Day 77: Jungles, rivers and beaches

Well, it's been a while since the last update, and as some of you may have notice, it was actually sent 5 days late anyway. It was written on my iPhone, but we didn't get access to send it until after the jungle tour.

In any case, there is a lot of ground to cover, so brace yourselves.I'll try to keep it brief.

After São Paulo, we headed to the city of Manaus, capital of the Amazonias province. As with all the cities in Brazil so far, we were surprised by the size of the place. We were expecting a smallish city, but it would probably be at least as big as Brisbane, and most likely with two or three times as many people.

The next morning, we set out into the Amazon jungle for a 5-day tour/4-night tour. Our guide's name was Tarzan. Yes, that was really his name. He lived up to it too - just a little bit crazy, but in a good way.

The river was our main conduit, and we spent a lot of time in little boats going from one place to the next. We spent two nights in a 'jungle lodge' (i.e. an actual bed, a roof over our heads and a shower!) and two out in the jungle, on hammocks under big sheets of black plastic. In between, we saw alligators, sloths, pirrhana, monkeys, jungle cats, poisonous frogs, venomous snakes, pink dolphins, tarantulas and lots and lots of bugs.

On the first two nights we were with a British couple, and for the last two we were on our own - a private tour! We managed to get completely drenched while stuck in the boat on the way to the first night in the jungle, and it took another couple of days to dry out fully. The next night, the British couple headed back, and we went deeper into the jungle. We even caught our own dinner - pirhhana.

After the tour, we jumped on a boat to the coast, to a city named Belém. The 4-day journey was very relaxed - there was pretty much nothing to do other than chill out, read books, and play dominoes with the locals. The busiest we got was when stopping in a town called Santarem. We were going to be in port for about 6 hours, so we caught a bus out of town to a beach on the Amazon river. After a 45 minute bus ride, we finally made it. It turned out to be a small island made of sand, about 50 metres out into the river, complete with thatched-roof huts, umbrellas and kayaks. We got there by a short boat ride, and we just chilled out for an hour or so. We left ourselves about 2 and a half hours to get back. This turned out to be only just suffient. The bus we were catching was about an hour late, and we got back into town with about 5 minutes to spare. After catching a taxi that then got lost, we finally made it back with about 1 minute to spare, and discovered that the boat would not be leaving until two hours later.

After arriving in Belém, we caught a plane to São Luis, then a bus to the town of Barreirinhas, near the national park of Lençóis Maranhenses. This park contains some unique sand dunes, which have lagoons of fresh water. You can even swim in them, and get nibbled by small fish. Fun!

From there we headed to a beach called Jericoacoara.The journey took a day and a half, and included two jeep rides, two busses and another jeep ride along the beach. Despite the fact that the last jeep had a leak in the fuel line and the new fuel tank was a big container in the front passenger seat, we made it safely to Jeri and are now chilling out as much as possible.

This afternoon we should be meeting my brother Andrew, who will be with us for the next couple of weeks. It will be good for both of us to have some news from home and someone else to tell all our old jokes to.

Anyway, for now, hasta luego amigos!

Los Davides

Day 62: Adiós Perú, ola Brasil!

Since this edition is being written on my iPhone while waiting for our flight to Manaus, in the Amazonia region of Brazil, there are three immediate consequences:

1. I can't check exactly where the last place we wrote from was,
2. There won't be any pretty photos on this edition, and
3. This one may be a lot shorter than usual.

No promises however...

I believe we were in Arequipa, Chile's second largest city, behind Lima, and home to the frozen Incan mummy named Juanita. She was found at the top of a volcano in 1996, and died around 500 years ago at the age of about 11 or 12. The one-hour tour is highly recommended if you are ever in town.

From there we headed to Nazca, home of the famous Nazca Lines. These are giant outlines of animals, such as the monkey, whale, humming bird, and spider, as well as geometric shapes, including triangles, trapezoids and rectangles. They were created somewhere around 500AD, and are only visible from the sky, leadomg to mich speculation about why they were created, ranging from religion to aliens. They were rediscovered in the late 1930's when commercial flights began in the area.

Nazca also has an interesting cemetery nearby, dating back about 1,000 years. It contains dozens of mummified remains in underground crypts. The area has been scavenged repeatedly by tomb raiders (not Lara Croft though, apparently), and as a result there are bone fragments and bits of clothing scattered around the landscape. There are a few tombs which were relatively undamaged however, and they contain well preserved mummies of adults, who often still had 2-metre long ponytails, and infants, several of which had a 'false head' because their real one had been removed in a sacrifice.

There was also another place nearby with an aqueduct system, and deep circular holes down to the water. You can ask Dave 'Water Engineer' Cohen for more details if you are interested.

After Nazca, we headed for Lima, where we would be catching our flight into Brazil. After arriving by bus at about 6am, we managed to track down a dodgy hotel to dump our belongings in, and headed out.

It was a pretty cruisy day all up, starting with a tour of the catacombs beneath the San Francisco church (containing bones from over 20,000 people), followed by a visit to the national library (Snr. Cohen wanted to research the Inca, and then took a nap), the Museo de la Nacion (lots of pottery and artwork), and finally sushi with a friend we met in Cuzco and eight of her acquaintances.

The next day, we headed to the ariport for the 5-hour flight to São Paulo, Brazil. We were met at the airport by a friend named Mariana, and her friend Rafael, who had generously offered to give us a ride to our hotel. This ended up taking a while, since we hadn't booked ahead and the first place we tried didn't have any space. We ended up in a 16-person dorm room, in which we actually got a decent night's sleep, contrary to our initial expectations.

The next day, we hunted down a hotel room, then headed to a local museum/garden area. The museum was closed, but the gardens were quite pretty anyway. As we were about to leave, it started raining and it got heavy quickly. We initially took refuge under a tree, but this soon proved inadequate for the task, so we ran to the awning of the museum. Once it lightened up a bit, we headed home, fairly thoroughly soaked. A good day out!

The next day, we met up with Marcos, who we had met in Brisbane about a year earlier when he was there studying English. It turned out that his brother lived on the same block as our hotel, so we dropped in there first. He turned our to be a former restaurant critic, and pointed us towards a place that had traditional Brazilian food from the north. It consisted of beans, rice and lots of meat, and was pretty darn good.

After lunch, we visited my favourite museum so far: the Museo do Futebol. No prizes for translation. It talked about some of the history of the game in Brazil, the stars of the game, great goals, and more. Afterwards, Marcos and I managed to forget to pick up our ID cards, and didn't realise until the museum was closed..

The next day, we headed back to the museum and successfully retrieved our posessions, then headed into Sé, which is the city centre. São Paulo has a great subway system, by the way, although we were warned that 7am is a bad time to try catching it (peak hour).

While wondering around in Sé, we came across a curious sight - a white leather couch with a cardbord cut-out of a peroxide blonde 60-year-old woman, and a TV camera pointing at it. Investigation revealed that they were recording short messages from people which would be played later on TV. Anyone who is in Brazil, look for us on STB at 7 or 8pm on February 9, on 'Sofa de Hebe'.

Today, we head for the Amazon jungle, and will be out of contact for somewhere between 5 and 10 days. In the meantime, feel free to peruse the hundreds of photos that we have finally gotten around to uploading. They are still about three weeks behind, but we're catching up. You can find them all here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bitmeizer

Hasta la proxima vez,

Los Davides