Day 81: Ilha Grande

Ilha Grande, Brazil's third-largest island, is a delight, packed with forests, beaches, hiking trails, bars and restaurants, domestic tourists, and stray dogs. I spent two nights here, at the hostel whose terrace – on the extreme left of the pic (pic) – overlooks the bay.


There are no cars here: transport is all by boat around the coast, or by bike or handcart on the island's few dirt roads. Everything vital, such as mattresses, gets moved this way (pic). Relaxing is clearly one of the main activities. (There are no banks, either.)


I hiked a few hours along stunningly beautiful trails accompanied by a friendly Brazilian family (pic). They were very interested in knowing about British culture, such as fish and chips. The lad, Vitor, spoke good English and wants to be a chef like Gordon Ramsay. I hope he doesn't start speaking English like Gordon Ramsay.


Our destination was a couple of lovely beaches (pic) where we swam...


...and picnicked on rather sandy sandwiches (pic). I was quite surprised by how out of shape a lot of Brazilians are: half of them seemed to be, well, fat. Clearly the economy really is booming. I wondered if this national weight problem went some way to explaining the recent decline of the once-invincible football team...


...but beach footy is evidently still popular (pic). One chap had to swim into the water to retrieve the ball after accidentally kicking it seawards. He was booked for diving.

Finally, back in the main settlement of Abraão, I could watch the sun go gently down, its golden glow making me very relaxed and happy. Funnily enough, the same applied to the beer (pic).

Day 79: Paraty

I'm now in Paraty, a picture-postcard colonial beach village (pic) between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. So it's full of damn tourists. Not even proper British ones speaking English in loud middle-class accents, but Brazilians, talking Portuguese very fast and even louder.


The town's pretty cobbled streets are closed off to cars, which means lots of bikes. Unfortunately the cobbles are too rough to bike along, so everyone gives up and leaves them propped against walls, like here... (pic)


...and here (pic). I did see someone trying to ride along one of the streets, but by the time I'd got my camera out, he'd got off to look for his fillings.


I'm staying in a lovely little hostel right on the beach. This was breakfast (pic) on Black Friday, the day when back home people are queueing to fight each other for cut-price flatscreen TVs. Well, I had to queue a few seconds for my third round of fresh fruit and coffee.


I hired a kayak for a couple of hours (pic) and paddled round the bay, visiting some of the beaches and islands. The novelty of being wet, but warm instead of cold, is one that didn't wear off.


In the afternoon I hired a bike for a couple of hours too, to trundle round the village (pic)...


...and surrounding countryside, where I saw something I've never seen before: a man taking his horse for a walk by bike (pic).

Day 77: São Paulo: Ibirapuera

I spent the morning in the São Paulo Cultural Centre – a place rather like London's Barbican, combining library, art galleries, concert venues, free wifi public space and exhibition areas, one of which featured this fine array of wrecked cars (pic). At least I think it was an exhibit. It might have been the overflow car park, in which case it's a poorer area than it looks.


The afternoon was devoted to Ibirapuera: the city's equivalent of Hyde Park, complete with skaters and skateboarders, a lake, cycle paths (pic), and a gallery with terrible modern art – the sort where you honestly don't know if what you're looking at is a room being refurbished in mid-builder chaos, or an installation. It was an installation. My brother John clearly doesn't know he's overseeing artworks every day.


Anyway, I hired a bike for 5 reals (£1.25) an hour and enjoyed trundling round for a couple of hours (pic). It felt great to be on two wheels again, and a welcome feature of Ibirapuera is the profusion of free public toilets. Brazilian breakfast coffee is just as fast-moving as British.


Another feature of the park is the buildings by Brazil's Oscar Niemeyer, a key 20th-century architect and prominent figure in modernism. This one (pic), for example, which looks like it's just landed...


...and this one, which looks like it's about to close the cargo bay doors and take off. Sadly, I resisted the temptation to try cycling up it.

Day 76: São Paulo: Museums

São Paulo museums very well, so today was my day for looking at exhibitions. First up was MASP, the Museo de Arte de São Paulo. Just as well it's not the Sao Paulo Art Museum. A super collection of top-notch pieces by all my favourite artists, from subversive Goyas to astoundingly ahead-of-their-time Turners to fabulous Impressionists. There were also some that puzzled me a bit, such as this Bellini called Virgin with child, embracing his mother (pic). Embracing? It looks the little terror's trying to strangle her.


