March 2019 – The Escape Hatch

The Toll, or “What the #@%! Am I Doing Here?”

“To think it will soon be June!” grumbled Bilbo, as he splashed along behind the others in a very muddy track. It was after tea-time; it was pouring with rain, and had been all day; his hood was dripping into his eyes, his cloak was full of water; the pony was tired and stumbled on stones; the others were too grumpy to talk. “And I’m sure the rain has got into the dry clothes and into the food-bags,” thought Bilbo. “Bother burgling and everything to do with it! I wish I was home in my nice hole by the fire, with the kettle just beginning to sing!” It was not the last time that he wished that!

– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Confession time again. Last week at Santuário do Caraça, I looked really hard at the possibility of calling the trip quits and coming home. Logistically, there was a window where I could have done it quickly and relatively cheaply. All it would have taken was a bus ride to São Paulo instead of Vitoria and a discount airline ticket to Orlando on the 20^th with a connection to Atlanta the next morning. The “escape hatch” from South America was right there, and all I had to do was pull the rip cord.

Long term travel is difficult for me on the best of days. It’s a lifestyle not well suited to my personality. Staring at the option of returning home forced me to think hard about whether I wanted to continue. No more excuses. Did I want to see the trip through, or admit I wasn’t enjoying myself and pull the plug? I decided to keep going, but I did have to admit that if I was going to get any value from the miles that remain I’ll have to change my attitude toward travel and how I take care of myself.

If I’d written this blog yesterday, it might have been a different story. Yesterday I felt much like Bilbo Baggins in the passage quoted above.

Right now I’m in Porto Seguro, a mediocre tourist town on the Brazilian coast. I came here with the intention of unpacking all my luggage, walking on the beach, not thinking about long-haul bus trips, and enjoying cheap burgers and caipirinhas in the sun.

So of course it’s been raining like crazy. Twice, when the rain seemed to have passed, I went for a walk along the surf – and both times I returned shivering and drenched to the bone from a sudden storm. The rain was so heavy that yesterday I worried about parts of town flooding and stocked up at the grocery store in case I couldn’t leave my hotel. The forecast was grim: 100% chance of DOOM until my bus ride to Salvador on Wednesday.

But yesterday afternoon the rain stopped. This morning the sun came out and everyone in town poured out of their resorts onto the sand. I spent an hour drifting in the waves, finally, finally recharging my batteries. The forecast still calls for afternoon showers but Noah can put away his nails; Brazil will not be sinking into the Atlantic.

I keep saying “I” because at the moment Lea has gone ahead to the island community of Morro de São Paulo (no relation to the big São Paulo), accessible only by ferry from Salvador, where at this very moment she is snorkeling the reefs and hopefully taking some fantastic photographs that we’ll get to share later. In fact, all the pictures you’re enjoying this week are thanks to Lea’s eye for macro and underwater photography because frankly, I got nothin’.

Splitting and up and traveling apart was always part of the plan for this voyage, but aside from two days in Bolivia when I stayed behind to hike Isla del Sol, we haven’t done it. However, at this point in the journey I needed to simply stop for a while and Lea needed to keep on going. If she were here in Porto Seguro, I guarantee she’d be climbing the walls.

Like Bilbo Baggins, I’m a deeply introverted person. Introverts aren’t averse to going out and having new experiences, but afterward I need time to slow down and process, preferably in the comfort of a familiar environment that I’ve made into my own personal refuge. Long-term travel rarely, if ever, lets that happen. In my case, I feel that non-stop travel has exacted a heavy toll – one that I’ve ignored and haven’t truly dealt with until recently.

When we set out on this trip, I envisioned it as a “hard reboot” on our lives. I imagined that quitting our jobs (in my case, my career), stuffing our belongings in storage, and hitting the road for ten months would change us in many ways. I didn’t set any goals or expectations as to what those changes would be. I just dove in and hoped for the best, thinking that “travel broadens the mind” (the narrative that frequent travelers espouse) and that it’s good to get out of your comfort zone (the narrative that successful risk-takers sell).

Side note: Lea did set goals and expectations for personal development on this trip, and you really ought to read about them and her progress on LinkedIn.

Not setting personal development goals has turned out to be a mistake, because it feels like that “hard reboot” I expected hasn’t happened. Instead I’ve sunk into old patterns of withdrawal and not acknowledging my feelings until they bubble over. Going “out of my comfort zone” with no clue as to what I hoped to accomplish has simply made me crave that comfort zone even more as we’ve traveled. I joked to Lea once that my comfort zone has actually shrunk, and that as soon as we get back I’m going to dig myself a hole and burrow in like a tick.

“Knowing where the trap is – that’s the first step in evading it.”

– Frank Herbert, Dune

So here I am, alone in a town where no one speaks my language, trying to get my mojo back and wondering where I’m going from here. But what happens now, and what happens when all this is over? Has this journey changed me in any meaningful way?

