The Wizard of Oz

It's true to say that we were more than a little concerned about our trip down under.

First note of concern was the length of time we'd be travelling. We firstly headed from Rio to Santiago in Chile; this flight was only about four hours but was last thing at night so we didn't end up getting to our hotel until the wee small hours of the following morning, although it was fortunately placed. being as it was directly outside the arrivals exit!

The following day we put our luggage into storage and got a taxi into town. We spent a glorious day in Santiago, wandering round, eating fresh fish in the market and drinking (big shock I know) some nice wine. We also got chance to visit a museum where there was a special exhibition on allowing you to watch the artists at work, plus some slightly bizarre neon and fluorescent heads and little bodies all covered in pins.

We made our way back to the airport at the end of what was a lovely, but quite long day, we thought very early to make sure we got good seats for the dreaded plane to Oz. Imagine our surprise when the rest of the plane already appeared to be in line before us. It slowly dawned on us that the reason was that the airline is notorious for over subscribing this particular flight (although we're not sure why everyone is so keen to leave the continent!) and so it was we were asked if we would mind switching flights to the following day if we were put up over night and given some travel vouchers. A quick confab later and we had agreed not to give up our seats for anything less than an upgrade to business class. Unfortunately this was also over subscribed the following day and so it was that their pleas fell on our deaf ears and we headed for departures.

The flight to Australia via Auckland was not too heinous, most flights tend not to be as long as work does not lie at the destination, although we wouldn't be particularly recommending the airline LAN to any of you. Siobhán made a new friend on the flight, a four year old Kiwi boy with an Argentinean mother, from where they were returned following a visit to Grandma and Grandad. Siobhán finally seemed to have found her intellectual equal as she set about entertaining him for the length of the flight (or was it the other way round?) but she was finally beaten when her new friend wanted to play hangman in Spanish . . . he seemed rather confused as to why Siobhán was not more able to help him!

Melbourne finally reared it's head, following a transfer from Sydney and we set about deciphering Aisling's directions. We did not actually have a house number, rather a description, which she later claimed was a mistake, but I wander whether she really wanted us to visit . . . ;)

Now, those of you who know me will realise that I am already enamoured with Australia from an earlier trip to Sydney and the East Coast, with their beautiful weather and friendly people even managing to out weigh their rather irritating ability to beat us a pretty much any sport you would care to name and Melbourne did not lesson this. It was a stunning city, easily navigable by foot from side to side thanks largely to its flatness and friendliness towards pedestrians. Siobhán and I spent many a pleasant hour wandering round the city, suburbs and Vic market, an even more impressive food market than our dear own Borough.

The highlight of our travels to Melbourne was obviously catching up with our old friend (no comment on her age I promise) Aisling, who has taken up this fine city as her current abode. It is here that lay the root of our second fear for our trip to Australia. The issue was, that when Aisling was living in London she was rather insatiable from a socialising point of view and many were the night that Siobhán and I would have to retire, tale between our legs, as Aisling and her more energetic friends would continue on to yet another club or bar in the early (or sometimes even late) hours of the morning. We were fearful therefore of not being able to keep up and being rightfully chastised for our lethargy.

Little should we have feared as it turned out as Aisling would seem to be broken! No more is the non-stop party goer, she is now one of us! Happy to end the night with the date the same when she returned as when she began and even (on rare occasion) requiring a night off!

Joking aside, whilst the nights were not filled with loud music and clubs as we had feared, we had some great evenings out dining on fine food and wine and meeting up with all of Aisling’s lovely new friends, including Joe a very amiable and generous Canadian who even welcomed Siobhán and I onto his birthday dinner.

One of the more memorable nights had to be the evening we had arranged to meet up with Rachel, a girl Siobhán used to work with at JP and who is now good friends with Aisling. The night in question was to a show in the Spiegeltent (http://www.spiegeltent.net/) where we endured, and I'm afraid that is the only way to describe the show itself, a small white man giving a performance as Grace Jones, the famous Amazonianly statuesque black woman . . . it was bizarre to say the least! That being said we did have a fantastic night getting to meet up with a large group of Aisling’s new friends and partying away into the early hours of the morning.

The highlight of the trip, was without doubt the road trip the three of us enjoyed down the Great Ocean Road. We had hired a car and stocked up with fabulous food and drink form the Vic market and spent three days driving down and back to visit the 12 Apostles (some big rocks in the sea) and spending the nights in holiday camps, where for a change copious quantities of wine were consumed and the two girls lost themselves in 8 year old versions of themselves on a large inflatable pillow!