Next was the Museo de Futebol (pronounced 'moo ze-oo je foochy boww'). This was only a museum of Brazilian football, so you had to know a bit about the country's footy history (who Pelé and Garrincha were, for instance – amazingly, they never lost a game in which they played together) and also be able to read Portuguese (pic). Which I can't. Some fun videos to be seen, I suppose. Almost as good as YouTube.


Finally was the Pinacoteca, the museum of Brazilian art (full of painters I'd never head of) that also had a wonderful temporary exhibition by Australian (but living in England) hyper-realist sculptor Ron Mueck. Here's an example (pic): the figures really look like they're about to move and speak. He ought to be made a Lord.

Anyway, I'm now back in the hostel and enjoying a complimentary caipirinha (a limey cocktail) which is just as well, because it's raining tropically outside, and thundering 'n' lightninging hard (no pic: my camera might get washed away).

Day 75: São Paulo

São Paulo is rather like Brazil's London: a huge, cosmopolitan, financial city (actually huger) but with lots of green spaces, lively locals, and lots of places to eat and drink relatively cheaply. Spending a few days in this sophisticated, 21st-century metropolis is quite a change from the cheap'n'cheerful 'South America'. Anyway, I spent this morning nosing around the district of Vila Madalena, famous for its street art. People illustrate their houses (pic)...


...and other people's (pic), but nobody seems to mind. It's all rather chaotic but good-natured, like a lot of Brazil. A feature of São Paulo I very much like is that everyone wanders round in shorts and t-shirts or summer frocks. Even the business people in suits don't wear suits. It's like everyone's on holiday. It gives the place an informal, friendly look. Also, I feel at home at last: I don't stand out as a tourist. In fact, I was asked for directions twice today. In Portuguese, so of course I couldn't reply.


I also wandered round the Old Town, including the lovely Central Market, with its fabulous fruit stalls (pic). You can get freshly-squeezed tropical fruit smoothies here for half the price they in Britain. Except it costs you six hundred quid to fly here, so you'd have to drink ever such a lot to break even. I'm giving it a go, though.


The food stalls in the market are famous for their mortadella: ham sandwiches (pic) in what we might call 'deep fill' in England. The only way you could eat one of these without staining your trousers would be if you were one of those snakes that can detach their jaws from each other so they can eat deer whole.


In the afternoon I went up the Martinelli Building, São Paulo's first skyscraper, which has fine views (pic) from the top of all the other three zillion skyscrapers that they've built since. This is a high-rise city, but the people seem very down to earth; I rather like it.

Day 73: Itaipú dam

My last glimpse of Paraguay was the mighty dam of Itaipú, in the city of Ciudad del Este. This awesome engineering project supplies 70% of all Paraguay's electricity and 17% of all Brazil's. The best way to see it is to fly over by helicopter on a sunny day, and I took this picture myself (pic). Unfortunately it's only of the publicity poster in the entrance of the dam's visitor centre. It was grey and rainy today and I couldn't afford the helicopter flight anyway.


But we had fun, going on the free tour (pic) and seeing the hugeness of the thing, with its forest of electricity pylons taking power to the two countries. Yes, so when it was built in the 1980s it cost £25bn and displaced 80,000 people and destroyed the extraordinarily beautiful Sete Quedas falls, said to rival Iguazu. But people want to recharge their mobile phones and watch football on the telly, so there you go.


Anyway, en route to the bus station, I saw that Paraguay is gearing up for the festive season with this roadside stall selling crib-scene statues (pic). People here are very religious, and bus and coach drivers often have slogans stuck up on their vehicles saying how they trust in God to get them there safely. I'd rather they just drove a bit slower and overtook a bit more carefully, to be honest. Still, Happy Christmas everyone!

Day 72: Colonia Independencia

A day trip to Colonia Independencia today: a 'village' (more a very scattered collection of farmsteads) famous for its German population. They make wine and beer and have an Oktoberfest, but I was too late for that. There isn't really a lot to see, but it was fun to visit a Paraguayan country community, even if the roads were rather busy (pic).

