Post 9:

A mass-murdering chef from Manila,
killed at breakfast, but not lunch or dinner.
His M. O. was usually
strychnine in the muesli;
the world’s very first cereal killer.

“She needs shorter skis, because she’s only a journalist”; “I only speak a little Spanish, so please talk more crazily”; “Can I please have two pastries, a coke and a chicken yoghurt”. In the course of murdering their language, these are all phrases we have at some time or other directed at locals in South America. As our time on the continent has progressed, so too has our confidence in the use of the language, but (as is evident) we sometimes get a little too sure of ourselves, resulting in botched attempts at communication. It is interesting how confused a sentence can become if you don’t use quite the correct word for “beginner”, ”slowly”, or ”strawberry”.

In spite of this butchering of their language, the inhabitants of Latin America have as a whole, been very receptive and seem to show a genuine interest in who their visitors are and where they are from. We got the impression that knowing details about a visitor’s own country is seen as a small victory to many of these people and it certainly was flattering that they had all even heard of our small island nation (that is after clearing up any confusion between “Irlanda” and ”Hollanda”, which sound very similar when mumbled quickly in Spanglish). It is to be expected that the information about your country may not quite be up to par thousands of miles away, so when one hostel proprietor started going on about “Braveheart” and “the Irish struggle”, I gently corrected him; kindly throwing him the bone that the film was however shot in Ireland and that we have much in common with the Scots (but that they still don’t know how to spell “whiskey” properly). Curiously, a few weeks later a second local was harping on about “the Irish film, Braveheart” with such pride that I didn’t have the heart to set him straight, and by the time our guide in Machu Picchu was extolling the virtues of the same film and saying what a beautiful Irish name “William” was, all I could muster was a wan smile.

Although the locals have been unwavering in their friendliness in the face of crazy talk from us, we equally have not judged them in spite of their small eccentricities. The street vendor - for instance - is by no means a character unique to South America, but some of the hawkers here peddle merchandise so specialised that it is hard to fathom how they make a living unless they are laundering dirty money. Even in the case of the latter, one would imagine that there are many enterprises that are more conducive to book-cooking than being a wandering shower cap, whiteboard or tipp-ex salesman.

Equally bizarre, albeit less surprising, is the chaotic system of driving over here. Like many other countries outside of the English-speaking world, the most important safety feature of any vehicle here is the horn, and indicators are decorative accessories that only seem to be blinking when they are malfunctioning. In addition however, road markings are used solely as pointers to which way the road is bending, obeying traffic lights is something you do when you see cops, and zebra crossings are little more than areas of road designated for killing pedestrians (possibly because the contrast of blood on black and white makes for more striking newspaper photographs). However, in spite of having grown accustomed to such motorist behaviour, we were still shocked at the driving habits of Rio’s bus drivers, in whom it is fair to say the spirit of Ayrton Senna lives on.

Getting to Rio in the first place was something of an ordeal. After some protracted credit card wrangling with a Brazilian budget airline, it was agreed that we would pay for our flight from Lima to Rio de Janeiro upon arrival at Lima airport. After a 22-hour bus ride to Lima, we went straight to said airport to kill eight more hours on the Peruvian equivalent of St. Patrick’s Day. In order to pay for the tickets, we had to withdraw US$600 from ATMs at one end of the top floor of the airport and then lug our bags over to the other end of the bottom level of the building where the airline in question had their offices. In an elevator en route, all the money somehow went airborne and there ensued a recreation of the gold-ticket chasing final challenge of “The Crystal Maze” as we groped around frantically for all the bills before the elevator doors opened to a lobby full of partying Peruvians. All that was needed to complete the picture was a bald skinny man mincing around in a hideous leopard-print ensemble. After successfully paying for the flight, we went to check our bags in. Prior to reaching the check-in desk, we were met by a placard-wielding attendant who asked us if we were carrying anything in our baggage that was listed on his sign. As a picture of a sword and the phrase “cold steel” was featured, I felt it necessary to inform the guy that I had a large machete in my main bag. This proved much harder here than it would have been in America or Europe. In response to what I had to say, I was not forced to the ground and restrained or strip-searched by burly security guards. Instead, the friendly attendant laughed kindly at my little “joke” and waved me through. After some persistence I successfully conveyed my seriousness and after a little deliberation, he decided that it was acceptable to leave the offending article in my checked-in baggage. After all this, we had to deal with a four hour delay in Lima and a five hour delay to the connecting flight out of Sao Paolo, where our Brazilian fellow passengers were ever so slightly irate, and seriously contemplating forcibly re-boarding our first plane to compel it on to Rio. After finally arriving at our destination, we discovered our baggage had been rifled by light-fingered luggage handlers, so we really were not inclined to think much of Rio. We decided however, to sleep off our annoyance and approach the city with a clean slate the next morning.

