Blessed and Beautiful (and us)

Looking bad-ass in the Baby RS

Taking the buggies through town

This is how the Lonely Planet travel guide describes Buzios: “…a summer playground for the blessed and the beautiful…where caramel-hued hard-bodies beach-hop via water taxis from one sugary stretch of sand to another…”.  We all got a good giggle out of this, until the smiles were wiped off our faces and replaced by our jaws dropping to the sugary sand.  Before today, we thought we had seen our share of tanned skin.  We thought we knew what Brazilian beach culture was all about. 

To be completely honest, it happened three days ago, with the official beginning of Brazil high season on December 27^th.  Overnight, the blessed and beautiful caramel-hued hard-bodies descended on Buzios by the thousands.  The beach went from calm and relaxing to a 24-hour bass-pumping club party, where clothing is optional… scratch that… clothing is prohibited. In fact, if you put all the clothing of all the people in Buzios in one pile, it probably wouldn’t even be a full load of laundry.  On the other hand, if you put all the gold chains with giant crosses in a pile, it just might eclipse Mount Kilimanjaro.  No joke.  Throw on cell phones, flip flops and aviator sunglasses and it would rival Mount Everest.

And then there’s us.  My family is still here, and they are having a hard time blending in.  Maybe it is their vanilla-hued pasty winter soft-bodies.  Or by this point, their sunburnt cherry-hued soft-bodies.  Even my bronzed skin is several shades lighter than the lightest Brazilian.  But somehow, somewhere between all the man-speedos and dental-floss thongs, we are managing to have a rip-roaring fun, wholesome family vacation.  Surfing, swimming, lazing on the beach, tearing around town in crappy buggies, and shopping.  The perfect Christmas vacation!

Hanging out with Brigitte Bardot... she gets her own statue because she made Buzios famous

Don't we look cool?!!

Surfer Gully and his beach babe Elise

You know you're in a beach town when the art is made of sand....

And more art... sandals in the setting sun

The quintessential Brazilian.. speedo, chain, cell phone tucked in speedo, and white flops

Thong re-adjustment

Enjoying a day at the beach

Make note of the speedos and white board shorts, and chains with crosses

Some nice tushies and washboard stomachs :)


And a little peek at what you're missing here at the beach:

City of God

 

Merry Christmas from Brazil!!! The Christmas spirit is definitely a bit toned down here, but in an effort to mitigate homesickness I’ve managed to draw some parallels between our Christmas in Brazil and the typical Christmas back in Canada: instead of -36°C with the windchill we have +36°C with the humidex; instead of candy canes dangling from coniferous trees we have coconuts dangling from palm trees; instead of Christmas carols we have samba music; instead of half a meter of snow we have half-meter-overhead waves; instead of rum and eggnog we have, well, just straight rum. Thankfully, Elise’s family made the trek down to Brazil to spend Christmas with us in the town of Buzios, giving us at least SOME sense of normalcy this Christmas.

About a week ago now, after spending a couple of days in the (supposed) outdoor adventure getaway for Rio de Janeiro’s elite (all there was to do there was jump off a waterfall), we decided to give The Big City itself a try. Rio: the undisputed beach capital of the world and the place with the most awe-inspiring cityscape in the world. Sounds romantic, right? Question: anyone out there seen the movie City of God? Anyone familiar with Rio De Janeiro’s favelas? If not, suffice it to say that the favelas (of which there are 1000 in Rio alone) are some of the seediest of underbellies, the slummiest of slums and the ghetto-est of ghettos in the world. Thus, driving in Rio (btw we rented a car to drive from Sao Paulo to Rio) presented a whole new set of problems for the reigning International Driving Champion, aka me. Now, I’ve navigated the streets of some pretty hectic metropolises – recall our jaunt through Eastern Europe last summer where I conquered the likes of Athens and Istanbul – but the urban chaos of Rio may have been my greatest test behind the wheel to date. Dodging traffic and pedestrians on cratered cobblestone streets with no lanes or traffic signals is challenging enough, but the stakes are raised when one wrong turn can bring you unwittingly into a favela. We knew that we in such a situation when I noticed all the parked cars on the street were suddenly burnt-out and sitting on blocks. I slammed on the brakes and did an Austin Powers-like three-point turn on the one way street and gunned it hell outta there. Some favela-dwellers were just staring at us in awe (luckily without weapons drawn). After an hour and a half of tense moment after tense moment (and almost rolling backwards down some of the super steep hills paved with slick cobblestones) we managed to find our place, us and the car all in one piece.

