Noah's Travel Journal - South America, Ninth Entry

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Super Sized

I'd seen the look before. Feigning perplexity, the beurocrat with a chip on his shoulder finished scanning my papers and prepared to drop the bull. Bullet proof glass and a huge Brazilian doorman forced me to smile back at the smirking official who quoted a minimum of one week of processing time. If I was a Brazilian stuck in the scorching, dry heat of Santiago, I probably wouldn't be so apt to grant a 90-day passage into my homeland either...but that smirk!

The fascination with Santiago's flora was waning as Samba music drifted across the Argentine pampas and through the window of our hostel. Not a duo to be put off by an early morning tourist visa rejection, Zan and I bought bus tickets to Buenos Aires leaving the following morning. Like true bargain shoppers, we were traveling to the continent's opposite coast to catch a sale that might not even exist. The last ranks of the diabetic camp crew saw us off as we readied for another 20-hour bus ride that had now become second nature to my rump. Real deal hunters don't travel by plane, they become one with their numb cheeks.

The events that transpired upon arriving the following morning happened in such quick succession that fragments of sentences are all they deserve: taxi to hostel, subway to embassy, run to bank and photo shop, doctor application information while standing in line, receive visa and bus tickets the following afternoon and then take a breath before boarding our bus the next morning. Shoppers, it was a blue-light special on Aisle 3: a cheaper visa, a 24-hour processing period, and a country with a stronger exchange rate with our ever-declining dollar. When a hurdle appears, jump over it...or just take a bus around the side.

I awoke briefly for a 2:30 a.m. border crossing and then fell back into nightmares about the small amount of money we had exchanged. The presence of modern, itemized, roadside mega-cafeterias confirmed my unease. The lush Brazilian vegetation kept my mind off of the problem until we arrived in Florianopolis that evening.

My brother and I had been traveling for long enough to know our favorite activities and how to be properly equipped for them. However, this boy scout mentality of preparedness now had us toting our two ridiculously over-sized backpacks (with many unused and unnecessary items), a duffel bag filled with premium-quality kayaking garb, a guitar and another duffel of juggling toys, supplies to make the toys and a hand drum. Other situational variables playing a lead part in the orchestra of paranoia were Brazil's reputation for violent crime after dark, bus station cash machines that don't dispense to foreigners, our minimal Portuguese skills and the fact that we didn't know of any cheap lodging. As we followed the unintelligible lodging directions from a taxi driver and descended the terminal overpass into a throng of heavily tattooed prostitutes, I found myself wishing for one of those wretched tourist guidebooks for the first and only time in my life.

We booked it towards the beaming fluorescence of a gas station, made a withdrawal and gladly had the cabby take us for a ride (in every sense of the phrase) before ending up at the hotel, four blocks from the bus station. The Dollar Store fan cut through the thick, humid air like a blunt knife through frozen butter, but it was only for a night. A dear friend had jumped the gun on our Florianopolis rendezvous and was on her way to Rio de Janeiro. Only a short 18-hour ride away...ha!

After some investigation of temporary lodging options, we ended up in a hostel three blocks from Rio's famed Copacabana beach. It was here that we met up with our hometown friend on a term of leave from Oregon's educational juggernaut that pumps out one Duckling after another. We quickly located a cheap apartment before the approaching tourist flood and prepared for a BIG week.

Rio's Maracaná stadium complements the country's acclaimed soccer reputation: epic. A match in the largest soccer stadium in the world was a perfect start to the mammoth week. Christ the Redeemer's open arms of forgiveness on the hilltop reached for the stands shaking with Samba music, but were kept at bay by battle cries of bloody murder from a Guns 'n Roses stylized, skeleton-pirate team mascot.

Next on the 'To-Do' list was the biggest name in music. Manu Chao, a real-life revolutionary hero who is despised by governments and loved by the people, was playing a concert in an intimate venue at the base of the Lapa aqueduct. His original group's (Mano Negra) international fan-base made the Grateful Dead's following look as significant as one word in a dictionary. Forced by governments to disband after every concert sparked massive social protests, the living legend continues his solo work and was in the area after a performance at the World Economic Forum near by.

In a venue that held less than 1,000 people, we witnessed a show that's memory still conjures goose bumps. When Chao donned a coat and ventured into the crowd incognito, to watch the French group that he was touring with, we got to meet and converse with one of the few men that I could think to compare with Che Guevara's influence. I gave him a hug, told him he was a true revolutionary and then cried and screamed like a prepubescent girl at an N'sync concert.

