Use The Force, Gringo

DAY 102: Lonely Planet's South America On A Shoestring, which covers all the countries in South America in an abridged form, is a brick, weighing maybe two pounds. Lugging it around had become a burden for me -- I already had the burden of lugging around cameras and electronics -- and so early in my trip I took the suggestion of many travel gurus out there: rip out the sections that you need, as needed. At first I hated the notion of ripping out pages in my neatly bound book, but after the first rip, there was no stopping me -- it was just easier. Ripping was a great idea as I could just fold 3-4 pages conveniently into my pocket, but it wasn't such a good idea when I lost the pages I needed: the section about taking the train from Santa Cruz, Bolivia through the small tropical highland towns to the Brazilian border.

SOME PEOPLE TREAT THE LONELY PLANET BOOK as a bible, calling it "The Book" or even "The Holy Planet." Others, like my recurring traveling partner Lara, call it "The Lying Planet," as most of the information is outdated and wrong. Many people I've met on the backpacker trail have what Heidi (from my New Year's trek) called "a love/hate relationship with Lonely Planet." On the one hand, you hate that their writers influence the opinions and the routes of the majority of backpackers. On the other hand, you realize that as much as you hate it, you are dependant on it for places to see and places to stay on a somewhat limited timeframe.

Zolly the Hungarian told me a story about a girl he met in Mexico. She too had a love/hate relationship with her guidebook, but one day decided to put it away. She compared it to the scene in the original Star Wars (Episode IV) when Luke Skywalker put away his targeting computer in the trench of the Death Star, only to rely on his instincts and The Force. "I'm ready. I can do without it now," she said according to Zolly.

With my pages missing from my pocket -- I must have misplaced it in an internet cafe or a bar -- I was forced to use The Force. Luckily I remembered a little bit from what I had skimmed from the section I needed and went off to the Santa Cruz bus/train station at eight in the morning when tickets went on sale for travels that day. Zolly tagged along and got a bus ticket to Sucre, while I waited on the long line for the railway.

Originally I remembered reading in "The Holy Planet" that it was possible to get a ticket to ride in a freight boxcar like a hobo -- something I wanted to try for the sake of the experience -- but apparently things had changed since the guidebook edition had been written. (Yet another reason why I'd agree with Lara and call it "The Lying Planet.") I saw no option of a freight car and security to the tracks was too tight that you couldn't sneak onto one. I took the closest option to riding the rails like a hobo -- a second class ticket in a passenger car, the cheapest option available. I purchased a ticket to San Jose de Chiquitos, a small town about halfway to the border to break the long journey in two -- I figured that perhaps I could get a boxcar from there.

I BID ZOLLY GOODBYE and just wandered around the big modern train station for most of the day, waiting for my 4 p.m. train. I left my luggage in storage and wandered to an internet cafe across the street, and then had lunch at one of the many broiled chicken places nearby. The restaurant was run by Chinese people and on a big screen television in the corner, someone had put on Bruce Lee's 1973 classic Enter the Dragon. Bruce reiterated the theme of the day -- me without my guidebook -- when he told a martial arts student, "Don't think. Feel."

I FELT MY WAY BACK TO THE TRAIN STATION in time to get on the long security line to the train tracks. Once on the platform, a cop noticed me and my big gringo backpack and stopped me for questioning like a Stormtrooper in Star Wars.

"[What's in the bag?]"

"[Only my clothes.]"

"[Where are you going?]"

"[San Jose.]"

"[Why? Are you a volunteer?]" she asked. San Jose was one of the several Jesuit mission towns in eastern Bolivia.

"[No, just a tourist.]"

My papers checked out, but she led me to an immigration officer nearby. My papers were still in order and they let me on my way -- I didn't even have to use a Jedi mind trick.

SEEING CAUCASIAN-LOOKING MEN in overalls and straw hats -- or Caucasian-looking women in long patterned dresses and straw hats -- was an occassional, but not rare, occurrance at the train station. The Jesuits of eastern Bolivia were apparently a widely-accepted minority, living in communities similar to the Amish in Pennsylvania, U.S.A. Three of them boarded my second-class car en route to the mission town and sat diagonally from me across the aisle. To the right of me was a talkative Bolivian woman who started a conversation with me after noticing my big gringo backpack.

"[You are a gringo.]"

"[What?]"

"[Where are you from?]"

"[New York.]"

"[Right, you're a gringo.]"

She asked me if I knew what a certain word meant, and when I told her I didn't, she and other nearby woman just laughed. "[See, he's a gringo.]"

Carmeña (that was her name) continued to talk to me in a patronizing way, me the only gringo on board -- the Whiteman Jesuit on board that looked a bit like actor Sam Watterson was fluent in Spanish and didn't get hassled the way I was. I entertained her with my less-than-stellar Spanish anyway to pass the time.

"[How come you aren't in Pullman class?]" she asked me, referring to the class above first class.

"[It's expensive.]"

"[Not for you; you're a gringo,]" she said. Suddenly I recalled Zolly the Hungarian's argument about our taxi fare from Samaipata to Santa Cruz -- "expensive" should always be relative to the native environment, not the environment back home.

I hated how Carmeña always addressed me as "gringo" -- not that it would normally bother me, but everytime she said it, my "cover" was blown and another man's head would turn to me conspicuously. I made sure the sweater I had tied around my waist covered all my pocket entrances as the day got darker.

Dozens of vendors when back and forth the car aisle selling everything from flashlights to the indigenous chicha drink to broiled chicken. Carmeña bought a bag of salty, donut-shaped crackers and shared one with me.

"[Eat, gringo.]"

She started to leave me alone when she tried to talk to the young blonde Jesuit girl across from her, who didn't understand anything. "[Now she doesn't understand any Spanish,]" Carmeña told me.

THE CRAMPED, HUMID TRAIN RIDE ON THE FERROVIARIA ORIENTAL through the tropical highlands lasted only about six and a half hours, although it seemed a lot longer. Carmeña wasn't all patronization during that time -- she tipped me on a place to stay and told me about things to see in town.

"[I lost my guidebook. What is there in San Jose?]" I asked her.

"[Nothing. People. The church.]"

Upon arrival in San Jose de Chiquitos I saw that she was right; there wasn't much to the town at all -- although it was nighttime and I couldn't tell for sure, just like every other time I arrived in a new town at night. I got a taxi to the main plaza and found the hostel Carmeña had spoken about, where I checked into a single bed room without a private bathroom but with a feature more important: a fan.

As I dined on my ration of a can of sardines and a pack of Oreos alone in my room, I was content that I had arrived in a town way off the backpacker trail without the Lonely Planet pages in my pocket. As Obi-Wan Kenobi said, "The Force will be with you, always" -- although I don't think Luke Skywalker was ever made fun of for being a gringo.

Random Thoughts While Waiting and Walking

DAY 103: It's funny the things from your childhood that resurge in your mind out of nowhere when you're alone on the backpacker trail. I woke up in my San Jose de Chiquitos hostel room singing the words to the theme of "Teeny Little Super Guy," the stop-motion animated series of shorts that were shown on Sesame Street in the 70s and 80s. This random thought that was one of the more exciting things of a relatively boring day of waiting and walking in the Jesuit mission town.

I HAD BREAKFAST at the hostel and then -- still without a map -- used my instincts to find the train station to buy a ticket. I walked down the dirt, residential roads, passed mules and butterfly swarms until I heard a train whistle and went in its direction.

The sign by the ticket window said that tickets went on sale at eight. I got there at nine, but no vendor showed up until ten. I passed the time just waiting on a bench, next to some fat kid eating candy and an ice cream, just after he had finished another bag of candy. When the ticket agent finally came, he told me that the train to Quijarro wouldn't leave until ten at night, and that I couldn't purchase tickets for it until five in the afternoon.

I wandered back into town under the increasing heat of the sun, to the main Plaza Padre Felipe Suarez. The north side of the plaza was the three-building Jesuit mission complex, which I wandered into, visiting inside the rustic wooden church and the courtyard until it was getting too hot to do anything.

A MIDDLE-AGED MAN WITH NO SHIRT ON and a really big gut came out of his back room when I entered his restaurant. He, like most of the other people in town, was trying to keep cool, complaining about the heat like metro New Yorkers and Torontonians complained about the cold up north. I had an ice cold Coke while chatting with the guy. Aside from telling me about his former life as an engineer, he reiterated what Carmeña told me on the train the day before: that there wasn't much to do in San Jose.

Luckily, the old woman who ran my hostel was nice enough to let me stay in my room seven hours later than the noon check-out time -- which was good because I need a place to crash and escape the sun. I took a nice mid-day siesta like the rest of the town, under the wind from my ceiling fan until I went out for a walk around the plaza. That got pretty boring, so I went for a walk to the other side of the train tracks -- everything was more or less just as dull.

I WAS BACK AT THE TRAIN TICKET WINDOW (picture above) by five and waited yet again until someone arrived forty minutes later. There was still no freight boxcar option so I bought a ticket in first class. For only less than two dollars more than second class, it got me half of a two-seater instead of a third of a two-seater I would have gotten in second. First class was actually third class anyway; the air-conditioned, video playing "Pullman" and "Super Pullman" classes superceded it.

I continued to soak my shirt in sweat as I walked the eight blocks back to the main plaza. I got an ice cold beer and sat out, watching the small, random march of people that went around the park. I went for another walk passed an outdoor club waiting for Friday night patronage and the usual general stores until sunset. After dinner I sat in the plaza again as kids pushed a wagon cart around with people inside. A distant lighting storm illuminated the night sky, but it didn't rain. The random song of Neil Sedaka's "Oh Carol" popped in my head and I couldn't stop singing it to myself.

Around 9:30, I walked my final eight blocks to the train station and waited with a couple of people in the waiting area for the 11:52 train. Forty-six pages later in Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, there were a lot more people in the waiting room with me. A train didn't come until around 1:30 in the morning. I got on that train, only to have the conductor tell me that I was on the wrong one and that I should get off and wait for the next -- others were in the same situation. My 11:52 train didn't come until close to 2:30 and didn't depart until around three in the morning.

As I sat in the darkness, the railcar speeding through the night, I wondered what new random thought would pop in my head, but I was too tired to think of anything and just passed out.

Oi, Corumba!

DAY 104: The sun rose and woke me up around six in the morning, only after a mere three-hour slumber. What the sun revealed was worth the rude awakening though; we were well into the Bolivian side of The Pantanal, with its marshy, tropical vegetation and impressive rocky cliff formations. The girl next to me wasn't so impressed; tired, she just kept on sleeping, often falling and leaning on my shoulder until she'd suddenly wake up embarrassed. When another two-seater opened up after a stop, she snatched it to sleep in peace.

The train continued through the wetlands of The Pantanal, stopping in small outpost towns to drop off and pick up passengers. At each stop, the train was assaulted by dozens of food vendors, usually women and children, selling lemonade, chicken and empanadas. Each one in a different pitch of voice announced their goods in increasingly annoying repetative calls, with vocal inflections ending as a question. After a while I tired of hearing "Limonada fria? Limonada fria? Empanadas de pollo y queso? Limonada fria?" over and over and over again.

THE LOCOMOTIVE CONTINUED TO PULL OUR TRAIN eastbound towards the Bolivian border town of Quijarro through the hot and sticky wilderness, cooled only for a short time by a passing shower. Along with the kids on the train, I popped my head and arms slightly out the window, ducking in whenever a branch would whiz by. I used the on-board toilet whose drain was merely a big hole to underneath the train. A team of border cops entered the train at a stop and randomly searched bags -- I had to reveal my electronics and cameras, but without any narcotics I was let go.

AFTER THE ALMOST FOURTEEN HOUR JOURNEY -- four hours longer than anticipated -- we arrived at the end of the line in Quijarro. I shared a taxi with a young Bolivian couple to the border crossing, across town. I paid the 10 Bs. (bolivianos) for the exit stamp and then changed a 50 Bs. note from a shady money changer guy on the street. Fifty Bs. translated to 17 Brazilian real -- I didn't change any more for fear of having gotten counterfeit money like I did during my Ecuador/Peru crossing.

The young Bolivian couple was detained by the border cops for a while, but I befriended two Bolivian guys that weren't together. "Taxi?" one of them asked me.

"Si."

"[It should be fifteen real. Five, five and five.]"

We walked across the border line into Brazil, the world's fifth largest country, and one hour into the future with the time zone difference. There was a collection of taxis nearby. An eager driver put our bags in his trunk.

"[Fifteen real]" the one Bolivian said.

The Brazilian taxi driver got upset. "[No, where did you hear that?]"

"[Fifteen. No more.]"

"[You're not going anywhere for fifteen,]" the Brazilian argued back, or so I figured without really knowing much Brazilian Portuguese. He took our luggage out of the trunk and dropped it on the street. Fifteen was too little and the other cabbies nearby agreed. I was confused; why were we worried about getting a taxi now, don't we have to get our entry stamps in our passports?

Another driver said he'd take the three of us into town for the (still low) price of 30 real. The other Bolivian guy convinced the first one to just pay the ten -- time was running out with the time zone change. It was already 5:10 and the customs office, which I soon discovered was at the bus terminal all the way on the other side of town, was to close at 5:30.

The driver sped across the streets of the Brazilian border town of Corumba, bringing us to the customs line with ten minutes to spare. We paid the driver the ten real each and got on line with our passports. The two Bolivian guys went ahead of me, making me the third and final guy on line before the window closed for the day.

However, just making the cut off wasn't good enough.

"[United States? Oh, you are American,]" the immigration officer said. He continued to tell me something in what I heard as a mix of English, Latin American Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese -- needless to say it was quite confusing. Brazilian Portuguese had been described to me by most people as "Spanish with a French accent," but I soon discovered it was more like what a woman I once met in Antarctica two years prior had described it: "It's like nothing you've ever heard before." Sure, written Brazilian Portuguese looks like Spanish with a French flair to it, but spoken, there are inflections in the voice that make it sound almost Dutch, German or some sort of Scandinavian language.

I didn't know what the immigration officer was saying, so the Bolivian guys helped me translate, surprised that they had been in the midst of a Yank the whole time in the cab.

"[I can't help you. You must go to the Federal Police in the town center,]" I deciphered from the immigration officer's mouth. "[You must get...]" he started, and then did the motions of a fingerprinting. I had heard through the Blog grapevine that Brazil had initiated a new law requiring Americans to be fingerprinted and photographed upon entry because the American government does it to Brazilians. I figured I was one of the first Americans -- if not the first to enter Brazil through its Bolivian "backdoor" since the law was instated.

"[Is the office open now?]" I asked.

"[No. Go tomorrow. Eight in the morning.]"

And so, I began my adventures in Brazil that day, technically as an illegal alien.

CORUMBA, BRAZIL, ACCORDING TO LONELY PLANET, had a "reputation for poaching and drug trafficking," and wasn't one of the major destinations covered well in the abridged Shoestring guide -- only one page was allotted for the border town and there were no maps for me to tear out. However, in the one page I found the Hotel Angola, a cheap hostel in the town center where I decided to go. With only seven real in my pocket, I needed to change some money in order to get a taxi into town. I asked the information booth and they directed me to a store, which directed me to the baggage claim -- none of them had changing services and there was no bank or ATM in the rather small terminal building.

"[How much to the town center?]" I asked in Spanish to a taxi driver that looked like legendary comic book creator Stan Lee. (Sam, who I toured the Bolivian salt flats and the Bolivian capital city of Sucre with, had been in Brazil and told me that I could get by in Brazil in Spanish more than English.)

"[Ten real,]" the cabbie said.

"[I only have seven. Is there a bank in the center.]"

"[Yes.]"

The Brazilian Stan Lee drove me into town as a slight drizzle came down from the overcast sky. I was waiting for him to take me to a bank but he took me to the Hotel Angola and waited for me to pay. Great, he didn't understand me, I thought. I paid him the seven real I had, dropped off my bags in the hostel and ran off to find an ATM. The first one wasn't closer than a block away, and it didn't accept my card. The second one I found didn't either. Luckily the international HSBC was nearby -- the first machine asked for my checking account number (Who carries that around?), but the second machine sorted me out with English words. I ran back to the taxi driver and tipped him a real extra for waiting.

SOMETIMES I FEEL THAT TRAVELING -- or Life in general -- is one big adventure role-playing video game where you have to collect certain objects to unlock doors or continue on. In adventure role-playing video games, almost nothing happens without some sort of reason or purpose for later on in the game.

While going to the bus terminal seemed like a waste of time and money -- I could have used my initial ten real to go straight to the town center instead of wasting time there, only to find out I couldn't get a visa stamp or a change of currency -- the one item I collected there was a brochure that a guy gave me for his tour agency. On the back of the brochure was a map of town with a star on his tour office, as well as the other points of interest. Without a map from Lonely Planet, this would be my guide.

After checking into my spacious room with a cheesy circular honeymoon bed and an all-important ceiling fan, I used the map to wander around town. The place was a ghost town with mostly everything closed -- Lonely Planet said that most things closed by 1 p.m. on a Saturday. I wandered the practically empty streets to the Porto Geral on the Rio Miranda, the Plaça da Indepencia and the Plaça da Republica. It was a gloomy day, but a huge, majestic rainbow appeared from a break in the clouds (picture below) to foreshadow that perhaps, in the end, things would be okay.

I had dinner at a Brazilian pizzeria and had a pie with corn on top, complemented with a bottle of Skol, Brazil's proudly brewed beer served in a glass bottle encased in a plastic cooler thing to keep it cold. I soon confirmed what I had heard about prices in Brazil -- with the exchange rate into US dollars, prices were about doubled from what I had been paying in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. I supposed I just had to adjust to the inflation, just as I had to with common expressions: no longer was it "¡hola!" it was "Oi!" No longer was it "gracias," it was "obrigado." The one thing that didn't change though was the apparent love for 80's American pop music, which came from the pizzeria's speakers. I swear between Bolivia and Brazil thus far, I hadn't heard Dire Straits' "Walk of Life" more than ever.

I WANDERED AROUND CORUMBA'S STREETS at night -- the illegal alien I was -- passing a church fair with outdoor bingo in the Plaça da Republica and stopping into the one internet place in town. Tired, I walked back to my hostel and laid in the circular bed under the cooling fan above -- in a new country with a new language, a new currency and new problems.

Oi, Corumba!

COPS in The Pantanal

DAY 105: I woke up that Sunday morning early and got in dressed in my Sunday best -- I was off to the Federal Police station for my entry visa stamp, obligatory mugshot and fingerprints for being American, since I couldn't get them the day before at the border. I wore my nerdy Poindexter glasses in attempts to look less of a criminal, or perhaps just a white collar one.

The Federal Police station was just half a block away from my hostel. Like many federal police buildings, inside had a strict and tidy feel like any federal building in a Hollywood movie. The two cops on duty were also out of a movie; one tall, one short, the two Brazilians wore plain clothes with similar haircuts to Wil Smith and Martin Lawrence in Bad Boys. They were just sitting around the lobby shooting the breeze until I arrived.

"Falla você, I mean, Você falla ingles ou espanhol?" I asked, using the torn pages in the back of my Lonely Planet book with a very, very abridged list of emergency Portuguese phrases and words (including the translation for "tampons" in case I needed any).

"Que queires?" ("What do you want?") the Wil Smith one asked.

"Ingles. I need a stamp in my passport."

The Bad Boys let me in.

Getting my immigration papers sorted out was an easier task than I thought. The Martin Lawrence cop took my photo with a Sony Mavica digital camera after fumbling around looking for a disk. He fingerprinted me onto a card after I filled out a standard immigration form. The whole ordeal took less than half an hour.

With ink still on my thumbs and a stamp in my passport, I was now legal in Brazil and it was time to continue on.

