modern art?

this is the ´river´ that runs through the centre of santiago, the bit on the right is 90% turd acording to my nostrils, i don´t know why i like this city so much. all i seem to do as i walk round is marvel at the serenity and beauty and wish that i could be here in summer aswell.

went to the museum of modern art today and wandered round trying to find a replacement camera that wasn´t the same as the last 2 i´ve had in the previous 10 months that have broken. due to highly restricted choice and the stranglehold that comes from memory cards costing half as much as the camera i ended up with the next model up, again. if this one breaks i´ll lead the charge on the samsung factory myself.

like most art galleries some of it you get and some of it you don´t, some of it you can appreciate is good buty don´t like and some of it is so audacious you have to like it although it could be a joke at your expense (more likely the expense of the gallery, i probably won´t miss the 60p entrance fee)

the whole thing was pretty good, the gallery of fine arts was integrated as half of both of them is (are?) closed for renovation. i don´t really like old school painting but what i do like is whole rooms that are decked out in crazy stuff in a kind of mock church witha precession of horrendously disfigured iconic figures riding scateboards to an insane altar type thing.

this had my mad-o-scope off the scale and captivated my attention for so long that i think that the security guard thought i was going to try and steal one of the things and ride it out of the door. on second thoughts he was probably trying to stop me from taking pictures, ho-ho i´m too sneaky for a mere mortal despite the camera making a horrendously loud digitised, false shutter noise.

non-elicit typing in santiago

 

i´ve been here a week and a bit now, hannah left yesterday, and i´m feeling a bit at a loose end with no-one to tell what to do but myself.

bit of a re-cap i feel is necessary.

i´m in the capital of chile, santiago, the only place in the world where a child molester was chosen to head the ´safety on trains campaign´,

i´m pretty sure that this guy is related to the man that creegan buys his pants off (if you don´t get this check www.ispyshanghai.com 29th of april, in fact check all of it as it´s brilliant).

we; me and hannah my sister, left rio in brazil after a cultural last couple of days, riding the bonde

the last of rios ancient tramway system which hurtles up the steep hills with people hanging off the outside;

we only managed to do the 30 kinute round trip after a wait of 50 minutes due to rain on the tracks. last time we tried, a month before, a tree had fallen down and as it was a bank holiday the bonde was out of action for a full 4 days. we looked round the municipal cathedral that makes paddys wigwam in liverpool look like st.pauls and has a statue of limeny snicket inside,

check the building itself in the reflection. also spent a few houtrs going across the water to niteroi to check out the museum of modren art and the famous views of rio from afar.

unfortunately the museum was closed and the visibility was about 3 feet due to the excessive rain but the cafe was open.

santiago wins the annual award for ´worlds most smoggingest city´ on a pretty regular basis

this is the best view of the andes i have managed so far, the picture postcard shots rely on an unlikely sequence of rain and sun which only really happens a few times in winter so i´m unlikely to see it in my visit. most days are spent doing my favouirite, free, activity; walking around and it´s a pretty good city for it.  the chileans are very proud of their independance and have loads of commemorations of their revolutionaries especially bernardo o´higgins who has half of the city named after him and loads of statues.

don´t sit down infront of this one or the armed police will have a 6 strong mothers meeting before electing someone to politely come and tell you to stand up. the city centre has severly steep hills round it that are responsible for keeping the smog around but are great for putting statues, churches and decorative gardens on.

there is also a play park at the top of cerro san cristobal which allows for some very mature swinging and climbing.

the city centre has the grandest archtecture that i´ve seen on the trip, in the placa de armas

many an hour is spent just sitting and watching the street artists, vendors and the world go by in general. the chilean people seem a lot more content than most and although the level of public affection is almost stomach turning in its intensity and often proximity, in general it´s nice just to hang around and watch people having fun and being happy in themselves.

at night the hostel has a free pool table which can burn up all of the time thats not spent sampling the local wines. in the centre of town along the main road, avenida o´higgins, runs the scankiest river i´ve ever seen, fortunately either side of the river is all parkland with statues, sculptures and fountains galore.

