The last leg. The long goodbye. The countdown. All through this long holiday of ours, a large clock has been ticking down inexorably towards our home-bound flight, but it’s only over the last week or two that we have been aware of it. The closer we get to the zero hour, the larger and louder that clock becomes. It’s hard to ignore. One way to drown out the ticking is to witness the thunderous roar of the Iguacu Falls. One of those ‘must-do’ places, the falls straddle three frontiers of Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. We stayed on the Argentine side and visited the Iguacu National Park. The paved entrance promenade resembled that of a drab theme park, with gift shops, snackeries and information kiosks. I half expected to see people wearing giant cartoon animal costumes – luckily, there were none. The place was pretty quiet. We boarded a small tourist train which took us through the jungle towards the Garganta del Diablo (devil’s mouth). The train ride was a bit like the one at Paulton’s Park, only with actual jungle and without the plastic dinosaurs. We left the train and walked for maybe 1km on metal boardwalks over the wide, fast flowing waters of the Rio Iguacu, with the roar of the falls rising in volume as we approached. The boardwalk took us right to the edge of the drop, with the waters rushing beneath our feet and blasting over the edge, it was an exhileratingly disconserting and truly awesome experience. There’s something about all that water; all its power seems to draw you towards it, it’s mesmeric – somehow, you want to jump in and be a part of it. We avoided certain death though and returned to the train which took us to another station from which we walked for a couple of hours above and below the many cataratas (cataracts/falls). Getting soaked in your clothes is usually an inconvenience, or even an utter pain in the arse. On this occasion though, I couldn’t have been happier as I was drenched by the mist and spray from the waterfalls. We shared the walkways with some strange badger/possum-like creatures. One attacked Siobhan’s cup of Coke as we took an afternoon snack. She thought her time had come as the beast lept at her from the table, and yelled out in fear. I laughed (it didn’t touch her). Once Siobhan realised she had evaded a scratchy death from a 2 foot long jungle badger she laughed too.
The falls were well worth the 16 hour bus ride and we left Iguacu behind on another long overnight bus – our longest and last – a 23 hour voyage to Rio de Janeiro.
Fears of daylight robbery returned to my weary brain after reading the many graphic warnings in the Lonely Planet Guide. I wasn’t reassured when google threw up various Internet pages on how ‘dangerous’ Rio is. However, there was also plenty of people saying that the dangers are exaggerated. I, however was a little obsessed with the bad reports so spent a long time looking for the safest possible neighbourhood to stay in. Leblon was that place, and it turned out to be a perfectly tourist-friendly and upmarket area. Brazil is a lot more expensive than Argentina so we were forced to stay in a dorm for the first time on the trip. This blow was softened by a complementary caiparinha* offered by our hostel bargirl.
*The Caiparinha is a famous Rio coctail of cacacha (a rum), lime juice and sugar.
We had several Caiparinhas and went to a local samba bar. The place was packed full of young locals and a 9 piece samba band who were banging out the rythym of the city, and singing many well known favourites with the crowd singing along and dancing the salsa like experts. I can only remember one other bar which had the same atmosphere of pure joy and that was in Dublin. The music was just as good in both places but people were dancing a little more skillfully in Rio, and I don’t think they had consumed nearly as much alcohol as the Dubliners (in fact almost certainly not). Siobhan tried to teach me to dance the salsa but I felt silly and sat back down. Strong spirits don’t really help me move my feet in a complex, rythmic fashion.
Thank god we hadn’t had to stay in dorms. This French Canadian guy crashed into the room at 5am and turned the light on. As he did so, Siobhan sat bolt upright in her upper bunk, her half open eyes at a level just above his and proclaimed a semi-conscious “whooahh” to the bemused reveller, who, probably slightly frightened, immediately turned off the light. He shuffled around with his bags for a while and I tried to get back to sleep.
The next day we caught a bus up to Pao de Acucar (Sugar Loaf) and rode the cable car up to the best view of Rio de Janeiro, and poignantly, one of the best views of the entire trip, which was a good thing as this was our last day. The money had all but run out and we had decided to fly home a few days early. A travel-crust was forming over us, and I think if we had stayed out longer, sleeping in dorms and loafing about the place there was a real danger of that crust enveloping us entirely – might we have become crusties? No, of course not. At least not totally. But the early signs were all too evident: we were wearing dirty, ripped clothes all the time; we had started to eat crackers (they’re cheap); we were packing our bags in the hallway; Siobhan wanted to buy some ‘ethnic’ bean beads; I was tending to loaf about a lot more; and our armpits were not odourless. I hope that by our excessive spending we had managed to retain most of our dignity, and so we emerge from our adventure tired and bedraggled but with a huge number of happy memories, far too many photographs, and an utterly worn out set of clothes. We didn’t get mugged or blown up by a terrorist, we didn’t catch a tropical disease and we weren’t incinerated in an ash-stricken Aeroplane disaster. Not yet anyway.
That’s it.
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Epilogue. Further observations on Crusties.
I just wanted to relay this small but (we felt) funny detail of our flight home.
After typing that stuff about crusties, it was a strange coincidence that just across the aisle from us sat three prime examples of that aforementioned breed. I observed their behaviour with great interest. Two of them had a large headfull of dreadlocks, into the depths of which a bony finger would probe, scratching and fiddling. All three wore their customary uniform of baggy floral/tie-die fabrics and all three were served a ‘special’ meal before anyone else – the vegan option perhaps. The strangest thing happened just 20 minutes into the flight. The one in 39d curled into a ball and lay on her compatriot, completely enshrouded in her blue blanket, from head to toe – by that I mean her head was actually covered. “they’re a bit like animals – what’s that about?! Don’t they know about eye masks?! You get them free in the BA flight set thing” I said, confused. Then I glanced at the bloke in 39f who was sat upright but also covered, corpse-style in his blanket. A strange bunch that’s for sure. But maybe they see us in a similar light. We are part of the greater common denomination. In conventional dress of jeans and t-shirt, our ordinary haircuts, our omniverous diet. We dress and behave like the vast majority of people we’ve seen around the world:- quite ordinarily. Most people we’ve encountered (including crusties) along the way have been friendly and decent and some not so palattable: Polite and noble in China (the spitting an exception); both friendly and occasionally deviously opportunistic in Thailand; gregarious and down to earth in Australia and New Zealand; and passionate, warm and welcoming in Chile, Argentina and Brazil. There’s plenty of good and bad eggs around, and in England there’s just a lot more of them in one place. Despite the overcrowding, England has a lot going for it. It’s a very comfortable, safe, orderly place on the whole, and there are some world-class buildings and landscapes. As we passed through central London on the Piccadilly line from Heathrow, several excited foreign tourists tumbled on and off, chattering about Big Ben or the Queen’s house probably. They obviously like it here. I do too. I’m looking forward to seeing friends and family, a walk in the forest and a pint.
