La Poderosa

After having observed the Cariocas in their natural habitat I went back to the hostel to check in. The weather was pretty crap and though I had spend the last two days on buses I was exhausted and thus ended up having a very lazy and relaxing day. Later that day I met four Aussies and the next day we spend our Sunday as we always do, with God. Christ on top of hill, pretty spectacular.
The next day we did a favela tour, you go into the favelas with a guide and get taught about life in the slums. Our guide was brilliant and knew everything. He explained to us that the locals like the tourists because it gives the tourists a more realistic image of the city. Its easy to get caught up in the beauty and excitement of Rio and forget about the slums that are so close to say Ipanema. We walked through one of the main streets of the favela which was pretty narrow when we asked why it was a so narrow and still be a main street the guide explained that it had once been wide enought to fit cars through but with the government having no authority here people just do as they like and build and build until the street has been turned into a tunnel, balcony to balcony. Though I though the tour might have been sad or depressing it wasnt. The people are happy and cheerful and proud to be from their neighbourhood.
When we got back from the favela tour and got back to the hostel they had some bad news for us. The night before two british girls had arrived they were friends of the aussies and one of them had woken up with bed bug bites all over her body. Now the hostel was blaming her for the bed bugs and kicked us all out. We had all come from different places and I had only met them there but non of this mattered we were out. So on monday night, on one of the Aussies girls 30th birthday we were bedless. Thankfully the hostel Ipanema Beach House had 7 beds free and this is where we spend the next couple of days. The hostel was beautiful and comfortable. And after one day there I felt like knew everybody and was living in Halls of Residence again. A few days later me and the Aussies took off to Ilha Grande a beautiful tropical island 5 hours from Rio only to return to Ipanema Beach House a for the weekend. The same people were still there and some new boys and girls had arrived. I started to feel like part of the furniture, being back for the second time. My days in Rio were spend having breakfast in the garden and shouting ´walk of shame´when someone would return back to the hostel in the same clothes they were wearing the night before. Going to the beach in the morning and having Açai for lunch (a berry from the Amazon, which you eat as a slushpuppy or in a fruitshake and is absolutely lush). Afternoons were spended at local markets or other neighborhoods sightseeing and evenings were mainly spend with the group in tex-mex restaurants and going out. I left Rio with a tan and a desire to come back as soon as possible.

Thursday morning I took the bus to Ilheus. The night before my newly made friend Francisco had called the hostel and reserved a bed for me. After 8 hours on the bus I arrived in Ilheus in the dark and went on to find a taxi company called washington which the hostel had told me to take to their hostel. Of course with my luck so far in Brazil this taxi company was nowhere to be found and seemed to be non-existent. The only other taxis were just men with cars, no signs. So I got in and gave the driver the note with the address and off we were. We drove and drove, out of town into the dark of night. I started to get slightly worried, where the hell was this guy taking me? I asked him how far we were from the hostel and he said not to worry, I´m a good guy, he assured me in poor english. I could make out the ocean on the left side of the road and just rainforest on the other. About 20 minutes later we drove into a little town where lots of people had gettered in a little side street and one woman with a mic was praising jesus with both hands in the air. Everybody shouted and screamed in agreement and we drove out of this town too into the jungle. After about one km we reached a house and this was the hostel. The only two people there were the female owner who was rather large and walking around in her underwear and her very very skinny fiancee. The oddest couple I ve ever seen... Neither of them spoke English, or Spanish, or French and of course Dutch was out of the question. As I checked myself in I noticed a large bowl of condoms on the coffee table in the lounge. I got shown to my room and asked if there were other people staying here, the answer was negative. I was the only guest. Negative answers I also got to the questions, is there internet here? is there a food place close? A working phone? ANY way of communicating with the outside world? I locked myself into my room started to feel really really nauseous. Why was I here by myself? I decided there and then that the beautiful beaches that the north of brazil had to offer were no longer of any interest to me and my next destination would be Rio de Janeiro. First however I had to get through the night and as nervous girls do I made myself more nervous by thinking of horror films. Not helping was the fact that there was some sort of animal living in between the roof and my ceiling which kept moving around all night. The next morning I got up early and walked out of the jungle, into the town and got a bus into Ilheus again (after waiting for the bus for one hour). I got to the bus terminal of Ilheus at 10.35 and the bus to Rio left at 10.30 but as it was Brazil I still managed to hop onto it. When I was in my seat with my lugagge savely tucked underneat the bus I cried with joy. I was on my way to Rio and safe. No more lonely nights in deserted hostels or old men hitting on me in the hostels. I was going to Rio, which was going to be full of backpackers (or so I hoped. Do I still have social skills I wondered). 24 hours later I arrived, I got to my hostel at 8 in the morning where they told me that check in wasnt until 12 so I spend the next 4 hours on Ipanema beach watching the locals surf, swim and run in the most bizar outfits, most of them very minimalistic. I was in Rio de Janeiro at last!

