Nique´s Travel Diary

Hi all,

Warning you that this is a really huge long email, sorry to any of you who bother to read the whole thing. Remember, this is just my diary, so bare with it if you choose.

I left Porto Alegre for Rio de Janeiro, for the biggest and the sexiest party on 'da planet, a 26 hour bus ride, and I was so lucky because the girl I was sitting next to and three of the people around us were awesome company. Ariana is a Croatian girl from Germany, Heinrick is a reporter from Sweden, Niko is from Switzerland, and Gisela is half Brazilian half Swedish. A lady at the tourist information box booked me one nights accommodation a couple of blocks away from Copacabana Beach. Again I was lucky ´cause the price for that night was $USD8 and then the next night the price trebbled just because it was Carnaval.

Gisela, Ariana and I arranged to meet at Santa Theresa at 7:30pm to go for a drink. The afternoon came and went, and I turned up at the meeting spot and no one was there. After waiting 1/2 an hour I decided to head back to the hostel, not wanting to be hanging around Rio by myself, especially after dark, given the reputation of the place. I was out in the hostel court yard chatting to some other Aussies, when Gisela and Ariana walk in absolutely so relieved to see me. They were so worried when I didn´t show up at the meeting spot (oops, wrong place), because apparantly Santa Theresa is a fairly unsafe place to be, but it has good views and good bars. So the three of us got in a taxi back up to Santa Theresa for a couple of hours before heading back down to Copacabana.

The 8th of February was the first day of Carnaval, and I'd booked accommodation with Toucan, the company I'm doing my tour with. Upon
arriving at the hotel I met my room mate, Terese from Perth in Australia, and some other people, Laura from Canberra, Sylvia, Briney and Kate from the UK, and Dalma from Hungary. The Toucan gang had posted a timetable of Carnaval related events on a notice board that people can choose to attend, and this nights do was a ball with the theme of 'Black and Red'. The seven of us attended and had a fantastic night. On stage there were musicians, and the decorations were fantastic and then there were some drag queens at one end of the room who would apply glitter and sparkles and stars and stuff to your face. There were many girls dancing on tables. Not entirely sure how many of them had actually been born female, but they were at that point in time anyway. Terese, Briney, Laura and I tried really hard to learn to Samba by immitating the locals, but by some of the looks and laughs we were
getting, I got the impression we were doing something not quite right.

The second day of Carnaval in the party city of Rio was spent wandering down Avenada Rio Blanka, but virtually everything was closed. Given that I´d been in Rio a day earlier than the others, and could just get by with my limited vocabulary of Portuguese words, I was the navigator and leader of the gang. All a bit of a laugh considering that I generally can´t find my way out of a phone booth and I can´t put a sentence together in Portuguese. But we got by just fine. Everything was closed, but the street was alive with people selling and spraying aerosole cans of foam, umbrellas that sit like a crown on your head, masks, food, drinks and anything else they could flog off to the jovial
partiers. We got back to the hotel just after the group had already left for the sports stadium to watch a game of futball (soccer) at the
largest stadium in, I think, the Southern Hemisphere, or possibly the world. It has a capacity of 210,000. We made our own way to the futball stadium where we managed to find the others still buying there tickets. The stadium was virtually empty. Whether that was to do with the fact that it was Carnaval, or that it was raining, we don´t know, but it
definately detracted from the expected hype of seeing a soccer match in Brazil. The two teams that were playing were Botofogo from Rio de Janeiro, and Sao Paulo. I haven´t watched many soccer matches, but I know that neither team played very well. In fact, they had the same
problem my Northern Beaches team had last season. Well, one of them
anyway... they seemed to always chase the ball, as opposed to staying anywhere vaguely in position. So when a player had posession and there was a man on, and went to kick the ball to another player, the player that was supposed to receive the ball was always somewhere else, and the ball went straight to the other team. Anyway, the score ended up being 3-2 to Sao Paulo.

That night we went to see a steet parade which was more for the
participants than the audience. A lot of effort and expense had been
put into the costumes and floats and coriography, but therse were the teams that didn´t make it into the main parade at the Sambadrome to be held over the next two nights of carnaval. The participants were between
the ages of probably 8 and 80. It´s amazing to watch them all,
regardless of age, shape and size, they all seem so uninhibitted and
comfortable with being on show wearing next to nothing, and shaking,
rotating and thrusting everything.

