn’t the case) get a better price by surfing around online then by asking a travel agent (in this case, I got nearly half the price I was initially quoted).

But one thing about travelling on the lowest common denominator is that you can’t always be sure what backasswards method will be employed in getting there. Winnipeg and Rio didn’t have any direct links (go figure) so I ended up flying on tiny jet (so small my head kept bumping the ceiling) to Chicago, catching a brand new intercontinental flyer to Washington, laying over there for a few hours, catching another new flyer south to Sao Paulo (slight change of plans it seems) and then on from there on a quick hop to Rio De Janeiro. Needless to say I was pretty tired upon arrival in Rio, but the journey itself did bring some absurdities. As the flight from Chicago to Washington taxied down the runway, for example, I was trying rather fruitlessly to open a bag of sour jubes to chew on the flight (so as to prevent my ears from popping of course). In my frustration, I turned to the foolhardy “pull them apart with all your might” approach to opening stubborn plastic bags, when the intercom welcomed us aboard United Flight 97 direct to Brussels...

Now as I was trying to go to Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, South America, the news that I was suddenly on a flight to Brussels, Belgium, Europe struck me as a bit of a surprise. I do apologize to my fellow passengers for my reaction to the news and to the torrent of gummy candies that rained down upon them as a result of it. As I nervously tried to collect my thoughts and the Great United Air Candy Explosion of 2009, the flight attendant kindly reassured me that the plane did in fact land in Washington before heading off to Belgium, where it would continue (with my troublesome candies stowing away around its fuselage) to Europe with me.

Other than that, the only other experience of note was my efforts to amuse myself in my long layover in Washington in the airport’s numerous America! shops which hawk all manner of cheesy over-patriotic nonsense that Americans are so widely celebra—er… known for.

These included such gems as “Don’t blame me, I voted for McCain & Palin (side note: I don’t care what the problem is, I still blame them),” foam presidential seals, and my all-time favourite “Barack in the Box.” Yes, you guessed it. You can actually purchase a jack-in-the-box version of Barack Obama at the Washington-Dulles airport; just turn the crank and a Mr. Rogers neighbourhood version of Captain Change pops out to spread his message of the Audacity of Hope. Shove him back in the box and use him to surprise your friends. I gotta admit, I was really tempted to buy one of theses, but it was too bulky for my luggage. Maybe they’ll make a pocket-sized edition for his re-election bid. I can wait 4 years.

So yeah, then I caught the overnight flight to Sao Paulo and finally emerged a be-draggled and jetlagged wreck in Rio, upon which point I realized, “Oh crap, I’m in South America” after which all this other stuff started to happen…

Brazil-Getting Real in Rio

January River!

Doesn’t sound too exotic does it? Or even somewhere you’d want to go (more like a frozen wasteland)

But just translate it into Portuguese and see what you get.

BOOM! Rio de Janiero, now we’re talking…

Yes Rio is indeed as beautiful as they say it is. Steep ancient mountains, verdant green rainforests and beaches that stretch longer than the legs of a carioca. The place would be a natural paradise if weren’t also a urban behemoth teeming with millions of soccer fans.

I stayed in Ipanema Beach, namely because I heard about it in that song. Upon arrival I was informed that there really was a Girl from Ipanema, although the song was written in 1962 or something, so she’s considerably older now and as one Brazillian guy put it “no longer beautiful, but in the 60s she was ah yeah.” In any case, there is certainly no shortage of beautiful people in Ipanema (or in Brazil for that matter), and the streets are filled with joggers at all times and heat levels. Now, that said, there are definitely people on the beach who come in all shapes and sizes (mainly the tourists and well me), but if want something to stand out like a sore thumb just ship it out from frozen Manitoba. I mean I’m used to feeling awkward with my shirt off, but this was… well let’s just say Rio had no more need of a lighthouse while I was on the beach. Then again, at least it drew attention away from my unsightly chest hair which for some reason has transfigured itself into the shape of a falcon.

But I digress… Rio has not one but two beaches that have famous songs written about them. The first, as I mentioned is the Girl From Ipanema song (“Tall and tanned, and thin and lovely, the Girl from Ipanema goes walking…”) but there’s also Copacabana Beach (“At the Copa…Copa Cabana… the hottest place north of Havana”). A side note to whoever wrote that song, incidentally: Havana is in Cuba which is the northern hemisphere, Copacabana Beach is in Rio which is in the Southern hemisphere. Granted there might be other Copacabanas (there’s one in Bolivia I think, but I don’t think that’s the one they meant, and its still south of Havana). There’s not whole lot of Latin America north of Havana (Tijuana perhaps?).