Honestly, I’m not sure. This trip has taught me lessons, but many of those were things I already knew in theory. Now I just have personal experience to back it up. In that vein, let me impart some words of wisdom to any of my fellow lunatics as you consider chucking your current life and traveling the world for an extended time.

DON’T.

Okay, scratch that. Unfair and too extreme. Let’s try again. Learn from what I didn’t do.

Know thyself. Know what your limits are. Know what you enjoy and what you don’t. Know what you hope to gain by traveling the world. Know how you want to push yourself and why. And most of all, know how you’ll need to refuel yourself in order to keep going.
Take breaks. Understand that you don’t have to do everything. It’s okay to say “no.” You don’t have to climb every mountain, visit every ruin, or hike to every waterfall. There are a million things to see in the world. You’ll never see all of them, but you’ll get to enjoy more if you acknowledge when you need to skip a few in order to take care of your needs.
Adjust your focus. It’s very easy to ruminate on the negatives of travel, especially when it’s 3:00 a.m. on a bus ride on an unpaved road and your teeth are about to rattle out of your skull. Many times you’ll find yourself, like Mr. Baggins, slogging through the mud and wondering what the hell you were thinking. But not every moment is going to be like that. Many will be magical. Focus on those times. Relish them, and come back to them when you need to.
Acknowledge that it’s going to be hard. Long-term travel is difficult, and even when you think you’ve figured it out it will get harder. I thought we had it mastered by the time we were coasting through Chile, and then we hit High Season for tourists in Patagonia. We escaped High Season only to hit the language barrier in Brazil. On top of that, we’ve just begun prepping for our return to the U.S. without guarantees and no fixed abode. The challenges change, but they never ease up. Be ready.

“No matter where you go, there you are.”

– Buckaroo Banzai, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension

Several times on this trip, Lea has asked why I didn’t go home when it was clear that I was struggling and miserable. I had reasons for staying, but none of them had to do with my happiness or well-being. On one level I was concerned about the financial hit we would take if I came back early, unemployed and uninsured, but I also knew deep down that I would beat myself to a pulp for “quitting” and giving up, even though I had no real plan to give up on.

It was in Caraça that I finally overcame the thought of being ashamed if I turned around and came home. So why didn’t I?

Because while we were there, I sat in monastic silence as a wolf walked by within arm’s reach and loped away into the dark.

I don’t travel to have fun and party. I’m not that guy at home, and I’m even less that person abroad. I don’t travel to relax. While I enjoy all-inclusive resorts and I love a lazy cruise, that’s not travel. That’s staying in a hotel.

When I travel, I do it to experience Wonder. I felt wonder when I saw the northern lights in Iceland, even though it was an ungodly number of degrees below zero and I was wearing too many layers of clothes to count. I felt wonder on the Serengeti, and looking over the rim of Ngorongoro Crater. I felt wonder in the maze of alleys in Fez, and in the ruins of Beit She’An. I felt wonder in the decorated cemeteries of Oaxaca, and watching humpbacks leap into the air off the coast of Ecuador. I felt wonder seeing the southern sky from a mountaintop in Chile. I felt wonder in the bite of the wind from the Perito Moreno glacier while watching a giant slab of ice calve into the water below.

I don’t know what wonders await in the jungles west of Salvador or south of Bogotá. I don’t know what wonders await in the barrios of Medellin. I don’t know what it will feel like to reach the Caribbean coast and know that I’ve circled a continent. But I’m willing to stick around and find out.

I could easily say that I don’t enjoy travel. I don’t like spending ten or more hours on a bouncy night bus. I don’t like eating the same food over and over again because it’s all that’s available. I don’t like being stuck in a room for days because of excessive heat or rain. I despise having to fix every damn toilet because apparently South America has a shortage of plumbers. I hate feeing isolated from the world I understand and unsure if my plans to start over will bear fruit when we finally return home.

But that’s okay. That’s the toll you pay when you travel for as long as we have. The question I asked myself when faced with the choice of whether or not to quit was whether or not those fleeting moments of wonder are worth the hardships that make them possible.

Today, the answer’s still yes.

P.S. Next week’s entry – the last for Brazil – will be posted on Thursday, April 4. On Monday, Lea and I will be exploring Chapada Diamantina and who knows what the Internet signal will be like. Besides, if I post on April 1 no one will believe a word I say.

Her Name Is Rio / Hungry Like the Wolf

Hold on to your britches. This has been a busy week of sightseeing so this post is going to be a barrage of “What We Did On Summer Vacation” bullets with little in the way of philosophical musings on the long-term travel life – except to say that we set our record for the sheer number of long-distance bus trips in a single week. The only close tie was our last week in Chile with all of its long-distance excursions. This week we saw the inside of the Belo Horizonte bus terminal more times than was probably healthy.

Email readers, this post is chock full of videos so click on over to TheEscapeHatch.net or miss out.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. When I left you hanging last week, we were leaving Foz do Iguaçu for Rio de Janeiro by air, having missed out on the local Carnaval and expecting to find nothing in Rio but leftover streamers, glitter, and discarded T-shirts littering the sidewalks in the wake of the festivities.

