Am I Corn or Kale?

We just got back from the Iguazu Falls, and there isn’t all that much to say about them other than, well, wow. Nevertheless, we’ll try to elaborate.

Last Thursday we flew to Foz do Iguacu through Gol, Brazil’s premier budget airline. As far as we can tell, their service is efficient and their landings are berserk: according to my sister’s boyfriend, they use a cheaper variety of brakes that cool off faster than hydraulic ones, allowing their aircrafts to land, drop people off, and take off within 20 minutes or so. The flipside is that the planes hit the ground incredibly hard and only slow down because the turbines/engines are reversed, which leads me to believe that an emergency landing in case of an engine issue would be all but a lost cause.

On Friday we arranged to have a guide, Heberth, help us tour the Argentina side of the falls. While we’d like to avoid guided tours as much as possible during this trip, we were convinced it would be much faster and easier to go through border/customs procedures and navigate the huge national park if we had someone experienced around (we were right); we also avoided the hassle of multiple bus rides and worrying about catching the last bus back before we got stuck in Argentina for the night! Our small group included the two of us plus my sister, Carol, along with 4 gringos: 2 Canadians from Quebec (Mario and Francois), a Dutchman (Nils), and Olivier from France.

They were all nice, and the tour was a success. It makes sense that the Iguazu Falls are on the shortlist for the 7 Wonders of the Natural World: the place really has a magical feel to it. I have never seen as many butterflies OR bigger spiders before (we’ll spare you of the pictures). Over the course of the day we also saw hordes of playful koatis (a cute relative of racoons), tropical birds, lizards large and small, one lone scared monkey, a chubby little red deer, and a toucan. We started by taking the 2-mile train ride to the long bridge over toward the Devil’s Throat (the falls’ largest continuous curtain of water) at the end of which we got soaked and witnessed my sister getting stung by a bee for her first time. She had no idea if she was allergic or not, but given she did not stop breathing or break into hives within a few minutes, we figured she would be fine.

In the afternoon we walked around a few more trails before embarking on the actually exciting part of our tour: taking a boat ride upriver into the falls! As you may imagine, this kind of adventure involves getting completely soaked, and picture-taking was not an option (of course, throughout the boat ride one of the guides is filming the whole thing, just in case you want to drop 60 bucks on the DVD). Even more so than we expected, the experience was breathtaking, overwhelming, awestrucking… and very, very wet. It certainly created a vapid feeling of “oh sh#t, are we really going toward that waterfall?” and then seconds later you couldn’t see a thing. It’s totally worth it, and we would definitely recommend it to anyone who makes it all the way to Iguazu (except for babies, older folk, or anyone who’s afraid of water). The picture below is not the greatest, but should give you the idea of what you’d be getting yourself into:

See, that’s the “oh sh#t” part.

Our Argentina tour lasted close to 10 hours, so we were wasted by the time we got back to the hotel. That night we discovered an awesome “per kilo/all-you-can-eat” restaurant that we ended up returning to twice more before the end of the trip.

The next day we went over to check out the Brazilian side of the falls. While in Argentina one can get awfully close to the cataracts, Brazil offers a shorter trail with an incredible panoramic view.

As in the previous day, we got lucky with the weather and the rainbows (it did get uncomfortably hot in the afternoon, but we’re trying our best not to complain so as to not offend our Northern Michigan friends). In the afternoon  we headed over to the Parque das Aves (Bird Park), which predictably is a variation of a zoo focused mostly on birds. While every zoo has a lameness aspect to it, this one did have a neat feature: giant caged areas that you could walk into to hang around with your new bird-o-buddies. The level of coexistence was quite impressive, probably because these birds were either bred in captivity or “rescued” (whether that’s true of an euphemism, who knows) at a very early age. A toucan developed great interest and almost an appetite for my toes, but luckily through all of these interactive cages no one was hurt or defecated upon.

On Sunday morning we toured Itaipu, a bi-national hydroelectric dam/powerplant co-owned by Brazil and Paraguay. It was kind of eery to visit such an atrocity towards nature the day after seeing such genuine beauty: Itaipu is the world’s largest operational hydroelectric plant (there is a dispute with one in China; wiki it if curious). The dam is about 5 miles long and the generators produce virtually all of Paraguay’s energy and more than 20% of Brazil’s share. As an engineering feat it is truly brilliant, but it did leave me with the same gut feeling as a similarly artificial, human-built, godforsaken stretch of Indiana landscape we once passed through on the way to a Radiohead concert (which ironically must be what Thom Yorke experiences every day he wakes up, based on the band’s lyrical content).