There is a nasty rumour circulating that I myself succumbed to the guilty pleasures of jumping on a large cushion of air, but I'm afraid such scandalous rumours will not be tolerated on this site, particularly without photographic evidence!

Anyway, no sooner had our time in Oz begun than it was over and we caught our penultimate flight of the journey, as we headed into the unknown that is China . . .

We're back, baby!

Ok, I appreciate that this may be a little out of sequence as the blog doesn't yet cover Australia or any of China but hey, we were too busy enjoying ourselves!

We got back in from Hong Kong at 05:15 on Friday morning, to be met by my parents who had got up at 03:00 in the morning to fetch us from Heathrow; fairly impressive considering my previous slanderous comments about my fathers age, I'm sure you'll agree.

Anyway, Siobhán is back to work on Monday, but as I am now officially part of the Great Unwashed, I will be endeavouring to finish off the blog for our own reminiscence, so if you are interested and would like to see how we finished our travels please do pop back over the next week or two as I keep myself entertained by putting in the final entries. If you no longer care, tough, it'll be here anyway.

The Wedding Crashers

Ok, well maybe it wasn’t a wedding, but we do seem to have got pretty good at getting involved in peoples honeymoons. Indeed Parity seems to be a fairly popular destination for honeymooners from various countries, with two newly wed couples staying at our Pousada and several more with whom we ended up spending time.

Before I go any further, I must thank Mendel with whom I used t work at BarCap, as it is he who suggested we spend time in Parity and it is a truly beautiful spot. The Pousada where we were lodging was the top recommendation from Trip Advisor (the travellers Bible) and it turned out to be a beautifully constructed boutique hotel owned by an American former network engineer (maybe that could be a career for me, when it turns out our impromptu travels have destroyed my once promising career!) and his artist wife, who couldn’t do enough to recommend places to go, lend a bike to get around on, or provide maps and recommendations for days out.

We managed to fit in a couple of dives, a jeep tour through the jungle where Siobhán froze under a waterfall, and afternoons and evenings, trawling around the stunning old town, one of which we spent in the company of another Brazilian lady and her American husband at the grandly (if perhaps slightly suspectly) named Academy of Food and Other Pleasures. This entailed three other couples (all newly wed and rather tragically nearly all in Investment Banking), plus ourselves spending an evening in the hosts beautiful home, being taught how to make a risotto and drinking as much red wine as you could handle. It turned out that the chef (the lady of the host couple) has also just written a cookery book, at the request of a publisher and as we speak should be embarking upon a world wide publicity tour for it.

It was on our last day in Parity that we had the good fortune to meet another newly-wed couple who were staying at our Pousada, Ian and Lorraine. Ian an actor and carpenter and Lorraine who is the spitting image of Thandi Newton were given the same advise as ourselves by the Pousada proprietor, of a beach side restaurant and bar that would be a good place to spend the afternoon. We arrived a little after them at the beach and sheepishly introduced ourselves, as we recognised them from the hotel. Within about five minutes we were alll sitting around a table, drinking the strongest passion fruit Caiprinhas you have ever seen in your life and that is where we remained for the following six or seven hours, covered from what had become an unfortunately rain drenched afternoon, but which bearly registered on us as we chatted away like old friends, getting more and more drunk!

The following day we had to head off to catch a bus to Rio, but not before we had exchanged contact details and agreed to meet up in Rio on our final day, when Ian and Lorraine would also be in town. The final bus journey to Rio was again rather arduous, but none the less we finally made it to our hotel, dropped off our bags and headed to reception to ask for a map of the area so we could go and get some dinner. At this point, you may have thought we had just suggested to the receptionist that we would like to take a stroll around Baghdad wearing “I Love Bush!” T-Shirts, such was his apparent dread at what we had proposed. Liking to think we are careful about such things, we heeded the gentlemans advice and took a taxi to a restaurant he booked for us, deciding we would decide during day light hours if Rio was quite as inhospitable as he was attempting to suggest.

By the gleam of daylight (and plenty of rain) it is fair to say, that Rio did not quite match the pictures we had in our heads of tanned beauties and muscle bound show-offs, strutting around Copacabana beach, but at the same time nor did it turn out to be Beirut on a bad day!