We were wrong. We landed in Rio and, on the way to our guest house, discovered that most of the entrances to the metro line were closed and those that weren’t were cordoned with traffic directed by uniformed security. Why? Because while Mardi Gras/Carnaval/Whatever You Call It ends on Fat Tuesday everywhere else in the world, in Rio de Janeiro it continues all the way through the following weekend.

The bad news: it took us a good two hours, at least, to get to our room in the south of town. The good news? We went to Carnaval! IN RIO!! Beat that, vicarious travel blog readers!

Sunday morning, bright and early, we got ourselves downtown to the path of the main “Monobloco” parade and picked out a patch of sidewalk to watch from. The crowd hadn’t become a mob yet, but it was thick enough for us not to get lost finding our way from the Metro stop to the parade route.

Now Lea and I have both been to Mardi Gras, and being a Louisiana native I had certain expectations of what a Carnaval celebration should entail: mainly bands and floats promenading down a street whose sidewalks would be a crush of bystanders and onlookers jostling for the best view. My expectations were dashed last week in Foz, and they tripped me up again in Rio – this time in a different way.

Can you party so hard you need a military escort?

I mentioned last week that Carnaval in Brazil seems to center around the “Block Party.” In that vein, a parade in Rio is quite different from its New Orleans counterpart. A Rio parade is a block party that moves.

There was still the crush of people ready to party all day, don’t get me wrong, but there was only one band and one “float” – a giant party wagon with singers and dancers on top, pulled very slowly by a semi. Once the parade begins, the band/float procession inches its way along the route, stopping every half block for fifteen or twenty minutes before crawling onward. The crowd, instead of idly viewing from the sidelines, moves with it. In New Orleans, you watch the parade. In Rio, you are the parade.

Lea and I stood our ground in the mob-shadow created by a stationary beer vendor and let the parade wash over and around us. Once it passed, and once we’d enjoyed enough thumpy Latin pop for the day, we made our way out against the tide of new revelers, beer coolers in hand, who were only then showing up to join the party. I can only imagine that not long after we left, the entire affair must have ground to a standstill – and everyone was probably overjoyed. You can’t party all day if you don’t start in the morning!

That evening we braved Rio’s horrific bus system to see at least one of the iconic landmarks of the city. The most famous is the giant statue of Christ the Redeemer (which we couldn’t stop referring to as “Buddy Christ”) but to get there seemed long, arduous, and expensive. Instead we opted to ride the teleférico to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain, a giant block of granite that overlooks Guanabara Bay with views of the entire city. The nerd in me couldn’t help but point out that it was on top of this very cable car that James Bond fought the assassin Jaws in the (otherwise terrible) film Moonraker.

Christ the Redeemer from a loooong way away.

Next came Beach Day. But how to choose which beach? Rio is known for two: Copacabana and Ipanema. By sheer luck, I managed to rent us a room in easy walking distance from both. We checked out Copacabana first, then rode the bus to Ipanema and found that it was less crowded but extremely dirty. We went back to Copacabana and, as per our beach routine, rented an umbrella and chairs from which to watch the surf.

The surf, let me tell you, was fierce. Though we were some distance from the water and on top of a plateau of sand, rogue waves would wash right under us, dragging away our shoes and water bottles if we weren’t quick enough to grab them.

All told, we spent three nights in Rio, the shortest length of time we’ve spent in any South American city of comparable size. In truth we could have spent a week and not seen everything, but Brazil is just too big and there are other things we want to see. On our last day in town we hit museums – the Museum of Tomorrow, the Museum of Art of Rio, and the Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading which houses the largest collection of works in Portuguese outside of Portugal itself. You’re allowed to take pictures, but you can’t touch anything.

The Cabinet of Reading or the Hogwart’s Library?

Thus began our paddle-ball travel route north to the mining city of Belo Horizonte and its surrounding environs. We took the night bus to Belo Horizonte, arrived around 5:30 a.m., and immediately bought tickets for the town of Brumadinho several hours to the west. (We can’t pronounce “Brumadinho” without concentrating, so we keep calling it Broom-Hilda.) Brumadinho, by the way, was the site of the recent dam collapse that killed hundreds and made international headlines.

Brumadinho is also where you will find Inhotim, an outdoor garden and modern art “theme park” set far back in the Brazilian wilderness. You could spend days wandering its miles of wooded trails to widely separated art installations and galleries. We stayed for several hours before the walking and the weather got the best of us.

The coolest installation is the one farthest from the park entrance. If you walk about two kilometers – all uphill – to the back of the park there is a hill in which the artist Doug Aitken drilled a 200 meter shaft into the earth and placed microphones along its walls. In a room above the shaft, the vibrations picked up by those microphones are amplified into the chamber, allowing you to sit and listen to the sounds of the earth. There were booms and long, sustained notes which Lea thinks might be the P- and S-waves of distant earthquakes. We don’t know for sure, but it’s as awesome a hypothesis as any.