-G

 

 

 

WAY-overdressed Lochnessy on Ipanema Beach

This monkey loves bananas even more than I do!!

JC

Co-pa...Co-pa-ca-ba-na (singing)

The Johnson clan + some Gulletsons

Taking the Plunge

A couple videos to divert your attention from the fact that we haven't posted a blog lately....

-E

Vanessa's Jump



Gully's Jump



Elise's Jump....or at least part of it...

Par(a)ty Time

It didn’t take long for Vanessa to get fed up with our poor-backpacker habits, and she soon had us jet-setting around Brazil on airplanes and in rental cars.  After all, she has a real job and a steady income.  No more bumpy bus rides on dirt roads for us!  After our stint in Caraiva (or butt-f$#^ nowhere, as Vanessa affectionately calls it), we hopped on a 3:30 AM flight (the cheapest one) to Sao Paulo, then rented a car so that we could zip along the coast between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.  And zip we did… at least for about 250 kilometers, until we were 15 km from our next destination, Paraty. 

And then – we encountered the bumpiest dirt road that has ever existed.  The irony!!  We found ourselves in the classic navigational blunder: “The Google map directions says there should be a road here!!!”  Google forgot to mention that only 4x4’s could possibly get over the massive craters, streams, and giant boulders that the road is comprised of.  Being in the middle of the jungle, and the shortest detour being 100 kilometers, we foolishly decided to give it a go.  Well, we made it (eventually), and it only took us 3 hours to finish the last 15 kilometers, with the sun steadily sinking and the jungle around us getting more and more ominous.  Our little rental VW Gol (no that’s not a typo) didn’t get discouraged at all, and did a great job even with the giant 4x4’s speeding by us every little while, only slowing down to tell us we were never going to make it.

I guess it was all worth it, because Paraty is a lovely place, full of …. you guessed it – beaches and palm trees and cobblestoned streets.  We’re here for a couple more days, until Gully’s complaining about the lack of surfable waves becomes too much to handle.  We’re also beginning to mentally prepare ourselves for what comes next… Rio, baby!!!

-E

Figuring out the next move

This trench looks much bigger in real life!

The car ahead of us followed their GPS and found themselves in the same situation as us

Pretty Paraty

Picturesque Paraty

One so dark, the other so pale...

Doing the Thumbs Up is cool here in Brazil

Weekend home of some rich and famous Brazilian

Cruising around Paraty Bay in our private boat

Enjoying drinks on our private island while the rainclouds move in...

...and then comes the rain

'Tisn't the Season

Christmas season is moving into high gear – and we’re none the wiser! We’re slowly but surely moving down the perpetually tropical east coast of Brazil, sticking to the small, chilled-out surfing towns. Other than a lame-ass miniature fake Christmas tree I saw in the Japanese restaurant last night, Christmas is pretty much nowhere to be found out here – no Christmas music playing in all the stores, no commercial after commercial on TV, and, much to my chagrin, no eggnog! Nevertheless, the wind that was taken out of our sails in Peru is blowing strongly again, thanks in large part to a much-anticipated visit from a family member. My sister Vanessa, aka Sista G, aka Loch Nessy decided to take a long overdue three week vacation in Brazil. She met up with us in a small surf town called Itacare (where I’ve continued to develop my shred skills in some solid surf for the past six days). My sis’s arrival was like an early Christmas for us; she brought replacements all the way from Toronto for nearly every item we lost in Peru: new camera, new iPod, new netbook, new backpack, new long johns, new….the list goes on. With the remnants of Elise’s wounds all but faded away as her skin bronzes in the tropical sun, we can finally close the unsavoury chapter of this trip that is Peru.

