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| Itinerary | Nepal | Alaska | Argentina | South Africa | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Brazil | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Photo Album | Tibet | Brazil | New Zealand | Tanzania | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Highs and Lows Highs Private piano concert - During our week in S�o Paulo, one of Annemie and Manu's guests, Tars Lootens, treated us all to a one hour piano concert after dinner in a restaurant. He played everyone's request, including Belgian classics such as Toots Thielemans, Jacques Brel and a fantastic Johan Verminnen medley. The medley included the opening dance of our wedding party. Tars was Johan Verminnen's companion for many years. Favela children's party - During our week in S�o Paulo, we attended a party organised by Annemie for the street children adopted by Belgian families through the charity Cunina. The party took place in a small Capoeira club house, which was packed with about a hundred people. It was an experience we really enjoyed. Hanging over the waterfall - On the third day of our hike in Chapada Diamantina National Park, we reached the top of a 400m high waterfall. No railings protected us from the vertical drop, so we lay on our bellies, peeping over the edge into the depth. Quite thrilling for someone with fear of heights (Jeroen)! Beach life in Lagoinha - Three days on miles of beach with fantastic waves and warm blue water. The only decisions you have to make are when to take your daily dip in the sea and which fish dish to pick from the menu. And all of that for US$30 a day all inclusive. Dune lakes in Len�ois - Endless sand dunes, dotted with fresh water lakes in Parque Nacional de Len�ois near Barreirinhas. You can just float on your back and admire the blue and yellow colours and the geometric shapes of dunes and lakes. Canoeing up the Rio Lim�o - Just the two of us peddling up a narrow jungle river on Ilha Marajo. Gliding between the overhanging trees and looking out for monkeys swinging over our heads and listening to the sounds of birds and faraway monkeys. Wedding anniversary in a hammock - We spent our third wedding anniversary in the middle of the Amazon jungle, drinking caipirinhas in our hammocks, strung up between the trees. Howler monkeys in the distance joined in the celebrations. Spotting monkeys in the Pantanal - On one of our wildlife watching walks we spotted three capucchino monkeys 5 meters away taking turns to drink from a pond, whilst one of them was keeping guard. Since there was only the two of us, we managed to keep quiet for 10 minutes and observe the whole procedure. Floating amongst the fish - Two and a half kilometers of floating in the clear water river Rio da Prata near Bonito. You feel like Superman flying when the current takes you through the fish and over the water vegetation. Lows Snake encounter - During the evening of our second jungle night, Jeroen reached out from his hammock for the pot of rice and saw a 30 cm long snake sliding past the pot. It was already getting dark and only the snake's white triangular head gave its presence away. It turned out to be a Jararaca, a poisonous snake! We didn't set another foot out of our hammock that evening. Sunk canoe - On a nightly jacare (alligator) watching trip in the Amazone swamps, Meriel sunk her own canoe, when her guide handed over a baby jacare. The little thing started wriggling and made Meriel jump abruptly. As a result, water entered the low-edged canoe and the canoe sunk into the shallow water, exactly where she had dropped the jacare and where its mother was probably waiting! Brazilian swimming trunks - Jeroen didn't have any swimming trunks with him when he arrived in Brazil (didn't really need them in Nepal, Tibet or Alaska), so he had to buy some in Brazil. Unfortunately, Brazilian bathing fashion is slightly different (ahead or behind?) from European fashion, so male swimming trunks come only in small and tight sizes, that take a bit of mental adaptation. Slippery rocks - On the second day of our three day hike in Chapada Diamantina National Park, it rained all day while we were crawling over rocks and crossing rocky rivers to get to the 400m high Cachoeria da Fuma�ao. The rocks were so slippery, it was the perfect time to break a leg. It fortunately didn't happen. Insulin scare - With one year's supply of insulin stored in our backpacks, we thought we would be safe from any insulin shortages, until all of a sudden, after three weeks of travelling in Brasil, the insulin stopped working and Meriel's sugar levels shot up to unhealthy levels. In the worst case, that could mean returning to London to get a prescription and new insulin. Fortunately, we managed to buy some spare insulin from a shopping mall pharmacy without a prescription! Ticks everywhere anytime - The delights of the Pantanal inevitably brought along the hassle of mosquitos and other insects. The ticks were particularly annoying, creeping up on you and settling randomly on one of your limbs. You constantly had to check your body and look for those litle black spots, very much like freckles from afar, but more like spiders from close-up. Once you pinched them off, you could see their little legs still wriggling! Finding English books - Reading books is an essential part of our itinerant life, particularly when facing long bus journeys. Unfortunately, English books, new or old, are very, very difficult to find. So far, we only found one bookshop with a decent collection (i.e. more than five old trashy novels). That was in Fortaleza and we immediately stocked up with five books , which is not ideal in terms of backpack weight. |