A couple days later it was time for the world renowned Rio Carnival. Everyone told us not to stay in town, but we had to know firsthand if the biggest celebration in the world was really not worth attending. There was some doubt as well about the actual size of the celebration, but I am now convinced that any dispute of grandeur can now be silenced. Let it suffice to say that while viewing the parade on one of two big nights, we were in one of 14 sections (ours with space for 9,500 spectators), and each of the seven, 80-minute parading Samba groups had an average of 5,000 members. Our section's tickets were the cheapest and received special attention by performers because it was the only place where many of the Brazilians could afford to watch the festivities from. After seeing the parade floats and Samba queens, America's squeamish attitude to exposed skin in public was really laughable.

The parade ranked #1 on our list of Most Touristy Attractions to date. The parade was the Carnival scene we'd been warned not to stay for. The real festivities happened in the streets around Lapa with an off-night artisan and youth crowd of some 20,000 people. It was here that we teamed up with a Chilean juggling compatriot to put on the show that we had been dreaming about ever since our first real performance in Huaraz, Peru. The singed arm hair and cheering was a refreshing reminder of the unparalled experiences found outside of large packs of tourists stationed around the watering hole.

I got a tip later that night from Reynardo, our Chilean friend, of a Capoeira community up in the North of Brazil where he was headed. The Brazilian martial art is the basis for many moves in break dancing, but even my experience in the latter had not saved me from a savage whipping by a little girl in a Capoeira demonstration the week prior. Thoughts of sweet revenge danced around in my head with glee. After some training I'd be ready to take that 10 year-old down a peg.

Our one-bedroom apartment had never received so much quality time in its entire existence. The six or seven regular residents all had a chance to get to know every inch of available floor area intimately for the duration of the festivities. Our crew, now three Eugenians strong, parted with our happy home and fellow occupants, and finally broke free of The Redeemer's 24/7, loving embrace. Astronomers claim that black holes playing for keeps cannot be seen, but they haven't trained their sights on the second largest city in Brazil. It had taken almost three weeks to break the vortex's gravitational tractor-beam.

The laid back atmosphere of Saquarema, two hours to the North, was something we had forgotten could exist. The site of the World Surfing Championship in years past, had somehow managed to stay off the Must-See lists of most guidebooks. We found a room above an organic pizza restaurant and waited in our private swimming pool for clean sheets to arrive.

The town had a beautiful, eerily-lit church overlooking an amazing surfable coastline, but I found my one true love down by the bus depot. A net fence surrounded six rectangular gymnast trampolines, and for $1 they were mine until fatigue-induced vomit threatened. It had been 10 months since I had trained on a trampoline bed, but my muscle memory told me it felt up to the challenge. Soaring above the safety fence build for children, I could still execute spinning flips that, even with a slightly botched rotation, would put any uninsured American company and myself, six feet under. Down here though, operators just want the dollar while there's still enough neural function to control a hand reaching for a wallet.

As I've now grown accustomed to, the necessary next step in the voyage always comes while juggling. As I was practicing under a palm on the waterfront, I made friends with a Brazilian who happened to be a capoeira master. Over the next few days of training I acquired the fundamentals of the art, as well as an introduction to the branch of capoeira involving staff twirling. Just when I ran out of juggling toys to play with, along came the birimbao.

We spent the next week-and-a-half visiting a myriad of beautiful beaches which, when compared to the entire Brazilian coastline, made up a whopping one or two percent. There was a long way to go before being able to consider ourselves connoisseurs of the super-sized seaboard. My beach-bumming efforts were matched by a much more meaningful goal of writing a piece for the upcoming issue of the Insulin Free Times. I thought about mentioning and praising their magnificent publication with a May release in my update, but I decided that would be too cheeky.

Modeling the Apollo 13 technique, we used the outer edge of the black hole's gravitational pull to slingshot our trio South of Rio, to Ilha Grande. Imagine the most beautiful turquoise water dotted with jungled clusters of white-sand islands that would grace a motivational poster for 'Tranquility,' and you come close to the Big Island and its children. Lagoons and beaches rush up to meet the dense jungle that cover's the huge island's mountainous interior.

The island's Lopez Mendez beach, which usually ranks in the top 3 of most lists for best beaches in the world, maxed-out in every category we had been using to rate previous sites. The atmosphere put us in such a good mood that we didn't even mind serving as body surfing speed bumps for local surfers. Brazilian locals reportedly make die-hard Hawaiian surfers look forgiving to foreigners riding the same wave. With our arms and legs still intact, we called it a day and trekked home through the jungle.

Our last day on the island was spent rappelling down the face of a waterfall on jungle vines and then making our own trail through the jungle by boulder-hopping downhill to whatever beach lay ahead. We encountered two other intrepid travelers among the boulders from New York and Israel, who detested guidebooks just as much as our trio. Disoriented and five strong, we continued navigating downward into the unknown. Lonely Planet, Footprint, and Shoestring guidebooks beware: even in a colossal country like Brazil, the original experiences people crave will not be found in a bible of eroded and carefully mapped game trails. As if that's a secret...