AFTER A BREAKFAST OF SALTENHAS (chicken "Hot Pocket" turnovers) at one of the few open places open on a Sunday morning, I took a taxi to the bus terminal to get a ticket for Campo Grande, the capital city of the state, which I hoped would be a lot more livlier than the border town. Using Spanish, I asked the man at the ticket counter for the next bus to Campo Grande. He said something that sounded like "dos en la mañana" (two in the morning) and after pouting a bit, I realized had no way around to getting an earlier ride. I bought the ticket and went to the baggage storage place to drop off my bag to keep there for the long-haul of a day.

"[This places closes at 9:30 at night,]" the man said. "[When is your bus?]"

"Dos en la mañana."

He smiled and made motions like I had nothing to worry about, which prompted me to think -- my ticket said departure time was "12:00" and usually bus tickets use the 24-hour clock. I looked at the number list in my Lonely Planet pages, and "doze", which he could have said, meant "twelve." But twelve in the morning? I decided to stick around until noon to see if a bus would show up at Platform 1 like my ticket showed.

While waiting, confused with the new language -- and I was just getting used to mastering Spanish! -- I took advantage of my bag in storage and went walking for a bit to look for an open bookstore in hopes of getting a dictionary. A drizzle came down as I walked the empty Sunday streets, and in the end I came back to the terminal bookless.

Noon was approaching and no bus came to Platform 1. I passed the time writing and watching a multi-ethnic-casted Brazilian sketch comedy show on a nearby TV. Just before twelve I went over to the bus in Platform 3 to see where it was going. It was marked "Campo Grande. 12:00."

Quickly I got my bag out of storage and ran for the bus. In a frenzy, the guys saw that I did in fact have a ticket for the ready-to-depart bus, and I managed to get on with just a couple of minutes to spare -- all the other passengers had already been waiting on the bus for the past forty minutes.

SAM, WHO HAD BEEN TRAVELLING WITH HER FRIEND ZOE and crossed paths with me in Bolivia a few times, told me that once I got to Brazil, the buses would be a lot nicer. Immediately I saw what she meant: the air-conditioned bus, equipped with a bathroom, had reclining seats with leg cushions that pulled out from the chairs ahead, forming a very comfortable Laz-Y-Boy experience. It was easy to take a nap for a couple of hours as the bus rode through the Brazilian Pantanal region, stopping once for a lunch break in the small town of Miranda. I took another nap for the second half the journey but was awaken by a stop at a federal police security checkpoint, where an armed officer got on the bus for a random search. He scrutinized my passport with a gleem in his eye, and then quickly frisked my legs -- and ahem, my crotch -- for weapons. Others got similar treatments, but there were no problems, unless of course someone secretly had public lice. It was hard to feel threatened by the officer because he wore old man reading glasses that made him look like Bob Newhart.

CAMPO GRANDE, ALTHOUGH DESCRIBED BY LONELY PLANET AS "the lively capital of the Mato Grosso do Sul state" and "a major gateway to the Pantanal," it was only allotted half a page in the abridged Shoestring guide. Without a map I was clueless on my bearings and it being a Sunday, there were no touristy places with free tour maps open. It started to rain and I hopped in a taxi which took me to the Hotel Americano in the city center, which was mentioned in the book. Lonely Planet said it "has the cheapest rooms in the center at US$8/16, but it's pretty grotty." However upon arrival, I found it wasn't that bad -- I'd had worse. In fact, my small room had a TV, A/C, private bathroom and a mini-fridge with sodas and beers inside. The manager of the hostel was a nice old grandmotherly woman who thought I was a bit too short to be an American.

After catching up on Blog duties on my laptop in the comfort of my "grotty" room, I went out to see what there was to do on a Sunday night. Most of the places were closed on my main street (picture above), but I walked over to another and found a couple of restaurants open, including what I like to call the "American Embassy:" McDonald's. I resisted a Big Mac Attack and went to Disk Gugu instead, a diner-looking place that I figured was the place to go for greasy food after a night of boozing. McDonald's Big Mac had some major competition at the Brazilian eatery; my heart attack sandwich, inappropriately named "Pap's Simple" sandwich, included hamburger, chicken, bacon and egg, all stuffed inside a bun, grease dripping from the edges. There was no way to get it all down without a Coke.

BIG BROTHER BRASIL was on TV when I got back to my room, complete with a photogenic Brazilian cast that would give American reality show casting a run for their money. As I tried to decipher what the model types were saying in their hoity-toity inflections, I reckoned Big Brother Brasil was a hit in the genre of Brazilian reality television, bigger than a show like COPS. From my experience of the day -- with federal police that just loiter around in an office or wear old man reading glasses -- a reality show like COPS probably wouldn't do so well, at least not in this part of Brazil.

The Sims

DAY 106: "The C Phase," a phrase I coined (or at least I think I did) is that inevitable period of time when a non-Spanish speaker first enters Latin America and, confused with the language, just says "sí" ("yes") to everything.

"[Would you like me to charge you more money than I normally do to a local?]"

"Sí."

The C Phase got me in many predicaments, like on a mountain bike ride through the Ecuadorean countryside and on a cargo boat trip through Peru, until I eventually got the hang of Spanish and started to understand the gist of what people were saying. However, in Brazil, the only Portuguese-speaking country in South America where "yes" translates to "sim," I was back to square one.

CONTRARY TO "CAMPO GRANDE" TRANSLATING INTO ENGLISH AS "BIG COUNTRY," Campo Grande was more like any big modern city, complete with Pizza Huts, Dunkin' Donutses and McDonald'ses. With a population of over 650,000 people, the state capital had many establishments where I could, behind the language barrier, revert back to my old ways in The C Phase.

Determined to get out of this phase, the first thing I did after my complimentary breakfast was head out to the used bookstore I noticed in my wanderings the night before. There I managed to buy a small little English/Portuguese dictionary, which would help me with the rest of my day. But the problem with the dictionary was that it didn't really explain grammar or sentence structure, and it definitely didn't explain how to decipher the words coming out of Brazilians' mouths at a rate of about a hundred words a minute.

I still didn't have a map to guide me through the city, but I managed to find a nearby museum with the word "turismo" on a sign outside. The door was closed, but a man came out to me and said something I couldn't understand.

"Sim."

He looked at me confused and I looked at him confused back. I reckoned the museum was closed for the day or something. "Disculpa, no entiendo," I said in Portuguese and Spanish.

[Something, something] "mapa?" the man said.

"Sim."

I now had a map to lead me around the city.

USING "SIM", SOME SPANISH and my finger to just point at things, I managed to get by in the city on the off-and-on rainy day. I made my way across town, through the Praça Ary Coelho and all the way down the main Avenida Alfonso Pena. On the map the road didn't look too long, nor the city too big, but as I attempted to walk the entire avenue I realized just how big the "big country" city was. The tall buildings of downtown that surrounded the Praça da Republica, with its monument to commemorate the seventy years of Japanese immigrants in Brazil, led me passed an obelisk (picture above), through a residential city neighborhood and out to the suburbs where luxury condos were in construction. I had walked about three and a half miles along a designated walking path in the middle of the highway, until I arrived at the deserted Parque das Naçôes Indigenas, which didn't offer much -- the museum there had burned down.

While in the suburbs, I did the most suburban of things and went to the big shopping mall, uncreatively named "Shopping Campo Grande." Parched from the hot, tropical weather outside, I went to get a milkshake at Bob's, the "100% Brazilian" fast food chain whose outdoor ad campaign had a striking resemblance to that of McDonald's.

"Milkshake. Morango. Grande," I said like a caveman, hoping single words would suffice in lieu of complete sentences. Coincidentally, I didn't know what "morango" meant, but I figured it was blackberry since that's what "mora" was in Spanish.

The disgruntled teenaged guy behind the counter said [something, something].

"Sim," I replied.

He looked at me like I was the moron. "Que sabor?"

"Morango."

[Something, something.]

"Sim."

In the end, I got a vanilla shake. I sat on a bench and looked in my dictionary -- "morango" was strawberry, but I figured he was trying to tell me they had none left.

IT'S ONE THING TO BE A "MARKET," and another to be a "supermarket," but in the mall was Carrefour, a self-proclaimed "hypermarket" that sold everything from DVDs to eggs by the dozen. A woman approached me in the hypermarket as I wandered down the main aisle.

[Something, something?] she asked.

"Yo no se," ("I don't know") I replied in Spanish -- another common expression I frequently used in The C Phase. I figured she thought I worked there and was asking for where something was.

[Something, something?] she asked again, this time a little annoyed.

I just looked confused.

"[But you're wearing a watch,]" I figured she said as she pointed to the timepiece wrapped around my wrist.

"OH! Quatro y media," I answered her in Spanish, showing her the face of my watch in case I said it wrong.

"Obrigada."

She walked away, shaking her head.

LIKE BEING IN "THE C PHASE," traveling with the "sims" got quite humbling after a day of wandering. However, the one encounter during the day that didn't stupefy me was when I went to a tour agency to book a safari through the Pantanal for the next four days.

"Você falla ingles?" ("Do you speak English?") I asked off the bat.

"Yes."

"Excellent."

I gave them my business right away.

ON AN UNRELATED NOTE that I couldn't resist but include here (you'll see why in a moment), my stomach heeded the words of wisdom from Blogreader Christy and led me to the American Embassy in town: the local McDonald's. I managed to order in Portuguese by simply saying "numero dois" and "sim" to a question that went [something, something] "Coka?"

Do you know what they call a "Quarter Pounder with Cheese" in Brazil? They call it a "Quarterão with Cheese." A "Big Mac" is a "Big Mac," but they call it "O Big Mac." I can't tell you what they call a Whopper though, because I never went into Burger King.


OKAY KIDS, I'm off to the N.I.Z. (No Internet Zone) for the next four days, as I go on safari through the wetland region known as The Pantanal. Assuming that I survive the mosquitoes, wild pumas and snakes, I should be back on the 7th of February -- hopefully with more desktop wallpaper-worthy pictures!

NEW & SILENT READERS: Please don't let the "Blog Hogs" intimidate you from posting a comment. I'd love to hear from anyone else that's out there!

Eight Hours to Nowhere

DAY 107: There was a Brazilian morning show on television called Mais Você hosted by a sassy middle-aged woman and -- although targeted for adults -- a talking parrot puppet. I figured the Brazilians needed to spice up their mornings with a soft-spoken character that could spontaneouly explode into loud outbursts, the way Americans did with Regis Philbin.

MY DAY'S JOURNEY FROM THE PUPPET PARROTS of a television studio to the real parrots of the Pantanal began when I checked out of my downtown hostel and took a cab to my tour agency by the bus station. It was there that I met Deb, a goth-type from outside of Birmingham, UK. It was strange we hadn't run into each other before; we had been on the same route since Ecuador for the same amount of time. She had been travelling with a friend for most of the time, but had split up with her, bringing her like many others, to the Pantanal solo.

When I signed up for my safari the day before, there were only four people on the list. However, about a dozen people signed up at the associated go around saying "sim" all the time. He also told me about the crazy pronunciations of certain letters in certain words: depending on the context, sometimes "r" sounds like an "h," "m" like an "ng", and "d" like a "j."

"What do you know about the Pantanal?" I asked the upstate New Yorker.

"Just what's in the book."

"Yeah, I just know that it's there."

After a four-hour ride in the air-conditioned bus on a paved road -- which was sometimes delayed by a herd of cattle crossing the road with a gaucho (a South American cowboy) -- there the Pantanal was. After a food break at a rest area for about an hour, we continued to the area where the paved road met the dirt one. We switched vehicles to a muddy 4x4 truck with a trailer in the back for passengers to travel in like soldiers, which took us over a bridge (picture above), along a bumpy and muddy road through the wetlands, passed the occasional ranch or caiman (similar to an alligator) swimming nearby in the water. On the truck ride I met the other people on the tour, an international mix from Sweden, Australia, Holland, Poland and the U.K. A Brazilian hung off the back of the truck and loudly yelped a happy, high-pitched "YAO!" everytime went over a big bump. We stopped at a small shop for a beer and toilet paper run and then continued through the dirt path -- and a fierce and wicked storm. We protected our trailer with the plastic tarps that rolled along the sides.

THREE HOURS LATER -- eight in total since we left Campo Grande -- we arrived in a camp in the middle of nowhere, somewhere right in the geographic middle of South America. It was too dark to see the camp at a glance, so our guide Akuna -- the energetic one that yelped on the truck ride -- showed us around, from the toilets to the showers to our mosquito net-walled hut with about twenty hammocks all in a row for us.

In the mess hut we mingled with the other people already in camp, including Pete, another New Yorker from Westchester with a very Jewish Bronx schtick about him. He had been travelling in Brazil for about a month thus far with his Brazilian girlfriend, having split up from her to do the Pantanal alone. Farley and I rapped with him a bit over dinner to "represent" New York amidst the other nationalities in the Pantanal. Pete mistakenly brought us New Yorkers a little shame though when he unknowingly chased away an armadillo with the bright lights of his headlamp before the others could see.

Most of the other travelers had brought cachaça (Brazilian sugar cane rum) and had started a caipirinha making contest at the table. I joined in on the competition and made one of the better ones according to one of the guides who was playing judge, bringing a little glory back to New York.

THE RAIN CONTINUED THROUGH THE NIGHT as we settled into our camp, eight hours from anywhere. At least there were caipirinhas.

Caimans and Big Cats

DAY 108: The one thing about wilderness safaris is that, unlike a visit to the zoo, animals aren't presented in convenient, sectioned off areas. The one guarantee about safaris is that there is no guarantee you'll see anything good. I had come to the Pantanal in hopes of seeing big cats -- pumas or jaguars -- but was disheartened when I heard that one Croatian girl who had been there a month working in the camp hadn't seen a big cat yet.

A BELL WOKE THE CAMP UP AT SIX O'CLOCK in the morning for breakfast, one hour before a seven o'clock hike through the wilderness to attempt to find some wildlife. Nearby we heard the sound of a chainsaw cutting into a tree (for another hut I later discovered).

"They're cutting down the rainforest. They must be making a McDonald's," I joked to Ludovic, an Englishman with really frazzled hair. He had been travelling with the others since Foz do Iguaçu and at one point had a really swollen foot. With his big feet and Hobbit hair, everyone just started calling him Frodo and it stuck.

Our big group divided into halves. Frodo's and my half was led by the energetic Akuna who brought us on a three-hour trek through the diverse ecological environments of the Pantanal:

• Tropical jungle areas, with its tall palm trees, toucan birds and termite mounds. Akuna pointed out one of the parasitic roots in the area, which wrap around healthy trees and suck them dry within two months.
  
• Marshy wetlands, where herons and ibex birds came to drink in water levels that went up to our thighs at some points. Jackie and Kate, two Aussie college girls in our group, were wearing flip-flops, which only flicked mud all over their backsides. February was still on the edge of the rainy season -- many area that we trodded through would be flooded by rains, making them only navigable via boat in a few weeks.
  
• Vast savannah grasslands, with grasses of varied lengths and the occasional tree that housed an eagle or hawk. It was in the grasslands that we found evidence of pumas without seeing one: a cow carcass that had been ravaged for its meat. Nearby there were two musk deer and Craig, a photogenic Aussie that could have graced the pages of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, did his best impression of Steve Irwin The Crocodile Hunter and ran into the long grass to chase them.
  

BACK IN BASE CAMP we rejoined the other group to swap stories; we were jealous when they told us they had seen black howler monkeys -- we hadn't seen anything that impressive just yet.

After a five-hour siesta period -- when the many journal writers tended to their blank pages and the guide played rodeo, lassoing a makeshift cow made out of wood -- we went off again on a hike in attempts to find something more impressive. The Pantanal, thirteen times as big as Florida's Everglades with the largest concentration of fauna in South America according to Lonely Planet, should have something for us to see other than birds. Birds were everywhere that morning, but birds just didn't do it for us.

Our guide Akuna, who we were soon discovering was a bit crazy (but in a good way), decided to stir things up for our walking safari. Using nothing more than a stick and some string, he managed to lure a caiman from out of a nearby bog. Using his gaucho lassoing techniques, he lassoed the reptile around the neck and pulled it up. Holding the head for our safety (picture below), he let us pet the creature and pose with it for photos, slapping us in the ass with its tail as we finished.

Akuna laid down the caiman on its back and rubbed its belly until it magically just fell asleep. As each of us got closer to pet the sleeping animal, it suddenly woke up just in time for a hilarious scared look on Frodo's face as he tried to hide behind me. Akuna kept the caiman out of harm's way with the leash until we let it go on its way.

A BIG STORM WAS APPROACHING in the distance. The quiet Israeli Assaf gave it twenty minutes to reach us, but it was more like five and soon we were caught in a torrential downpour -- but we didn't let it stop our trek. We waded through the muddy waters around a bog where Akuna went out to chase some more caimans -- they were more afraid of him than the other way around.

In the bog we found an orphaned family of ducklings, which we were going to take back to camp in Craig's hat -- that is, until we realized that holding their feisty bodies signaled us that they just wanted to be let go. Craig the Aussie was hoping we could feed one straight to a caiman for some live National Geographic action, but I think Akuna had chased all the caimans out of the area already.

TWO NEW AUSTRALIANS, Michael and Kaz, were in camp when we returned back in camp. Michael wanted to try and get a game of pick-up soccer going. We eventually got a six-on-six game going on the sloppy wet mud field nearby with small wooden goal posts and the occasional pile of horse shit. We played in teams of Europe and Israel Vs. The Rest of the World. Rather than try and remember everyone's name, we called to each other just by country: "Sweden!" "U.S.!" "Aussie!" "Poland!" etc. In the messy but fun game, Europe & Israel beat the Rest of The World before dinner.

Dinner was followed by tea which was followed by beers and caipirinhas. I wasn't in the mood to get stupid drunk, which was the complete opposite of the others. The two Swedish guys had inside jokes amongst each other and giggled high-pitched like schoolgirls. Craig used his Abercrombie & Fitch looks to get close to some of the girls. Matt, a tall guy from the U.K., continued his Lord of the Rings references with Frodo --Frodo would always blame his actions with "It's not me, its the power of The Ring!" Deb the English goth girl from Birmingham was a loud powerhouse of drunken energy, stuttering like Ozzy Ozzbourne when he's sober, threatening to piss on people's faces in their hammocks. I was sort of stuck in the crossfire of everything as my hammock was in the middle of all the action, and was swung over and over by the others. As they say, if you can't beat them, join them -- or in my case, just sit quietly and observe the embarrassing entertainment of others. Most of the night I soberly thought "Wow, do I act like that when I drink that much?"

Everyone in the rest of camp was probably pissed off at our hut -- we were so loud the animals in the area were probably pissed off as well. The party went all night, which most people soon regretted since our wake up time was four o'clock in the morning for a pre-dawn safari, the primetime for spotting predators. In the madness of my hut, I only slept for twenty minutes before having to get up.

GROGGILY, AND SOME STILL DRUNK, we piled in the truck and head out into the savannah. Akuna shined a bright search light out onto the grasslands to see what we could find. We found some emus, foxes and owls, but we really hit paydirt with the sighting of a small puma.

Our truck raced around the plains, chasing the big cat in a big circle. Akuna jumped off the truck, the mad Brazilian he was, and ran towards it. He ducked low behind some tall grass in a pouncing position and in a flash, he jumped on top of the puma, holding its legs and claws down to keep from getting his face ripped off or eyes clawed out. Another guide ran to his aid and together they held the puma triumphantly in the air.

"HERE IS THE PANTANAL!!!!" declared Akuna.

The crowd cheered with drunken "WOOOOOOO!"s. I was glad I was sober enough to have remembered the thrilling event. After all, on a safari in the Pantanal, there is no money back guarantee for pumas.

The Last American Cowboy

DAY 109: Frodo, who fleed like a girl when the caiman got temporarily loose the day before, had the same sort of reaction when he had to dehook the piranha he caught from the bridge where we were fishing for our early morning activity. He was too scared to handle the "man-eating" fish until it eventually got loose, fell through the bridge planks and back into the creek.

I shouldn't have laughed because if I were in his shoes, I would have probably acted the same way -- that is, if I had caught anything. I had no fish to contribute to the group pile. Meanwhile, Mika, an aspiring tennis star from Holland, was master of the fish with a catch of four.