We had an easier time posting videos on Facebook than on this blog, so below are a couple of links:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=364083751208

 http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=363619101208

Today is the final day of the Carnaval holiday and for us that means that the city will get busy again as all the Paulistas return from their beach vacations. Although Carnaval is one of the things Brazil is recognized for internationally some Brazilians all but ignore the festivities. Marcelo had never attended a Carnaval performance so we decided to take advantage of our timing here and see what all the fuss was about. Saturday night (the second night of 3 parade-like performances) we ventured to the far out stadium (used almost exclusively for Carnaval) to witness the madness. Quite honestly I was expecting to see more nearly naked people, but I guess Sao Paulo Carnaval is somewhat tame compared to other cities (and/or the media focuses on the bare breasted beauties that are among the minority of performers–imagine that). Anyway, the performances started around 10pm and by the time we left at 4:30 am, 2/7 of the schools had yet to perform! In this competition each school had between 3,000-4,000 participants who paraded down the long corridor of the stadium for about 1 hour. Some schools had as many as 28 different sections (each with different costumes and routines) and 5 massive floats. The schools pick a theme to which they compose a Samba that is played/sung over and over during the entire hour. Costumes are elaborately gaudy and look best from a distance. We had the (mis)fourtune of being caught in the chaotic aftermath of one performance as we were making our way to the spot where Marcelo’s mom was picking us up. We bobbed through the sea of neon-colored synthetic fabrics trying to avoid getting our eyes gouged out by some sharp plastic spines.  Luckily, we were not in an altered state (except that of sleep deprivation) as this experience would have been terrifying! Seeing the performers up close I was suprised by the average nature of many of the people.  For some reason I imagined that only young, beautiful, and fit people were allowed to perform–maybe next time we will participate 🙂  That’s not to say there weren’t celebrity performers, the most remarkable of which was the soccer player Ronaldo, World Cup’s all-time leading scorer (15 goals in 3 different tournaments). At the tender age of 33, he’s currently overweight and playing (occasionally) for the loathsome Corinthians, one of the city’s main teams–they have the greatest following in the state and 2nd-largest in the country. Since their organized torcida has its own Samba School… there he was.

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On Sunday, after sleeping until noon, we drove to Centro to visit the big Municipal Market. The concept of large, indoor city markets is somewhat common (Toronto has a neat one), but Sao Paulo’s is distinguished for having restaurants that serve the classic paulista lunch: pao com mortadella, a hot bologna sandwich on the omnipresent french roll. The bologna is sliced impossibly thin and is used in obscene amounts: I used to make cold bologna sandwiches at home in Brazil with 2 to 3 slices, and my sandwich must have had about 20! There is, of course, evidence:

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Yesterday we drove to Campinas, a city about an hour and a half northwest of Sao Paulo, to have the famous feijoada. Some of Marcelo’s family friends invited us to join them for this delicious meal that took them about seven or eight hours to prepare. By the time we arrived most of the cooking had been done so unfortunately we did not get to observe the whole process.  While we waited for the bean/pork concoction to stew, we were pressured into drinking a couple caipirinhas (a very strong alcoholic drink made with fruit pulp (we had one with lime and one with passion fruit), sugar, and a lot of alcohol (in this case vodka).  Needless to say, by the time the food was ready to eat we were a little tipsy and very hungry. In addition to the bean/pork dish feijoada includes rice, farofa (a grainy manioc flour), greens (maybe chard) cooked with bacon chunks/grease, and pieces of orange to cut the fat content! Although I am not a big fan of pork, this was some of the best tasting food I’ve had here. After two plates full we moved on to dessert: passion fruit mousse and key lime pie (both home-made of course). At that point it was nearing 5pm and most of the people there (I think there were between 15-20) crashed on the living room floor. We waddeled out to the car to head for home and I was sleeping within ten minutes… even though I had just had coffee!

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More Carnaval pictures!

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