on the rare occasions that i have splashed out, i blew 50p on a day at the races

went crazy in the museum of precolonial art

i only managed to get this one picture of a shaman wearing a monkeys skin before getting rumbled taking pictures and stalked like a scally in harrods for the rest of the visit. i´m not sure if the voluntary contribution towards the upkeep of the cathedral counts as excessive spending but i had to fit in this sculpture which is easily the best i´ve ever seen;

the one big blowout was at the city theme park fantasilandia. when you spend 5 quid on something you have to make it worth your while so basically every ride was hit both day;

and night;

the highlight was definately this beast;

which is the same as the missile at the american adventure but without the week long queue and this beast;

which is kind of like being inside a washing machine with 20 other people. anyone who, like me, hasn´t been to a theme park in the last 5 years, get to one now!!!

no scratch that,

get to one when i get back!!!

ho-ho santiago

landing in chile from the balmy heat of rio was a little like getting the christmas weather that i missed this year in oz, though you´d think the beddriddening cold of beijing sufficent for 1 year, apparently not. sorted out a hostel and negotiated the bus and metro system in record time despite having no idea where i was at all, i was warned about the scamming taxi drivers and sure enough hannah got fleeced the very next day when she arrived. the problem seems to arise from going from 4 reais to the pound in brazil to 956 pesos to the pound in chile and the subsequent feeling of extreme wealth at the cash machine with a fist full of notes with 5 or 6 figures.

the hostel has free pool, breakfast and internet. free pool; winner, free breakfast; adobe brick rolls, jam, margarine and a kettle, the worst i´ve encountered by miles, free internet you say, very handy except… there is only 1 computer and because it´s cold out people are loathe to go and lay on the beach (not that there is one) or generally go more that 10m from the comfort of the gas fire, there is always someone on it. so you write your name on the board, always 6 plus names long, and wait for your 10 minute slot. now i´m sure some people can bang out an essay in 10 minutes but i´m not the fastest typer in the world in fact, me and edward scissorhands have the same score on mavis beacon, i´m a troglodite. by the time i´ve got the title of an email done isaac or xeme or wayne is standing next to me glancing suggestively at their watch. so here i am at 3 in the morning, reduced to sneaking round while the security guard sleeps, oh yeah, no internet between midnight and 9 either.

my camera is broke and so we will have to rely on hannah for photographic evidence, balls, she´s in bed, i give up, i´ll have to try again tomorrow.

fozfozfozfozfozfozfozfozfozfozfozfozfozfozfozfozfozfozfoz

 

after flying from 1 in the afternoon till 3 in the morning on 3 different flights nearly the full length of brazil the hotel del rey was eventually hit and straight to bed. in 3 days visits to the worlds biggest hydroelectric dam, largest waterfall complex and country most against england in the falklands war needed to be completed, plus secondary missions of; get the hell out of this expensive/mouldy-smelling hotel, spot the toucan, eat the hotels price worth at breakfast tomorrow, had hopefully to be achived.

got up at 8 completely jiggered and forced down a family sized pizza, a jug of freshly squeezed oj and 10 mini croisants (the most expensive things on the buffet) to make the room good value. feeling satisfied we decided to get out and head to argentina for a look at their side of the waterfalls, the plan was swiftly changed at the bus station when we reallised that the passports were still in the safe in the hotel, off to itapu dam then.

basically itapu is the largest dam complex in the world supplying 90% of paraguays power and 25% of brazils, after a brief intro in the form of a film we were off on a bus to see the mighty structure itself. if anyone has ever visited a dam before then they will be able to tell you that despite all of the gigantic stats that were being bandied about; 200 eiffel towers worth of steel, enough concrete to make a 5 lane motorway from moscow to lisbon, etc, there isn´t actually much to see. pretty much it´s a lake, a big wall and a river, all of the rushing, surging power goes on, for obvious reasons, inside tubes and turbines and stuff. you can probably tell from this that my idea of a nuclear power plant would be like mr.burns´ with glowing green bars on conveyor belts and rooms full of flashing dials, if anyone has been to one, and they´re not, don´t shatter the illusion for me. anyway, afterwards there was a tour of the regeneration site full of animals whose habitats had been destroyed, including unavoidably steponable numbers of butterflys,