AFTER A MUCH NEEDED FIVE-HOUR MIDDAY SIESTA, I awoke to find that my fellow New Yorkers had left camp to move on with their shorter time itineraries. With Pete and Farley gone, I was the only American left amongst the thirty or so people left in camp.

For our afternoon activity, Akuna and another guide put on leather chaps over their jeans to lead us as gauchos (South American cowboys) on a horseback riding tour through the Pantanal. Each of the fifteen of us were assigned a horse and we all saddled up for our big cowboy adventure. It would have been something out of an old classic spaghetti western if not for our clumsiness with the horses -- it was more like 1991's City Slickers.

My horse Marivica was a tempermental little thing, never really responding to my instructions. At first I thought maybe she was just a dumb horse, until I realized that perhaps she was the smarter one between the two of us.

During a group break under the shade, Marivica did what none of the other horses did to their riders: get down on her knees to try and get me to dismount. I figured she was a disgruntled employee of the company, but Craig and Kate told me that it looked like she had a bum hind leg.

A broken leg on my horse was on my mind as we continued through the jungles, marshes and vast grasslands of the Pantanal like the riders of the Old West. But in the middle of a big open plain, my real life western fantasies-come-true had ceased when my horse decided, on its own will, to just stop going.

I kicked her side the way I was supposed to make her go, but nothing. I slapped her on the ass, and as kinky as that was, nothing. Everyone else had gone way far ahead towards the horizon, leaving me stranded under the hot sun with an unresponsive horse. I did everything I could to get her going again that didn't involved bestiality, until I gave up and waved and whistled down one of the gaucho guides.

"I think she has a broken leg," I told him.

"No, you just don't know how to ride."

With the big boss man watching, my horse got back going again, completely fine and without a limp. Eventually we caught up with the others that were waiting patiently for me under a lone tree.

"What happened to your horse?"

"I dunno, she ran out of gas."

EVENTUALLY I GOT THE HANG OF RIDING MY HORSE, even better than the time I went horseback riding outside of Cusco, Peru. I had Marivica walk, trot and gallop, and I even got my body going with the flow so my testicles didn't have to bang over and over on my saddle all the time. Whenever one of the gaucho guides got behind me, Marivica shot off faster than I thought she could, twice zooming me from the back of the line to way ahead like I was the surprise winner in a race on the horsetracks. I'd yell a nice manly "H'YAA!" and she'd keep her speed up, and amongst my peers, I truly felt like The Last American Cowboy.

But going fast wasn't all fun; at one point my horse veered off from the grasslands and towards the low tree branches of the jungle, almost as if she wanted to intentionally knock me off like in a cartoon -- I prayed I wouldn't pull a Christopher Reeve. One time in the jungle area, she went towards the branches and knocked my hat off -- I had to quickly break off a branch and flick the cap up towards my head before the horse ran off into the grasslands again.

AFTER A FEW HOURS, the group really started to get the hang of the horses, so much that we eventually went ahead of the guides. A herd of cattle was nearby and we moved them along like real cowboys of the Old West.

"I think we should wait up for the guides," Kate said.

"Nah, they're right there," Michael the Aussie said.

Eventually the guides caught up with us, and together, we rode off into the sunset and back to camp.

BEFORE THE SUN COMPLETELY SET, we had another muddy game of soccer on the dirty field -- this time Brazil vs. The Rest of the World. The Brazilian guides were outnumbered in quantity but not in skill. As hard as we tried, our united nations could not score one goal against them -- in fact, their goalie was so confident the other players would keep the ball away that he just sat by the goal post and smoked cigarettes. We even tried recruiting one of the Brazilian crew on our team -- calling out to him as "Bolivia" -- but still, Team Brazil beat us four, nil.

NO DAY AS A COWBOY IS COMPLETE without a night out around a campfire. After our dinner of fried piranhas, we built a nice roaring one outside the outdoor bar and continued the rainless night as obnoxious tourists. Two Brits Wil and Louise were also in the camp from another group, and entertained us with their hobby of twirling fire batons like the Maori people of New Zealand. Deb from the UK also knew how to do it and joined in on the flaming action -- others who weren't experienced just got burned, literally.

I spent most of the night at the campfire chatting with "Poland" -- I forgot his name, but that's what we called him in soccer -- who gave me a preview of what to expect when I eventually make it to Eastern Europe.

Under the full moon of that night, Eastern Europe seemed like ages away; I was still revelling in being in the Old West of South America.

Standing Room Only

DAY 110: I don't know if it was from the horseback riding or the fact that I slept in a hammock that had sunk low from everyone's drunken swinging, but I woke up with every muscle in my body sore. Perhaps it was a combination of the two.

IT BEING THE RAINY SEASON, we were already tapped out of things to do -- in fact, people who had signed up for four-day tours decided to leave a day early. We had already caught a caiman and a puma and spent a day as cowboys. The one thing left to do wasn't nearly as exciting: making necklaces out of objects of the Pantanal.

I walked out with Akuna and a knife to collect some aloe vera leaves -- the same leaves that cut up my legs on our nature walks. Akuna taught me how to scrape off the "meat" of the plant, leaving its stringy fibers, which he braided into string. For my centerpiece I wanted to put a caiman tooth, but they were all out. Rather than be a poacher and kill one -- with my bare hands --
I used what was available: some backbones of a caiman they found dead near camp. I spent a good two hours carving the bone out into something that looked like a tooth -- others couldn't tell the difference from afar.

After a final lunch, a a truck took our group back down the bumpy road to the entrance of the Pantanal. Michael the Aussie was quite loud when trying to figure out the certain "nocturnal activities" that had transpired in the shadows of camp. Frodo and Matt talked about television shows, while Deb, Assaf and I sat in the back pretty quiet to observe the occasional emu running by.

The crew dropped us off at the intersection of Dirt Road and Paved Road and waited with us there until our buses came. Half of us went to Corumba while the rest of us went to either Bonito or back to Campo Grande. I bid farewell to Frodo, the Aussie guys, the Brits and the Swedes and got on a bus with the three Aussie college girls and the Israeli. We flagged down a bus, the same line I took from Corumba to Campo Grande, but it was standing room only. The next bus wouldn't come for another three and a half hours, so we just got on and stood or sat on the floor. With my body still sore, I endured an hour and a half of standing until we arrived at the midway rest point in Miranda. Afterwards I stood another three hours (picture above), leaning on the bathroom in the back, reading Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones and chatting with one of the Aussie girls Storm, who sat on the floor with me for a while until two seats opened up when two people got off. (By the way, Storm is her real given name -- her parents must have been really hippy or really big fans of The X-Men.)

BACK IN CAMPO GRANDE, I got a room at the Hostelling International hostel near the bus station and got a sandwich back at the Disk Gugu food joint two blocks away. I spent the rest of the night tending to Blog duties after a hot shower that didn't really do much for my still sore body.

Eat Your Heart Out

DAY 111: On my first day in Campo Grande, I was totally confused with the Portuguese language and just said "sim" ("yes") to everything. Being in the Pantanal for three days with mostly English-speaking tourists, I didn't get to practice much of the new language, so when I got back to Campo Grande, not much had changed.

I allotted myself the day to just run errands before hopping on a night bus to Foz do Iguaçu. The first order of the day was laundry. I brought my load to the laundry service next door. The man, who spoke a little Spanish, told me it'd be done in "dos horas", but when I went back two hours later he said, "No, dos horas." I didn't know if he was telling me it'd be done at two p.m. or at twelve (which sounds like "two" sometimes), so I just waited until four to pick it up. It was done by then.

MOST OF THE DAY I spent in air-conditioned internet cafes, but managed to walk around and get some sun at a free samba concert in the Praça Coelho. A live band played on a stage while passers-by couldn't help but stop and dance for a while. I took a photo of the band, prompting a shady guy to approach me.

[Something, something,] he said in Portuguese.

"Uh, não," I said. I thought he was with security or something and wanted to confiscate my camera for taking a picture of the band.

[Something, something,] he said, this time with his index finger going up and down -- the international hand gesture for "take a photo." I eventually figured out he wanted me to take a photo of him dancing to the band (picture above.)

FOR LUNCH I WENT TO A NICE OPEN-AIRE RESTAURANT with an aroma of sizzling meat that was to hard to pass up. Withouth knowing what it was, I blindly ordered the coraçao de frango, which was listed on the specialities section. It came on a plate next to a basket of bread. Oh, little cut up sausages, I thought, and ate them with the toothpicks they had been served with. Tastes like pork, I thought -- "frango" must mean "pork." As I downed the really tasty meal, I looked up the words in my dictionary to confirm I was eating little pork sausage tips.

coraçao: n. heart
frango: n. chicken

I continued to eat the barbecued chicken hearts, content that at least I was finally eating something other than the usual greasy sandwiches I'd had in Brazil thus far.

I WAS BACK BY THE BUS STATION in time for my 7:00 bus, but the bus agent told me they were running a couple of hours behind. Luckily the Aussie girls Jackie and Storm were having a cocktail at a nearby sidewalk cafe and I joined them for caipirinhas. Kate the Aussie and Cesar, the Brazilian guy who worked in the tour office and booked my Pantanal trip, joined us, and we chatted about Brazilian food and tourism. During the beginning of a round of beers, my bus arrived, so I quickly chugged my full bottle.

"That's very Brazilian," Cesar said.

"No, that's Australian," Storm said.

I slammed down the bottle on the table triumphantly when I finished in about ten seconds. "No," I declared. "That's American." On that note, I got my bags and went off to my bus and rode through the night.

So there, Australia and Brazil, eat your heart out -- or at least try one of the chicken ones. I'm telling you, they taste like pork.

An Episode of E.R.

DAY 112: Behind the scenes, the producers of "The Trinidad Show" (me) had been emailing certain former cast members in hopes they would return for another appearance. Like the returns of Diane on Cheers and Lilith on Frasier, Lara -- who I met in Lima, spent Christmas in Cusco with, partied with in La Paz, and toured the Bolivian salt flats with -- came back for some more episodes.

Little did we know that her comeback would be on an episode similar to one of the medical drama E.R.

LIKE THE TEAMS IN THE SECOND SEASON of CBS' The Amazing Race, Lara and I raced to a camp outside the Brazilian city Foz do Iguaçu near the world famous Iguaçu Falls, from different starting points that morning. I came straight from the north from Campo Grande, unknowingly one hour into the future of a new time zone, while Lara came from the south, with a little delay at her border crossing from Argentina into Brazil. We kept track of our locations with internet cafe stops and realized that we arrived in the city at about the same time, without ever running into each other. Lara, who wasn't about to attempt to start learning Portuguese too early, just hopped in a cab while I chose the long way for 28 real less: three public buses to take me to the finish line 12 km out of town. I had missed my stop on the second bus and fell behind, having to walk half a mile with my packs in the sun to catch my third bus. Lara was already reading a book in a hammock when I arrived.

"Hey there!" she called to me.

"Hey! When d'you get here?"

"About an hour ago."

Lara followed me to my guy's dorm room and we caught up on our travels as I sorted out my things. "I have something for you," I told her before surprising her with her favorite treat: a pack of Oreos.

She smiled but told me she was now on a diet.

LONELY PLANET described the Hostelling International Paudimar hostel as a "mini resort" and they weren't kidding. For just $9 (US), you stay in a secluded little paradise with big lawns and hammocks everywhere, internet access, a sports field, a swimming pool and a bar. I joined Lara -- aka "Ms. Croft" (as in Lara Croft of Tomb Raider fame) -- at the pool to cool down with a dip and a couple of cocktails. It was a perfect resting period after the race that morning.

LARA WAS GETTING LOW ON CASH so we decided to take the public bus back into town to look for a bank. We walked to the main road, hopped on the crowded bus, making fun of the little boy who hated my backpack swinging in his face. The bus took us to the central urban terminal, a collection of roofed platforms with metal signs hanging from above to designate your bus stop. As soon as I got off the bus, the sign "Parque Nacional / Villa Carimã" decided to randomly come off its chain and plummet straight down on my head like a guillotine. Its timing couldn't have been more precise; it missed my shoulders, arms and struck me dead center on top of my head.

At first I thought nothing of it -- I just held my head in pain and started laughing, which prompted Lara to start laughing, making everyone around us think we were on something -- but soon blood started dripping all over my face and down my neck and we realized it wasn't a simple cartoon injury.

Luckily an English-speaking guy with "France" on his nametag from the nearby information booth came to my aid. He led me to the men's room so I could wash up and analyze the situation.

"Are you a doctor?" Lara asked.

"No, but I have some first aid training," France answered as blood continued to rush down my face.

"You need to apply pressure on it to stop the bleeding," France said. "Do you have an extra t-shirt in your bag or something?"

I scrambled through it. "No."

France quickly asked Lara if she would take her sarong off so we could use that, but she refused. Later she told me that she was all up for helping me, but wasn't about to walk around the city in just her bikini bottoms.

Luckily I found my small towel in my bag and we used that amidst the chaos. Chaos is no fun unless its documented with cameras, so Lara had my little camera around her neck to document the events -- while still laughing along with me the whole time.

France escorted us to the nearby police station -- we stopped briefly to take a photo of me and my assailant. The police didn't speak any English, but luckily France was around to translate.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah," I said, still smiling and giggling with Lara who was nursing me with water from the water cooler.

France had a squad car pick me up instead of an ambulance. Lara and I hopped in the back seat while an officer was up front.

"[He's a tourist,]" France told the cop in their native tongue. "[He doesn't speak Portuguese.]"

The door closed shut and we drove off to the public hospital.

I GAVE LARA MY PASSPORT, MEDICAL RECORDS AND INSURANCE CARD and she sorted me out with admissions while I rushed into the emergency room. A male nurse led me to the guerney while I laid and waited, staring up at the ceiling, wondering what would happen next as a pool of blood started to collect underneath my head. Unfortunately there were no hot Brazilian female nurses to tend to me -- they were all male -- but luckily the lovely and headstrong Nurse Croft came to my side despite administration telling her it wasn't allowed. She knew me well enough that I would have been pissed if no one was around with a camera to document the whole thing. (You can thank her for these photos.)

An E.R. surgeon came into the room with a handful of supplies to prepare for surgery.

"Wow, look at the size of that needle!" Lara said to me and I lay in my own blood. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'll shut up now... Oh what's that? It looks like chocolate sauce."

"Chocolate sauce?"

The "chocolate sauce" was actually an anethetic and before I knew it was coming, the doctor was injecting it into my head around my wound. It numbed the pain pretty fast because I didn't feel anything as he sewed me up with about five or six stitches (picture above). Another doctor came in to check up on things, talking to the other in the foreign Portuguese that I nor Lara could comprehend. Staring up at the ceiling, I told Lara, "Wow, its like The Twilight Zone in here."

In a short while I was all stitched up and ready to leave, despite the cartoon-like lump on my head that was starting to swell down. The city had paid for my medical expenses, probably since I was from the U.S.A., the country of suers. I wouldn't have sued anyway -- it would have been too much of a hassle and besides, I got my exciting Blog entry out of it.

NURSE CROFT TOOK ME OUT FOR ICE CREAM at a nearby parlor before we went wandering the city of Foz do Iguaçu. There wasn't much to do on a Sunday so we had a quick cocktail and walked back to the terminal. The "Parque Nacional" sign hadn't been hung up yet -- it was probably down at the station for questioning like in a television police drama.

LARA AND I CHILLED OUT at the poolside bar for dinner and spiked milkshakes that night. We wondered how bad things could have been if I wasn't wearing my baseball cap, which cushioned some of the blow from the edge of the metal sign -- and now had a bad ass blood stain on it for my memento.

"I would have had to post a message on your website to your mom to call me," Lara said.

Sure, an episode of involving my parents in a hospital would most likely be more entertaining that this one, but that's something the producers of "The Trinidad Show" would probably save for Sweeps Week.

When Quatis Attack!

DAY 113: Iguaçu/Iguazu [Brazilian/Spanish spelling] Falls, one of the world's greatest natural wonders and a UNESCO site as of 1986, is a massive collection of 275 waterfalls at the borders of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina, where gravity pulls down millions of gallons of water in a great spectacle that looks great on a postcard.

I had been recommended by everyone who had already been there to visit the Brazilian side first for an overview of the falls before seeing it up close in Argentina. I passed this recommendation onto Lara and so we went off on our own to the national park just 3 km. away and accessible by public bus.

On our way to the bus stop on the main road we stopped in a small grocery store for some munchies. The snacks we ended up buying were two bags of bacon and cheese puff that were dated October 2003 -- we figured they might be okay since they were in a sealed bag. However, when we opened them up on the way, we realized just how stale something could get in three and a half months.

"This is what they package electronics with," I said.

Luckily in our plastic grocery bag we had a big bottle of water to wash out the taste and some chocolate wafers to replace it with -- they weren't stale at all.

AFTER TEN MINUTES ON A BUS, we arrived at the national park with a very developed welcome center that looked like something out of Disney World. We waited on the long line to pay our admission fees, making fun of the petite Japanese woman with the obvious and ridiculous boob job, and the old Japanese guy that looked like the old man in the back of the store in 1984's Gremlins. We got our tickets and them hopped on a fancy double-decker transport tour bus which took us to the beginning of a trail along the falls.

On the bus we had been warned not to feed the animals and at the trail there was a sign that reiterated the rule. Nearby a cute little quati (pronounced KWAH-chee) -- which looks like a raccoon with a longer snout -- casually strolled by. I had put down our grocery bag of munchies for a second to switch tapes in my camcorder when suddenly the critter starting coming towards the bag. When I went to grab it, the quati turned from cute, furry little critter to ferocious little monster with sharp claws and teeth. It pounced the bag and dragged it bedhind the fence and began to devour the stale cheese puffs that we didn't want anyway.

"[You're not supposed to feed the animals,]" a nearby woman tourist told us.

"Uh, yeah, we weren't meaning to do it," Lara retorted.

Next to the "Don't Feed The Animals" sign was one that said it was prohibited to climb the fence. "We should get the water at least," Lara suggested.

Watching the animal I hesitated but figured a little raccoon-like critter couldn't be that bad -- besides it was occupied at the moment. "I'll get it."

I took my pack off and stooped under the fence like Steve Irwin The Crocodile Hunter at a zoo. I kept my eye on the quati as I slowly approached the bottle of water, still in the big grocery bag. I reached my arm out, but then suddenly the little monster lunged at me with its claws.

"Oh shit."

I flinched away quickly. In the end we let the quati have it all.

"Oh man, there go the wafers," I said.

WATERLESS AND SNACKLESS we continued down the trail with the other tourists, taking photos with the various falls that make up "Iguaçu Falls." None of them looked as impressive as in the postcards.

"Don't get me wrong, they're beautiful, but I thought there would be more water," Lara noted. As we continued down the path along the river, there the abundance of water was, at the postcard photo-worthy Floriana Falls -- made accessible for close ups with a pedestrian bridge -- and Iguaçu's crown jewel, The Devil's Throat. We continued to take photos, trying to get out of other people's way -- even most of them didn't reciprocate the favor. Lara and I actually tried the reverse tactic, posing in hopes that someone would block the view -- the old Japanese guy with the foot-long beard.

AFTER A COLD DRINK UNDER THE SHADE, we took the transport bus back to the entrance, stopping briefly at the optional safari that turned out to be more money than we thought. We took the public bus into the city for an internet session instead. On the way, I went to visit France, the man who helped me the day before during my accident He said that I might be able to get in the newspaper if I e-mail him some photos and started to make some calls.

Lara and I went out for a nice dinner at a sidewalk cafe and then to a nearby supermarket to buy provisions for our journey to the Argentinian side of the falls the next day. Lara, still determined to be on a diet (although I didn't know why), decided to stock up on fruits -- apples, pears, plums, nectarines -- in addition to some bread and lite cream cheese for sandwiches.

"People are going to think we're vegetarians," I told her, looking down at the contents of our cart. I went off and got a small pack of ham.