The next day we caught the early bus back to Belo Horizonte and grabbed the noon bus from there to the town of Santa Barbara. From Santa Barbara we took a taxi for another 20km to stay two nights at the Santuário do Caraça, a Catholic seminary and mission set in the midst of an 11,000 hectare nature reserve. There are endless miles of trails you can hike if that’s your thing but the main attraction at the Sanctuary is the chance to see the rare Maned Wolf.

The Maned Wolf is technically not a wolf. It’s South America’s largest canid and resembles a giant red fox the size of a pony with a crest like a hyena, though it’s not related to any of those (certainly not the pony). The reason you can see maned wolves at the Sanctuary is because the monks have been feeding them for decades. It began when they noticed the animals rooting through the monastery’s leftovers and decided to make it easier on them. A tray of meat cuttings is set out in front of the steps to the chapel every night at 7:00 and guests are allowed to sit, wait, and watch. The rules are to not approach the wolves and to not take photos until after the wolves feel comfortable enough to approach the food and grab a few bites.

There’s always the chance that the wolves won’t show, but on our first night they appeared right away and returned to the buffet about every 45 minutes. On the second night we weren’t so lucky – it had been a rainy day and thunderstorms were moving in during the evening. Apparently the wolves weren’t as interested in free food as they were in staying dry.

As brief as each appearance of the wolves was, it was always amazing. I’m used to being around domesticated animals and even small wild animals, but to have a wolf walk right beside you, look inscrutably at you while it dines, then move along without a care in the world – the experience carried a sense of intimacy with the Wild that I didn’t even feel on safari in Africa back in 2012.

Our stay ended with the taxi-bus combo back to Belo Horizonte. Originally the plan was to immediately grab another bus for Ouro Preto, but at this point we’ve regained some flexibility in our schedule and decided to stay put. After two nights in the far outback without even hot water for a shower, we (for the second time on this whole voyage) spent the night at a Holiday Inn.

Our time in Belo Horizonte was brief, as we’d booked a night bus to the coast for the very next evening. Nevertheless, the city surprised us. What we’d seen near the bus terminal wasn’t inspiring, but after moving to another part of town we discovered an entirely different city, with beautiful parks, Chinese buffets, a Mercado Central where we sampled outstanding liver and onions (a dish we both normally hate) and a mineralogy museum with a mind-blowing collection of, well, minerals.

The best liver in Brazil, and it’s at a market stall.

One more weary night ride with a driver who handled his bus like a dirt bike has brought us to the seaside town of Vitoria, where we’ll begin to crawl north along the Atlantic coast. More on that next week, but for now I’ll leave you with a musical send-off:

Waterworld: Iguazú, Part Two

I don’t want to bury the lead, so I’ll start with this: Iguazú is much, much, much more enjoyable from the Argentinian side. If you want to visit both sides of the falls, do what we did and go to Brazil first.

The Brazil side is impressive too, but if you go there after visiting Argentina you will be disappointed. The Argentinian side feels much more like a national park and less like Disneyland. There are more trails, more overlooks, and much more contact with nature (not just the legions of coati trying to steal your food).

And FYI, coati define “food” as “anything in a bag.”

Fair warning – There are a lot of videos in this post. Email subscribers click here or miss the full show.

You’ll also notice that I’m spelling it Iguazú, not Iguaçu. Spanish, baby! I never imagined what a relief it would be to return to a Spanish speaking country, if only for a few days. Though they do share many words, Portuguese has much less in common with Spanish than I thought it would. Lea can pick out a little bit here and there, but I’m completely at a loss. Foz do Iguaçu did have many more Spanish and English speakers than the other parts of Brazil we’ve been to so far, but communication in Puerto Iguazú (the town on the Argentinian side) was so much simpler.

Uncharitable thought for the day: To the untrained ear, Portuguese sounds like Ewoks speaking French.

Also – skipping ahead again – from Puerto Iguazú you can see Paraguay! We decided not to enter Paraguay since it would cost us $160 USD each for the visas, but two kilometers from our hotel was an overlook where you could see three countries at once. Here it is:

Paraguay on the left, Brazil on the right, Argentina in the foreground.

Anyway, last week I left you hanging with the question of whether or not, since we were in Brazil for Carnaval, we would get to experience any Carnaval-related activities. Well – yes, but…

Being a native of Louisiana, I had my own set of expectations about how Mardi Gras should properly be carried out. I had visions of parades, beads, costumes, floats, loud music, and festive Krewes marching down the street. I projected these cultural expectations onto Brazilian Carnaval and while some of them were met, most were not. Looking at the schedule of events in Foz do Iguaçu, there had been a parade on Saturday that we’d missed. There were other activities on Monday and Tuesday which we decided to seek out once we were done with the Brazilian falls experience.

From what we saw, Carnaval in Brazil is centered less on parades and more around the “block party.” The event we found on Monday night was a family-friendly neighborhood party with a band, food trucks, and big inflatable bouncy things for kids to play on. We hung around for a while to see if anything else would happen, such as people promenading in fabulous costumes, but it was not to be. Instead, we did have some excellent shawarma from a restaurant called Bin Ladin. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that Bin Ladin is just a common Arabic surname. Whatever the case, the food was good and inexpensive.