But I digress, Rio is full of beaches, and yes there are people in g-strings (both genders) but there’s also plenty of more conventional swim wear. The beaches are always full (unless its night and then they’re deserted and its unsafe to be there). The waves are huge too and smacked me into the sand but good on many an occasion (apparently you’re supposed to dive under the crest not bodycheck your way through it).

So let’s see, what else did I do in Rio? Oh yeah there was this boat party, where they had this DJ and people jumped in the water and tried to dance on the top of the boat. No as much I enjoy dancing with bikini clad ladies on a sopping wet boat in Brazil, I’m surprised more people didn’t crash into the stair well they teetering over (or fall over the railing into the ocean more). People were plenty drunk enough. Frankly I’m surprised I personally didn’t do either of these things. About the only disaster I was involved with was the loss of a digital camera (not mine). Actually someone was trying to take a no doubt incriminating photo when he slipped and dropped the camera in the ocean.

I met some cool people in Rio, like the British girl constantly in romantic turmoil who wrote music for video games and vaguely resembled Rene Zellwegger (I’ll call her Bridget Jones), the whirling like a dervish and gypsy dancing in the street happy girl from Istanbul (I’ll call her Turkish Delight), the cassanova of a hostel manager who could only speak like 5 words in English but that was all he needed to woo the hostel girls (I’ll call him Samba Ramba), the tough but sassy female dorm roommate who referred to me as “fresh meat” within an hour of my arrival (I’ll call her Will-kill-me-if-she-found-out-I-gave-her-a-nickname).

I didn’t spend the whole time at the beach. No, I also went to a soccer game at Maracana stadium which was pretty intense (see my piece on Cuban beisbol then throw in a dose of extra violence and rain storm). The game itself wasn’t anything spectacular, except it was between two rival teams from Rio (Vasco and Flamenco) there were more red cards than goals. My guidebook described Brazillian soccer as the “most inventive and creative” in the world, but by that I think they mean there’s a lot of “acting.” Seriously every single play would practically go like this Player from team A would get the ball, would pass to another player on Team A, this player would be tripped by Team B, the tripped player from Team A would fall to the ground in absolute agony unless it was clear the ref wasn’t watching, in which case he would get up without hesitation and rejoin the game. At one point, one of the goalkeepers was out at midfield with the ball—an odd place for a goal keeper to be at the best of times—when an opposing player crashed into him. Both fell to the ground, the goalkeeper doing a flip before dosing so. While his fall was dramatic, he quickly got up and returned to his post. It was only after he turned around and saw his adversary acting injured in front of the ref that he suddenly realized that he too was in agony, collapsed, and called for the ambulance. Ridiculous.

Only two goals were scored (for 10 red cards) neither of which I saw, because a massive downpour forced me and a human stampede to flee our seats, which were practically court side, for shelter of the bleachers, which of course we couldn’t get to, because 20 000 people trying to cram into the same one metre aisle doesn’t work so well. Not sure how they expect people to get out in an emergency.

And don’t kid yourself, Brazilian stadiums are never far from one. Putting aside stadium collapses (which apparently have happened during games in Brazil) The crowds redefine rabid devotion, with competing teams waving flags and banners like a call to arms. The rabid of the rabid take any calls against their team, no matter how minor, as insults to their manhood, which for some reason appear to be remedied by only taking off their shirts (a frequently used solution in Rio to many of life’s problems), bellowing loudly, and beating the seat in front of them. Hey whatever works I guess.

I should probably mention that Rio has a rough side. It might seem like a paradise, but it doesn’t take long for that veneer to fade as people will often warn you this is one of the most dangerous cities on the planet. Tourists are instructed to taxis everywhere they go (and to be careful about the taxis they use) and to go everywhere in groups and avoid large chunks of the city at night or altogether. Even in relatively safe and wealthy Ipanema, I heard of at least two fellow travelers being robbed at knife point nearby. That said, nothing bad happened to me (not even a pickpocket attempt) and the annoying hustlers weren’t near as bad as Cuba. In fact, almost all cariocas (ie people for Rio) where extraordinarily friendly to me and not just because they thought I had money. Indeed some welcomed into their homes and took on us on wild tours of the city (the Turkish girl was very good at ingratiating herself with the locals). Too good perhaps, as her and I soon found ourselves whirling across Rio on a very sketchy bus on a Friday night, but the destination we hit (a massive street party in the Lapa neighbourhood) was well worth it. Literally there were thousands of people in the street getting their groove on (apparently these kind of parties happen every Friday night Rio) and somebody had the bright idea of offering me a capinrinha, a Brazillian cocktail made out of exotic Amazonian fruits, that knocked me around oh but good with just one glass.