DENIED McFLURRY'S AT A JUST-CLOSED McDONALD'S DESSERT STAND, we just left the city and took the bus back out of the city, singing random songs and jingles from the 1980s -- a addicting habit from Lara, the former drama student. We walked from the main road back to the hostel through the night with our grocery bags of food, hoping there were no more quatis lurking in the darkness waiting to attack.

Great Adventure

DAY 114: When Lara and I signed up for a tour of the Argentine side of Iguazu Falls with the Hostelling International office, we spent the extra 10 real on a tour called "Gran Aventura" that included both a truck and boat ride. Like the Six Flags theme park with the English translation of the tour name, the tour included a wet and wild ride through the roaring rapids of the Rio Iguazu.

Seventeen of us from the Brazilian hostel -- most in their college years, born 1981 or later -- hopped on a bus clearly marked "TURISMO" on its side in huge letters. The driver, a happy Argentine man named João Paulo who joked about only letting girls on the bus and no guys. He drove us to a supermarket near the border, waving and honking at all the passers-by with the familiar "Shave and a haircut" melody, always completed by the other person with the "two bits" part.

After a brief but uneventful border crossing -- and one hour back in time with the time zones -- we were transported to Argentina. It was great to be back in a Spanish-speaking country where the signs looked familiar again.

João continued his "Shave and a Haircut" drive through the border town of Cataratas, to the point of the "tres fronteras" where one could see the national towers of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina at the same time. From there we went to the entrance of the national park where we split up -- most in the group without the truck tour, and me, Lara and a Scotsman named Jaime in the "Great Adventure" one. Before the adventure started, Jaime and I visited the nearby museum where I learned about the poisonous black, red and yellow butterfly to avoid.

Lara, Jaime and I joined the handful of other and got aboard the 4x4 transport vehicle that took us on a relaxing drive throug the subtropical rainforest -- most of which was pretty boring unless palm trees excite you. After a 20-minute lack-of-animal safari, we arrived at Puerto Machcu, where we donned on life vests for the real adventure: a motorized raft ride up the Rio Iguazu. Unlike the "Roaring Rapids" ride at Six Flags' Great Adventure, all the drenching waterfalls were all powered by nature.

The captain took us up close to the San Martin, Mendea and Mbigua Falls for a photo opp and then up against the current of the river and under the Dos Mosqueteros Falls for a soak. Swinging around we went back to and under the tremendous San Martin Falls where nothing in the raft stayed dry unless it was in one of the plastic bags they had provided us with.

JAIME RAN OFF TO CATCH A FLIGHT and so it was just Lara and I who dried out on the rocks with a homemade sandwich picnic. Afterwards, we still had a good five hours to kill in the park and took a boat to the Isla San Martin -- supposedly the only island in the world surrounded by falls -- and trekked to an outlook point of the San Martin Falls. We trekked around the island -- on the way, Lara stopped for a "bush piss" in the woods and got startled by a rustling in the leaves (hoping it wasn't a ferocious quati); and we had a sighting of the poisonous butterfly I learned about that morning (we avoided it).

Back on the mainland of Argentina, we trekked up to the Bossetti Falls and stopped off at a sidewalk cafe to write some notes -- only to end up distracted and attacked by a swarm of bees invading anyone with a soda can. We took the mini-train to the far side of the park, where we saved the best for last: a catwalk that led to an observation deck overlooking the Devil's Throat (picture above), where millions of gallons of water spilled from higher to lower ground. We made our way through the pushy photographers and managed to take photos ourselves. Mist filled the canyon as a rainbow appeared out of thin air.

The trail we did afterwards wasn't nearly as impressive so we just rushed through it and head back towards the entrance as the day was getting late. Instead of taking the train back to the main station, we walked a short trail, stopping for photo moments along the way: one of Lara's Wari people dolls on the train tracks a la the 1986 movie Stand By Me, one with Lara doing a cartwheel; and one of me spinning around in a circle twelve times like a four-year-old until I was too dizzy to stand straight. (Why don't adults do this more often?)

We met up with the four British college girls from our hostel at the pizzeria in the food court and then went back to the TURISMO bus. It was easy to find when João did his signature "Shave and a Haircut" melody.

WE WAITED A GOOD FORTY MINUTES FOR THOSE WHO CAME LATE -- João psyched them out by driving away for a bit when they approached so we could see them run -- and then zoomed back over to Brazil and back to the future of one hour. We continued the festivities that night at the poolside bar with the rest of the big group that had gone to Argentina that day and some other newcomers to the hostel camp. Amongst the many rounds of drinks, Lara and I confirmed that most "cool" people were born before 1981, although there were a couple of exceptions on both sides.

The festivities went on all night and until morning for some -- all part of this complete Great Adventure.

Dumb and Dumber Day

DAY 115: I don't know if was the daze and confusion of a slight hangover from partying the night before, but all day Lara and I just acted silly and stupid like Harry and Lloyd in 1994's Dumb and Dumber.

MY MORNING STARTED groggily in time for breakfast in the cafeteria, where I met Oren. The Israeli proved to me once again how small the world is; he had family in my hometown of Teaneck, NJ and grew up in a house across the street from the club Jimmy's in Morristown, NJ where I had been to a couple of times. We chatted a bit until I met up with Lara at poolside (picture below). Both of us were still dazed and confused, but content with the sunny new day.

Lara set out and sunbathed while I struggled at a table with my journal without much motivation -- but I kept on going anyway until I was all up to schedule, at least by hand. Lara was attacked by mini-Lara, a five-year-old staying in her dorm room with her mother that absolutely loved that Lara had the same name as her -- making Lara her new best friend. Mini-Lara jumped on her back in the pool, making Lara's morning a little harder to overcome from the night before.

Meanwhile outside the pool, I noticed the German pair from our tour -- one portly older woman and a younger late-teen boy -- who everyone assumed as mother and son -- until I noticed the latter rub suntan lotion all over the former. Turned off, I thought they might be something else and shared my theories with Lara when I joined her in the pool, keeping my stitched-up head above water.

"You think they're doing it?" Lara said like a schoolgirl.

"Oh, c'mon... awww... you just put an image in my head."

The questionable Germans entered the pool and continued their ambigous behavior. One glance over to them and Lara and I couldn't stop giggling like immature school children.

"I dunno, maybe it's his 'special' aunt," I said.

"Shhh... I think the guy speaks English."

THE TWO OF US ALLOTTED THE DAY to just be lazy and figure out what to do the next day. We had the idea of going into Asuncion, Paraguay for a couple of days as it was only five hours away by bus, so we decided to go into town to the international bus station to investigate. I took three public buses to get there, which took a lot of waiting, which meant a lot of time for random things to pop in our heads like the characters in the Farrelly brothers movie.

"The Vengabus is coming, the Vengabus is coming..." Lara started singing even before the bus was ever in sight. I joined in with the bassline and melody only to have the other people ignore us with deadpan faces. I continued to sing randomly Crazy Town's "Butterfly" since the day before ("Come my lady, come come my lady, you're my butterfly, sugar, baby..."), but nothing topped Lara's constant rendition of Montell Jordan's "This is How We Do it," followed by her dancing The Running Man.

"Thi-is is how we do-o i-it..." she'd start off and then go into the dance made popular by M.C. Hammer in the early 1990s.

ON THE SECOND BUS RIDE INTO TOWN, we giggled about the sleeping woman on the bus that looked like she had three boobs and then got on the third bus to the international terminal. We found a bus that would take us into Paraguay and gave our passports for the purchase of tickets.

"[North American? You need a visa,]" the guy informed me.

After inquiries at an information booth, we discovered that I needed to wait on-line at the Paraguyan consulate with a proof of exit, money and the visa fee of $45 -- I felt it wasn't worth the hassle for a mere two-day jaunt for the sake of a passport stamp. I told Lara she could go without me -- Brits get in with no problem -- but she decided to blow it off and find some other adventure on the coast with me.

AFTER AN EARLY STEAK DINNER at our usual sidewalk cafe in town -- complete with our usual confusion trying to decipher the menu -- our Dumb and Dumber day continued when we walked towards the supermarket.

"Thi-is is how we do-o i-it..." Lara started up again with her Running Man dance in the middle of the road.

"Uh, stop," I said.

She kept going.

"Uh, hold up," I said. "Cars. Cars are coming."

Lara stopped her dance, looked over at the oncoming traffic and moved before almost getting run over. I told her it was a shame she didn't because then she could have answered the stupid random question I asked her: "Have you ever wondered what it feels like to be hit by a car?"

WE WENT INTO THE SUPERMARKET, the two 29-year-olds we were and bought frosted flakes, chocolate milk and ice cream like a couple of ten-year-olds. We went back to the central terminal -- where the sign that hit me had been rehung -- and hopped on the bus back out of the city, passing by the local McDonald's.

"A Pizza Hut, A Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut. McDonald's, McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut," Lara sang, remembering the silly British pop hit from the Fast Food Rockers. Her songs were getting sillier and dumber, but I didn't mind.

"Come my lady, come come my lady, you're my butterfly, sugar, baby..." I'd come back with.

A couple of Running Mans later, we were back at the hostel and sat with the four British college girls who were still recuperating from their hangovers. The girls called it an early night so I sat at the table with Justin, the Canadian from my dorm room, and chatted over caipirinhas. I told him about the incident with me and the sign and showed him my stitches.

"Oh, I just thought [your barber] missed a spot."

THREE BIG GROUPS FROM A BRITISH OVERLAND TOUR COMPANY had pulled into the hostel camp and filled the poolside bar area with dozens of people -- it was like a Spring Break pool party. As more drinks were consumed, the Brits started throwing each other into the pool with their clothes still on.

Exhausted, I left the party fairly early, but later learned that the rowdiness escalated to people throwing chairs and tables into the pool -- there were also a lot of broken beer bottles. I was content that I didn't stay out late for all that -- if I had been thrown in the pool with my head still in stitches, it would have made my Dumb and Dumber day just stupid.

Race to Rio

DAY 116: In CBS's Emmy award-winning reality show The Amazing Race -- coincidentally, a show I tried to get on with wheat -- teams of two must get over their differences and work as a team to beat other teams to the finishing checkpoint in some city around the world. Without being on the actual show, I had no definite finish line to get to.

Many mornings in my global trip so far, I'd wake up and not know what would happen that day or where I would be that night. Lara and I knew we wanted to check out of Foz do Iguaçu, but where we would go we didn't know just yet. At breakfast, I searched for a coastal pirate town that Sam had mentioned to me once in Sucre -- I found it in my Lonely Planet book: Parati (pronounced pah-RAH-chee).

The Four British College Girls and Justin the Canadian joined me at the breakfast table as I ate some frosted flakes. They too were set to check out of the hostel in hopes of getting a bus to Rio de Janiero.

LARA AND I WERE LOW ON CASH and had no choice but to take a bus into town since the guy at the hostel said the ATM at the international bus terminal didn't always work. We lugged our bags -- they seemed to get heavier as time went on -- on the two buses to the central terminal. We continued our team effort; I went out to search for an ATM while Lara kept an eye on the bags. The two nearby banks didn't accept my card, but after asking around, I found a usable ATM inside a pharmacy. I took a picture of the drugstore to show to Lara for when I kept bag watch.

One quick bus ride later, we were back at the International Terminal. I kept bag watch while Lara went to get us tickets for Parati -- but as we thought, it was only accessible by going to Rio de Janiero first and backtracking.

"Rio then?" she asked me across the way.

"Sure."

But the bus agent said they were all sold out for the day. Luckily, he recommended another company way down the long hall. Lara kept bag watch while I went to investigate. The other company had two seats together on a 2:40 p.m. -- it too didn't stop in Parati, and so Rio it was.

I walked back down the hall as people scrambled back and forth. Lara looked at me to see what was up. I smiled and held up the tickets in my hand.

"We're going to Rio, baby!"

IN THE TWO AND A HALF HOURS TO KILL, we camped out at a table in the cafeteria to write. Lara cuaght up on her journal while I worked on the last batch of postcards to Blog sponsors in South America. Joining our camp were two English guys we had met in our hostel, Justin the Canadian and The Four British College Girls. Justin and the girls also had a 2:40 p.m. bus for Rio, but with another company from that of mine and Lara's.

"We'll race to Rio then," I suggested to Alice, one of the four girls. I thought it'd be a cool little moment as per The Amazing Race.

"Yeah," she answered unenthusiastically. Apparently she wasn't into the travel reality show as much as I was.

BETWEEN SNACKS OF BRAZILIAN PASTELS, we all took turns using the bus terminal's one internet connection until it was time to go. The Four British College Girls were still in a daze, sitting in the waiting room -- if it weren't for me to remind them what time it was, they might have missed their bus.

Team Lara & Erik got on Bus No. 1, the first of two to depart at 2:40 p.m. bound for Rio de Janiero. We sat in the back like two journalists writing notes in our notepads to catch up on our events while waiting for the A/C to kick in.

The movies Basic and Biker Boyz came on (dubbed in Portuguese) as we rode through the countryside (picture above). We stopped at a service stop for a dinner break and had food from the por quilorestaurant, a hot plate buffet where you paid R$11.90 per kilo of food. Ocean's Eleven came on the bus monitors afterwards -- luckily still in English -- which killed two more hours of the estimated 22-hour bus journey. We killed another hour making fun of Justin Timberlake's lyrics coming out of Lara's Discman until the batteries died and I fell asleep.

The bus cruised through the night. I wondered where the "other team" was, but I'm sure they didn't wonder about us.

Welcome to Rio

DAY 117: I woke up in my seat the middle of the night on my overnight bus from Foz do Iguaçu to Rio de Janiero. My eyes opened and saw that Lara wasn't in her seat next to me. I assume she moved to the two empty seats behind us to spread out and closed my eyes again.

I opened my eyes a couple of hours later and saw that in Lara's chair was a big Brazilian man.

I thought that maybe he was a pickpocket working me -- seeing that I had been speaking English to Lara on the ride so far -- and thought maybe he was waiting for me to fall asleep so that he could take some of my stuff. So I stayed awake and stared out the window until he eventually got up and walked back to the front cabin -- he just was the conductor trying to find a comfortable place to take a nap for a while.

Perhaps the paranoia of such an incident spawned from the fact that Rio doesn't exactly have the cleanest reputation, and I had heard many stories from other travelers that supported it. Camera or purse snatching via bicycle. Armed robberies by a taxi driver. And my favorite, a armed thief who merely knocked on a door in a hotel and robbed a guy at gunpoint when he opened the door to see who it was.

Of course, any of these things could have been inhibited with a little street smarts and common sense. Coming from the "safety" of other smaller Brazilian cities, it was time to put my guard back up.

THE SUN ROSE AND THE BUS CONTINUED ITS WAY through São Paulo and onto Rio de Janiero. The rest of the journey flew by with two more movies -- Bad Girls and No Good Deed -- until we arrived at the Novo Rio bus terminal 2 km. out of Rio's city center, with its "Bemvindo a Rio de Janiero" sign (picture above). The entire journey took about 25 hours with all our stops -- three hours ahead of the other bus that left Foz do Iguaçu at the same time. Later I learned they had been delayed with a flat tire and a smuggler bust.

Despite the bus terminal being in what Lonely Planet called a "seedy area," it couldn't have been easier to get information there. Two tourist information booths specifically for backpackers were in the main lobby, clearly marked. Lara and I went to one to find out what accommodations were available since many people told us they would be scarce. Most places were in fact booked solid, but there was one place, an Israeli-frequented hostel in Copacabana called Shenkin that had some spaces for us in the dorm. After checking our options with the other information booth, we decided to go ahead and reserve the spots. The information guy radioed the Shenkin with his NexTel walkie-talkie.

"Where are you from?" he asked us.

"New York."

"The Channel Islands," Lara answered. Sometimes she just says "Inglaterra" (England) to this common question as it was just easier to say than having to explain where the U.K. Channel Islands are and that she's British but not English.

"Do you smoke?" the guy asked us, translating the questions from the other end of the walkie-talkie.

"No."

The guy spoke some more and in the end, he told us we were out of luck. "There's room, but they won't give it to you because you're not Israeli."

"That's a bit racist," Lara commented.

"But I grew up in a Jewish town," I said. It was no use and we had no choice but to go with the only other hostel available from the other information booth: The Botofogo Easy Hostel in the Botofogo district near the harbor with a view of the famous Pão de Azucar mountains.

It was easy to get a taxi there -- no in-car robberies at gunpoint -- and we checked into a dorm with two triple bunk beds. The hostel was nice, with a cable TV lounge, a nice eating area, kitchen and a very small swimming pool -- it was their substitute for not being near the beach.

Lara and I met an Irish guy named Joe in our dorm who was still recovering from the night before. He moped around while Lara and I went for a walk in the neighborhood to get our bearings. We were just three blocks from a major shopping mall and managed to get the last two "Portuguese for Tourists" phrasebooks in a bookstore. After, we just wandered the seven floors of shops, boutiques and restaurants and had dinner at an Italian place that had a chef that tried to get a rise out of me by telling me his friend was Iraqi, after hearing I was American.

AS THE SUN SET, the Pão de Azucar was illuminated with orange hues and so the two of us went for a leisurely walk on the small beach along the Botofogo Bay. Lara sang Otis Redding's "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay" as we watched the joggers of varied body builds and beach soccer players get some exercise.

Lara was exhausted from the overnight bus journey and just read and wrote in her bed until she passed out. I spent most of the night on my upper bunk with my laptop, typing up some entries. I was finished by 10:30 and then went downstairs to the pool to check out the vibe and meet new people.

Joe the Irish guy and two British girls were about to head out to some Brazilian jazz club to see one of the hostel owner's perform in a band, so I put on some clothes and joined them. We took a taxi to the other side of town to the club Scenarium, a rustic, three-story venue built out of an old house. The cover charge was R$18 -- the British girls refused to pay it to "listen to that shit" -- so it was just me and Joe who went into enjoy the live music sets. There were about a dozen others from our hostel inside anyway -- I met an Aussie, a Belgian, four Norweigian girls and an American guy from New York who was the younger spitting image of Moe Green from The Godfather. There was also Zed, the Brazilian from our hostel and we all danced and bobbed our heads to the danceable jazz coming from the stage while sipping on beers, caipirinhas and caipifrutas (made with crushed strawberries and pineapple).

Rio's reputation of crime so far was just a myth, and as I stood in the club feeling the hypnotic rhythm of the music with my caipifruita in hand I thought, What a great way to be welcomed to Rio.

Fantasies From The Thirteenth Floor

DAY 118: For my first full day in Rio de Janiero, the goal was to figure out the plan of attack for the rest of the stay through Carnivale. Lara and I had two mission objectives: 1) to find a place to stay since our Botofogo hostel was already booked for Carnivale time -- at three times the price of the regular rate -- and 2) to try and figure out a way to join a samba school and actually march in the Carnivale parade rather than be a spectator.

Both objectives were hard to achieve because: 1) every hostel and hotel in Rio had been booked in advance for the world's most famous party and 2) no one that we had asked so far had any clue how to suddenly become a participant in the parade -- I thought it would have been easy since I saw host Ian Wright do it on the Globe Trekker show.

We figured our two objectives could easily be handled by simply looking up things on the internet, but with only one computer for about thirty people on a slow connection, doing it in the comfort of our hostel was near impossible. Being in the Botofogo neighborhood of Rio, there weren't many tourists, and thus not many internet cafes -- we only found one place in a shopping mall that had a five-minute limit.

We walked about a mile to Copacabana, the main tourist area by the beach and immediately the multiple cafes with entry points into cyberspace. We looked up samba schools, but no site told us about getting into the actual Rio Carnivale -- only about samba schols in other countries and one lame internet-based one. We eventually gave up on finding a school via the web and left the cafe, but not without working on a third, minor mission of the day: email The Four British Girls that we met in Foz do Iguaçu to meet up later since it was one of their birthdays.