Evidently they don't need, or perhaps have, lawnmowers here to keep the village green trim... (pic)




...or the roundabouts (pic).


Maybe they don't have washing machines, either (pic). They had countless bars and restaurants, though.

Back in the big city of Villarrica, in comparison, it was all action (pic): playing draughts with bottletops.

It's been a lovely couple of days chilling out in quiet, friendly, tourist-free bits of the country, and practising my Spanish. I can say 'two empanadas and a bottle of Brahma please' in a perfect central-Paraguayan accent now.

Day 71: Villarrica

A seven-hour-long, and unimaginably dusty, bus ride over scarlet-coloured sand roads got me to the town of Villarrica, in central Paraguay. Quiet, quaint, and virtually untouristed, it was irresistible. The first thing I did was to sample a Paraguayan speciality: tereré. This is a herbal tea, rather like Argentinian maté, which you see people sipping all time through a metal 'straw' from tankards they carry round with them, which they constantly top up with water. But while maté is hot, tereré is cold, using iced water (pic).





I didn't really care for maté, which smells like grass clippings and tastes like ashtrays. Tereré, served here at a stall by Villarrica bus station, is more complicated, using fresh herbs and plant extracts skilfully combined (pic). It still smells like grass clippings and tastes like ashtrays.


Villarrica is an attractive place to explore, with some picturesque colonial buildings (pic). The pace of life is slow: it takes them a while to get round to cutting vegetation down.


The 'Plaza de los Heroes' commemorates locals who fought in the many wars of recent centuries. Paraguay seems to have picked unwise fights at various times with everyone around them, including themselves, and usually come off worst, including with themselves.


There isn't much to see or do in Villarrica, and locals make their own entertainment: arm wrestling... (pic).


...or fishing in the local park (pic). But it's a nice friendly place, and I didn't have a wrong word with anybody. Though that's probably because most of them only speak Guaraní, the indigenous language.

Of course, if you don't like arm wrestling or fishing, you can always watch paint dry instead (pic). Probably while sipping tereré all afternoon.



In the evening I had a leisurely beer at a corner bar and watched the locals flock past on motorbikes. The average number of people per bike is 2, because most bikes have two people on them, and for every single rider, there's a family of three (pic). The average number of helmets per bike is 0.05. I saw some drivers casually sipping tereré, texting, and eating fruit as they trundled along. Yes, all at the same time. Clearly riding a motorbike is very safe here.

Day 70: Encarnación

I'm now in Paraguay, in the pleasant beachfront city of Encarnación. The bus over the bridge across the Río Paraná from Argentina had this intriguing sign cataloguing the special-needs categories for preferential seating (pic).


Given the availability of cheap food and drink stalls here in friendly Encarnación, it's something I should bear in mind. But at least there's the costanera, the beachfront, just by my hotel, where you can swim in the river's sweet fresh water, and gaze at the town of Posadas in Argentina over the other side. It gets crowded in the evening, but in the afternoon I had it to myself (pic).


This is a more typical view of my time so far in Encarnación, though. I'm rather liking Paraguay.

Day 68: Resistencia

Yesterday, Day 67, was a local bus trip out to the village of San Lorenzo, a popular weekend picnic spot for Salta's residents. I was quite taken with this ninja-knitted craft shop (pic). Obviously they take insulation very seriously here.

Today was mostly another bus day, taking me from Salta to Encarnacion, over the Rio Paraná in Paraguay. En route, however, I took a couple of hours to explore Resistencia. The Argentinian town is famous for its outdoor sculptures: over 500 of them. It seemed quite a cycling town, as well, and almost every sculpture seemed to have someone on a bike next to it (pic).





A factor in cycling's favour here is the flatness. This part of Argentina consists of endless green plains. Imagine a billard table stretching from London to Rome, but without balls or pockets, or players, and just the occasional humdrum gridstreet town that looks the same as all other gridstreet towns. Sound interesting? Not really? Exactly. The boredom factor clearly affected the model for this sculpture.


Still, Resistencia proved a pleasant, friendly and generous town (people kept buying us bus tickets). And, with its arty aesthetic, it stopped and made me and my fellow temporary backpacker companion think. Specifically, how the cafe bill managed to add up to twenty pesos more than it should.