 

and trees that had been drowned by the sudden appearance of a gigantic lake. nothing was mentioned of the 4 indigenous tribes whose land was in the way aswell, i´m sure they got a polite letter a few weeks prior to the flooding and the usual indian compensation; vouchers for bargain booze and pelts´r´us or something. it was my mums birthday and being the generous, altruistic philanthropists that we are we decided to go out and celebrate with an all you can eat meatathon. needless to say i nearly had norris mcwhirter on the phone as an elvisesque amount of meat was consumed, i nearly, i repeat nearly, had to leave my beer, narrowly avoiding a re-dial to mcwhirter, but it all came good in the end.

next day, passports in hand, we headed off to argentina. the falls are split unevenly between the 2 countries, with brazil getting the ginger stepchilds portion, which effectively means that although there are more falls to look over in argentina the overall view is better from brazil.

i don´t think 2 better days could have been envisaged, belting sunshine all day which made the most incredible rainbows and dried clothes almost as quick as thay got soaked. the full walk round all of the tracks took the best part of each day and at all times there was something to marvel at. there´s no point in describing them so i´ll let a few pictures paint a few thousand words.

this is the full curve from angentina but the majority of the falls are below the platform out of sight,

 the same view but from the brazilian side, the plume of steam is in front of where the next picture was taken from.

getting completely soaked by the vapor, almost close enough to touch;

what the pictures don´t convey is the sheer, all consuming noise or the blast of vapour so what i recommend to do whilst viewing is play the scratching at the end of a record at full volume, though you´ll need to overide the ´auto-return´, plus put your head out of a train  window whilst spraying a sanitizer infront of your face. report back on your success in this venture to go into a prize draw to get the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to send me a cheque for fifty pounds!! wow!!

porto de galinhas

not much more to say about pernambuco. 2 beautiful sunny days, 1 lightning storm that caused a power cut, one day on the reefs watching in dismay as the locals take out tourists in boats that push off the reef to propell themselves destroying it in the process and then set the tourists down on top of the coral where they tramp around on it to really get it annihilated, oysters and crab claws on the beach and an afternoon or 2 watching the champions league semis. roll on the 23rd.

oh linda cidade

 

heading north from salvador, skipping the 2 boring states sergipe and alagoas, we landed safe and sound in recife. the guide book rants on about the streets here and every second picture is on the brightly coloured facades that fill every street, unfortunately without a wide angle lens the streets are too narrow to get a picture of much more than one house in a single picture

 

so i duly filled hannahs camera with pictures of entire streets house by house with a view to reconstructing them at a later date. the sky managed to stay blue for a full 3 days and once again it started to feel like tresspassing on someones expensive holiday. days spent wandering the streets and churches, afternoons by the pool

 

and nights samping the local fares. olinda has the same cobbled, intimate feel as salvador but completely without the abject poverty, grime and tourist infestedness. lack of people means lack of ´atmosphere´but this is made up for 10 times over in charm and tranquility.

the nightlife is suprisingly good for such a laidback place, although there seemed to be no more than 6 bars they all had character or characters working there. being friday and saturday nights during the stay meant that no excuse was needed to drink caipirinhas until i fell off my chair, it did have wheels to be fair, moments after this was taken.

due to the tradition of keeping all of the glasses and bottles that a customer has used on the table for counting at bill time when i fell and kicked over the table their was all kinds of havoc, think 9/11, and much hilarity for the waitresses at my expense. feeling a little regretful of my abuse the next day i decided to take it easy

oh no i didn´t, sorry i was thinking of someone else.

the traditional way of drinking up here seems to involve eating a small snack with every round, all of the customers sit with small pots of stuff next to their drinks, and in some bars called caldarinhas (literally; small stock/broth-erias) you get a little pot whether you want one or not. obviously being timid of foreign food and of a weak constitution i was loathe to indulge so i only had seafood soup, pickled olives, bean both, curried crab, pickled potatos, salted meat, cachaça, lime and egg soup, caldo verde and anything else i could get my hands on. all of it was brilliant and stopped me from falling off my chair, although i did roll down the road on the way home.

whilst on the subject of food, i managed, after 6 weeks of trying, to get the national dish feijoada.