I thought the street environment would be a lot more alive and throbbing with energy, more like Mardi Gras back home, but the crowds were thin, and mainly tourists with cameras and parents watching their kids. I sort of expected there to be a bit more onlooker participation. But it wasn´t to be.

As people started to arrive at the hotel my group of friends started to grow. By the third day of carnaval, there were 10 people in my little group, all going on diffent Toucan tours after Carnaval. We all decided to spend the morning at the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Gardens before heading off to Copacabana Beach to meet Sebastian and AJ, a couple of Dutch tourists who we´d met at the Red and Black ball a couple of nights ago.

The gardens were beautifully maintained and things were labelled and
described in Portuguese and English. Unfortunately my camera and lense, which had been sitting on our hotel room floor in front of the air conditioner over night, got totally fogged up in the intensly high, sticky, revolting, hot humidity and was useless all morning. There were some pretty amazing looking flowers and trees though.

To our surprise, when we reached the place where we were supposed to
meet the Dutch boys, they were actually there already. We had our doubts they would remember or bother to turn up, given the state that
we were all in when the arrangements were made. The boys were staying in an appartment directly across the road from Copacobana beach, owned by the rich relatives of one of them. The relatives were away, so the boys had the maid and the cook just for them. Not a bad way to holiday. We weren´t allowed in to have a squizz though, but I gather it would have been a pretty impressive appartment. There was a 24 hour guard inside the gate, and only the guard could open the gate to let people in and out. The afternoon on the beach was lovely. The water was refreshing and I even eventually rounded up a few people to play some volleyball.

That night was the first of the Sambadrome parades. The Sambadrome is just a street with stadium seating on either side, specifically
constructed for parades. The boys´ relatives had booked them $US125
seats in some special seating box, and they were getting picked up
at 7pm. We had to meet the other Toucan people at the hotel at 8 so
we could catch a public bus, and get to our section to get decent seats
in the bit where tickets cost $US15. Ahhh, how the other half live.

In the parade there were seven Samba schools, each having 2-6,000 active participants. From where we were we could only really see the
headdresses of all the people on the ground, and all of the people
raised up on the magnificently constructed floats. The colours and
the music were fantastic, it was just such a shame we were so far away and couldn´t really see or feel the environment up close and impersonal. I´d really like to go back some other time and spend a
fortune but get good tickets. The thing is though that the parade doesn´t start until about 8, and we were in the last section, so nothing even comes into sight until about an hour after it starts.
Each Samba school has an hour and 20 minutes from start to finish,
so I guess it takes 20 minutes for the entire parade to pass each
section. There´s an hour break in between each Samba School, and that´s just so the music at one end of the Sambadrome doesn´t interfere with the music from the preceeding school. So by the time seven schools have done their thing it´s about 9 in the morning or something rediculous. A bunch of us left after the third school. It rained and stopped raining at least 3 times whilst we were there, and with the dancing and the
weather, and not being able to see that much, and the long breaks in
between each group, we were tired and ready to go. We could always watch more on TV at the hotel if need be.

On the way out of the Sambadrome, strewen all over the street are
costumes. The Samba schools invest a huge amount of time and money and effort, preparing all year for this one event, their eighty minutes of
glory for the year. It costs each participant around $USD300 for
their costume for the night, and then after it´s over, they get dumped in the rain drenched streets. Some people pick them up and sell them to other people who were a little too slow to pick them up of their own accord. A decent chunck of a costume may be sold for $R3, about $USD1.

My fourth day in Carnaval turned out to be what some may call an
interesting experience, and others may call a bloody nightmare. Either way, it kept me busy, mildy amused, and mildly annoyed. The plan was for a group of 8 of us to hire a couple of taxis to take us to the big Jesus statue, more appropriately known as Christ The Redeemer, that towers over the city of Rio de Janeiro, and then on to the massive cable car that reaches to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain, and then return us back to the hotel. That was the recommended way and cost effective way of seeing the two tourist attractions, and it should take about 3 or 4 hours.