IN MY FIRST ADVENTURE WITH "MS. CROFT," the two of us split a cab from central Lima, Peru to the beach suburb of Miraflores overlooking the Pacific Ocean. (It broke down in the middle of a highway and we ended up hitching a ride from a random stranger.) Two months later, although we had gone different routes, we arrived together on the otherside of the continent on the Atlantic. We walked across the scorching sand of the beach to the water to come full circle -- but didn't stay long. Lara was determined with the mission at hand.

We went to try and find The Four British College Girls' hostel with only a hostel name and bad directions, but couldn't find it. Along the way, we looked at other hostels in the Lonely Planet -- one was charging R$160/night for a really shabby-looking place. We thought we could do better.

As for the other mission objective -- getting into the famous parade -- we investigated at a tour agency near the beach. We were led to a desk of a woman named Gisele, who spoke English with a thick Brazilian accent.

"Okay, what do you want?" she asked us.

"We want to join a samba school," Lara said.

"For tonight we have..." Gisele started, before mentioning some places. It started to dawn on me that "samba school" was merely a club or group that you go to any time of the year.

"No, we want to be in the actual Carnivale," Lara interjected.

"Ah," Gisele said. "We have different fantasies. What kind of fantasy?" It took me a while, but I soon realized that "fantasy" was a costume. It took Lara a little more time because later she told me she was thinking, Well, every person's fantasy is different.

"What does the fantasy look like?" we asked.

Gisele pointed outside to a display and almost immediately Lara pouted in digust. "Are there any other costumes?"

Gisele looked up things in the back room, but the tacky costume outside was our only choice. As much as Lara hated the costume, we were ready to sign up. The costume warehouse wouldn't be open until Monday, so Gisele told us to come back two days later.

THE SUN CAME DOWN ON COPACABANA BEACH as people of varied builds just walked around in bikinis or Speedos. Contrary to popular belief, not every person was fit and attractive -- in fact, there were a lot of people who shouldn't have been in Speedos at all. Lara said they shouldn't even be at the beach in the first place.

We had lunch and a Valentine's Day toast at a sidewalk cafe across the street from the beach and then wandered into an internet cafe to see if The Four British College Girls emailed us back. Lara was on her computer longer than I was on mine, and so I killed time talking with the Brazilian girl that was working the desk. I asked her about samba schools to enter the Carnivale and she pointed me to a single flyer posted on their bulletin board. I wrote the address in my notepad.

The address turned out to be for a high-rise apartment building. We asked directions from the doorman and still got lost, but managed to find the tour agency up a solitary stairwell from the twelve floor. "Angramar Turismo" was actually a small-run business based out of some guy's apartment -- well hidden from the masses of tourists (picture above).

Inside we were greeted by Luis, a hairy man who was still in his tight Speedos from spending some time at the beach. We asked him about being in the Carnivale procession and soon discovered we had come to the right place; unlike the other touristy tour agencies, Luis and his associate (and/or life partner, I couldn't tell) had contacts into the actual competing samba schools which would march into the center stage of the Sambadrome -- the lesser groups would only be in the street procession. They explained their package deals that would include fantasies, admission into the Sambadrome as a spectator and as a dancer in the competition.

Luis showed us the catalog of fantasies -- all from the top competiting schools -- and tried to sell me on a very gay biker costume with cheesy hearts around the head, but Lara fancied a different one. "I really like that one," she aid, pointing to an orange tribal-looking thing, complete with a walking staff to twirl around.

"Beija Flor," Luis said. "They were the winners of last year's Carnivale." Leave it to Lara to have chosen the winners. She got even more excited and turned to me to see what I thought.

"I'm in," I said.

Using our Portuguese for Travellers phrasebook, we converted our American and British sizes to Brazilian ones. Luis called the warehouse to check the availability and gave our sizes for the Monday delivery two days later.

With one mission objective accomplished, Lara asked about our other one: "Do you deal with hostels?"

"No, sorry, we don't work with hostels," Luis said apologetically. "We only rent apartments."

Our faces lit up again.

Luis told us about one with a view of Copacabana beach that would open up in a couple of days. He gave us a price and and Lara worked it out on her calculator -- per day it came to about half of what any hostel or hotel was charging. The whole thing was almost too good to be true.

"Can you sell us anything else?" Lara joked. Luis told us about a trip they were doing that night to Manguiera, one of the major competing samba schools in the slums outside of town. There would be a huge samba party there where we could learn and practice the Brazilian dance. We took Luis' flyer to try and convince The Four British College Girls to join us.

WITH BOTH MISSION OBJECTIVES accomplished with the help of The Magic Tour Agency on the Thirteenth Floor, Lara and I went out for a celebratory drink on the beach. We toasted and joked about already being winners in the 2004 Rio Carnivale. We were even more excited at the prospect that, being in one of the top schools, we could be called back on the Saturday after Carnivale for the final ceremony. Luis told us with Beija Flor, we had a 90% chance of that happening since they were the 2003 champions.

After our high of the day, we started the walk back to Botofogo, passed the guys in the streets performing the Brazilian dance/martial art capoiera, and got lost -- or so we thought. We hopped in a cab to take us near the hostel and discovered we were only four blocks away. Surely not the move of a champion, but we were learning.

Lara promised in an email to The Four British College Girls that we'd get in contact with them at 8 p.m. in Copacabana, leaving us just an hour to get ready for a night out. I tried to get Joe the Irishman, David the Aussie and Pascal the Belgian to come out to the samba school, but none of them were enthused about it at all. Lara and I got dressed and took a cab back to Copacabana to check out email -- not one of The Four British College Girls had written us back. Lara felt bad about not being with them on one of their birthdays, but I pointed out that we made way more an effort than they did and we should probably just do our own thing.

We went back to The Magic Tour Agency on the Thirteenth Floor and asked to use the phone to call our hostel to see if anyone had changed their minds -- none of them had. So it was just me and Lara and a handful of friends of the tour agency. We met Carlos, the owner of the company -- and the apartment -- and went with him in a shuttle bus to pick up other clients from hotels around town. Most of them were from the older, package vacation crowd.

WHAT MANGUEIRA LACKED IN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT being one of the slums outside of Rio de Janiero, it made up for in pride of being one of the major contenders in the samba competition. The shuttle bus took us through Mangueira's crowded street stands to the "Palace of Samba," a big dancehall where musicians performed for the estimated 4,000 Brazilian dancers -- and tourists learning to dance. At first the party was a little lame -- it felt like being a kid in a boring adult party -- but things started to pick up after a couple of caipifrutas. Lara and I stood in front near the band and watched the Brazilian girls shake what their mamas gave them. About an hour later, I finished another drink.

"Okay, I think I'm drunk enough to go out there now."

Samba is a really fast-paced movement of the lower body which is really hard to do if you think about it. It's better to just feel the music and go with the rhythm and sing along with the lyrics if you know them. Lara joined me on the dance floor and we shaked our booties amongst the Brazilians of varied ages. A middle-aged woman starting bumping and grinding with me -- I was too drunk to care -- and it was all fun and game until she took my hand and led me somewhere off the dance floor. Lara started laughing about me getting pulled by an old woman.

The woman brought me to a table and soon I realized her intentions. She wanted to introduce me to two teenage girls who were too shy to get on the dance floor. She figured it would take an English-speaking American to convince them, although I managed to figure out she was telling her other friends something to the effect of "Can you believe it? He has Asian eyes and he speaks English!"

The two girls must have been about thirteen or fourteen and looked like they wished they were both back at band camp if you know what I mean. The old woman probably pulled me over thinking I was in their age range, but I shocked her when I told her I was 29. I tried to get the band camp girls out on the floor but they still wouldn't budge, so I just said I had to go to the bathroom and left them. The old woman thanked me for my efforts.

I wandered up the stairs to the mezzanine level for a photo of the 4,000 or so people partying away. Men were asking me things in Portuguese and I didn't know what was going on. I just said "sim" a lot and shook some hands. Later I learned I was in the emcee's booth and where only authorized personnel was supposed to be.

I regrouped with Lara who told me that in my absence, an old Italian man tried to pick her up, even though his wife was sitting at a nearby table. "She's dumb," he told her. Lara made the excuse that she had to meet her friend and left him.

More and more people crowded into the Palace of Samba up to the point where you couldn't even walk around without spilling a drink. Lara befriended three Brazilian girls who taught her how to move around and dance. We danced with them as about twenty guys banged away on different kinds of drums, conducted by a man with a whistle. As the hard hitting percussion filled our ears, Lara made a great impression on her new friends -- one of them gave her some of her bracelets as a token of new friendship.

For a night out it was a surprisingly great night since the beginning of it was sort of lame. For the entire day, it was a surprisingly great day, having accomplished the two mission objectives we had. And we owed it all to The Magic Tour Agency on The Thirteenth Floor.

Who think's that number is unlucky anyway?

And The Crowd Goes Wild

DAY 119: In the U.S.A., "football" refers to the classic American sport where teams of padded warriors duke it out under their coaches' plays, so they can ultimately work their way to the Big Game where Janet Jackson gets her boob flashed on national television. In the rest of the world, "football" refers to what Americans call "soccer," and it is an international phenomenon which brings out the obsessed craziness in most people. No where is football (soccer) more a part of national culture than in Brazil.

As if timing couldn't be more perfect, Lara and I had arrived in Rio de Janiero in time for Brazil's Caroica 2004 semi-finals. On that Sunday, it was the place to be, even if you weren't Brazilian. Luckily the Botofogo Easy Hostel made it easy to be a part of it, with tickets and transport for just R$50.

After a lazy morning, Lara and I joined the twenty or so others spread over two mini-buses to the Estadio Jornalista Mario Filho for the crazy madness of Brazilian football. We made our way through stadium traffic and found ourselves at the entrance of the stadium where thousands of fans across the street were already jumping and twirling their shirts in the air in support of the favored Rio-based team, Flamengo. The red and black uniformed team was up against another Rio-based team Vasco. The crowd was already cheering during the pre-match match of the minor leagues of the two teams.

Our group had decent seats in the upper tier with the thousands of crazed and fanatic Flamengo fans. Some brought huge banners to spread across their entire sections, others brought huge flags to wave around like they had just taken a fort, and those without props just waved their shirts in the air (picture above). Everyone knew the words to the various chants and songs to scream to the other side of the stadium supporting the other team -- everyone that is, except us gringos, but we improvised with the "ooh"s and "aah"s, the rhythmic clapping, the yelps, the arm swaying and occasionally, the doing of "The Wave." Lara who wasn't normally a beer drinker, got into the swing of things and bought cans of Brahma with me from the stadium vendors walking through the rows. It only enhanced the Brazilian football experience.

We watched the match with the rest of the group and although it was exciting -- way more exciting than just watching it on television -- it could have been crazier. The game was too easy for our favored team; they beat Vasco 2, nil. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a downer, but being in Brazil, I thought things would have been a lot crazier. In fact, for the two English sisters from the hostel, the most excitement of the day was when one got her camera stolen out of her pocket during a beer run during the first half.

AFTER THE VICTORY OF OUR TEAM FLAMENGO, the stadium cleaned out and took to the streets. It wasn't as rowdy as I thought it'd be, probably because they stopped serving alcohol at half time. A group of us went out after the game to fill the void at the pizzeria across the street from the hostel. Everyone but Lara and I seemed to take the rowdiness too far, yelling at the waiter or just bitching about the quality of the food.

"1981ers?" Lara whispered to me.

"Definitely." It was more supporting evidence of my theory that people born after 1981 were just rude and ungrateful of others -- although there are exceptions out there. Lara got so embarrassed sitting at the table with the big group that she just put her money in and left. I stayed a little bit longer but left after David the Aussie really starting belittling the poor waiter. The 1981ers continued to be loud as I left back for the hostel.

If only the concession stands at the football stadium served beer after halftime, perhaps the rowdiness of the westerners could have been put to good use.

Miscommunications

DAY 120: The only task Lara and I had for the day was to try on our Beija-Flor costumes for when we marched in the Rio Carnivale and we were back at our tour agent in Copacabana in time for our 10 a.m. appointment. A pet turtle on the floor walked by, foreshadowing what a slow process it would be to get our new clothes.

We gave our deposits to Carlos in his office. He was in a good mood, pumping up the musical themes of each of the schools in the 2004 Carnivale on CD, dancing along as he made calls and did some paperwork. We were given booklets with all the lyrics so we could learn them before our procession the following Monday night. Luis brought our money to the bank to transfer to the costume maker, and they told us to come back at one for when the costumes arrived.

Lara and I, excited about the wheels in motion for our participation in Carnivale, killed the time waiting in an internet cafe. We went back at one in the afternoon, but nothing had arrived yet. Carlos said there was some delay and that we should come back at three. Being a grey day (picture above), it wasn't such a good beach day. We went out for lunch and went shopping for Flamengo jerseys on Avenida N.S. Copacabana until we went back to Carlos' tour office/apartment at three. When the door opened, we saw no costumes and anticipated the bad news.

Carlos was frantically going back and forth from the waiting lounge to his office in the back with a frustrated look on his face. He came to us with a paper and pen to draw out a picture of a bank and an ATM, trying to communicate with us by drawing out what he couldn't say in English. We understood where he was going, but he got so frustrated with his lack of English that he went in the office to call his friend Paula to translate for us. Carlos said something to Paula in Portuguese and then handed me the receiver, and then I relayed the message back out to Lara. It went on and on like that for about four times.

The message was that Luis had transferred our money to the costume maker via ATM rather than a person, and machine transactions didn't go through until the end of the day. The costume warehouse wouldn't release the costumes without the money and thus, the reason why there were none in Carlos' apartment. Carlos apologized over and over, but we understood that things happen -- we were just happy that there was some resolve for the day so we could go about our business.

The day was still grey and so we just went to the air-conditioned Rio Sul Shopping Center to browse around. Growing up in New Jersey, USA, I was back on familiar ground. Lara the Guernsey Girl (Guernsey is next to the British Channel Island Jersey) went in and out many stores trying on many clothes in the dressing rooms -- nothing struck her fancy -- and she simply hated me when I simply went in a men's clothing store and came out with some new boxers without any indecisiveness.

"YOU LIVE YOUR LIFE IN A PERMANENT DAZE, DON'T YOU?" Lara said to me as we walked back to Botofogo from the shopping mall. I don't remember what it was that she said when I spaced out, but it was just another example of the many miscommunications we've had over the times traveling together off and on since December 2003. Sometimes it's my mumbling, sometimes it's her British phrases that Americans don't understand, sometimes its my nasal congestion that muffles my ears, but often we end up just saying "What?" to each other. Sometimes I forget to say the "What?" and just zone out like Homer Simpson.

We were walking on the sidewalk through one of the long tunnels along the highway, just the two of us. Call me paranoid, but walking through long tunnels really gets my guard up -- if you are held up, you are essentially trapped with nowhere to go but run into uncoming traffic going 100 miles per hour. We were about three quarters through the long tunnel when suddenly behind us there was a man right behind the two of us. Immediately I increased my rate of walking to make it to the end -- Lara didn't know what was going on.

"Why did you suddenly just start walking fast?" she asked.

"There was that guy," I said.

"Did you take a look at that guy?"

I looked back and saw that his right arm was in a plaster cast and sling, while his left hand held a bag.

"Look at him. There's no way he would have done something," Lara said.

"You never know."

"Did you think he had a gun or something?"

"Maybe."

She laughed at me as the injured man walked a different way from us outside the tunnel.

"Maybe I've been in New York too long," I said.

She said something after that, but I think I spaced out again.

WE STOPPED OFF AT THE GAS STATION STORE for snacks and then vegged out back in the hostel by watching a really bad made-for-American-TV movie starring Linda Hamilton as a park ranger. David the Aussie sat in with us and the three of us decided to try and order Chinese food with the help of the hostel guy. Being the most language-savvy of us -- although not near fluent at all -- I was designated as the guy to order. The hostel guy spoke first to ask if there was someone there that spoke English. A Chinese guy on the other line spoke enough English to say, "Here is the list in Portuguese..." before reverting back to Portuguese. In the end, there was definitely some miscommunication because they messed up the order, only bringing two of the three we wanted -- Lara's chicken fried rice was missing.

If it's not one thing, it's another when there's some sort of miscommunication, but I suppose a little in life is okay -- just as long as my costume doesn't look incredibly cheesy and as long as my chicken with broccoli comes when I'm hungry.

New Neighbors

DAY 121: It's one thing to travel and live out of a bag, hostel to hostel to hostel. It's another to actually travel somewhere and live there for a while. That morning, Lara and I checked out of our Botofogo hostel dorm to find out exactly how living in Rio felt like. We packed our bags and took a cab to our agent Luis in Copacabana, who was all set to bring us to the apartment when we arrived.

"Oh, you mean the one that overlooks Copacabana Beach?" Lara said yet again with a smirk. It became her tag line for whenever we mentioned the new pad.

Luis' sister came with us with the key to our new subletted home (picture above): a studio on the sixth floor with ceiling fans, satellite TV, kitchen and bathroom. And the view outside the window did have some sort of a view of the beach, as promised. Lara and I were immediately impressed and suddenly transformed from mere travelling partners to roommates.

Luis and his sister gave us the keys and told us to come back to the office later to fill out the contracts and pick up our costumes. "Oh, one thing," he said. "You have to pretend you are my cousin."

"Uh, okay," I said. I figured I'd tell people I was from Little Brazil in New York City until I realized I didn't know how to say that in Portuguese.

AFTER SETTLING INTO OUR NEW HOME (picture above), Lara and I went to the Angramar Turismo agency in Carlos' apartment. Learning from the day before, it was no big shocker when we given the runaround again; we had to come back later since nothing was ready yet. In the meanwhile, Lara used her energy by grocery shopping while I just went back to the apartment to make myself at home with my laptop and "Blog" in the comfort of the glass dining room table. Lara came back shortly with a bunch of groceries and, more importantly, bottles of liquor.

A couple of hours later we pressed our luck back at the tour agency. When the door opened, we saw the good news laying in the corner: our costumes for our samba school, Beija-Flor. Carlos was there with our two-week sublet contracts -- which we filled in and paid for in full -- and then it was time to play dress up. Lara and I put on the mainly orange and red pieces, from the shin guards to the shoes to the headdresses and masks. The heaviest part of the costume was a decorative mass of feathers and grass, which was draped over our torsos with the support of a harness. We didn't get snap happy with our cameras just yet -- Lara suggested I don't post any photos of us in costume until we are actually marching in the parade.

IT HAD BEEN NINE DAYS SINCE MY ACCIDENT IN FOZ DO IGUAÇU, and it was about time I got my stitches out. As if the location of our apartment couldn't be more convenient -- half a block from the beach, one from a supermarket, two from our costumes, four from a subway station, four from my New York-based Citibank (Can you say "Location, location, location?") -- we were just one block away from the English and French medical clinic mentioned in the Lonely Planet guide. However, when I got there I discovered that only the head doctor was bilingual. The check-in attendant and all the nurses only spoke Portuguese, which sort of a pain.

After waiting in the waiting room for about an hour, I was led into the head doctor's office. I explained the cartoon-like accident I had in Foz do Iguaçu and he sent me to another room where two nurses attended to me. They tried to talk to me and I made my best efforts -- I tried to shine them on by telling them I was marching in the Carnivale procession with the Beija-Flor school. Both of them immediately started laughing; I don't know why.

Using solution and a pair of scissors, they cut a ridiculous patch out of my hair, which made my head look like a lawn that a kid had started to mow before running off to play video games instead. They treated the still somewhat open wound with some ointment -- I didn't realize how ridiculous I looked until I saw myself in the bathroom mirror.

"Wear a hat," the doctor told me when he came in to check up on me. He also told me I shouldn't go to the beach for two days -- I assumed he meant that I shouldn't go in the water.