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| The Route | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SAO PAULO Although we intended to spend only a few days in S�o Paulo, we spent our whole first week with Annemie and Manu, friends from the University of Leuven, who are now living and working in S�o Paulo. There were four more guests staying there and the house turned into a real youth hostel/commune with a real buzz. We all got along very well, all with different backgrounds which made it all very interesting. Pieter from the VRT, the Flemish state broadcaster, was making a programme on the Favela street children together with his Brazilian assistant Rodrigo. Sophie Van Gheel, founder of Belgian charity Cunina, and Tars Lootens, musician and Cunina ambassador, were just on a tour of Brazil to evaluate different Cunina projects. We really had a lovely time together, chatting away for hours and hours. TRAVELING NORTH ON THE WEST COAST When we finally left S�o Paulo, we set off for Ouro Preto in Minas Gerais, the old colonial mining state. Ouro Preto (and nearby Mariana) have a nearly untouched colonial look with lots a barroque and gold-laden churches. From Ouro Preto, we moved further inland ("interior") to Diamantina, an old diamond mining town, and then to Pavao. Pavao is a town in the middle of nowhere with nothing to offer but a real countryside feeling. We were lucky enough to be able to attend a Festa Junina celebration, where the town children dressed up like adults and dance. From Pavao we took the overnight bus to Salvador, the oldest and original colonial city in Brazil. We aimed straight for the beach, which we thought we deserved after three months of mountains and cold. As it is now off-season, Morro de Sao Paulo proved to be a relaxing spot, where we booked ourselves into a pousada right on the deserted beach front. We then hung around a bit in Salvador, enjoying the Afro-nightlife. On 2 July we got caught up in the middle of the Bahia independence celebrations with the whole town upside down, which was a good laugh. We then spent nearly a week in Len�ois and the Parque Nacional Chapada Diamantina, which features plenty of canyons and waterfalls of all shapes and sizes. The highlight was a three day hike that took us to a 400m high waterfall. The terrain was very hard and the rain on the second day didn't make things any easier, but the sight of so many waterfalls made it really worth it. At least Brazil allows you to alternate painful hikes with rest & relaxation on the beach, so after that we headed straight off to a beach north of Fortaleza. We spent a lazy four days on the beach of Lagoinha, moving our bodies slowly between swimming pool, hammock and sea. After Fortaleza, we moved further north to S�o Luis. The Parque Nacional de Len�ois near S�o Luis (if you call a 10 hour bus ride "near" is an amazing collection of sand dunes and fresh water lakes that are formed during the rainy season. You can take a 4X4 trip into the park and swim in the middle of a sand desert. When we arrived in Belem, we had finally finished the south-north leg of our Brasil trip. We spent four days on Ilha Marajo, which is an island the size of Switzerland in the middle of the Amazon delta. We stayed in a pousada run by a Flemish lady from Brugge, who had left her teaching job in Belgium at the age of 45 to set up the pousada with her newly found Brazilian husband. Very relaxing days, with always something to do every day - a guided jungle walk, a canoe trip up a jungle river or a long beach walk. IN THE AMAZON Our Amazon jungle trip fully met our high expectations. We joined a little group of eight people and spent five nights in a jungle camp more than one hundred kilometers away from Manaus, along the Urubu river. We spent our days canoeing around to watch pink dolphins, made nightly trips in the swamps to look for jacares and took jungle hikes to look for sloths and monkeys. We also spent two nights away from the camp, sleeping in the middle of the jungle, with our hammocks strung between the trees, looking through the high canopy at the full moon and listening to the sounds of the jungle. TRAVELING SOUTH AGAIN We then moved on to Brasilia, the purpose-built capital of Brazil. Interesting place, but unfortunately a bit overloaded with architecture from an unfortunate period (1960�s) and a bit biased to one particular architect (Oscar Niemeyer). We absolutely loved