But my time in Rio wasn’t all just beaches and parties… okay it was mostly beaches and parties, but I did make a point of doing a tour of the Rocinha favela, said to be the biggest urban slum in all of Latin America, in the interest of doing “research” which was the theoretical point of my being in South America in the first place. Now, we were explicitly warned never to enter favelas unguided, so I hired a tour guide who drove us out to the base of the slums, the idea being we would hitch a motorcycle ride with locals to the top of the favela, which was built into the side of amount underneath the big Jesus Statue, Cristo Redentor (I did go and see the statue at some point, but it was fogged in, so there wasn’t much to see except for a giant headless Jesus—the fog obscured his head).

Now I should mention that the police have no control over favelas, and in fact routinely engage in altercations with the various gangs, druglords, and corrupt cops who do control them. This particular favela, Rio’s largest with a population of 200 000, was controlled by a drug dealing gang called Amigos Dos Amigos (Friends of Friends—and yes the name makes the sound more like a peer group for special needs students than a criminal organization, but I wasn’t about to tell them that), anyways the motorcycles they were using to escort us apparently had some legal issues, and some cops had arrived to confiscate them (this was still on the edge of the favela) so our guide informed us we were going to sneak the motorbikes a block north, take off from there, and run away from the police. Before I could protest that engaging in a hot pursuit in Rio de Janeiro maybe didn’t seem like the hottest move, we were swarmed by a crowd of 20 motorcyclists (there were only twenty of us on the tour), and I soon found myself (on my guide’s insistence) whisked onto the back of one, and sent racing up the steep inclines of the favela, as the motorcycle armada fled the police. The roads jagged left and right, over cobblestone, litter, and exposed wires, as pedestrian and motorcycle traffic shot both ways. A couple of times I lost sight of my compadres and instead found myself side-by-side with a teenager motorcyclist with a M80 machine gun tied to his back. When I would later reconnect with my guide at the hill’s summit, he would explain that these teenagers were members of the gang and defacto police of the favela, and although he insisted they were all at least 18 I wasn’t terribly convinced. At any rate he suggested it was not a good idea we took pictures of them and I happily complied. He said that there usually wasn’t this many number of armed people walking around and that “something must be up,” to which I replied “great.”

Now the guide did say that most of the people living in the favela are not druglords and that we shouldn’t pay too much attention to them (not that kids walking around casually with weapons issued to armies is easy to ignore), and he did have the point. There are plenty of legitimate people (okay quasi legitimate) doing things like producing art, baking food, and even foreign workers running schools (although I think the general lack of safety of the area should make one consider carefully if volunteering there is the right choice for them). That said I certainly didn’t have any problems, other than the ubiquitous requests for donations, although my fellow tourists perhaps weren’t the brightest tools in the sheds and kept wandering off and driving the guide nuts (two dudes were rich suburban teenage partiers from Miami who seemingly only joined the favela tour to score women and drugs and maybe were a tad naïve about what they were getting themselves into). At any rate, the experience was definitely very eye opening, and the sheer scale of poverty, the underlying reasons for it, and what motivated people to live under these conditions was definitely educational in a way a news report never could be.

So on that note…

Paraguay-Para Hey!

Okay so Ray Silvius made fun of me for making Paraguay my second stop on my South American journey, but Brazillian visa requirements demanded I have a flight leaving Brazil and I still wanted to go to Iguazu Falls, which is near the border with Paraguay and Argentina (although I couldn’t get a direct flight to Argentina) so I ended up booking a flight to Ciudad Del Este, Paraguay. Ciudad Del Este (City of the East) is known as one of the most corrupt cities in one of most corrupt countries this side of Africa. The “international airport” reminded more of a paved field than a global terminal, and there were a couple of curious unmarked 747s parked on the runway.

Paraguay seemed very agricultural after Rio, and in fact I consider it a subtropical Manitoba, dusty, flat, and full of cowboys. The soil was a brilliant red—and believe me there was a lot of soil, not to mention gravel roads. Clearly if I had been trying to get off the beaten path, I had succeeded.

Wanting a break from the hostel (and a couple of annoying Swedes I was rooming with who seemed to have an inexplicable hostility towards all things Finnish), I opted for a room in a hotel near the bus station as recommended by my guidebook (actually there are no hostels in Paraguay apparently, so it wasn’t so much a choice as a necessity). Hotel Tia Nancy was an interesting family run joint, and I do mean family run--We’re talking pictures of the grandparents on the walls and toddlers chasing about the halls. In fact, I’m pretty sure I was the only non-blood relative in the building. They were very friendly to me and made the freshest peach juice I’ve ever tasted (it was so good, I ordered like a litre of the stuff) and fed me a lunch of Paraguayan beef ribs and accessories (Paraguayans apparently take offense to the Argentines taking all the credit for South American beef bragging rights). Looking forward to a night to myself, though, I was in for a bit of a surprise, as while there were certainly no other people in my room, I was far from alone. At first a lone hormiga (ant) trotted across the floor, and being unphased by such a simple invasion and vaguely bored, I opted to smash the creature into oblivion. As successive attempts failed, I began to notice a second ant, and then a third… and then a hundred. Pretty sound a fountain of insects was pouring out of two cracks in the baseboards, and one in the sink.