We slowly built up our courage over the next few days through visiting the usual sights such as Christ the Redeemer and Sugar Loaf Mountain and had decided that our final evening in Rio was to be spent in Lapa (what is considered perhaps the worst part of town), sampling the local nightlife and Samba clubs, when as luck would have it we received an email from Ian and Lorraine who had arrived in Rio early due to non-stop rain in Parity since we had left. We called them up and arranged to meet in Santa Theresa for drinks . . . well it didn’t take long for us to get back in the swing of things and four hours later we persuaded the perhaps dubious Ian to accompany us down into Lapa at some time approaching midnight.

Four more drink fueled hours swept by and we all got to experience the dubious pleasure of spending time in what can only be desribed as the OAP Samba club in town, getting to watch distinctly old people (even older than my father!) strut, gyrate and grind into positions and poses that may be forever indelibly printed to my rather delicate mind!

Anyway, with that it was time to leave Brazil and embark on what we had both been dreading, the several day journey to the Land of Oz and a visit to Ms. Aisling Twomey!

Brazil by Bus

We caught the first if our four buses from the national bus terminal in Foz do Iguazu following a late dinner at a restaurant describing itself as Modern Brazilian . . . from the brief exposure we had thus far experienced, this meant little more than more expensive, with the fare on offer not being dis-similar to our previous meals in Brazil, largely consisting of copious quantities of cooked meats in various guises. Indeed the salad that pre cursed Siobháns meal would constitute a considerable sized meal in any restaurant London may have to offer.

To be fair, I was pleasantly surprised by the bus on which we had booked. Front row, airline style seats, plenty of leg room and no fear of annoying passengers behind when reclining. Unfortunately even the most luxurious of bus cannot turn an 11 hour, overnight journey into something one could actually describe as a wonderful experience and so we were more than happy, when upon arrival in Curitiba at 7 o’clock in the morning that our hotel was a mere five minute walk away and they were happy for us to check in immediately.

The hotel, like the town itself was no great shakes, but we did manage to visit an Oscar Niemeyer designed building, he is the architect responsible for large portions of Brasilia, as well as make a trip to the local cinema, where the usual hapless American hero managed to save the world (by which I mean the American version of it) from an evil computer, hell bent on a logically baffling US genocide!

Just one night in Curitiba and we caught our second bus on to Sao Paolo, the financial centre of Brazil and home to the worlds largest Japanese population outside of Japan, apparently. Whilst nothing spectacular to look at, we spent three pleasant days in Sao Paolo, even managing to find a delicatessen that sold fabulous cured meats and French cheese, the kind of food we have been rather missing since we embarked upon our little sojourn and spent a lovely evening in our little apart-hotel devouring our spoils and washing them down with liberal quantities of wine!

A third, very winding, bus journey took us to our penultimate Brazilian destination of Parity, but that can wait for the next installment (I bet you can’t wait!)

Wet Again

We left Buenos Aires after far too short a period of time and took what was going to be the final of our flights before leaving South America, as we planned to travel by land through Brazil, to Iguazu.

There is only one reason to visit Iguazu and that is the absolutely stunning waterfalls. You can visit the falls from both Argentina and Brazil, as they straddle the border between the two countries. We were flying into Puerto Iguazu first on the Argentinian side and from there were to travel to Foz do Iguazu in Brazil, to see which side offered the best view.

A friendly local called John, who owned a small B&B, had helped organise accommodation for us from Buenos Aires (as his was booked out) and upon our arrival we were met by a taxi driver he had organised for us, someone we were going to become all too familiar with as he took it upon himself to by our designated chauffeur for the subsequent three days.

The accommodation he had organised was not what could be described as the best experience, with an odour somewhat akin to the underside of a compost heap and an air conditioning unit that made my beloved wife fear she was going to contract legionaires disease. This however, was not my cause for complaint, but more that we had unwittingly been booked into a hotel that specialised as a holiday venue for German tourists. We weren’t so much battling them for deck chairs as the usual stereotype would infer, but they did seem to annex the breakfast buffet each morning.

That being said, John was still a more than accommodating host, even though we weren’t stopping at his establishment, inviting us round and plying us with copious quantities of Caiprinhas and introducing us to his guests who we enjoyed a pleasant evening with.

In terms of the two Iguazus there was not much to rave about in either town, although if forced to chose I would say the Argentinian town is nicer. It would be somewhat more difficult to chose between the visit to the falls on each side, with Brazil arguably offering the best views, whilst Argentina offers a better feeling of them as it is from there you can walk directly over them. Having said that unless you’re American you don’t really need to chose as it is easy to get between the two. Our unfortunate trans-Atlantic cousins however, have to pay $120 per person for the privilege of passing into Brazil, which could be a little rich for a different angle of the falls.