WITH MY NEW YORK YANKEES CAP ON, I went to do my share of grocery shopping, which included a 12-pack of beer and potato chips. My grocery list wasn't all that of a starving college student, I was supposed to get ground beef for making dinner in the new apartment. Unlike supermarkets in the U.S. where you can simply pick a pack up in the meat section, here you had to go to the butcher and have him grind it fresh for you from a slab of beef of your choice. It took me a while to figure this out, but with the help of my phrasebook, I managed to ask for one kilo, surprisingly without confusion or miscommunication.

Back at the new apartment, I made Penne Bolognese for dinner for me and my roommate. Lara mixed drinks and mixed drinks and mixed drinks, and needless to say, it was a giggly first night celebration of the new apartment. The Beatles pumped out of my laptop hooked up to the television speakers, and although I didn't think we were that loud, we were evidently pissing off the neighbors. The intercom buzzed a couple of times -- we just ignored it and continued our festivities -- but we couldn't avoid it when the doorbell rang. It was the doorman who had to come up personally to tell us to tone it down. I don't know what he was saying to me, but I just said "disculpe" ("sorry") about half a dozen times.

What a way to be welcomed to the neighborhood.

The Girl From Ipanema

DAY 122: Seeing the state of the dining room table the morning after a first night celebration of our new apartment, there was no explanation needed for the fact that Lara was pretty much sick and hungover all day. I was feeling fairly okay -- nothing that a little breakfast couldn't cure. Lara stayed in bed feeling rough while I went out to attend to Blog duties at an internet cafe and buy a couple of more groceries: a fresh baguette for Lara and slices of cheese for my hangover breakfast, the good ol' American grilled cheese sandwich.

After recuperating while watching episodes of Friends on our satellite TV's The Warner Channel, we decided to take advantage of the sunny day by strolling all the way through Copacabana to Ipanema Beach (picture above). On the eastern end of Ipanema Beach was the Arpoador, a small, rocky peninsula that jutted out into the Atlantic, a perfect place for surf waves and for fishermen. I explored the area with my camera while Lara sat on a bench to recuperate some more.

Lara was still feeling rough and walked back to the apartment to chill out while I went on to explore the rest of Ipanema Beach. Getz and Gilberto's classic song "The Girl From Ipanema" implied to me that I'd see many lovely Brazilian girls on the beach -- the kind that when they pass, each one they pass goes "Aaah" -- but they were few and far between. In fact, a lot of the people I noticed in and around the beachfronts were American guys who I take it were influenced on coming down to Rio for Carnivale because of Snoop Dogg & Pharrell's "Beautiful" music video, shot in Rio.

I continued my leisurely stroll along the beach, passing the impressive sand sculptures of a talented artist. I was beginning to think the supposed "girl from Ipanema" was merely a figment of his imagination until I realized the nearby rainbow-colored flag waving proudly on a pole.

I continued west until I heard the rhythm of a five-man samba band performing around a crowded, touristy (and hetero) beach. There was a group of people with mobile phones and cameras trying to look important, and soon I realized what they were all hovering around: a swimsuit model lounging out near the waves for what looked like a swimsuit calendar shoot or something. The tall and tan and young and lovely girl was moved and primpped into several sensual positions by an assitant, and glared her sexy Brazilian eyes for the nerdy-looking photographer behind the camera. Aaah. Needless to say, I wasn't the only one trying to sneek in a photo without security looking.

As dusk was approaching, I went off to find a bicycle rental place so I could ride off into the sunset. It wasn't as easy as I thought; the address of the one place in Copacabana mentioned in my tourist guide turned out to be that of a residential high-rise. I gave up on the idea anyway since I was tired from the total four-mile walk and just sat out for a bit watching the waves, sipping sweet water out of a fresh coconut.

LARA WAS FEELING MUCH BETTER when I got back to our apartment. She sorted herself out with a pack of ramen noodles while I just finished the leftovers from the night before. After, we went out for a nightly stroll to shop for Flamengo soccer jerseys to twirl around during the Caroica 2004 finals the following Saturday -- it was easy since there were many guys just walking around and selling cheap bootleg ones out of a bag or over their shoulder.

The vibe on the beach was chilled out with a slight breeze of salty sea air. A man with a guitar played for a cafe on the beach. Hippies sold homemade jewelry on towels spread across the sidewalk. Spray paint artists worked their magic on their boards on the sidewalk. People sat with drinks at sidewalk cafes and watched people go by. We saw all this as we made our way to the night markets in the middle of Avenida Atlantica along beach, which sold the regular tourist souvenirs of t-shirts, jewelry, paintings and some other cheesy things that you might by for others but not yourself. An American guy who probably knew the lyrics to the Snoop Dogg/Pharrell song more than he did any Portuguese overheard Lara speaking English and tried to get her to try on a woman's shirt so she could model it for him. She just gave him the usual "Não obrigada." ("No thanks.")

Whereas The Girl From Ipanema can make people go "Aaah," Lara the Girl From Guernsey just made the guy go "Awww..."

Before We Have Company

DAY 123: Since both my roommate Lara and I had company coming from overseas to Rio de Janiero for Carnivale, we were saving visits to the major tourist attractions for when they arrived. Avoiding the famous Pâo de Açúcar rock formations and the towering Cristo Redentor statue overlooking the city, we simply decided to go on the walking tour of the central city as written in our Lonely Planet guide.

The tour started seven Metro subway stops away from ours near the Praça Mahatma Gandhi, graced with a huge statue of the Indian peace activist. Lara questioned why Brazil would honor a hero from another country, but took a photo of it anyway. Nearby was the Praça Floriano, a busy plaza full of people on the go flanked by the Teatro Municipal to the north and the national library to the east. We continued to connect the dots used to designate the walking tour on the Lonely Planet map, through the street vendors of Avenida 13 de Maio and over to the Petrobras building. Across the street from the Orwellian-looking office of the energy company was the ultra-modern Catedral Metropolitana de Sâo Sebastiâo, which looked like something that should be on the strip in Las Vegas rather than a place of worship (picture above). Inside the dome, light shined through the stained glass, coloring and illuminating what would otherwise be a dreary looking cement tee-pee or beehive.

Across the street from the sleek makeover of Catholicism was a more traditional building, the Convento de Santo Antonio. Despite the fact that it was convent, it housed as statue where, according to Lonely Planet, women would go to pray for a husband. Lara was welcoming this prospect until a woman outside stopped us to tell us [something, something] in Portuguese. We stood there sort of clueless until the woman pointed at the camera in Lara's hand.

"No photos?" Lara asked.

"[Something, something,]" the woman said concerning her camera. First we thought she might be telling us that photos weren't permitted on the grounds, but then thought maybe they were permitted, just without flash. After the slightly frustrating session of foreign banter, we figured she was just trying to be nice to us by warning us of the people around that might steal the camera out of her hands. Lara put it in her bag.

STRAYING OFF LONELY PLANET'S DOTTED LINE, we wandered around a nice little neighborhood full of restaurants and musical instrument stores. We lunched at a por quilo place, a hot buffet cafeteria where you pay what your food weighs by the kilo. Amongst the smorgasbord of Brazilian delicacies was a churrascuria, the traditional Brazilian barbecue where various meats are flame-grilled on big metal skewers that look like swords. Even with juicy medium rare slices of filet mignon on my plate, my meal only weighed about three US dollars.

CONTINUING THE DOTTED LINE, we made our way passed a street performer dressed in drag to the Rua de Caroica, only to be hassled and followed by a fairly aggressive peddling woman who wouldn't give up unless we said something other than "não obrigado" ("No thank you"). We increased our walking pace, weaving through other pedestrians -- including a woman with hairier legs than my own -- until she was no where to be seen. However, when we entered the Praça Tiradentes, a highlight in the Lonely Planet guide, we discovered it was a sketchy, fenced off area filled with really dubious-looking homeless people. One look at us and one of them just got off his bench and started walking towards us really questionably.

"I think we should get out of here," Lara suggested.

"Uh, yeah."

Three blocks away was the Campo de Santana, which felt a lot safer to walk through. With trees, flowers and the occasional deer mouse, it was a much more picturesque place to sit for a while. Playing tour guide, I pointed out the historical trivia that it was here that in 1822, Dom Pedro I declared Brazil's independence from Portugal. Lara added to the conversation of trivia by mentioning that a barnacle's penis is five times bigger than its body and that more people die from coconuts falling on their heads than from shark attacks.

Walking through the street market on the Rua de Alfandega, we found ourselves back in an area we had been before. Escaping the sun in an air-conditioned store for a while, I bought some new sandals since the soles of the ones I was wearing were flapping around all day with the poor glue job.

After an internet stop, we strayed off the dotted line and walked over to the waterfront where ferries linked Rio to the eastern suburbs. Although the classic architecture of the boat station was impressive, the water wasn't so much. We left and just went to a sidewalk cafe across the street from the Palacio Tiradentes to chat and take some notes over a couple of drinks.

OFF THE SUBWAY BACK IN OUR OWN NEIGHBORHOOD IN COPACABANA, we went grocery shopping for ingredients for chili. Brazilians don't seem to import red kidney beans -- we searched three different places -- but Lara's chili was still tasty without them. The rest of the night, we just stayed in -- saving nightlife activities for when our company arrived -- and tried to learn the lyrics for our samba school's theme song by playing it over and over and over from the CD we picked up from Luis that morning when we reserved our soccer final tickets. Learning Portuguese and its crazy pronunciation was bad enough, let alone trying to sing it really fast. We rested our brains and our tongues by taking breaks to work on our journals -- I spent all night and some of the following morning determined to catch up before the arrival of her friends the next day and Blog readers markyt, wheat and Paul the following. Lara and I knew that as soon as company arrived, things would finally start to get a little crazier.

Incoming!

DAY 124: The Friday before Carnaval weekend in Rio de Janiero, city of the world's most famous party, was the day the city really geared up for the influx of tourists. Men in costume and on stilts waited that morning in front of oceanfront hotels (picture below) for the lines of taxis that eventually pulled in all day. By the late afternoon, the streets were full of even more people -- many of which had the familiar accent from my homeland -- and I said to myself, "Could there be any more Americans here?"

Lara and I also had to prepare for the influx of our own guests, starting with Lara's two pairs of friends from back home in Guernsey. She got some hair removal via waxing, while I some hair removed via a barber who finally leveled my hair so I wouldn't have that dent in it from when I had my stitches removed. The day was pretty gloomy, but we realized that didn't stop the festivities when we saw one of the many seemingly spontaneous street parades go down our block.

Inspired by this, I went off to go on the bike ride along the beach that I planned on doing anyway. I rented a bike and pedaled about seven miles on the bike path along the Copacabana and Ipanema beaches. At the north end of Copacabana, the grey skies didn't thwart what looked like a film shoot for an MTV-esque show live from the beach.

I returned the bike after riding through a drizzle for a bit too long and went back to the apartment. Lara was on the couch doing one of her guilty pleasures: watching Touched By An Angel on TV, solely for the sake of making fun of the cheesiness of it -- particularly when the angels all of a sudden start glowing in front of humans who ask, "What's happening?!" She got me hooked on the "comedy stylings" of Roma Downey -- and in one episode, Ozzie Davis as the Angel Gabriel -- until we got ready to meet her friend Kate, who was travelling with her friend Jilly, at the fancy Rio Othon Palace hotel along the beach.

Kate and Jilly were already drinking chopps (a little smaller than a pint) of beer at the bar when Lara and I arrived. We sat down and lounged around a table over some more rounds. Lara and I entertained them with stories of our adventures in South America, together and apart. Lara's other friends, Esther and Pago turned up at the hotel and found us, and we continued the conversation until we went out for dinner.

"HELP" IS A BIG DANCE CLUB ON THE BEACH, known to many people (and some guidebooks) as the place to go to pick up prostitutes. Right next to Help was an outdoor sidewalk restaurant where we decided to have dinner -- with the huge influx of tourists, there was an influx of hookers left and right, many of which we assumed were not normally hookers, but just did it during Carnaval season for the extra pocket money. The six of us talked over dinner amongst the old men at tables with up to five young Brazilian girls primpped up in obvious and suggestive clothing.

"Isn't that Justin?" Lara said to me, noticing the Canadian we met at Iguazu Falls walking by. I ran out to him -- he was on his way to Bob's, the Brazilian fast food restaurant with his friend Steve from Ottawa. The pair of Canadians joined us for drinks at an extended table. With tourists pouring in left and right, our group was getting bigger and bigger -- it was bound to happen before the Carnaval festivities really kicked off.

Meanwhile, Back at the Airport

DAY 125: Before the 10:30 meeting time with some of my friends from the New York area, I had a couple of errands to run. Despite the round and rounds of beers, cuba libres and caipirinhas with our big group the night before, I was awake early and performed our morning ritual of going out to the supermarket with the in-store bakery for some fresh baguettes. On the way back, I stopped off at a florist to get Lara a yellow rose, simply because I felt like it -- her white one on our dining room table was about halfway dead. The florist heard me stammering in Portuguese and thought I was Japanese until I said "Americano" and eventually "Filipino" to explain my Asian-looking eyes. Hearing the latter, he immediately got excited, trying to explain to me something about volcanos or something. I kept on saying, "Sim, Pinatubo," but he kept on trying to tell me something else -- he even drew out a picture of a volcanic eruption on a piece of paper to explain himself, but I just didn't get it. I smiled and just said, "Sim, Pinatubo, Pinatubo," again and just walked away.

After breakfast I went off to Angramar Turismo to see if they had extra Carioca 2004 final soccer tickets for Lara's friends Kate and Jilly, but there were no more left. It would just have to be the crew we had already bought tickets for: me, Lara, Lara's friends Ester and Pago, and the two friends I was to meet at 10:30 in front of the Copacabana Palace Hotel, Paul and Terence (a.k.a. wheat on The Blog). Waiting in front of the five-star hotel on time, I could not find them.

A COUPLE OF NIGHTS PRIOR, Lara and I bought soccer jerseys for the team we supported in the semi-finals, Flamengo, the favored team since it was from a working-class neighborhood in Rio de Janiero. I wore the red and black-striped shirt as I waited for Paul and Terence. Half an hour went by and I figured they were probably stuck in immigration getting photographed and fingerprinted for being Americans, so I sat out at a sidewalk cafe on the beach -- in a vulnerable position where passers-by could clearly see the colors I was wearing.

In a country of soccer fanatics, loyalties roll deep, and not really knowing the history of the team I was supporting, I suddenly became conscious that wearing the red and black shirt would make different people react in different ways. One guy wearing the same jersey cheered me on, crossing his arms above his head to form and "X" to signify victory. Another group of guys wearing the opposing team's green and burgundy jerseys walked by and yelled at me in Portuguese -- one of them, an old man, stopped and gave me the finger. Luckily for me, there were more Flamengo fans than Fluminense ones around town.

After drinking bottles of water and energy juices for close to 90 minutes waiting for Paul and Terence to arrive, my bladder decided tell my brain to walk back to the apartment. On my way back, I heard the call from behind me:

"'Rik!"

I saw them walking behind me and replied with a familiar saying from The Amazing Race: "Terence and Paul, you are Team Number One."

Paul and Terence had arrived after a long line at customs as I predicted, but were happy to be on the beach and away from the New York winter. My brother, Mark (a.k.a. markyt on The Blog) had to hang back at the airport to meet up with his friend Sharon who was coming in from a later flight from San Francisco since it was one of her clients that was renting all of them an apartment in the working-class, but quaint residential neighborhood Santa Teresa. Unfortunately for Mark, he was missing from the welcome toast of homemade caipirinhas at the apartment.

LARA'S FRIENDS ESTHER AND PAGO RANG OUR DOORBELL shortly thereafter and we all made with the introductions with more caipirinhas and beers. We hung out for a while with Oreos, Pringles and microwavable snacks -- Terence appreciated them more, being away from home. He also noted that being in my apartment in Rio was like being back at my old apartment across the Hudson from New York City.

"Yeah, it's just like being back at my apartment, just with British people," I told him. We joined the Brits and indulged in the gift Lara had received from home via her friends: a jar of Marmite, the quintessential yeast extract spread from the U.K., spread on crackers with some butter.

Yeast extract or no yeast extract, the festivities continued as we made our way to meet the guys from the tour agency, who led us to the beach to wait for our bus. As another seemingly spontaneous samba parade went by, Terence was in just awe of the fact that in Rio you can just drink on the street legally and took advantage by buying cans and cans of Skol from any of the vendors walking by with coolers. The vendors were great because, even when we boarded the bus and drove across town, they'd sell us ice cold beers through the window so we could continue the party on the bus.

"Meanwhile, back at the airport..." I joked with Terence and Paul, thinking my brother Mark was just stuck around doing less exciting things at the airport. Terence and Paul posed like they were bored out of their mind, waiting around for a flight to come in. It became our ongoing joke of the day.

THE PARTY BUS ARRIVED AT THE STADIUM just five minutes prior to game time, so we rushed in to get our seats. Unlike the time Lara and I went to the semi-finals, we weren't seated in a section surrounded by fans of the same team; we were put in a lower-tier section with a mixed crowd, so there no flags or banners or unifying support. It didn't stop Lara from twirling her shirt around in support of our team.

Beer vendors continued to come around to take our business, and when they weren't we'd just go out and just make beer runs at the concession stand. Needless to say, Terence had a bit too much and dozed off for a little bit during all the action. The rest of us enjoyed the match, but more the energy of just being there, and at the end of a close match, Flamengo beat Fluminense 3-2.

The victory called for a celebration and luckily Terence woke up for it. Walking out of the stadium, supporters of Flamengo were cheering, twirling their shirts or crossing their arms in air like an "X" for victory. Walking passed a flag of the opposing team set on fire, Terence, Paul and I celebrated and wondered the doings of my brother yet again: "Meanwhile, back at the airport..." I said, and they'd do the pose.

On the ride home, most of the passengers on the bus rode pretty much the whole way with their upper bodies out the window to cheer along with the fans walking or dancing in the streets. "Gol, gol, GOOOOOOOOL!" I shouted out to the people below. Paul leaned out with his arms in an "X" as people in other cars got out their flags to wave around while stuck in traffic. With an open half-full beer can in my hand, I held my thumb over the top to shake around and make a geyser to a crowd we drove by, not realizing it was a group of Fluminense fans. One of them got really pissed at me, ran to my window, jumped up and slapped my arm really hard -- the impact forced the inside edge of the can to cut into my thumb and I was suddenly bleeding all over my hand from what could be described as a really deep, circular paper cut.

"I'm not taking you to the emergency room again," Lara joked as she continued to wave her soccer shirt out the window to the people and cars passing by. The bleeding stopped anyway after some pressure and I continued with the celebration out my window. As we rode into Copacabana, the party on the bus was brought to an untimely close when someone just grabbed and stole the soccer shirt right out of Lara's hands when we were at a traffic light.

LARA AND I TOOK THE OTHER FOUR TO "OUR PLACE," La Maison, the restaurant a couple of blocks away from our house on the beach where we often ate. After dinner we all split up and so I took Terence and Paul on a stroll along Copacabana Beach to Ipanema. Along the way, we walked through yet another seemingly sponteneous samba street parade (picture above), some of them celebrating the victory of Flamengo as well. It was yet another thing that made us just think, "Meanwhile, back at the airport...."

At eleven, we made our way to the Copacabana Palace Hotel, where hundreds were watching a fancy black-tie Carnaval ball on the mezzanine level, to finally meet up with Mark and Sharon -- and, if he had gotten the email, Tim the Aussie that Lara and I met in La Paz, Bolivia who we told could crash on our floor if he needed a place to stay in Rio. Tim was a no show, as was Sharon who was too tired and just stayed back at the apartment in Santa Teresa. Mark was in good spirits though as we hung around the beach and toasted his arrival with some caipirinhas. He informed us that his day didn't involve waiting around the airport all day like we all had joked about; after settling the apartment rental, he managed to hang out at the beach with Sharon for a while, where they saw a couple having sex.

Who knows what was going on at the airport when that was going on?