After extensive negotiation we settled on a price for the 2 cabs and
set off. Here ends the similarity between the plan and the actual events that took place. My taxi of four was doing fine until we got to the base of Mount Corcovado, the hill on which the 1,000 tonne statue stands. Our taxi couldn´t get up the first bit of the steep and narrow cobblestone street. Then the water temperature light came on, and the driver had to stop the car to pour some liquid, which I hope was water, out of a sprite bottle into some container in the bonnet. Unable to do a hill start, we had to roll back down the little bit of the hill we had progressed up, and start again. This second time we made a bit more progress up the hill, but then started approaching a bottleneck. Hoping that the traffic jam would creep along faster than the taxi was driving, the taxi driver slowed down even further, so as not to have to come to a complete stop, but alas, the traffic was at a standstill, and still not wanting to stall or come to a complete stop, our taxi driver drove straight into the car in front of us. Despite the sound of smashing glass, no one batted an eyelid, not even the driver of the vehicle in front of us got out of his car.

We inched forward for eternity, and finally arrived at a small car park in front of the pay station to the tourist attraction. Our driver told us we´d have to walk the rest of the way, and he´d wait here and fix his car whilst we were gone. It was still a very long, steep way up and the heat and humitidy was unbareable. I told the other three that I´d walk ahead, find the other group of 4 from the other taxi and tell them not to wait for us. The top was layered in such a way that there were numerous places to go and I searched everywhere for the others but couldn´t find them. Later on I discovered that their taxi driver had been informed half way up the hill that the monument was closed, so he turned around and took them to Sugarloaf instead. Anyway, I finally caught up with the rest of my group, and Sarah was feeling absolutely sick, so I stayed with her while the other two went to the lookouts and took some photos.

Sarah was in no shape to walk back down to meet the taxi so we had to hitch. Easier said than done, especially in a group of 4 and given that most people come in a full taxi that waits for them and takes them down as well. So we split into two groups of two thinking that would increase our chances of being picked up. Sarah and I got a ride back down only to find that our taxi driver had gone. So we waited for the others, and decided to hitch back down the rest of the way and meet at the street where we´d previously not been able to get up the hill.

Again in twos, Sarah and I hitchd a ride, but the drivers went a
different way to that which we´d come up, so we never saw the
meeting place and thus deemed it impossible to find it again. We
figured the other two would walk anyway, they didn´t hitch the first
part of the ride, and propably weren´t likely to try for the second
part either. So we decided to just forget about them and move on to our next meeting spot.

Before we´d set out for the day we said we´d try and meet up with the rest of the group who wasn´t going to the statue, on Copacabana Beach at the same place we sat the previous day. We gave an estimated time of arrival to be about 4:30. Sarah and I arrived at 4:40 and the beach was a lot more crowded than it was the previous day, we had bucklies of finding them. We looked for a while and then decided to have a juice and go home. Whilst sitting in the outdoor cafe waiting for our drinks a little black girl was going around to the cafe patrons asking for money. I called her over and offered to buy her some lunch. So the three of us eagerly shared a banana split, and the little girl had a cheeseburger and chips. She didn´t look under-fed or anything, but she was cute, and showed us how she was learning to read at school by going through and reading the entire menu to us, asking for help when she wasn´t sure how to pronounce something. She taught us how to say the ingredients in her cheeseburger in Portuguese, and we taught her how to say them in English.

That night when the entire group was back safely back together again, we went out for dinner. After dinner we got the food that was left over put into a doggy bag, as recommended in Lonely Planet, and I went and found a street person to give it to, before heading back to the hotel, and the others headed out for drinks.

The final day of Carnaval, 12th February 2002, started bright and
early when the sun streaming into our room woke me up at 6:15 and a
fantastic idea came to me. This would be a great time to go hang- gliding over Epinima Beach! I went down to breakfast and there were the four boys from my group having breakfast after having just walked in from the previous nights drinks. I asked them if any of them wanted to come with me, and Alex was pretty keen. So off we went. I´d previously got some directions from someone else that had gone the day before. The directions were pretty poor, so when we jumped off the bus at where we thought we should, we went into a fancy looking hotel and asked how to get to where ever they do hang-gliding from. Thankfully the guy spoke English fairly well, and booked us in, as well as arranging for us to be picked up from the hotel. Within an hour we were harnessed up and ready to run of the top of a very tall mountain under a canvas wing. This was an awesome idea! We both went one after the other, tandem of course, and it was such a cool sensation flying around. It was noisier than I expected, but it was great, not to hot or cold, and we flew over the jungle, the suburbs, the beach, the ocean, and landed about 15 minutes later, both with big grins on our faces. We were back at the hotel by 11am and the others had just finished breakfast and were getting ready to start their day.