On our first visit there on the Argentinian side, we took a boat under the falls, which whilst tremendous fun, did leave us soaked to proportions not seen since biblical times (or our trip to Columbia). Fortunately on this attempt we had seen the likelihood coming and had taken the necessary precautions, so no more electrical equipment needed to suffer an untimely demise. The one thing we hadn’t considered was just how cold it was going to be going under the falls, a phrase involving brass monkeys leaps to mind.

From Brazil, we decided a second ride under the falls may be a little over the top, so instead went white water rafting just downstream of the falls. It wasn’t the most thrilling of white knuckle rides, but fun was definitely had by all, especially Siobhán who went for a little swim in the icy cold river. I’m afraid I have no pictures to enhance this image as taking a camera would not have done it the world of good and the company charged about £40 for the privilege, which we figured was a little on the steep side.

That pretty much covers our time in Iguazu, take a look at the photo gallery if you haven’t already, as there are some fairly stunning photos of the falls for you all to become envious over, as well as hundreds of butterflys that literally flocked together on the Argentinian side and a few little monkeys. Our next stop would take us into the final country of our South American voyage, this time by bus to Curitiba, a journey of ten hours overnight that I think it is fair to say I was not looking forward to. Anyway, I’ll leave the gory details for the next post.

You know when you've been tango'd

There is only really one suitable description for our first impressions of Buenos Aires, and that is massive. Coming from London you think that not a lot is going to take you by surprise, but the pure size of BA is immense, apparently bulging with the best part of thirteen million residents, effectively twice as many as the capital of dear old Blighty.

Our cab from the Airport to our Hotel took about forty minutes, trailing through the sprawling metropolis to San Telmo, the oldest district of BA and home to those of a bohemian persuasion. Whilst our hotel was a lovely converted town house, it was a little nearer to La Boca, an area reknowned for it's high crime levels and general lack of safety, than is perhaps sanguine. A fact probably made evident by the hotel continually keeping it's front door locked.

On our first day we wandered down to the main square and took in a few of the sights, such as the Presidential Palace Casa Rosada. I was feeling fairly scruffy having up to this point failed to get a hair cut and so we marched onwards looking for a barbers. This turned out to be a rather fruitless mission as I rejected venue after venue as being too girly, but I did at least manage to track down some new clothes, although Siobhán talking me into buying a velvet jacket may have been a purchase too far.

It was whilst wearing both my new jeans and jumper on a walk the following day, that an Argentine couple started gesticulting wildly at us. A few dazed moments later the reasoning for their energetic wavings became clear as we realised that we had both just had the misfortune of a pigeon deciding it needed a bathroom break, leaving us both rather the worse for wear, so much so that we needed to immediately head for the nearest mall and buy Siobhán a new pair of jeans, whilst hoping that with a little care and attention, my jeans and jumper may survive.

As you may expect, in a city the size of BA, there was plenty for us to try and fit into our short stay. We had the obligatory long walks around the city, which has become one of our staple activities on our travels, as well as spending time at an enourmous antiques market, partying in Palermo and spending an evening at the obligatory tango show.

It was during a visit to La Boca to see the Caminito that we managed to make one of our now customary cock-ups. Everyone warns visitors to BA that walking to La Boca to see the brightly coloured buildings of Caminito is fine and perfectly safe, but that in no circumstances should you wander anywhere else in La Boca.

We were following the instructions from our guide book, which indicated you could walk along the harbour in safety however, about twenty minutes into a slum we had just about realised that we may not be in the best part of town . . . this thought was confirmed by a taxi that mercifully drove by, slowed, and gave us rather cusory glances, following which I flagged him down.

The driver was so clearly concerned at where we had been walking and his Spanglish mixed with gestures of being shot in the head made his message clear, as did the fact all of his doors were locked and he wouldn't stop anywhere in the area, happily driving on the wrong side of the road if it avoided slowing down, let alone stopping.

Anyway, as you've probably realised, based on the fact we're writing this, we emerged from the slums unscathed and suitably chastised by our taxi driver, ready for the next part of our journey . . . Iguazu!

Tour Map Updated!

Ok, I know it has taken me until the evening before we go, but I have finally added the Chinese destinations onto the tour map, so click on through and see where we're headed in the final leg of our trip.

I'll also do my best to bring the blog up to date this week. Buenos Aires will be up today and I'll try and fill you in on Brazil and Melbourne whilst we're in Beijing.