DSC02561

After the Pantanal I got dropped off at a hostel in Campo Grande full of weird dirty men. The next day I got out of there as soon as possible and took a bus to Brasilia at 11 in the morning and arrived in the capital the next day at the same time. After 24 hours in the bus I felt greasy and gross and just wanted to get to my hostel to spend a day there as Brasilia is not very exciting and then continue to Salvador. Only in Brasilia nobody had heard of my hostel and some even claimed the address didnt exist. I got taken to the bus depot with an older lady and two men non of who spoke english. The lady called her daughter and the only thing I understood was that she said to her daughter she was with a gringa who spoke no english and was lost. At the depot they all got in a car and took me with them to a parking lot where the daughter was waiting. The daughter, married to an American, spoke English and I explained the situation to her. She tried to call the hostel for me but the number was out of order and so I stood there no knowing what to do when she asked me what the hell I was doing here on my own. Not what you want to hear when you are lost, a local telling you you are crazy travelling through their country on your own. I ended up getting her business card and phone number as a back up plan with my first plan now being getting a bus to Salvador straight away. The two men got in their car again as did I and dropped me off at the right bus terminal, when I got out they both said, what I understood to be, may god be with you. Blessed and paniced I walked into the terminal to find a ticket and bought one for 5 hours later. With no internet cafe in the terminal I walked across the highway via piss smelling bridge to a massive shopping mall in an attempt to find internet but as it was sunday only the food court of the mall was open. Thank god for Diego the securityguard who gave me a phone card so I could arrange a hostel for Salvador as I didnt want to get into the same situation again. After having waited 5 hours I got on to another bus for another 24 hours and finally arrived in Salvador monday night. Salvador is like nothing I had ever seen before. It is hectic, chaos everywhere. Its like the city is build around nature instead of nature regrowing around the city after having been chopped down by humans. The setting is hilly and tropical rain forest and little streams of water inbetween patches of houses as if they have been randomly thrown around the city. My hostel was the old center of town which is filled with colorful colonial buildings, cobstone sidestreets and a church on each corner. Every tuesday night there is a party in town with music and drums on all the squares and plazas, an amazing experience and what you imagine carnaval to be like only on a larger scale. Finally there is the bonfim church, the church were those colorful ribbons come from everybody who has visited brazil wears around their wrists. The ribbons are supposed to be tied around the door knobs or fence outside the church with three knots and with each knot you get a wish. Exactly what I needed after my adventure in Brasilia.... And off I was to Ilheus.

After all the sandboarding and sunsets I headed off to Iquique on the Chilean coast. A beach city with casino´s and high towers. Luckily I was in a quiet part of town in a beautiful and relaxed hostel full of surfboards and skateboards and a dog that carried around its own blanket. I stayed in Iquique for 2 days relaxing on the beach eventhough the sun only bothered to appear a few hours every day before hiding behind clouds again. But me and the 3 girls in my dorm were committed to the cause and did get a tan. After having relaxed for 2 days and a night of watching local fishermen fish on the beach (I went to see it with a Dutch girl and two Chilean guys and when I said that watching the fish die was aweful one of them pointed out that this was a European thing to say because this man didnt fish for fun, this was his job, his food) I decided it was time to go back to San Pedro de Atacama. Unfortunately I got pickpocked on the way back but it didnt spoil the fun. A girl in my hostel in San Pedro helped me with reporting to the police and then took me out for happy hour, and a happy hour it was before passing out in my bed!
The next night I went on a Stargazing tour, you drive off to the desert and a funny French man explains the stars to you and shows you different things in massive telescopes. First he explained how humans thought about the universe: "The earth was flat, the sky moves around us and I live in the center of the universe. AND in my case thats true because I m French. No serious look at any map of the world and you ll see that France is in the middle!" Furtermore he explained that the sky we see today is the same as 3000 years ago because the fastest moving star moves from our perspective maybe a centimeter in the sky, and so all the knowledge we have we got from the egyptians, the romans, etc. From all the things we saw in the telescopes, cluster of stars, the brightest star (which is actually two stars really close together), it was saturn which was the most impressive with the disk around it like it was fake, from a cartoon. After that the French guy went on the explain how star gazing is not a nerdy profession, its great to pick up girls! No but seriously he explained a lot about how stars come into existence, all i remember is E = MC2. Not that that means anything to me.... And something about the sun expanding, red gaint, someone won a nobel prize for this theory. All he said made sense at the time but I would not be able to retell or explain any of it now but that is science to normal people I guess.

The next stop in brazil was Bonito, a small town in the mato grosso do sul region. Edje and Lilli went snorkling here in the rio de plata (silver river) but with my irrational fear of fish I couldnt join and enjoyed the peace and quiet the town had to offer. Next up was Pantanal. Often compared to the everglades in Miami Pantanal is enormous area of wetlands spread over Paraguay, Bolivia and Brasil. We went to a camp near the Bolivian border and from there we did ´safari´s´. Divided into groups of six maximum, Lilli, Edje and I were joined by two Swiss (or were they French) guys and went Piranha fishing. As you can imagine I as a fishphobic loved this. Lucky me, we didnt catch any. At night we went on a night safari and saw a fox, lots of aligators but most impressive of all was the sky! As a city girl this was something I had never seen before, not even in the small village were I used to go on holidays in the south of france. The next day we went for a walk through the water and around islands on our bare feet. We saw monkeys and armadillos and surprise surprise more aligators. That afternoon we gave piranha fishing one more go and actually caught three. The teeth on these creatures are nasty! Vicious creatures! That night for dinner? Piranha! The next morning we went for a morning safari but our guide showed up 30 minutes late by which time the sun had already risen and he was drunk so this was a bit of a let down but we had seen plenty of wildlife as it was.