On Fat Tuesday itself, we went hunting for what looked to be the main Carnaval event in the city. The location was simply given as a street name downtown so I assumed this would be the parade we were after. It was not. The event was supposed to begin at 3:00 and last the rest of the day, but we headed to the street in question and, after much walking around, found that one long city block had been cordoned off with a bandstand at one end and entry gates at the other. People were arriving with chairs and coolers, vendors were setting up on the sidewalks, and children were running around spraying each other with silly string. Lea and I picked a patch of sidewalk and settled down to see if anything would happen.

It didn’t.

Apparently, 3:00 p.m. was the setup time for the street, nothing more. Other events were listed as beginning at 6:00 and 7:00 so we went back to our hotel. When we returned later, we discovered that Carnaval in Foz is one massive block party with alcohol, thick crowds, and a band playing loud music. We entered at one end of the block and pushed our way through to the other while randomly taking pictures over the heads of crowd. Many people were dressed up in what looked like neighborhood uniforms – one whole crowd with Superman t-shirts, another with yellow tutus. Compressing all of Foz’s revelers into one city block created the equivalent of the Bourbon Street Crawl minus the throwing of beads.

Lea and I made it from one end to the other, paused to catch our breath, then went to a Brazilian steak house and stuffed ourselves silly with meat. And that was it for our Carnaval experience in Iguaçu.

The next day we crossed the border, found our hotel in Puerto Iguazú, left clothes at a laundry, located the bus terminal, grocery store, an honest-to-God Mexican restaurant, stood in line at the Post Office to mail our last few Argentinian postcards, and got rained on a little. While our days in Foz had been hot and dry, the forecast for Puerto Iguazú promised to be hot and damp. That was fine. We had dry bags and ponchos, and were ready for whatever the rain gods had to offer. As before, we planned to spend two days at the national park – the first to see as much of the falls as possible and the second to hike a nature trail that promised the chance to view more wildlife than on the beaten path.

Day One

We got up really early. Rain was forecast for the afternoon, so instead of bringing my tripod and backpack full of camera gear, we simply brought a drybag, two ponchos, my Canon Rebel T3 with its standard lens, my wide-angle screw-on attachment, and Lea’s ever-trusty waterproof Olympus. The bus to the park was a longer ride than in Brazil, but the crowd to buy tickets and get into the park was nonexistent. The Argentinian side opens earlier than its Brazilian counterpart and we were there on a regular weekday, not a national holiday.

Instead of buses to take you farther into the park, Iguazú offers a very slow-moving train. There are two stops: the first for the trails and the second for the viewing platform over the Devil’s Throat. On this side most people opt for going to the Devil’s Throat first, so we got off at the stop for the trails. This was the right decision. We had the trails almost completely to ourselves. For the first hour or more there were only a handful of other hikers – until the big tour groups finally returned from the Throat platform and met up with us.

There are two sets of trails to view the falls – Upper and Lower. The lower trail is longer and more strenuous but also offers better views of more of the falls. The upper trail takes you along the top of the falls, so all you really see is water rolling over the cliff. The lower trail is – well, breathtaking is too small a word. You can see the full magnitude of Iguazú and can get right up to some of the falls to experience their power first hand.

Photo and video dump commences:

Approaching the longest section of falls.

You can watch a giant flock of birds swirling in the updrafts in this video:

A mated pair of North American hairless apes provided for scale.

The falls keep going and going and going.

After hiking the lower and upper trails it was easy to hop on the train and take it the rest of the way to the Devil’s Throat platform. To be clear, it doesn’t drop you off at the platform itself. It stops at the last nugget of dry land, from which you have to walk a kilometer along a raised walkway over the slow-moving Iguazú River. Along this route there are several stops for you to put on your ponchos and anything important into your dry bag. The fact that everyone you pass on their way back is soaking wet lets you know that this will be important.

While hiking along the metal bridge across the wide expanse of water, we started to hear thunder. It’s always been my hope that if I were to be struck by lightning I’d have just enough advance warning to shout “Shazam!” before it struck and possibly gain superpowers. Doubting that would actually happen we picked up the pace.

By this point you want to have your wetsuit on.

On the Brazil side, you can see the giant cascade at the head of the Devil’s Throat from afar on a tightly packed observation platform while craning your neck around a Japanese lady with an enormous blue hat. On the Argentinian side you are literally hanging right over the thundering void. See for yourself:

My glasses were useless without windshield wipers. Thankfully you don’t need your eyes to feel the power of the fall. Hanging there in space above it is like standing in the middle of a thunderhead. We inched our way around the platform, soaking in every sensation, then scurried back across the walkway to the train, inched the slow way back to the park entrance, and splurged on the park’s magnificent buffet.

