Buenos dias,
Well we are now up in La Paz, Bolivia. It was an interesting and at times frightening mission to get here across 3 flights, 2 buses and a cab ride where Krys and I were convinced we were going to lose our kidneys. But I’ll leave that to another time.
Anyway, when we left you last time we had just escaped from the set of a low budget, soft p#rn movie set disguised as a cute little Rio cafe. Thankfully the next week was far more relaxing.
After Rio it was down to Ilha Grande, which is an island off the Brazilian coast, and where there was not much to do except swim, drink and eat. Given a large portion of my backpack is approaching the ‘body hugging’ stage we did try to go on a couple of walks to try and temporarily halt the expansion process at ‘muffin topping’. The first walk was through a little track that should have been easy for us, but within 10mins I was breathing harder than an asthmatic elephant seal and had managed to slide down a portion of it on my backside in white board shorts. So we got to the next town (all of 40mins away) not only looking like I’d just piggy backed Meatloaf the entire way, but also with short stains that looked like he had threatened to make me listen to an elongated live performance. The walk also brought out Krys’ extreme fascination with monkeys and she carried a banana trying to lure them out from the tree – perhaps she just wanted to experience a more evolved level of interaction than what I had been providing the past few weeks. But in my defence, I had stopped throwing excrement at people once she said that it was not appropriate.
Our other exploration attempt fared little better. We had been told about a cute little grotto, which was a narrow little cave that you can climb into that has water illuminated by sunlight at the bottom. We received typical Brazilian directions; walk over the hill, you’ll get to an open area walk for another 15mins then you’ll find it. The directions said nothing about a fork in the path 5mins in. Paper, scissors, rock suggested we take the path on the right.
After walking for 45mins something started not to feel right. The ‘track’ had almost disappeared, and we were left pushing through bushes and walking across ‘bridges’ which were little more than thick pieces of timber laid down unsteadily between 2 rocks. Then the ‘path’ abruptly ended on the porch of a cabin that conformed to no building codes I’d ever seen, and housed two Brazilians living like toothless versions of Crocodile Dundee.
They were startled; almost as much as we were. We tried in our best charades mixed with Portuguese ‘grotto, grotto?’. With a look on his face that seemed to indicate an internal battle between helping us or enjoying a fleshy tourist meal, he looked like he was trying to say ‘back over the hill then turn right’. Or he could be saying ‘you have 10mins head start before I hunt you down, eat you and feed the scraps to my pet chickens’. On reflections my charades for ‘cave we can crawl into’ complete with large circle and crawling motions may have looked like I was asking to explore his backside.
Then on our hasty retreat back to the fork in the path, we bumped into a larger and more festive group of locals. This time Krys tried ‘grotto grotto’ while I did the backside exploration motions but again we were met while blank faces. Finally, one of the group seemed to comprehend, and motioned for us to follow him around the back of the house. We tentatively followed, wary this could be another chicken feeding trap. But instead we walked into what appeared to be a family birthday party in full swing, where our friend appeared bearing cake for Krystal. Can only imagine that Krys’ pronunciation of ‘grotto, grotto’ loosely translated into ‘willing to leave my underwhelming, backside exploring partner for a small slice of fruit loaf’.
I grabbed Krys before she could accept the fruit loaf offer, and we set off again in what we thought was the right direction. But after trudging for ages straight up a hill in the hot sun, we decided we were beaten and the grotto mission was officially aborted. So 2hrs of walking brought us a lucky escape from some Brazilian nomads, a relationship offer based on fruit loaf, and Krys cursing my lack of interest in being a “Scout” when I was younger (I thought that was for strange kids in in brown neck ties?).
While on Ilha Grande we took a boat ride to a beautiful beach on the other side of the island that had surf. And I was desperate to have a go. There were a group of Brazilians on the shore who appeared done for the day (either that or they just carry the board down then sit around getting drunk and trying to kiss each other), so I had the idea of offering them some money to hire their board for a little while.
So I approached a young lady and tried to ask if I could rent her board. She appeared to have learnt only one English word; ‘negotiate’. Given my last effort at offering a Brazilian for a favour saw me laughed away from a Brazilian pizzeria, I was more than a little tentative. So on the first number I heard that I could recognise, I said ‘si’. So for $20 I got a 20min surf on a board that was about 5 sizes too small and missing a large chunk of the nose, and another embarrassing lesson in Brazilian negotiation techniques.
Our trip to Ilha Grande finished off with a big night with the owners of the Villa we were staying at. We had some duty free whiskey to get through and they were only too happy to oblige. Only issue came when I put a little coke into my mix; the look from the very large South African chef indicated a mixture of potential violence, pity or suspicion that I may be a lady-boy. Given he was so large I wouldn’t have argued if he told me to spoon him until he fell asleep, it was straight whiskey from then on.
More to tell about Iguassu and La Paz, but the altitude here has made my brain sore and even slower than usual. If it gets much slower my thinking will be going backwards. It’s taking me about 10mins just to put pants on in the morning. Krys has found me, semi dressed, wandering in confused circles in the room like a dog hunting for a long forgotten buried bone until she directs me to the next step in the ‘getting dressed’ routine. So I’ll save more for another time.
Adios.
Krys and Trent spooning a large South African man.
smallthoughts 