the Pantanal. We signed up for a four day trip, but stayed on for three more days on the last fazenda (farm). Particularly those last three days were very enjoyable. The heat during the day was unbearable, up to 40 C, so we took naps or played games during the day. We would get up early though, and go for walks to the ponds and the forests to spot birds and animals, or go for horse rides through the savannah in the late morning. There are hundreds of different bird species in the Pantanal and they are not difficult to spot, particularly in the latter half of the dry season. We saw loads of jacares (alligators) from nearby, observed the great horned owl in his nest with his little one and frequently dropped by to look at the howler and cappuchino monkeys in the nearby forest. Wonderful! In order to get a break from the heat, we then spent three nights in Chapada dos Guimaraes, a plateau 70km north of Cuiaba. The heat only reached about 35 C at midday! The delights of Chapada were the series of little waterfalls with clear ponds and the Festival di Inverno, the annual festival of Musica Popular do Brasil (MPB) that happened to take place that weekend. We made sure we stayed for three nights in order not to miss the world famous Rick & Renner and Aldemir Satir (you know!) In Bonito we spent a few days floating around the local clear water rivers Rio da Prata and Rio Sucuri. The water was so clear that you had the feeling you were flying. The fish were massive and you felt like one of them as we were floating cheek to cheek. Our last stop in Brazil before heading into Argentina was the waterfalls of Igua�u. These falls are spread out across the Argentina-Paraguay-Brazil border and are the widest in the world. After our little detour in Argentina, we spent a little less than a week on Ilha Grande, near Rio de Janeiro. We waited patiently for the sunny weather; which never materialised. Ilha Grande is a small island with lush tropical rain forest and 106 sand beaches. Very pretty, but you run out of things to dol when it rains all day. Our last two days in Brazil we spent in Rio. We must admit that we were quite happy when our two days in Rio were over. It is after all a dangerous city and reading articles in the local papers about armed attacks on a line bus the day before in the same tunnel you passed a few hours early, confirmed our paranoia. We did manage to go to the famous Pao de Azucar, the Sugar Loaf rock with an amazing view over Rio, and to attend a football game in the legendary Maracana stadium. |
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| Detailed Trip Schedule | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 11 June - 17 June: Sao Paulo 18 June: Sao Paulo - Night bus to Ouro Preto 19 June: Ouro Preto 20 June: Ouro Preto 21 June: Ouro Preto - Diamentina 22 June: Diamentina 23 June: Diamentina - Carpalinha 24 June: Carpalinha - Pavao 25 June: Pavao - Night bus to Salvador 26 June: Night bus to Salvador - Valen�a 27 June: Valen�a - Morro de Sao Paulo 28 June: Morro de Sao Paulo 29 June: Morro de Sao Paulo 30 June: Morro de Sao Paulo - Salvador 1 July: Salvador 2 July: Salvador - Night bus to Len�ois 3 July: Len�ois 4 July: Len�ois 5 July: Len�ois 6 July: Len�ois 7 July: Len�ois 8 July: Len�ois 9 July: Len�ois - Cachoeira 10 July: Cachoeira - Night bus to Fortaleza 11 July: Night bus - Fortaleza 12 July: Fortaleza 13 July: Fortaleza - Lagoinha 14 July: Lagoinha 15 July: Lagoinha 16 July: Lagoinha 17 July: Lagoinha - Nightbus to S�o Luis 18 July: Nightbus - S�o Luis 19 July: S�o Luis (Alcantara) 20 July: S�o Luis - Barreirinhas 21 July: Barreirinhas 22 July: Barreirinhas 23 July: Barreirinhas - Nightbus to Belem 24 July: Nightbus - Joanes 25 July: Joanes 26 July: Joanes 27 July: Joanes |
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| 28 July: Joanes - Manaus 29 July: Manaus 30 July: Manaus - Amazon Jungle 31 July: Amazon Jungle 1 August: Amazon Jungle 2 August: Amazon Jungle 3 August: Amazon Jungle 4 August: Amazon Jungle - Manaus 5 August: Manaus 6 August: Manaus - Brasilia 7 August: Brasilia 8 August: Brasilia - Nightbus to Cuiab� 9 August: Bus - Cuiab� 10 August: Cuiab� - Pantanal 11 August: Pantanal 12 August: Pantanal 13 August: Pantanal 14 August: Pantanal 15 August: Pantanal 16 August: Pantanal - Cuiab� 17 August: Cuiab� - Chapada dos Guimaraes 18 August: Chapada dos Guimaraes 19 August: Chapada dos Guimaraes - Nightbus 20 August: Nightbus - Bonito 21 August: Bonito 22 August: Bonito 23 August: Bonito 24 August: Bonito - Nightbus to Foz do Igua�u 25 August: Nightbus - Foz do Igua�u 26 August: Foz do Igua�u - Puerto Iguazu 12 September: Buenos Aires - Ilha Grande 13 September: Ilha Grande 14 September: Ilha Grande 15 September: Ilha Grande 16 September: Ilha Grande 17 September: Ilha Grande 18 September: Ilha Grande - Rio de Janeiro 19 September: Rio de Janeiro 20 September: Rio de Janeiro - London |
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| Map of Brazil | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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