We made it to the bus before the rain clouds exploded, but not to the bus station. Though only three blocks from our hotel, we were trapped and had to wait it out under the station’s overhang for an hour while this happened:

Day Two

The rain forecast was still in effect, so we returned to the park early (50% discount if you validated your tickets the day before), skipped the train to the usual tourist spots, and walked out of the park entrance complex in search of the nature trail. I’d switched my wide-angle lens for my telephoto, but otherwise we were geared up the same as the day before. It was at least a kilometer along an access road just to reach the trail head, and from there more than three kilometers to another fall. The ground was muddy and puddled from the day before and we crept along slowly so as not to disturb any wildlife along the way.

We spotted a medium-big cat hurrying across the trail and a Rodent Of Unusual Size but didn’t manage to photograph either. Mostly what we encountered were insects, birds (from a great distance), and the giant scary-ass spiders that cover the entire area with their huge webs, many of which are just above head-height.

The main thing we were after were the monkeys that were supposed to live in this area, but two kilometers in there had still been no sign. Our joints were tired from the past week’s excessive hiking and we were afraid of getting deluged on again, so at the 2km post we turned and headed back.

Soon though, something up in the trees started shaking water out of the higher branches. We looked up and there they were: spread through the trees around us were what must have been a whole troop of monkeys. They were in the highest reaches of the branches nibbling on leaves and whatever else they found, just at the edge of my telephoto’s range and ridiculously hard to focus on even when they weren’t jumping from tree to tree. Every now and then I swear one of them noticed me and stopped to check me out, probably because of the sound of my shutter. From over a hundred photos blurrier than Bigfoot, I did manage to catch a few of them pausing for a moment to reflect on their little monkey lives.

That wrapped our time at Iguazú Falls. We ended the night with pizza and hot dogs from the restaurant next to our hotel. The next day brought a 4:00 a.m. alarm clock for a 6:00 a.m. taxi across the border and a 12:45 flight to Río de Janeiro. We were tired but quite happy from our experience at the falls, but a little disappointed that we’d missed the full experience of Carnaval.

But had we? On my calendar Carnaval was over, but Río had a surprise in store. Next week, faithful readers. Same Bat-Time, Same Bat-Station.

Heaven & Hell: Iguaçu, Part One

I haven’t been completely honest with you. If you’ve read this blog, you may have come away with the impression that long term travel has its ups and downs, but in the long run – despite the difficulties – it’s very much worth it. Hopefully at some point in the future I’ll be able to look back and agree with that sentiment, but I haven’t written about the full truth of the situation. The truth I’ve left out is the part where I’ve been suffering chronic, intense, agonizing pain for the past several months.

It began in Bolivia, where I put it down to the effects of high altitude. It continued off and on through Chile, where I assumed the source of the pain was related to a known medical issue that I’ve already dealt with for several years. That assumption was incorrect.

The pain escalated throughout Argentina and became pretty much unbearable by the time we reached Mendoza. (“Unbearable” is a funny word, because when you’re stuck in the wilderness of the Argentinian outback you’ve got no choice but to bear it.) Since we had left behind the South American equivalent of the Gobi Desert and returned to civilization, I called our expat health insurance and arranged an appointment with a doctor in Córdoba.

I’m being deliberately coy about what my medical problem is because 1) I don’t want to say and 2) you don’t want to know. Suffice it to say that the doctor in Córdoba diagnosed the problem, prescribed medication, and suggested a course of self-treatment. That was five weeks ago. Treated, this problem should clear itself up in four-to-six weeks, yet while the pain has lessened (on most days) it’s still there. When it flares up it hurts worse than just about anything I’ve ever experienced, and that includes broken bones, an incarcerated hernia, and gout.

The result, dear readers, is that a lot of the awesome sights and experiences I’ve shared on this blog I’ve experience through a fog of pain. On some days, such as when we sat on the beach in Uruguay, I was merely squirming in discomfort. On others, such as when we visited a bird sanctuary I’ll get to below, I felt like I would rather pass out. I could have left the park but, as I told myself, the pain would follow me wherever I went, so why not suffer through it while looking at beautiful birds?

Now that I’ve bummed you out, on with the story!

Hell:

Last week I left you hanging as we were about to depart Porto Alegre for Florianópolis. That was after we’d driven our rental back to Porto Alegre, three hours in the wrong direction, instead of simply heading north. After dropping off our car, we went to the bus terminal and waited, waited, waited in sweltering, sticky heat. It had rained all day but that hadn’t dropped the temperature – especially not in Porto Alegre’s extremely busy terminal where the heat from all those buses washed through the station like steam from Lucifer’s hot tub.

Our bus didn’t leave until 11:00 p.m. The bus itself was air conditioned, but only when it was running. This particular bus stopped at every small town and off-the-main-road terminal along the route, and the driver kept turning the bus off and on again – I guess to save gas? At one point, perhaps at two in the morning, they shut the bus off for half an hour while the staff went to have dinner, turning the inside into a sauna. Yes, everyone else could get out and snack at 2:00 a.m. as well, but the whole point of taking the night bus is to sleep.