Fly Like An Eagle / The Chaperone

DAY 126 (Part 1): Lara was buttering another fresh baguette in the morning, before spreading on a layer of her favorite spread Marmite, which she excitedly received the day before when her friends Ester and Pago brought it over from home. We sat over breakfast and waited around for people to come over at 9:30 so we could all try and go hand-gliding together. First to arrive were Esther and Pago and I leaned out the window to see if anyone was coming around. Suddenly I recognized a familiar wavy hairstyle on a guy walking around, looking fairly confused.

"I think I see Dundee," I told Lara before running the five flights of stairs down to catch up with the Australian Tim whom we'd befriended in La Paz. He reminded us of a cross between Steve "The Crocodile Hunter" Irwin and Paul "Crocodile Dundee" Hogan, and usually referred to him as "Steve" or "Dundee" -- although not to his face. Lara had yelled his real name out the window, signaling him to walk over to our building.

I met Tim downstairs on the street and said my hellos. He had flown from Salvador to Rio the night before, but never got my email about meeting at the Copacabana Palace at 11 the night beofre. Fortunately for him, upon looking up our apartment, a resident offered him an apartment rental on the spot, which he snatched.

My brother Mark, Terence, Paul and Sharon arrived as I was standing out on the sidewalk with Tim, and the six of us joined the others upstairs. Kate and Jilly came shortly thereafter and we were off -- minus Pago and Esther who weren't interested in the jump, and Tim who had been stopped by his landlord to do paper work.

"I'll just catch up with you later," he told us.

The rest of us walked down to the Superfly Handgliding/Paragliding truck near our usual restaurant La Maison. No one was there, which was weird because we had always seen someone, so we waited around at a table for drinks until someone came. After a while, I just used the payphone to call the number on the side of the truck. The woman on the other end told me that although it was a nice sunny day at sea level, it was cloudy up in the mountains and not clear enough for flights. She said that the cloud coverage might clear up in the afternoon and told me to call back at 1:30. Optimistic, I made a reservation for a pick-up at 2:00 anyway.

The eight of us disbanded for a bit to regroup at one and went our own ways. Sharon, my brother's friend from San Francisco, had met a group of Californian guys on her flight and wanted to look them up -- they were staying at the fancy Rio Othon hotel and so we walked with her to check it out. Mark, Paul and Sharon went up to their room, leaving Terence and I to wander around the rooftop pool area. We managed to snag a picture of the view before we started to get looks from staff who I guessed knew we weren't staying at the hotel. We just went back to the lobby bar and drank caipirinhas, watching the many Americans come in and out in beach wear.

We walked back to the the meeting place along the beach, through the crowds of tourists claiming stakes on practically every inch of sand. We stopped off at one of the many drink stands along the way for another round before meeting up for lunch -- and for Terence and Mark, more beers. I went off to call Superfly again and as predicted, the sky was clear enough. We finished our lunches just in time for our transport at two o'clock. Joining us for the ride was an elderly Swede who anxiously wanted to fly like eagles like the rest of us. Terence and Mark on the other hand, temporarily lost enthusiasm as they both passed out in their respective seats -- Terence more than anyone; he didn't even wake up when we got to the Superfly meeting place on the beach in nearby São Conrado and we just left him in the van.

Terence eventually woke up for yet another round while we waited for the glide organizer to sort us out. He sat at a table with another beer, across from the Swedish guy and started up a conversation with him, while I sat by the curb overlooking the beach. Later, Terence told me the conversation went something like this:

"So, did you sign all your paperwork with your landlord?" he asked.

The Swede had no idea what he was talking about.

"'Rik, is this your Australian friend?!" he called to me.

"No, he's Swedish."

Embarrassed and drunk, Terence came to sit on the curb next to me.

WE SIGNED OUR LIVES AWAY ON INDEMNITY FORM and then waited around for our individual transports up the mountain. Kate and Jilly went first since they had to get back early for their Sambadrome transport with their tour agency, followed by Sharon, then Lara -- who was still sort of nervous about the whole prospect of jumping off a cliff. The Superfly guy told the rest of us to wait at the nearby drink stand. "A round of beers on the house, while you wait," he said. We couldn't say no to free beer as handgliders soared above our heads.

I was next to go up and was picked up by my pilot Saqua, a very experienced glider of nineteen years who had his own handgliding school and had accomplished the feat of flying 100 miles over the California desert. With his glider folded and mounted on the top of his car, we and his assistant drove up the 1805 ft. up the mountain along a steep, winding road. At the top, I met the others who were already in gear and ready to fly and soon suited up myself in a helmet and safety harness while Saqua and his assistant put the glider together.

"Okay, you have to run with me," Saqua said, stressing the importance of being in sync with our footsteps as we were to run down the wooden platform over a quarter of a mile high before jumping off the cliff. I put my hand on his shoulder and my right foot forward as instructed for a practice run on level ground.

"Okay, I'll count down three, two, one and then we run," he instructed. I wondered if he meant start running on "one" or after "one," but he started the countdown already.

"Three... two... "

"Wait, which foot first?"

"...one!"

We ran and kept our speeds together with the help of the arm around the back, hand holding the shoulder.

"Good, you have it," he told me. I was hoping it wasn't just beginner's luck.

Jilly and Lara were already in the air (picture above) when our glider entered the queue for the runway. Saqua did a quick weight check with me and fastened a bunch of things that I hoped would save my life if need be. I felt pretty confident that things would go well, and was just excited to just be in the air. In less than a minute, we were on the runway, ready to go.

"Three... two... one!!!"

We ran in sync and jumped off the edge. Wind caught our sail immediately and soon we were soaring in the air above the mountain residences and eventually the beach and the ocean. A soared with a permanent smile on my face, laughing most of the time, which was good for the bunch of pictures taken by camera mounted on the side of the frame, which Saqua took with his remote control.

"Do you want to drive?" he asked me.

"Yeah!"

He put my hands on the grips where his were and let go. "Okay, I have to take a nap now because I am going to Carnaval tonight," he joked while pretending to nod off for a second.

With the wind as my companion, I tried to navigate the glider left, right, up and down to Saqua's commands, but it wasn't so easy. I was pulling when I should have been leaning and leaning when I should have pushing or I don't know -- I just know that I never really went in the direction I was supposed to. I almost took us out to sea until Saqua took the controls to steer us back towards the beach.

We gradually descended for our landing on the beach. Saqua explained something about the procedure of landing, and I was a little confused as where to hold onto. Unknowingly, I was holding onto his arm.

"Don't hold my arm, I'm steering!"

Quickly I moved it to a strap hanging off his chest. Before I knew it, we were coming in for the landing. At the end, he jerked the glider up a little so we could just land on two feet. I fell over though, but with a smile on my face.

"You are a good pilot," he entertained me. "Next time, just don't grab my arm."

He gave me the roll of film and went off to prepare his glider for the next client.

TERENCE, PAUL AND MARK HADN'T BEEN PICKED UP YET by their pilots when I got back to the table they were drinking at. Paul, who was pretty sober, was soon picked up by his pilot and went on up to fly. Terence was next in line and the Superfly guy saw the state that he was in.

"How many beers did you have?"

Apparently Terence was drunk enough to not even lie about it. "Uh, seven?"

"You can't go handgliding," he told him, before explaining to us that you really need to be coordinated for the initial run down the platform.

"No, I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay," Terence said in his slurrred speech.

"I'm going to put you with a paraglider," he told him, explaining to us that it's just as good to come down with a parachute, and without any coordinated running.

"Yeah, you should do that," Mark said.

"Good call there," I said.

Terence was out of it enough not to complain and went with a paragliding pilot rather than the next handgliding one. Mark, who had sobered up enough, went with the pilot that Terence was supposed to have.

Kate and Jilly had left in a taxi to get their transport to the Sambadrome, leaving me at the table with just my roommate Lara. We caught up on our inside gossip over orange Fantas until the rest of the temporary eagles came back down to the beach. Sharon was all smiles when she came down, as was Paul. Terence came down in the parachute and stumbled across the beach, giving me his signature middle finger from afar when I took his photo. We waited around until Mark came down with his pilot who told him that out of all the places to paraglide commercially in the world, Rio was probably the best.

With our group all smiling and thrilled by our unmotorized flights in the air, he hopped back in our transport van with our same driver who had us speak on his mobile phone to prove we were with him so the woman on the other line, I take it, didn't think he was cheating on her since he was running late. He probably would have run late anyway with all the traffic on the way back to Copacabana. With all the spontaenous samba parades closing down streets left and right, traffic jam was an understatement. Luckily, we were entertained by a couple of street jugglers through the window.

LARA WENT OFF HER OWN WAY, while the rest of us danced for a bit with another spontaneous samba street parade en route to dinner at a churrascuria, the ingenious Brazilian barbecue type of restaurant where diners can go up to a hot buffet of salads, stews, rices and pasta while waiting for about a dozen waiters each holding different sword-like skewers with different types of meat on it. Each table is assigned a two-sided piece of cardboard or peg to notify the meat men to serve the table; red means "No, I've had enough," green means "I'm no vegan; pile it on, buddy."

We kept our card on green for most of the time to beckon the different cuts of steak, chicken, pork or bacon-wrapped scallops. Us carnivores dined with a bottle red wine while listening to the musical stylings of the piano player nearby who played classic tunes like "Feelings," "My Way" and of course, a jazzy "The Girl From Ipanema." Eventually the meat was just coming too fast and we turned off the spigot by turning our card to red, but waiters came regardless with juicy meats that we couldn't resist anyway. Needless to say, there should have been a sign out front that stated, "Vegetarians need not enter."

With my stomach full of food, I was glad that I wasn't going handgliding right after.

The Chaperone

DAY 126 (Part 2): A taxi took us to the apartment in Santa Teresa, which was situated on a dead end street called Rua Murtinho Nobe that most cab drivers didn't know the location of. With the help of CB radio, we eventually made it to the three-bedroom place on the third floor of a five-story building. We sat around, beerless, wondering what to do before going to the Sambadrome for the first night of Carnaval after midnight. Sharon went off into the other room and come back with a smile.

"I have a date."

Apparently, the 27-year-old Sharon fancied the cab driver she rode with the night before who was trying to pick her up with a line about trying some the Brazilian asaieda fruit. After she called him on the phone and her high came down, she was suddenly all indecisive about having called the stranger for a night out in the first place and asked the rest of us for advice.

"Just follow your heart," Terence said with a snicker before we all busted out laughing.

"How can I say, I haven't met the guy," I said, not knowing saying it designated me as a chaperone.

"I'm just going to sit with him on the steps," she said. She said she wasn't out looking for a one-night stand.

"We can just follow you like a group of chaperones, like in The Godfather," Terence joked.

"He's a cab driver, he'll probably want to drive you somewhere."

"Am I being stupid?" she asked.

Paul just shrugged his shoulders.

Eventually Marcelo the cabbie came in his taxi and parked in front of the building on the quiet street. We saw him waiting outside from our window.

Sharon, all dressed up to impress went downstairs, but not without dragging me along to check him out. With very limited Portuguese, Sharon tried to communicate with the tall, dark and I guess handsome cabbie who fortunately spoke some English. As predicted, he wasn't about to sit on the steps all night and was there to pick her up to take her somewhere. Marcelo looked fine to me, so I gave Sharon the heads up and announced that I was going out for a beer run.

"Can you give my friend Erik a ride to the market?"

I thought maybe she wanted a wingman for a bit longer and so I hopped in the backseat, while the impressionable San Franciscan girl sat up front. All of the stores in the area were closed, so a local beer run was out of the question. By the time we finished wandering for an open store, Sharon felt confident enough to go off with Marcelo and dropped me off, beerless. The two of them continued on to the otherside of town to buy the supposed fruit for her to try. "Do you want me to get beer?" Sharon asked me.

"Yes."

"I don't have any money."

"I feel like I'm giving you an allowance," I said as I gave her twenty reais. "Don't spend it all in one place now -- unless it's for beer."

Sharon gave me her key to get back in the building and told me she'd be back by midnight so she could go with us to the Sambadrome. The two drove off for "fruit" -- and hopefully my drinks.

IT WAS ABOUT 10:30 WHEN I GOT BACK TO THE APARTMENT. With all the exhaustion and a long night ahead at the Sambadrome, we all dozed off for a bit. I awoke about an hour later when I heard Paul and Terence watching the Carnvale festivities on the TV in the back room. Despite the bad reception, we still saw the dozens of super hot, topless Brazilian women being interviewed before shaking their asses for the camera. At a certain point, all we saw was ass after booby after ass after booby.

"I love this cameraman," I said.

Midnight -- the time that Lonely Planet suggests is primetime to get cheap scalper tickets into the Sambadrome -- was approaching and there was no news from Sharon. We couldn't exactly leave since I had her key and she couldn't get back in, which made us all jokingly yell "Sharon!" the way Ozzie Osbourne does to call his wife. We sat in the bedroom, watching the hedonistic festivities about a mile away -- on a little TV, feeling like the losers in American Pie. It was a pretty pathetic sight.

Suddenly the phone rang.

"Are you guys mad at me?" Sharon said on the other line.

"No," I said, the chaperone.

"We're on our way back, the place was really far. Do you still want beer?"

"Uh, YES."

Another hour of watching the boobies and asses on TV, Sharon finally arrived with our beers. With the night progressing without us, we just left the beers in the fridge and headed out. The one good thing about Sharon dating a taxi driver was that suddenly the rest of us had a free lift to the Sambadrome. Marcelo dropped us boys off near where the scalpers were (picture below) and left with Sharon to continue their date, lost in translation.

LONELY PLANET REALLY GOT IT RIGHT when they suggested not to buy tickets from a tour agency and to just show up after midnight to get some from a scalper -- the show goes on til sunrise anyway. Lara's friends paid up to $200 for their tickets from an agency, while us four guys could just shop around for whatever seats we wanted. If one scalper didn't have what we wanted at the price we wanted, they'd go ask around until we got our request. We eventually got four tickets for Sector 6, right by the stage for about $33 each.

Sector 6 however, was on the other side of the parade route, and it took a while to figure out how to get to the other side. It was fun anyway, watching the party revelers around the Sambadrome, and the kids with party spray foam attacking some guy who was taking a nap on the grass. When the guy woke up, face covered in foam, he didn't know what was going on. A little kid ran up to him and threw even more foam in his face.

Eventually we found our sector and stood at the front with the hundreds of others cheering on their favorite team. For the past twenty years, Carnaval in Rio is actually a competition of the top fourteen samba schools, or teams, who create the theme, costumes, choreography and floats to express an particular idea each year as they parade down six blocks to the Sambadrome arch at the end. For example, the Grande Rio school's theme for 2004 centered around safe sex -- a lot of their choreography involved a lot of homosexual, heterosexual and bisexual making out. Each of their floats had some sort of giant inflated condom on it -- some even had huge statues of Adam and Eve having sex on it and were actually censored by officials. Grande Rio made the best of the situation, and covered the sex acts with blankets and a big "CENSORADO" banner on it.

I was really impressed with Unidos da Tijuca's finale float which actually included two figure eight go-cart tracks on it with guys driving around as people danced around them. But the star of this first night of Carnavale was Mangueira, the school I went to see practice just the weekend before. Being from the slums outside of Rio, many people in the stands were cheering on, waving their pink and green Mangueira flags. I didn't know the exact Portuguese words to their song to sing along to, but I faked it with mouth movements. We all enjoyed the whole thing anyway as we danced and tried to sing along with the locals and tourists around us.

The sun was starting to come up around six in the morning, and there was still another school to perform for their 90 minute performance. Tired of partying in the stands, we just left at dawn, knowing we'd be back in the Sambadrome the next day anyway.

When we managed to get back to the apartment after confusing a taxi driver without directions, Sharon was there waiting. She had only just gotten back from her date with Marcelo, the last hour of which was spent outside the apartment. Marcelo wanted a real kiss goodnight, but Sharon would only give him a peck on the cheek. He waited around for it, but she refused and stood out there hoping that her team of chaperones would scare him off -- meanwhile, we were too busy partying at Carnaval. She eventually got rid of Marcelo and waited up for us.

I was dead tired when I got back and just slept in the spare room on the floor, in the darkness, away from the sunrise coming from the windows of the other rooms. I was sleeping for a good half hour when Sharon yelled at me in shock when she opened the door.

"OH MY GOD!"

"What? What?" I said as a chill went throughout my body from the shock of the rude awakening.

"You can't sleep on the floor!"

"Uh, I just was sleeping on the floor."

"I won't have it. You shouldn't sleep on the floor."

"It's no big deal. I'm tired."

She grabbed my arms and led me to her full-sized bed where I managed to get back to sleep while she stayed up talking in the other room.

Still a little cranky, I decided that I would never be a chaperone again.

Enter The Sambadrome

DAY 127: Carnaval, like New Orleans' Mardi Gras and the U.K.'s Pancake Day, is the celebration just before Ash Wednesday and the Christian season of Lent. During Lent you are supposed to give up your vices and pleasantries and suffer for forty days in preparation of Easter, and so, Carnaval was designed as a way to party your ass off before having to give it all up. In Rio, partying is done in the form of samba, where you party your ass off by shaking it as fast as you can.

Samba parades in Rio de Janiero began in 1932 and over the decades, evolved into a huge spectacle that attracted people from around the world. By the early 1980s, there were so many people coming down to Rio for the festival and so, in 1984, a huge venue known as the Sambadrome was created in order to contain the masses. With the 20th anniversary of the Sambadrome, to be in the Carnaval parade was only the more special; as touristy as it was, I couldn't wait to be down there in costume, marching the parade route. However, experiencing the touristy Sambadrome that night would have to come after seeing another tourist attraction in the day.

I WOKE UP AROUND 9:30 IN THE SANTA TERESA APARTMENT when the sun worked its way above the houses and through the blinds, lighting up the room enough that I couldn't sleep anymore. I opened my eyes and saw that Sharon was at my left, just waking up as well. Lying in bed, we ended up talking for an hour about independent travel and independent life until our laughter woke up the others.

Everyone eventually woke up and got ready for a new day. The sky looked pretty clear so we figured it was a good day to check out Cristo Redentor, the famous statue of Jesus Christ in Corcovado, high above the city -- the tourist attraction of Rio if you had to single one out. Rather than call a taxi as usual, we decided to take advantage of the nice weather and walk down the hilly neighborhood of Santa Teresa. A huge stairwell took us down to the base, where we split up into two groups in two taxis: Mark and Paul in one and Terence, Sharon and me in the other.

"We'll just meet at the top," Mark said before our taxi took off.

Our cab driver was a nice Uruguayan man who was easy to get along with since he knew Spanish. He pointed out the clouds hovering around the Christ statue and suggested that maybe it wasn't a clear enough day to see it. We had no choice but to go anyway since that was the meeting place, and none of us had mobile phones to call or text my brother's.

The taxi driver took us to the base of the mountain, where tourists can choose one of two options to go to the top: the train that brings you straight to the top, or a taxi that takes the winding road, stopping at overlooks along the way. As soon as we stepped out of our taxi, we were approached by a nice man named Ronaldo who offered us his taxi service. He showed us a map of his route: it included going to another mirador that overlooked the Pão de Açucar in addition to seeing the Christ figure for just five reais more. We told him we were waiting for two more friends, but after waiting close to an hour with no word from Paul or Mark, Ronaldo suggested that perhaps they went straight up with their street taxi.

We hopped in a minivan with a family of five, and Ronaldo took us all up the hill Corcovado, first to the lookout point near the heliport. The clouds were really coming in, obstructing the view of anything -- looking out towards the famous Pão de Açucar rock formation, all we could see was grey. Terence posed for a photo to tell me how it made him feel.

On the bright side, this lookout point gave us taxi-travellers something that I don't think the train-travellers got: walking stick insects and, more cuddily, lemurs. They sort of made up for the crappy view, but not really.

Back in the van, we drove up to Jesus Christ himself, where Mark and Paul were in fact waiting, for an hour and a half by the time we got there -- their street taxi did take them all the way up. The facility around the statue was fairly touristy, with multiple concessions stands and souvenir stores. The weather was so cloudy that even two flights of stairs down from the base of the statue, Jesus was nowhere to be found. I sufficed the disappearance of Jesus by posing as him myself. I would have thought it was the thing everyone did, but I was the only one.