In an attempt to show my sister the true meaning of ‘getting away from it all’ on her vacation, we ventured eight hours by bus, then took a ferry, then took another three hour bus, then a canoe to get a place called Caraiva. It’s supposed to be a sandy hamlet on a long, churning surf beach (Lonely Planet’s words) but what it really is is a beyond-off-the-beaten-path time warp to the age before cars and electricity. There are no motorized vehicles; the streets are paved with beach sand (this makes it extremely difficult to transport rolling luggage). Also, there are no street lights, which means we need to take flashlights out with us to find a restaurant for dinner! On top of it all the ocean is flat right now, so no surfing for me here. On the plus side there are no other tourists around, so we pretty much have the run of the land (which includes about 3 km of beach all to ourselves!)

Yeah yeah, I know what you're saying, another dull blog… – I know! Hey, at least I didn’t write about how we’re living it up in this tropical paradise, sipping cocktails on the beach and surfing all day long while the rest of you are scrambling at work and settling in for the cold Canadian winter. But seriously, we have a fancy new camera now so we’ll do our best to take more pictures of our pretty faces for you all to use as your desktop backgrounds during the Christmas season.

-G

I had to have at least one pic with my shirt off

Aprés-surf electrolytes

A frolicking Loch Nessy with a missed opportunity for me in the background

Vanessa on the Main Street in Caraiva

Sweet Tropical Relief

Heaven knows we suffered in Peru, and it was about time that we had a change of fortune.  

Beach sports provide plenty of eye candy for the ladies

So, finally!!  Tropical paradise!!  We spent three days on an island in the Bahia state of northeast Brazil, in a small town named Morro do Sao Paulo.  We stepped off the boat, and breathed a huge sigh of relief after enduring a taxi ride, 3 plane rides, 2 more taxi rides and a catamaran ride in a 24 hour period.  All the while, Gully is as sick as a dog and running for the bathroom every ten minutes.  One last gift from Peru, I guess.

Palm tree partytime!!

We truly feel we are in paradise.  The town has no roads, no cars, only friendly people and beach after beach after beach.  And did I mention the cocktails?  For only a few dollars, someone will mash up fresh tropical fruit of your choice and mix it with your alcohol of choice, and then you´re sipping on the best drink you ever had (well, until the next one).  And did I also mention the food?  We are gorging on amazing seafood dishes that I have never heard of or tasted  before, which is a pretty big feat after living in multi-cultural Toronto, where I thought every type of ethnic food was available.  And I should also mention the climate - hot and sunny!  Our bathing suits are our official uniforms now.  And Gully is ecstatic - shirts are optional (perhaps even discouraged)!  Even in the grocery stores!!  

I know, this is a pretty boring post, no bad news or funny adventures, but it is great for us. Finally we are relaxing a little.  I´ll take cocktails and seafood over trials and tribulations any day.  I know your mouth is watering... maybe we can even convince some of you to come join us!

-E

I bet you can´t name half of these fruits!

Choose your sweet, sweet poison

Hmmm.... should I take my shirt off now? or later?

Swaying palm trees and tropical breezes....

Always On Duty

BIG NEWS: we managed to get the eff out of Peru. Finally. And we’re never looking back. Just to recap, it was perpetually cold everywhere we went and the landscape was bland and desertous (with the exception of the Inca Trail), I got sick FIVE TIMES over the course of the six weeks we were there (once I had to take anti-parasite medication and twice antibiotics. Brutal. Elise and I are now at a higher level of comfort), and as you all know we got robbed for everything valuable we own(ed). Did I mention Elise got dragged for half a kilometer down the highway? Nuff said. Speaking of the robbery, there is one positive thing that came out of it: we made a new friend. But not just any friend – a cop friend! The cop who drove us home the night of The Incident happened to be going home to Lima the next day for his vacation so he offered to chaperone us. What better way to feel extra safe the day after you’ve been robbed than to have an off-duty cop as your guide? He even set us all up to take a bus that was being driven by a buddy of his. Nothing could wrong. And nothing did (until we got to Lima of course…reference Elise’s last post). I made note of the fact that Omar (that’s our cop friend) wore his gun on his belt for the whole trip. Standard practice, I assume, for off-duty cops in Peru. (Do cops do that in Canada?)