We arrived in Florianópolis at 6:00 in the morning. We weren’t staying long. Florianópolis is a large-ish city on an island just off the Brazilian coast, but it’s on the side that faces the mainland across a narrow channel. The apartment we’d rented was on the Atlantic side of the island, in the Ingleses Sul neighborhood an hour away by local bus. We wouldn’t be able to check in until 10:00, so we hung out in the station with our post-bus-ride headaches and, as long as we were there, bought really expensive first-class seats to our next destination. The trek to Foz do Iguaçu was going to be a fifteen-hour ordeal and we would be traveling on a holiday weekend, so we wanted to make sure we had seats we could tolerate.

The only break we could catch.

As in Porto Alegre, it was raining in Florianópolis. The bus to Ingleses Sul only ran once an hour, so we hiked several blocks through the drizzle and waited at the bus stop under a blessedly sheltering overhang. The bus arrived and should have dropped us off at about the right time for our check in, but that morning no one but us and two other people were taking that route. The bus blew by nearly every stop and dropped us off in Ingleses Sul an hour before our apartment would be ready.

And it was still raining.

Though near the beach, we’d washed up in a mostly residential area with not a single open café where we could wait. We ended up sheltering under a leaky tin awning in front of a closed convenience store eating pastries Lea bought at the grocery just down the street. The rain finally eased up, check-in time arrived, and we dragged our tired bodies and four backpacks down the road to our apartment.

Heaven:

We really got lucky with this apartment. It had a real kitchen with a full-size stove and refrigerator. It was better, I dare say, than the one we had in Santiago, and a million times better than any we’d had in Argentina. It had air conditioning that worked. It had a shower that worked. It had a couch. It had a shady courtyard. Unlike every other option in our price range, it was only two blocks from the beach. And get this – the owners had beach chairs and umbrellas you could borrow for free.

Ingleses Sul isn’t an exciting place, but let me tell you – they know how to beach. The beach there is long but extremely narrow. Wherever you plant yourself, you can be sure that sooner or later a wave is going to wash under you. But that’s okay. We stayed for four nights, and every day the forecast was the same – not too hot, not too cold, mostly cloudy with a little bit of sun and a chance of rain in the afternoon. On Tuesday and Thursday the beach was crowded. On Wednesday it was surprisingly empty. (Higher chance of rain, sure, or maybe Wednesday is the designated day off for all the vendors?)

Oh yeah, beach vendors – Here’s a thing we didn’t see in Uruguay and that I’d been craving since Ecuador: guys going up and down the beach offering cold adult beverages. Caipirinhas. Caipiroskas. Piña coladas. Not to mention the guys selling fire-grilled cheese on a stick or chorizo in a bun with slaw. That’s the way to do it, señor. That’s the way to do it. On Tuesday I walked nearly all the way up and down the beach several feet out into the surf. On the other days we just sat where the alley from our apartment let out and waited for tasty treats to come by. When the rains came in the afternoon, we moseyed back to our apartment and napped.

Boring? Perhaps, but it was everything I’d been wanting.

Purgatory:

The day it finally got hot in Florianópolis was the day we had to leave our cool apartment and hang out in another bus station. We dropped off our luggage and went in search of a museum that wasn’t there (no one had bothered to tell TripAdvisor). The city was gearing up for Carnival, downtown was very crowded, the wind had died almost completely, and the temperature spiked over 90. We ate at a lovely poke-bowl restaurant and slugged back to the bus station sauna.

Our bus company had a V.I.P. lounge that we’d hoped would be cooler than the rest of the terminal, but so many bodies were packed in there that it felt like it was over 100. So instead, we baked in the main waiting hall and savored some quickly-melting ice cream. We didn’t have as long to wait since our bus left at 6:00 p.m. When we got on board we found out – to our amazement – that the expensive seats we’d paid for didn’t simply give us more arm and leg room, but were designed to lay all the way down and become actual beds. This, let me tell you, was wonderful beyond belief, since it let us actually sleep and helped keep my pain under control despite the fact that the road from Florianópolis to Foz was insanely bumpy.

This bird has never experienced “bumpy” in his life.

Our room in Foz do Iguaçu was one that we’d booked well ahead of time. Iguaçu Falls is one of the sights we knew we had to see on this trip, but it took us a while to decide if we would approach it from Brazil or Argentina. We decided on Brazil (though we’ll visit the Argentinian side too) but we’d also needed to make reservations well in advance for Carnival. It was my bright idea to combine the two, which let us avoid spending Carnival in the crush of Río or another big city. However, it also landed us at one of Brazil’s major tourist attractions on one of the biggest holiday weekends of the year.

The hostel we found was ideally situated just outside of the central area of the city of Foz do Iguaçu on the road that leads directly to the park, so all we had to do was walk to the corner and hop on a bus. Usually after a night trip we’re too ragged out to do anything but wander around like zombies, but since we were both able to sleep for once we decided to go ahead and start seeing the sights. We’d save the Falls for the next day, but we started with a visit to the Parque das Aves (Bird Park) just outside the entrance to Iguaçu Falls park itself.