basically a massive pot of pork products and beans served with rice, farofa (manioc flour sauteed in butter which does nothing but dry the food out and is possibly a variation of the english tradition of emptying the hooverbag onto a good roast dinner) and orange wedges (!?). by products i mean all of the bits traditionally in the sausage, ears, trotters, tails, big sheets of skin and fat, cheeks with lower eyelid attached and other bits that were indeciferable which i was forced presume they were trimmed loin or a nice de-boned chop/penis. obviously hannah was at it with wreckless abandon as everyone knows girls love offal and bones on their plate, i´ll admit that parts of it were even a little much for me and i´ve eaten some crazy stuff in the last few months alone, my hat comes off once again to creegan and his live prawn soup, i don´t think i´ll ever better that my friend.

nearly forgot then but in the bar where i fell off my stool were 2 live scrawnalikes;

clarke,

boz!!!

turtles…

the reason for getting back to salvador a day before our flights north was so that we could visit the tamar turtle project in praia de forte, a visitors centre where thy are trying to save the 5 species of turtle that breed on the brazilian coast. as well as looking for nests, incubating the eggs away from predators and releasing the babies into the wild they also have live turtles on site as they keep 1 in every 10,000 eggs that they recieve for research purposes, presumably not to test fags and eyeliner on, and to get money from the visitors, after all no-one is going to pay to see a tank with no turtles in it.

obviously i took a thousand of photos 900 in which the turtles aren´t smiling, are blinking or looking the other way and due to space restrictions i will post the rest on facebook one day for the real enthusiasts.

the highlight was the babies who went, relatively, crazy at feeding time and gobbled the fish fillet with surprising ferocity.

when we got back i saw a photo of me lying on the beach and realised that where i had shaved that day, only my neck, was white. fearing that i would get back to the uk and have to shave for work only to reveal a patch of pallid goth-flesh i decided to trim my beard, only having a razor i started and within minutes had clucked it up so badly that i was forced to go the whole hog and have a real shave

salvador pt2; the music

one thing that can be said of salvador, and bahia in general, is that the people like their music and thay like it all of the time and anywhere. the biggest samba school, odolum, is based in the city, it is also the home of forró and axé, 2 of the most popular music styles nationwide and the birthplace of capoeira.

no matter where you are in the old town the sound of the birimbão, a single stringed instrument that is integral to the music of capoeira, is never far away. where there is a birimbão there are people spinning, kicking, jumping, handstanding and all of the other craziness that constitutes the martial dance. as with any street performance the quality varies wildly from incredibly impressive organised troups to exhausted bedraggled talentless lads jumping up and down for an hour.

to fill in our cultural quota for the week we went to a show that represented all aspects of bahian life, from the slave origins, through candombolé; the banned african religious synthesis with enforced christianity, samba, capoeira and other stuff that involved a lot of energetic dancing in traditional dress

to the music provided by the live band, note the 4 year old who played 4 different instruments in the show.

at night the music goes 2 ways, either in a bar or in the street, the night that we returned odolum were playing a gig that was priced so as to be restricted pretty much to tourists, a plane was chartered especially from europe and loads of wide eyed pasty rich folk were getting terrorised by the street children into buying all kinds of rubbish at massively inflated prices. not to be put off by not being able to afford to go to a gig it turned into a street party outside the venue

and the money saved was enough to pay for the next weeks drinks.

in the bars it is a little more organised version of chaos, nothing is done in moderation, in a bar the size of the average living room, where any normal place would have someone strumming a guitar, a 10 piece samba band is crashing away forcing the people literally to dance amongst the instruments and in any space they can find.

paradise bank woes pt2

the top of this post is in the blue bar at the top ´cos i did it as a page instead of a post.