Overwhelmed I retreated to the front desk, explained my problem and requested a room change (Ants may not be much of a big deal in Canada, but in South America I wasn’t taking any chances). The clerk smiled and handed me a bottle of Raid.

So that was it then, the room would either be mine or the ants’, one of us had to go. I charged back to my room and began unleashing chemical warfare upon the insectoids, targeting their access points and then mopping up the survivors. Eventually I secured a perimeter around my bed—probably inhaling a fair share of the spray in the process—and satisfied that my mission had been accomplished I opted to get some fresh air and walked down the street to a local Internet Café (the hotel didn’t have Internet access it barely had a phone).

Due to a bad connection and a mouse that refused to work when the girl running the café wasn’t looking, I ended up spending longer at the shop then I wanted to, and I was startled to realize that the neighbourhood had turned considerably sketchy in the interim (night had fallen). I cautiously headed back to the hotel, stopping only for some food and drink at a food stall. Many Paraguayans were definitely eyeing me in the street and one finally asked me “What the hell are you doing here? This area is not safe. You should go home, quickly.” Grabbing what I believe was so form of cheeseburger, I took his advice.

A bit put off by security concerns and ant infestations, I decided to move up my onward journey to Igauzu Falls although I felt I should at least see one Paraguayan attraction before I left the country unable—thanks to its visa requirements—to return.

As it turns out Ciudad Del Este does have one attraction, a big giant dam.

The Itaipu Dam, which straddles the border with Brazil, is the second biggest dam in the world (only China’s Three Gorges Dam is bigger) and such a behemoth of engineering that it created a lake so big that Se Queda Falls (a set of waterfalls that once rivaled Igauzu it in immensity) was completely submerged, along with countless acres of forest and traditional Guarani villages (the Guarani are the aboriginal people of Paraguay). It is an engineering feat of great magnitude, and is a national treasure of Paraguay, even celebrated on one of their high amount bills (actually, the Paraguayan currency is the guarani, named after the aboriginals who were displaced by the dam). It supplies the power for 90% of Paraguay and a huge swath of Brazil. That said, it’s basically just a big dam. I guess that’s cool if you like that sort of thing. Tours only in Spanish.

A note about Paraguayan currency. It’s named after the Guarani presumably to honour them, but 1 guarani is worth so little that they don’t appear to have a bill lower than 1000 guarani. In fact, about 1 dollar Canadian could buy you something in neighbourhood of 4000 guaranis (you could make your own village). Take out a normal amount of funds from the bank and suddenly you’re a millionaire.

Of course though, once you get guarani money good luck spending it. Even the Paraguayans prefer other currencies, such as the Paraguayan taxi driver my hotel hired for me who followed me around all day including at the dam, at the cramped zoo created as means of making ameans for the ecological destruction caused by the dam (not sure if Paraguay really has a good handle on this environmentalism thing), and last but not least, the Argentinean border. To get to the border with Argentina (I was trying to get to the town of Puerto Iguazu, Argentina) you first had to cross through Foz do Iguacu, Brazil. The border crossing between Foz do Iguacu and Ciudad Del Este basically consists of a pretty sketchy bridge that travelers are advised never to walk across at any time of day or night due to the high frequency of muggings. Luckily I still had a taxi, but I still had to run across a crapload of traffic, and people hanging out in the street so I could get my passport stamped at the well hidden passport office before heading back to the taxi via the same precarious route and over to Brazil.

Now if your taxi driver says you don’t need an entry stamp for Brazil, but your guidebook, embassy, and stomach say you do, listen to the latter three. Despite my repeated requests, we did not get my passport stamped for entry into Brazil and after my taxi driver dropped me off at the Brazilian border with Argentina, the Brazilians informed me that they I had entered their country illegally (while Brazillians themselves might seem relaxed, their customs officers certainly are not). Thankfully, I was able to explain the situation and the woman gave her head a shake that suggested this wasn’t the first time this was happened and I was whisked off to the Argentinian side where I was promptly searched. Finding nothing but my dirty underwear, the Argentinian official cracked a few jokes and let me go on my way. Finally, I arrived at a Hostel Inn Iguazu, a former casino and possibly one of the nicest hostels I have ever stayed at, at which point I promptly thanked God and jumped in the pool.