At the base of the statue, the Christ figure was a little bit more distinguishable, only by a tad, but it didn't stop the hordes of tourists from taking photos of it anyway. The view of the city from high above was essentially non-existent; the map that displayed all the points of interest in town was useless.

Ronaldo the Cariocan taxi driver extended his service to Mark and Paul since the family we had ascended up with had left already. Ronaldo blasted his Brazilian tunes for us to bop our heads to as we made our way back down Corcovado. He was a popular guy, waving at all the people along the way -- one of them gave us some jackfruit to eat in the car. On the way down, we stopped at the other lookout point for my brother and Paul. Although it started pouring rain, the cloud coverage over the Pão de Açucar had lightened, giving us a better shot for a photo.

The minivan took the five of us back to Copacabana. I split up with the others to go my apartment to take a nap for the long night ahead in the Carnaval parade.

LARA CAME HOME AFTER HANGING OUT with her friends in the daytime around 6:30. We sat around watching TV, wondering when we were supposed to meet at the tour agency for our transport to the Sambadrome -- they had neglected to tell us. I took a walk over to find out and Carlos told me "7:40." I rushed back home to tell my samba schoolmate.

"Seven forty," I announced right away.

Lara looked at her watch. "We have less than an hour then!"

"We have forty minutes until we meet to be in the Carnaval."

Lara smiled and let it sink in. "AAAAAH!" she screamed in excitement before heading into the shower. I head out for a bit to do a quick email check and get my watch band replaced.

Forty minutes later, we were both out the door with our "Carlitos Carnaval" muscle shirts Carlos asked us to wear to represent his company. We waited outside his building with others -- most were only going to the Sambadrome as spectators and admired us for actually being in the parade. The group was big enough that multiple transports had to be taken. Lara and I ended up in a minibus with an Argentine, a Japanese, and a big group of guys from New Jersey, U.S.A. One of them met a girl from Albany and asked her to come along -- it was an ordeal to pick her up because the guy couldn't remember what hotel she was staying in exactly.

A DRIZZLE CAME DOWN FROM THE SKY as we approached the Sambadrome. Traffic built up en route to the venue as spot lights shone up at the sky (picture above), and it looked like we were headed for the Super Bowl -- a Super Bowl of Samba, that is. After finding a place to stand the car, we were led by one of the tour agency guys that we really didn't know to Sector 13, right at the end of the parade route near the Sambadrome arch. We arrived just in time for the beginning of the first school's performance and cheered them on and dance amongst the crowd of people that only got more packed as the night wore on. The rain really started coming down, but it was all good with the rounds of beers.

The people at Angramar Turismo neglected to inform us of the place and time Lara and I were to meet to change into our costumes. During the second school's performance, I kept a watch outside the Sambadrome for anyone that looked familiar, but no avail. After the second school -- we were to be fifth -- Lara and I left the stands to go and try and find someone, anyone who could help us out.

With the rain turned to drizzle, we wandered around the areas surrounding the Sambadrome, using broken Portuguese to ask where the fantasies were, or where to line up to be in the Carnival. We never really seemed to get consistant answers and were just really wandering around aimlessly. The third school was coming to a close and we still had no idea were to go. Lara was on the verge of crying.

I stopped to ask a police officer where to go, and while he was trying to explain his answer about walking all the way to the far end of the Sambadrome, Lara spotted a familiar shirt: the "Carlitos Carnaval" shirt, and in it was Carlos himself. He was all smiles as usual and led us to where we needed to go.

He passed us off to Luis who led us on the otherside of the Sambadrome to an staging area -- in a place far enough that there was no way we would have found it on our own. Most people were putting on their costumes before queuing for the parade route. While waiting for our costumes to arrive by taxi, we befriended a bathroom attendant who absolutely loved the fact that we actually knew most of the lyrics for the theme song of our school, Beija-Flor.

Eventually our tribal warrior costumes came and we suited up in our shin guards, wrist bands, torso harnesses, headdresses -- and for me, a pair of really tight red Speedos -- and followed the rest of the gladiators of samba to the entrance of the Sambadrome. We looked around for others with the same orange and red costumes as ours amongst the dozen others, each of which represented a different aspect of Beija-Flor's 2004 theme, the magic of the Amazon.

Lara and I were at the front line of our block with about a hundred others in the same tribal warrior garb behind us. A Beija-FLor conductor kept everyone in line and arranged people so everything looked perfect from above. He told me that I should only concentrate on dancing and not take pictures with the camera dangling from my neck, so I just hid it to take some when he wasn't looking.

Sooner than I thought, the group ahead of us started their procession and we followed right behind them towards the colliseum of samba. The drizzle from the sky had turned into a pouring rain, and it only made the mission into the Sambadrome only the more dramatic.

"It's showtime," I said.

Once in the Sambadrome, I heard the same theme song (5.5 MB MP3 file) Lara and I had tried to learn by playing it over and over the week before. Soon we were marching along the same parade route I had seen only as a spectator before, for the tens of thousands to cheer on. With all my energy, I sang along while moving my legs to the beat, staff in hand, raining pouring down my face.

Being at the front lines, the Beija-Flor conductor continued to, very strictly, kept everyone in line like a drill sargeant -- he really reminded me that we were in a competition and that I should give it my all. We eventually made it to center stage after marching for about 45 minutes, right by the Sambadrome arch for the final leg. We continued to sing and dance our hearts out until we exited stage left of the arch. There was still another half an hour before our last float made its way to the end, so we continued the festivities with the others by the stage. Eventually the last float and the last group of drummers came on by, bringing our performance to a close.

When the music stopped, the only thing we could hear was the applause and cheers from the tens of thousands of people cheering from the stands. Despite the fact that the rain was still pouring down, it was a really momentous event.

"There's no way I'm doing this again on Saturday," Lara said, wanting to leave the Sambadrome on a high note. (The top six teams would close the ceremony the following Saturday.) I agreed.

WITH THE RAIN STILL POURING, we wandered around looking for Luis, who was to pick us up outside. I left my headdress with Lara at a street corner and eventually found Luis, who led us to the pick-up point for our transport back to Copacabana. However, because of some confusion or something, the taxi never came, leaving us standing in the pouring rain for 45 minutes. After all that waiting, it sort of killed the buzz and I almost forgot where I had been just hours before.

The taxi never came, so we just hopped in a taxi, leaving the costumes with Luis to pick up later. As we entered our apartment, Lara said, "You think Touched By An Angel is on?"

"Oh, that would only make the night even better."

The show we tried to watch religously to poke fun of -- no pun intended -- wasn't on, so instead -- after the once-in-a-lifetime event -- we just had some ramen noodles.

Ah, ramen noodles after a night of boozing and partying in the Rio Carnaval -- life couldn't get any better.

Fun With Foam

DAY 128: "Fat Tuesday" -- known by the French as "mardi gras" -- is the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday and the Christian season of Lent where you are to chill out with all your comforts in preparation of Easter. Therefore, Fat Tuesday is the one last chance to party before the forty days and forty nights of "suffering," so you'd better make it good. Little did I know on Fat Tuesday morning that in Rio de Janiero, "Fat Tuesday" should actually be called "Foam Tuesday."

CALL ME A TECHNOPHILE, but I can't conceive of life without the internet and mobile phones. Well, that's not completely true; to get away from it for a while is refreshing, but not when you're trying to contact your brother on the other side of town. I knew his apartment had a phone, but I didn't have one in mine, nor a number to call him anyway. Mark did however have a mobile phone that accept text messages, so I woke up early -- way too early after the night of parading in the Sambadrome -- to send him a message from the internet cafe two blocks down. He eventually got it and we planned to meet at two in the afternoon at our usual beachfront restaurant, La Maison.

Meanwhile, Lara had also waken up at an ungodly time in the morning, after only about three and a half hours of sleep. On the bright side, she was up just in time for our daily viewing of morning cheese, Gilmore Girls and her favorite, Touched By An Angel. After chuckling at the glowing Della Reese, Lara joined me to meet the crew from Santa Teresa. We had lunch together -- for Sharon, it was the last time. With her duffel bag in hand, she left after eating for the airport. A rookie backpacker on a first big trip, she was off to Cairo to explore Egypt and Turkey for a couple of months.

LARA WENT HER OWN WAY AS WELL, leaving it to just the four boys to cause a ruckus on the streets of Rio.

"Where do we go?" Terence asked me.

"We'll just walk and run into something," I answered. In a city of seemingly spontaneous samba street parades, we were bound to encounter one.

The sky was grey, but everyone in town was out and about on the closed side of the two-partition Avenida Atlantica along the beach -- even the dogs were dress up festively. In less than five minutes, we did run into a samba street parade en route to Ipanema -- in fact, there was one about every four blocks or so. Although each had its own unique group and song melodies, one common thread betwen all the samba parades was foam.

By foam I don't mean the saliva coming out of a rabid dog's mouth, I'm talking about party foam that sprays out of a can like shaving cream. I wasn't sure exactly what the party foam was made out of -- I'd rather not know -- but I do know that it was a blast having a can of it. People sprayed foam into the air to have it rain down on others, whether they liked it or not. Some put loads on their heads to make puffy white hairdos. Street kids that would normally beg for food or money begged for a handful of foam instead -- I was happy to furnish some.

Just like the kids playing with foam amongst themselves, Terence, Paul, Mark and I walked down to Ipanema, foam fighting, spraying foam on each other in different ways (other picture above). Walking through the quiet commercial block in between Copacabana and Ipanema, all we got was stares and weird looks from passers-by.

AFTER CHILLING OUT AND POSING FOR PHOTOS AT THE ARPOADOR, the small, rocky peninsula that jutted out into the Atlantic at the end of Ipanema beach, we checked out the scene along the beachfront. Fat Tuesday festivities continued all along the road as afternoon turned into evening and evening into night. Street vendors sold souvenirs and other various chotskies. Paul asked for a lighter from one of them and when asked for which color in Portuguese, he answered in the only Portuguese he knew: "Murtinho Norbe" -- the name of the street their apartment was on.

Food and drink vendors profitted more than the souvenir vendors, selling hot dogs, churros, grilled cheese skewers and of course, alcohol, to the thousands of people in the streets. Everywhere we turned, we heard at least one vendor selling Brazil's Skol beer by yelling "Skol, Skol, Skol!" The more we drank it, the more we loudly immediated the vendors like fools.

Beer wasn't the only drink being consumed; we also had big bottles of sangria and cocktails with Red Bull and Johnnie Walker Red. Unknowingly for some, the combination didn't bode well in the stomach; for others (namely me and Paul), it just made them pee on the beach.

The 2004 Camisinha parade came around, a predominantly gay parade that promoted safe sex. Drag queens and gay men dressed in sailor hats marched through a packed crowd of parade-goers. We followed the parade spraying foam in the air, until some thief who was eyeing us made a grab for Paul's necklace. Fortunately, it was just broken, not stolen.

We head back the other way and saw that car traffic started coming through one of the open lanes -- each vehicle had no escape from the revelers and their cans of spray foam. As each one came by, we'd spray the windshield all up -- despite the fact that there was no rain, wipers were a must.

AFTER BEFRIENDING ONE OF THE BEACH HIPPIES selling homemade jewelry and other paraphernalia, we walked back to Copacabana to find another party. It wasn't hard at all and in two seconds we were right near one where people were dancing to the infectious beat of a live drum and brass band.

"We need to get in there," Paul suggested. The four of us entered the crowd of happy dancing people and shook our booties as the Cariocas did.

BY THIS POINT IN THE NIGHT, all the Skol, sangria and Johnnie Walker transformed my brother from marketing manager on vacation to samba dancing machine. He went right up to the woman dressed as the queen of the small parade and shook his pelvis faster than Elvis ever could. A fairly large old woman asked him to dance and he bumped and grinded away with her for a bit. Mark became such a spectacle with his moves that other tourists assumed he was a part of the act. Two girls from Sacramento went over to take a photo with him. We revealed to the California Girls that we weren't Brazilian but from New York; they danced the night with us anyway. A happy Carioca man joined in our little circle and had no escape from the spraying of the foam either. When the band finished, a DJ continued the music on big speakers. A conga line went around a couple of times, the prime target for a little spray foam attack. My can of foam had already run out, so I asked some kids for some of theirs. They returned the favor and I did my dirty work -- but not without getting foam all over myself as well.

HUNGRY AND FOAMLESS, we left the California Girls for a bit to grab some food at the restaurant known for prostitute pickups. Despite that fact, it was a fairly classy-looking joint with classy food. I ordered two of the duck dishes, one for me and one for Mark who was already on his way to the bathroom to, as Lara calls it, "be sick." I went to check on him and he was doing fine -- as fine as any guy leaning over the edge of a toilet bowl gagging. Eventually he came back to the table.

"Cancel my order."

At the table next to us was an old man who came in with two obvious-looking hookers. By the time his meal was over, there were five working girls there, hoping to get a little piece of the action -- and by action I mean the kind that folds and buys you candy. The sextet entertained me, Terence and Paul as we ate our food. Mark just had his head down on the table until he got up to go to the bathroom again. I went to tend to him -- the way he or Terence had done for me many times in New York -- and found out he was fine; he just needed some rest.

With the garbage bin a little sloppier than when Mark entered the bathroom, the two of us left for the apartment in Copacabana. Although walkable, we took a taxi. Mark passed out on the sofa.

Lara was still out, so I left her a note to excuse my brother's state -- also so she wouldn't mistake him for me -- and went out to meet Terence and Paul. They had already walked bck toward my apartment with a doggie bag of food, so we went up to put it in the fridge. I was all set to go out again, but then Terence passed out, leaving Paul and myself to just lounge around the living room to watch television and sing the theme song of The O.C.

Soon Lara came home from hanging out with her Guernsey crew and joined Paul and I in marveling at the state of Mark and Terence. Eventually I got the two guys up and we hopped in a cab to their apartment in the quieter residential neighborhood of Santa Teresa, away from the samba, the booze, and above all, the spray party foam.

And The Winner Is...

DAY 129: With Carnaval officially over, it was time to stop being a non-stop party monster and just be a tourist again. For Terence's, Paul's and Mark's last day in Rio de Janiero, that's just what we did.

We cleaned up the Santa Teresa apartment and then called a taxi to bring us to the owner's parents house to drop off the keys. The taxi brought us to Copacabana where my three visitors droped off their bags to pick up later before heading to the airport that night. We made an ATM stop and then a lunch break at Habib's, the middle eastern fast food restaurant with locations all over Rio. We stopped at Angramar Turismo to pick up Lara's and my costumes from Carlos -- he was his usually cheery self, just really sore from partying the night before.

With all the chores done, we took a taxi to Rio's other big tourist attraction after the Cristo Redentor, the Pão de Açucar, or "Sugar Loaf," the massive two-mound rock formation linked together by cable cars. The sky was overcast, but there weren't any low clouds -- the view was decent, just not great. One cable car took us to the first mound, with its views of the Christ statue high above Corcovado, and another (picture above) took us to the taller mound, with its spectacular views of the city and the Atlantic horizon. We hung out a while for photos and to just chill out, reciting lines from Enter The Dragon near an Australian guy traveling with what we assumed was a hooker.

Back down the Sugar Loaf, we walked passed the Praça Tiburcio and back to one of the shopping malls in Botofogo, so Mark could use the bathroom. In the food court, everyone was fixated on a nearby television. On the screen, it was the Carnaval judging ceremony, live from the Sambadrome. The four of us became fixated too when the announcer read each judge's score individually for each of the fourteen competing samba schools, each score preceded by a dramatic pause. With a scale of 1-10, the scores were posted on the screen with graphics in a grid. There were many 9.6's, 9.8's and 9.9's -- some 9.1's and 9.4's too -- but when the announcer read a score for my samba school Beija-Flor, he'd pause dramatically before forcefully saying "Dez!" ("Ten!") Other teams got tens as well, but not with the consistency of Beija-Flor.

By the seventh judge, Beija-Flor soared to the top with a perfect score -- it was up to the point where people watching in the mall food court just waved their hand in disgust with a "Bah..." like they were bored of Beija-Flor's streak. The streak ended when one judge -- Tito Canha -- gave a 9.9. I felt like raising my fists in the air and yelling, "Damn you, Tito Canhaaaaa!!!!"

AT THE TIME, I DIDN'T KNOW HOW MANY JUDGES there were, so rather than sit and watch TV in a mall food court, we moved onto the next mall Rio Sul, the much bigger and better one, to shop for a duffel bag to fit my Beija-Flor costume into. The food court wasn't much different; dozens of shoppers stopped their sprees and just fixated on the big flat screen. Points continued to be awarded. Beija-Flor was getting even more tens -- after dramatic pauses of course -- and I really started to get excited. The mood was spoiled when another judge gave a 9.9, allowing other teams like the favored Manguiera, to catch up.

In the end, Beija-Flor took first place after all the points were awarded from forty judges. Out of a possible 400 points, my samba school won the competition with 388.7 points. Tied for second with 387.9 points a piece was Manguiera, the team I saw practice the weekend before Carnaval, and Unidos da Tijuca, the team with go-cart tracks on their final float. With Beija-Flor as the champs, that officially made Lara and I "Winners of the 2004 Rio de Janiero Carnaval." Now how's that for a line on the resumé?

The drawback to being in the Carnaval parade -- 2004 champion or not -- was shipping the costume home. Fortunately, my brother was on his way back to New York and I could pass it to him. I bought a couple of duffel bags at Lojas Americanas, Brazil's version of Target, and my costume fit inside just one of the bags tightly, minus the big torso harness piece that we just put in a big plastic garbage bag. I hoped the airline baggage guys would play nice with it.

I had a farewell dinner and round of drinks with Terence, Paul and Mark at the usual La Maison -- Mark and I shared a delicious Carioca seafood stew -- and then we picked up their bags at my apartment. The trio hopped in a cab and head off to the airport, and thus ended their guest appearances on "The Trinidad Show."

Lara came home after a night out with her Guernsey friends. She hadn't heard the news, so I excitely broke it to her: she too was one of the "Winners of the 2004 Rio de Janiero Carnaval."

Seriously, does that not look good on a resumé or what?

The Nerd of Copacabana

DAY 130: By the time I woke up in the morning in my Copacabana apartment, Terence, Mark and Paul had already arrived at JFK International in New York City. With my company gone, it was time to keep a promise I'd made to myself and my audience: to stay in all day and catch up on Blog duties.

It couldn't have been any better of a day to juts be a nerd on a laptop all day (picture above); outside it was pouring rain. The beach was empty and the clouds obstructed any of the views from the mountains. When Lara spent the last day with her friends from home, they pretty much just stayed indoors at shopping malls.

I spent a good nine hours straight sorting through photos, writing rough drafts and polishing them up. By around 6:30 I had only written up three entries -- four if you count Day 126 as two -- and my brain was totally fried. I went out to take a break by walking out in the rain -- only to end up at another computer to upload my homework at an internet cafe (or as pronounced in Portuguese, interneish cafe). However, there was one particular highlight of my one time out of the house: the news that Beija-Flor was the 2004 Rio de Janiero Carnaval winner was on the front page of every newspaper at every newsstand.

WOULDN'T YOU KNOW THAT THE ONE TIME I decided to go out was during the time that my roommate Lara came home to get me to come out drinking with her mates. I found this out around 1:30 in the morning when Lara came home drunker than I had ever seen her before -- this is probably because I was sober this time. In her inebriated stupor, she managed to make some ramen noodles and sat on the couch with me to, with really slurred speech, tell me about her day. She passed out in bed, leaving me to continue my work while watching The Food of The Gods, a so-cheesy-its-hilarious B-horror film about killer wasps and giant killer rats on the Retro channel.

A bad sci-fi movie after an entire day in front of a computer, living with someone who obviously had a much better night than I did. Could I have been any more of a nerd?