Rio is by all accounts an incredible city, and one of incredible contrasts. It is a city of the very poor and the very rich, and the rich wear their wealth on their sleeve so to speak (except when they are on the beach, when they wear as little as possible). It is also a very dangerous yet very friendly city where, if the locals aren’t trying to rob you for all you’re worth, they are trying to walk you to the bus stop you asked about in order to wait for your bus with you, explain to the driver where you want to go and pay your fare out of their own pocket. Add to this the fact that the neighbourhoods are cut off from each other by sporadic jungle-covered outcrops, and that even within neighbourhoods the mood can change drastically over the space of a few blocks, and it is easy to appreciate how visitors (sometimes literally) don’t know where they stand. Having said all this, if it is a party you are after, Rio is certainly the right city to be in; forget coming for Carnaval or New Year’s, you will find massive street parties here every weekend. Life in Rio is one long festival. My only gripe is the way they make their local drink, the caipirinha (having sampled my fair share of them in the trendier bars on the other side of the Atlantic). The cariocas (as natives of Rio are known) spoil perfectly drinkable caipirinhas with a vicious liquid called cachaça. Seriously though, if it were possible to ruin a cocktail by adding too much of the main alcoholic ingredient, then the denizens of Rio come close; not because their drinks taste bad due to all the alcohol (far from it), rather that after 2 or 3 Rio caipirinhas each boasting 17.5 seconds worth of sugar cane spirit, it is nigh on lights out time. After my fair share, I was wandering about asking all my new friends about the new Brazilian player that Manchester United had signed. Sir Alex will doubtless be concerned that only a single drunken partygoer in twenty at 3am on a backstreet in Rio had ever even heard of the guy (and this claim was most likely made simply to stop me talking bad Spanish at residents of a Portuguese-speaking country). After a week spent lying on Ipanema and Copacabana beaches and partying on the streets, we made for the Brazilian-Argentine border and Iguaçu falls. “Poor little Niagara”, Eleanor Roosevelt was supposed to have said upon seeing the falls, and they are indeed nothing short of spectacular (Iguaçu is almost four times the width of Niagara). Whilst in the area, we also visited a highly recommended aviary, and were not disappointed as we had hummingbirds whizzing past our ears and got to share an enclosure with dozens of raucous macaws. The surprising highlight of this trip however, was seeing "the bird formerly known as the Crested Guineafowl", which bears a striking resemblance to one of pop music’s more distinctive looking musicians.

Following on from Iguaçu, we took another long bus to Buenos Aires, where we stayed for a few nights while we arranged our tour of South Argentina and Patagonia. First stop was Bariloche, one of the country’s primary mountain resorts both in summer and winter. As it is currently winter in the Southern Hemisphere, we hoped to rent some ski gear and that Gráinne would be able to add “learning to ski in the Andes” to “learning to swim on the Great Barrier Reef” on her list of notable tour-related achievements. It must be said that she is something of a natural on the slopes and looked very comfortable even on her first day. Over the course of three days, she only had a single minor collision; a tangle with a middle aged man who, along with his self-righteous bitch of an instructor, were hogging as much of the beginners’ slope as possible and moving at a pace that would put a tortoise to sleep. The instructor overreacted to the accident, seemingly forgetting that it had taken place on the beginners’ slope, where people learn to ski and where one is likely to collide with someone else sooner or later, especially if you park yourself two abreast in the middle of said slope, barely moving. It all paled in comparison to the way I learnt to ski when visiting some friends in Vienna a few years back. Learning by means of the unconventional Japanese teaching technique known as the "Kamikaze Method", another total novice and I were brought to the top of the pistes on our first day and effectively told there were two ways down; on skis or on a stretcher. This teaching method, where the student’s main means of reducing momentum is by running out of mountain, in practice necessitated serious utilization of snowdrifts in order to avoid the massacre of schools of 4-year olds winding down the slope and even still resulted in some rather nasty tangles. It was all a far cry from the fairly pedestrian knock in Bariloche, and certainly did not warrant the given response from the instructor. As ski resorts are a slightly newer feature in the Andes than they are in the Alps or the Rockies, playing the arrogant local skier is a relatively newer concept to the Argentines, but to be fair to them they’ve taken to it quite well. Following the skiing, we went to the Atlantic coast of Patagonia to an area where the massive Southern Right Whale spectacularly bursts out of the water then crashes down on its back, and subsequent to that, we went right down to the bottom of the continent to see some incredible ice fields. We are now back in Buenos Aires and our travels are coming to an end.