The Parque das Aves is a bird rescue and conservation reserve. The birds are all in aviaries so that some of them you can only view through mesh screens. Several of the aviaries, however, you can walk through and get very close to the birds themselves. The birds are amazing, from many species I’d never seen before, and many of whom are endangered (or even extinct) in the wild. I wish I could have enjoyed it more but as I said earlier, the chronic pain I’ve been feeling kicked into full blast during our visit and it felt like I was seeing all these amazing creatures from inside a scorching hot torture box.

Seeing Heaven from Hell:

On Sunday it was time to do what we came for: see the falls. Iguaçu Falls, on the Brazil/Argentinian border, are actually a confluence of many cascades that make up the largest waterfall system in the world. You can view them from either country and there are different activities to do on each side. Some you can do and stay dry. Some will get you soaked.

On Day One we opted to get soaked. We brought shorts, water shoes, Lea’s waterproof camera, and a small dry bag. We’d read that there was a lower trail where you could view the falls but get wet doing so, and that there was an into-the-falls boat ride you could do for an extra fee.

We also decided to sleep in and go to the falls in the afternoon. Big mistake.

We arrived and bought our tickets at an electronic kiosk rather than wait in the line for the ticket counters. There was a deep discount for buying two days at once, though it locked us in to coming right back on the following day and not skipping one in between. Then we got in line to get into the park.

Ladies and gents, that line was an hour and a half long. There were three parts: a loop-de-loop through the bus drop-off area, an outside rat maze, and indoor rat maze. Halfway through the indoor maze they scan your ticket, and at the end of all this you get on a bus to take you to the drop-off point of your choice in the park itself. Entry to the park closes at 5:00, and the last bus to bring people out runs at 6:30. We left our hostel at 2:00, and it was 4:30 before we even got into the park. We decided to skip any trails and go right to the boat ride.

The boat ride was disappointing. First, the wayfinding at the park is awful in general, but particularly at the boat launch. First you ride a very slow open-air wagon down to the upper platform where you can rent a locker to store anything you don’t want drenched, then you take a short funicular down to the river where you get in line for your boat. At every point along the way you have to ask someone “where do I go next” because there is absolutely no signage to direct you and there is no logical flow to the human traffic.

The boat ride takes you up the rapids towards the falls, which is fun, but doesn’t get nearly as close to the big falls as we’d hoped. You can glimpse them in the distance, but the boats never venture farther than several of the lower, smaller falls, which they slowly dunk you under. The ride does have some nice views, but for several key minutes of the journey there’s a member of the boat crew in a blue rainsuit standing right in front of you taking pictures with a GoPro to sell to you later. The whole thing is a disorganized, overpriced theme park ride. Leaving the boat launch at the end went so slowly that we barely made it out of the park before they shut down and locked up behind us.

On Monday we got up early and hopped on the bus to get there when the park opened. This involved arguing with the bus driver, who didn’t want to drive his route all the way to the end and instead wanted to dump his passengers at the Bird Park and make them walk. Thankfully we weren’t the only ones to argue about this and when we got to the park entrance there was hardly a line at all.

The line, or rather the mosh pit, would be at the falls themselves.

The viewing, pushing, shoving, and squeezing platform.

Beyond the stop for the boat cruise, there is a bus stop at the beginning of the hiking trail. The next one is the stop for the restaurant, shopping area, and main viewing platform. What the park wants you to do is get off at the trail, walk to the falls from that direction, and then spend your money at the gift shop and buffet. We chose to ride all the way to the end, start from the viewing platform, and work our way backward. I’m not sure if that made things better or worse, but we would have been fighting the swarming mass of humanity either direction.

The falls themselves are magnificent. They’re amazing. They go on forever, it seems. And while viewing them it feels like being crushed against the stage in the front rows at a Metallica concert. Given that there were this many people there in the morning when the entrance line was low, I can’t imagine what it must have been like later in the day. Busload after busload poured into the trails, with more people taking selfies instead of enjoying the beauty around them than even at Machu Picchu.

I want the power to make selfie sticks explode with my brain.

We never did find a trail that would soak you with anything more than a fine mist (unlike visiting Victoria Falls, which felt like walking through a carwash). We did find that people were rude in the extreme and we had to stand our ground many times to avoid being shoved off the narrow path.

The path was also crawling with coati, cute little members of the raccoon family. We saw one of these fellows from a distance way back in Guatemala, but the coati at Iguaçu have identified humans as a food source (despite all the signs advising not to feed them) and will come right up to you. If you have a bag, they will at the very least sniff it, if not outright steal it. I think my favorite moment was watching one lady get her purse invaded by a clever coati while she was posing for a picture.

Four days of peace, three days of excitement, two long bus rides. We’re about to take a dip back into Argentina and experience the falls again, despite impending rain in the forecast. On a lighter note, the pain I’ve been bitching about has been getting better, and aside from that one horrible flare-up at the bird park has been steadily improving.

But wait, you say, wasn’t this also Carnival weekend? Hopefully I’ll have more to report on that. Stay tuned, dear readers. Stay tuned.