So we went out a couple times with Omar and his friends and family. Ate ceviche, drank some beers. Good times. Safe times, too, since Omar was strapped when we went out to dinner and drinks. The other day we went over to his grandmother’s house to have lunch and meet more of his family. Of course we got the authentic, home-cooked Peruvian experience. Big shout-out to Abuela Zevallos and the rest of the fam. It was when we were watching a Mexican soap opera (pretty standard for soap operas to be playing at any grandmother’s house I guess) that I noticed Omar was packing heat there too! At grandma’s house?! Really? You can never feel too secure, I suppose. Anyway, we got to spend one of our last days in Peru feeling like true locals. Plus, with Captain Omar around to protect us (yup, he’s actually El Capitán) we were able to relax a little and stop looking over shoulders constantly to see who’s about to accost us.

-G

P.S. Sorry for no pictures. As you know, we lost one camera, but we promise to take some pics with Elise’s camera for our next post from Brazil.

Murphy's Law Part Two - Bed Hopping

Well, the bad luck didn't end with the robbery (although that was definitely the worst part).

After crashing in bed after midnight after the horrific day, we had to get up at 6 am in order to catch a ride to Lima.  Getting out of bed was painful (literally), walking was painful, and the thought of a ten hour ride on a packed Peruvian bus was more than a little daunting.  To make matters worse, I realized I was coming down with the flu.  Gully had been laid up in bed for a day with the flu two days earlier, and still hadn't fully recovered, and apparently now it was my turn.  The bus ride nearly killed me, with all the vomit-inducing stops and starts, the cramped quarters, and my cough and runny nose getting worse by the mile.  But we finally made it to the hostel in Lima (I was about 5 minutes from death at this point) and gratefully settled into our room. 

In the morning, I had the full blown flu, complete with terrible migraine.  It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that it was one of the worst days of my life. (Poor me!!) And where was Gully during all my misery?  Running between the embassy (for his new passport), the internet cafe (to skype with various parties), the fifteen pharmacies in the area (for my dressings), and the bathroom.  The bathroom because he was suffering from major "stomach issues" (aka diarrhea).  Poor Gully!!  While I was laying in a virtual comatose state in bed, trying not to hear Gully's GI tract at work in the bathroom, I noticed that there was an 8 inch space between the top of the wall and the ceiling.  "Strange!" thought I.  "I wonder what is on the other side of the wall"?  I found out soon enough - it was another room - when a couple of people moved in.  We were basically sharing a room with them.  What the hell?  Why couldn't they have just built the wall all the way to the ceiling??? We'll never know.   I do know that they were noisy and kept us awake.  In retrospect, it was probably worse for them.  They had to listen to Gully's bathroom noises, and my cries and moaning into the pillow (not in a good way) when he changed my dressings (anyone who has had gauze stuck to a giant open wound knows what I am talking about).  They definitely thought we were weirdos.

This continues for a couple of days, then we decide we have to move, we can't take it anymore.  So, reliable Gully goes out again, while I continue to lie around in bed, to find an affordable hostel to move to.  He comes back with great news!!  He found a hostel that has a whole apartment - bathroom, kitchen, bed, and TV - for the same price!!  Life is great, we move into the hostel (which involves Gully carrying every single thing we own while I pathetically limp twenty meters behind).  We make dinner in our kitchen, watch Happy Feet (by the way, what is up with that movie? Penguins dancing for fish? I think I missed the point) on our TV while lounging in bed, life is GREAT.  Then.... we saw it.  A little bug scamper its way across the sheet.  "Hmmmm, what was that?" "Hey look, there's another one!" "And another one!"  AGHHHHHH.... BEDBUGS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Our paradise came crashing down around us.  By this time, it was after midnight.  So, again, reliable Gully has to trek out in the middle of the night to find us yet another place to stay, while I try to limp around the apartment quarantining any clothes or other items that might have been infested.  We arrive at the new hostel, with several garbage bags with quarantined clothes in tow, which we promptly throw in the corner of the bathroom.