Over the course of our travels, having met many different types of people and travelled in groups of various sizes, we have come to appreciate some home truths. It is now clear – for instance – that budget travellers come in all shapes, sizes and attitudes, and that voyagers at one end of the backpacker spectrum are just as annoying as those at the other. At one end of the scale, you have those self-satisfied journeymen and women ("I'm a traveller, not a tourist") who regard travelling as a competition and who don’t let a minute go by without aggressively reminding you that they go out of their way to eat dodgy street food (the only way to really get a feel for a culture), that they prefer touring in areas where communication with the locals is difficult, that their entire journey has been conducted alone, sans schedule, plan or guidebook (God forbid) and that no matter how much trekking you have done, they have completed treks that were longer, in colder temperatures, at higher altitudes and while carrying much more equipment (or else they’ll tell you that they “don’t go in for that stuff; people only do it because Lonely Planet tells them to”). Such people claim to be shunning the backpacker “formula”, but the irony is that by refusing to even consider adopting any elements of the more common approach to travelling, they are of course assuming an even stricter blueprint. Quite like Goths who claim to reject the “conformist” fashion of mainstream society’s fools by wearing only black, you are left wondering who the real fool is. The other side of the coin of course, is the (usually young) backpacker whose idea of experiencing a major city is by sitting on their dorm bed all day with their laptop, or else by watching films in the blacked-out hostel video room from dawn till dusk. Having spent a week doing this in Buenos Aires, they will claim to have “done” Argentina, and having spent similar periods in a few other cities such as Rio doe Janeiro, Cuzco or La Paz, they will return home and proudly announce to their friends that they have ”done” South America. In order to get a rounded experience of a place, sometimes it is necessary to go out on a limb and to explore the complete unknown, but equally there should be scope for visiting the highlights listed by the guidebooks or even for spending a little downtime in the hostel. It is a balancing act, but one the majority of visitors manage successfully.

When it comes to travelling in groups, we have noticed a strange social phenomenon that takes place on guided tours (usually of remote or inhospitable areas) which last for a few days or more. In such circumstances, one invariably finds at least one single female traveller (German, English or American more often than not) falling in love with the male tour guide. I feel that this spectacle and the freshman crush on the college professor are the benign cousins of Stockholm Syndrome, and all share the same origin. All three phenomena hark back to a more primitive time when a social group had a set size (be it guide and group, class and lecturer, or kidnappers and kidnappees), where survival is slightly less of a given than in the outside world (due to being in the desert/jungle, having upcoming exams, or being surrounded by nervous gunmen), and where a single male acts as unopposed leader, with a serious responsibility for the well-being of his charges. It is little wonder, given a state of affairs with such primordial undertones that at least one female in such a tour group will feel instinctually drawn to (what is for all intents and purposes) the Alpha Male. Knowing in advance that the conditions are conducive to such a scenario can add an amusing sociological dimension to one’s zoologically/archeologically/geographically-themed expedition. Alternatively, you could take the theory to heart, change job and score lots of chicks.

I wrap up this final post in the travel blog as we have only a few days left before returning home. As D-day approaches we are thinking more and more about the things we have missed from home. Gráinne maintains that it will require some serious self-restraint to prevent her from brushing past her family in the arrivals hall and making a beeline for the fridge in the nearest café or newsagent for a frenzied reunion with good aul Oirish full-fat milk. In keeping with the dairy theme, I am looking forward to a decent selection of cheeses. South America stocks a very limited range of cheeses, and as Bill Bryson pointed out in his book, the fact that Australia’s repertoire of hard cheeses consists of “tasty” and “sharp” doesn’t say much for their variety in that department. To give the Aussies their due, they are broadening their horizons; recently the authorities decided to lift the import ban on unpasteurised cheeses – much to the delight of the public (cynics might say that this is the only culture Australians get excited about).

The time has really flown by (11 months all told), and although everything we’ve done hasn’t sunk in yet, I think we’ll look back on it as a series of discrete, individual holidays rather than one big one. I’d like to thank anyone who has made it this far for reading the blog, and only hope that the posts were as enjoyable to read as they were to write (except when I have been left pondering why the three potential employers who I know each read at least one entry never got back to me). If there’s a silver lining to take from having read these progressively more protracted sermons, it’s that whenever we meet, you won’t have to suffer any boring holiday anecdotes; at the first sign of one, I can be cut off with a curt “that was in the blog”, and I will have no recourse but to converse about something we both want to talk about.