The four of us who were in a taxi yesterday decided that we still
wanted to go to Sugarloaf, so we did. The cable car is so massive, it goes really fast, but takes 3 minutes for each half. And there is a vast viewing platform at both the half way and full way points. The views are just amazing. I think most cities in the world have a fairly smallish CBD, and then the suburbs just sprawl, but are fairly low, storey wise, compared to the CBD. Rio seems to have sky scrapers everywhere, all very drab and dreary, but so big! And the coast is outlined with beaches that are so crowded, it´s like seeing the typical Sydney Morning Herald City to Surf photo superimposed onto a beach. From high up it´s just millions of tiny multicoloured dots on the sand and in the water. Umbrellas, sunbakers, massage tents, ice-cream sellers. And even from the top of this huge mountain, you could still here the sounds of summer fun drifting up from the beaches.

The four of us then went and had lunch at a really nice cafe at Epinema Beach, the same cafe where the song "Girl From Epinema" was written. That didn´t mean anything to me, but it might to someone on this list. Anyway, the food was great and there was a bunch of Samba musicians doing there thing around the outskirts of the cafe. A very groovy atmosphere, apart from having to leave as soon as we´d finished eating, so as to make room for the next group in the queue of people waiting to get in. There was´t much left to the day but to get back to the hotel and get ready for the big night ahead of us. One of Carnaval in Rio´s most publicised balls, the Gay Gala, at the same club where the Red and Black was held.

There was a massive cat walk set up outside the club and hundreds of
people lining the baracaded streets to watch the prossession of
characters that entered. And there was no other way to get into the
club than to walk down the catwalk. We decided not to watch, but to go straight in, knowing that even though the street was packed now, it would only get more crowded later, ´cause no one turns up to a party on
time. So our group, who had substantially diminished for this outing, walked the walk into the club. A couple of the girls had bought cheap sparkly tiarras to liven up their very conservative outfits, and I´d taken off with a bunch of brightly coloured and nicely arranged feathers from one of the Sambadrome parade costumes that had been dumped, and used them to spice up my outfit.

We went straight to the drag queens and got our glittery faces put
on, and stood around drinking and talking and watching in absolute
awe the costumes that the people around us were wearing. Leather and
latex, chains and straps, beads and sequines, feathers and furs, skin and paint. It was such a spectical. Such a fantastic spectical!
I lost the others for a while when I was whipped away onto a dance area which was much to empty for my liking, but I was consoled by the fact that my Brazilian dancing partner and I were so much less of a spectical than the characters strutting their stuff around us, that no one would bother to even take a second glance at my attrocious dancing. It was heaps of fun, mingling and dancing with these entirely self assured, whacky people, but I thought that I´d better catch up with the others at our on the hour meeting spot we set for if we got separated. It was about this time that everything turned very pair shaped for me.

I won´t go into detail, but after finding the others I got really, really sick. Some of the girls in my group were giving me little cups of water to drink which I just spilt everywhere ´cause I was shaking so much. After about half an hour of this and not feeling any better, and not being able to walk or support myself to even stand up, someone called a medic who had to carry me to a room upstairs above the stage somewhere. I was kind of aware of what was going on but couldn´t really show that I was there and awake. It was an aweful feeling. In the room there were three of my friends, thankfully one was a doctor and one a nurse, and some guy was standing there fanning me, and then there were a couple of medics. They prepared a drip for me and hooked me up. They tried to get me up after the drip had run out, and they´d taken my blood pressure, but I couldn´t even sit up in a chair. So back I went to the bed bench thing, and passed out stone cold for a couple of hours. I still don´t know what the problem was or why it happened, I don´t think it was food poisoning, and as far as I know, if someone wanted to put something into someone´s drink, that would not be the outcome they would be trying to achieve. But who knows. I´m okay now, and that´s all I care about.

So, I´d like to thank Therese, Briney, and Cath so, so much for looking after me that night, and for keeping an eye on what they used in the drip and noticing that the needle they used was clean and opened from a sealed packet in front of them. I´m so lucky and greatfull that you were all there throughout that time and I´m sorry for detracting from your own night of fun.

So that was how my 5 days of Carnaval finished... definately a night
to remember... bits of.

Hope you´re all well and happy,
Ciao for now,
Nique