This hostel is, fortunately for us, the same one we are currently at.  But the moving pain didn't end there.  When we arrived after midnight, we were told the room was only available for one night, and in the morning we would have to move to a new room.  OK, fine, we can change rooms, no big deal.  We changed rooms in the morning, then were told that the room was only available for one night, we would have to change in the morning.  Fine.  Next night, same story!! We ended up in four different rooms before we finally got one that we were able to stay in. 

While all of this is going on, I am still hacking up a lung in a most disgusting way, and Gully is still frequently running for the bathroom.  He finally has to go to the clinic, where he has to poo in a cup again (he is getting pretty good at it, from what he tells me), and has to go on antibiotics to clear up the problem.

So, someone answer me this - what god did we piss off?  What did we do to deserve this week straight from hell?
-E

Even with all our troubles, we still stop to think of Canada´s war vets

Murphy’s Law Part One: The Theft

When we set off on this trip five months ago, we knew that bad things had the potential to happen. We were putting ourselves at great risk by travelling for so long. Of course, you never think that the bad things will actually happen. You try not to think about it while at the same time you try to plan out a standard operating procedure for all those “what if” situations involving theft, assault, kidnapping etc.

So here’s the reason why we haven’t posted anything on this blog for over a week: we were robbed. We’re ok. We lost only material possessions – not our limbs or lives or our irreplaceable good looks.

Below is an account of the events surrounding the theft as I (Gully) witnessed it:

We had spent four days surfing on the beach in Peru that boasts the world’s longest wave (Puerto Chicama). Conditions were epic, but we decided we needed warmer weather and warmer water. So we decided to leave central Peru and head north to get closer to the equator. At about 11 am we were waiting for an intercity bus on the main drag of a little town called Paijan (population of a few thousand). All of our bags were stacked against the side of a building and Elise and I were standing on either side guarding them. I decided to go to the variety store a couple of doors down to get some snacks for the long road ahead. As I walked away from the bags, a mototaxi (see image below) pulled up a few meters away and waited, unnoticed by Elise and me.

Typical mototaxi

All of sudden I heard Elise yell “HEY YOU!!”. She had turned her head for a few milliseconds and in those few milliseconds someone had snatched my daypack from the top of the bag pile. Elise was already running toward the mototaxi that the thief had jumped on to when I got my own legs in motion. As I ran toward the mototaxi I witnessed Elise do the bravest yet most foolish thing I have ever seen anybody do. She grabbed hold of the mototaxi. When the mototaxi started driving away she didn’t let go. She fell. She kept holding on. And holding on. And holding on. I was running after them but there was no chance of catching up. I was helpless as I watched my girlfriend get dragged down the Panamerica highway at 50 km/h. I was horrified. Can you believe she did that?! There were witnesses to all of this but they didn’t do anything to help. Actually, it all happened so fast that they probably wouldn’t have been able to. Anyway, it dawned on me that the rest of our bags were still sitting on the side of the road, so I had no choice but to run back and tend to them. I yelled from a distance to some bystanders to look after them, praying that they were trustworthy people and I didn’t just kiss the rest of our belongings goodbye. I darted back to the street as Elise was about to leave my view. I jumped in another mototaxi (real cars are rare in rural Peru) and just said “VAYA!” (simply, “GO!”). Luckily, this mototaxi driver had just seen where the thief (with Elise in tow) had turned off the main street and was able to follow the same route. They had turned on to an unmaintained dirt road with some pretty big rocks on it. My heart sank, Elise was nowhere in view. We turned the next corner and there she was. Her pants were in tatters, but she was walking toward me when I approached in the mototaxi. Words cannot describe the relief I felt at that moment. The bag was gone, but Elise was ok (relatively speaking). All she said was “GO GO!! The mototaxi is red and it says ‘Mavila’ on the back!! GO!!” Some bystanders who had seen Elise go by had already come to her aid. So I kept going, but the thief was already out of view. There were many places to drive and hide in the back roads of this shanty town. Then a cop truck passed me; they must have been alerted by some people back on the main road. Then another cop truck came up and I jumped in with three officers wielding rifles. We drove around for the next ten minutes looking for the thief but never found any sign of him.