in the morning we duly left after a few hours in the beach shelter and got the slow boat back to camamu with a thought to making the connecting bus for salvador at 3.30. got in with half an hour to spare and rushed up to the bank only to find that the only atm was broke, the bank guy reckoned it could fix itself any time so we duly waited round. getting perilously close to the bus leaving an official looking man arrived with spare computer parts and access cards and went to work on the machine for all of 2 minutes before standing infront of it scratching his head for well over the length of time left till the bus went plus the time it took us to check into a mouldy stinking room in the only pousada in the scaggy one horse/bank machine town. next day the machine is still off, it´s not possible to pay for a bus ticket by card and we don´t even have 2 reais to rub together. the girl in the pousada forgot to tell the chef that we are there so there´s no food and so it´s orange fanta for breakfast to suppliment the ´bread´ (actually just dust held together through its own magical dryness) and bite of cheese that was all we could afford for tea the night before. in the end i was forced to accost people in the supermarket who were about to pay and try to buy their shopping on my credit card in exchange for cash. in a country as educationally numerically deficient as brazil this is no easy task as everyone, including the shopkeepers, thought i was trying to rip them off. i´ve seen people working in the metro ticket office, where every ticket is r$2.30 and all they do all day is sell them, have to fetch a calculator to work out how much 2 tickets would be and then the change from a r$5 note. the lady who sold us our plane tickets produced a calculator to work out the change for r$198 from the 2 r$100 notes i had given her, but then she also sent herself and email confirmation for our tickets and then had to search the whole of her inbox, literally 5 minutes, as she didn´t have it organised in any way shape or form and appeared never to have deleted any of the spam junk she had recieved since the year 1PG (post-gates). after 4 shops and 10 people an old woman understood the intricacies of the transaction and allowed me to pay for her yoghurt and crisps and we were off!!!

unfortunately the pitiful amount was only enough to get us to the next town where we debunked rushed to the bank and got the next bus out, when we got to the port the ferry wasn´t for 2 hours and as we got back to the hotel in salvador it had taken more than 28 hours to finish the 60 mile journey.

morro de são paulo

have decided that i need to get up to date with my entries as i am about a week behind at the minute so have made notes on salvador and am going to write it up as and when i have time. abrupt end to yesterdays post has been rectified, we realised that the cafe was extortionate and quit but still managed to pay more than our accomodation costs just for 2 hours use. it´s binning it down outside so i don´t feel like i´m missing anything sitting here, in fact it has a tendency to unleash pure tropical storms as it did last night where it got so wet so ridiculously quickly   that the main thoroughfare became a river and it ended up being fun. the town that we are in is a poky little place, there are no vehicles on the island apart from 2 tractors, 1 on either side of the island, and the main mode of transport for the rich is in wheelbarrows  with the word taxi painted on them. the more adventurous can opt for horses  

or the lazy option on a speedboat. our side of the island has 4 beaches which we investigated on the 1st day, all of them are pretty similar but the further you go from the town the more secluded they become. our local, the inspirationally named praia 2,   is where most of the day is spent lazing or playing in the sea. the island is a dormant volcano so all of the coast and beaches are covered in rocks that are perfect for 2 things, 1 for coral to grow on and fish to live in, and 2 for destroying the feet of unwary bathers and walkers. hannah spends each day laying in the sun pretending to write her diary   and i spent 2 hours looking at fish with my snorkel and then the next 2 days hiding from the sun to try and rectify the extreme lobster effect i developed on my back. went out on a speedboat cruise yesterday,   much to the dismay of my epidermis it included several hours snorkelling and a lot of time spent thrashing around the island at full whack with no roof to protect me from the elements. needless to say i´ve been out of the sun all day again today. we took a look around the original settlement which was relatively uninteresting partly because salvador was so full of old churches,   partly because the bahian accent is nearly beyond me, i only understand every odd word, and probably because the guide was describing archetecture, words like plinth, brocade and stipple effect are not exactly at the top of my vocabulary lists. also went to a beautiful beach which would have been secluded if it wasn´t for 20 of us turning up and sitting on it.   i took the time to get a photo, which i feel the blog has lacked lately, of myself in my hat which has now faded to the same colour as the palms that you get on palm sunday and so has been declared, by me, as a holy relic.   for lunch we stopped off at an oyster farm where everyone seemed reviled by the prospect of eating them while i dived in, not literally, and even managed to get hannah to try one.   finished up the day with another proper storm and a caipirinha    from my favourite street stall made from biri-biri fruit which is naturally sour enough to make your hair stand on end just by looking at it. now it´s time to unleash the meat-a-thon that is a rodisio, i´ve been saving myself all day and am hoping to put them out of business….