Growing more and more anxious about the rest of our bags back on the highway and not knowing the extent of Elise’s injuries, I had the cops drive me back to where it all began. Our bags were fine, but Elise hadn’t come back to the place where we had been waiting. We drove around, scouring the streets for “la chica rubia” (the blonde girl). Finally, some witnesses told us that she had been taken to the town clinic. Her legs were covered in deep scrapes and bruises were already forming. It looked pretty bad, but unbelievably she wasn’t hurt too seriously.

An hour later, Elise was discharged. She never got a great look at the thief (actually, it turns out witnesses saw three thieves in the mototaxi including one woman) but she was able to say that he was chunky with a round face and he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt. Apparently, that was enough of a description to give the cops a lead so when we were driving back to the police station we pulled up beside a heavy-set guy on the street and the cops started demanding answers from him. After some yelling back and forth the cops threw him the back seat of the truck right beside me and Elise! He was pleading ignorance and innocence to the cops and refusing to even look our way. We said this might be the guy, but that was enough for the cops to drag him to the station and interrogate him. He gave nothing up. We could only sit there all day and look at him in disgust as he averted his eyes from us. We went with the cops to his house (which had dirt floors) and searched it. Nothing. He had had enough time to stash the bag anywhere. The new mototaxi out front was red and branded Mavila. He even had fresh, deep fingernail marks on his forearm – likely from Elise’s clawing! This was the guy, but there’s nothing we could do. There was no concrete evidence so he eventually went home.

It was after 11 pm by the time we finished all the paperwork for the police report. We lost my passport, the laptop, my camera, my iPod, $100 cash, credit cards and bank cards, all our pictures from the last month in Peru, some clothes and other valuable, hard to replace items that I won’t bother listing. Worst of all, Elise was badly banged up and limping.

Don't worry, Elise is ok and she's healing excellently. But, you’ll realize in the next part of this two-part series, everything that could go wrong for us seemingly did – and it all happened over the last week.

-G

The only remotely pleasant memory of all this: riding on the back of a police bike.



Would you have kept holding on?



After Gully's handiwork

Is there a doctor in the house?

Nothing left to do but eat ice cream.

Oh Mr. Sandman....

One major misconception I had about South America was that it was perpetually hot and tropical. Not so. I mean, obviously if you go as far south as Canada is north you get a true winter where you’d expect it to be freezing during the winter and temperate during the summer. But, since we got to South America it has NEVER warmed up for us. Buenos Aires was cold and rainy. Patagonia was frigid and snowy. Passing through Chile brought us sunshine but with bitter winds and highs in the low teens (the ocean was unbearably cold there too). Enter Peru. Ahhhh….balmy Peru with its palm trees and picturesque beaches. I figured it HAD to be warm in Peru – we’re practically at the equator for God’s sake! Not so. We spent the last three weeks above 3000 m and so we were stuck in a perpetual early spring (I had to wear a hat and scarf in Cuzco!). Finally we’d had enough. “Screw it”, we said. “Let’s go to the desert!”. FINALLY some tropical weather! We ended up in Huacachina, Peru, an oasis town of 600 people in the middle of a sahara-like desert. The main attractions there are sunshine and sandboarding (which I rip at…kinda). We took an epic ride into the dunes on a macro-scale version of the mini-baja dune buggy Elise and I helped build in university. As the former captain of the suspension team for the McGill Mini-Baja, I was extremely impressed with the ride quality until my brand new knock-off Ray-Bans were jostled from head. I hope some desperate soul stranded in that unforgiving land appreciates them some day.

To give you an idea of the scale of geography in the pics below, one of the dunes we sandboarded down was about half the size of Blue Mountain (sorry, you need to live in Southern Ontario to understand that, but suffice it to say that that is a downright mammoth heap of sand). Sandboarding is pretty much just like snowboarding on fresh pow-pow (that’s shredder slang for ‘powder’) except that when you bail you can guarantee you’ll be picking sand out of your eyes and ears for the next hour. Also, you have to haul your sorry ass back up the dune after each run, which, expectedly, sucks. Oh yeah, and while it gets boiling hot during the day, like most deserts the air in Huacachina gets icy-cold at night. The search for summer continues…..

-G