Sanyu's World

The Road Less Traveled

For my last lazy day in Sucre I took in a few museums including the Ethnographic Museum displaying the some fantastic hand woven rugs. I bought some last minute World Cup sticker packs and headed off to the bus station with Rachid to catch our bus to Misque, a tiny town barely mentioned in the Lonely Planet. We arrived at 1am and I was petrified as we walked the streets trying to find our hotel. A Bolivian from the bus walked with us and a car with about 5 guys inside slowed down to check us out. Rachid walked right up to them and asked them if they knew where our hotel was while I stood stock still thinking how well I've done traveling not to have been robbed up until this point. Unfortunately their directions were wrong and as we rounded the square to check in the other direction I saw the same car lurking about a block up. My heart was racing but it actually turned out to be a different car, a taxi in fact who gave us perfect directions and didn't ask for a dime. We finally made it to the hostel to find them waiting up for us. No problems but no more midnight arrivals for me.

Getting to sleep was a nightmare due to a late night dog party to which evidently weren't invited. I told Rachid that I gave him permission to go outside and kill the dog but he just laughed. I was not a gentle goodnight. We groggily headed out the next morning to the local covered market where we hopped from stall to stall to put together a great breakfast. Coffee here, soup there, freshly squeezed orange juice at the end of the aisle. Afterward we went for a walk to check out the town, Rachid got his wish, not a tourist to be found. The town was pretty much just 2 long parallel roads that lead to the cemetery on the edge of town. People were quite nice and very curious and we were saddened to find out that we had missed the Annual Peanut Festival by only a couple of days;) We had thought to stay in town for a day or two but by noon we had already opened all my World Cup stickers and were dead bored. We ate lunch at what seemed to be the only restaurant in town and then booked a bus to Cochabamba for that afternoon.

We arrived in Cochabamba at 7pm and decided to walk to our hostel which should have been about a 10 minute walk away. Unfortunately the Lonely Planet, or the Lonely Liar as I will henceforth be calling it, got the address wrong.  Luckily it wasn't too much further on but it was pretty frustrating for a while.  We settled into a restaurant for that great Bolivian staple of roast chicken and chips before turning in early. In the morning we were awake, dressed and breakfasted in under an hour. A new personal best for us. We only had about 4 hours to check out the city before our our 1pm bus to La Paz. I wanted to get a better look at some of the beautiful churches we had passed by the night before and check out some of the huge markets the city is famous for. The markets here are unending with each street or area specializing in something different and the food markets are always a crazy, if unsanitary, affair. If you like potatoes, Bolivia is the place for you!

This is the town that rose up against Bechtel and their own government over water privatization back in early 2000. It was also spotlighted in the Canadian documentary The Corporation. It's amazing to try and picture this entire city shut down and everyone out on the streets protesting. And the crazy thing is that they won! The government conceded. Power to the people!

Sweet Sweet Sucre

Rachid, Christian, Muitia and I took a taxi from Potosi to Sucre. While the cost of taking a cab is twice as expensive as taking the bus it was faster, more comfortable and still only $4! Driving into the city got me so excited. This place is gorgeous. There are big grassy squares, beautiful old churches and a big busy covered market where they sell everything. And to top it all off it is actually warm here, OK, maybe a little chilly at night but nothing like the temperatures I've been enduring through the past week and a half. Muitia was feeling ill so the rest of us headed off for lunch and a walk around the main square. We stopped into a traveler hangout called Joyride where I ran into a cool girl named Tara that I'd met a few times in Brazil. We got caught up and agreed to meet up a few hours later to catch a showing of Sin City in the small comfy theater in the back of the restaurant.

Rachid and I enjoyed a leisurely breakfast on the roof of our hotel the next day before heading out to check out the big market right across the street from us. Lots of fruits and vegetables, a huge area just for selling potatoes and stalls in the upstairs part where lots of local sit and have enjoy meals for around 50 cents. I had fried chicken and chips and then headed to the juice bar section and tried a glass of tumbo (unripened papaya) juice which was surprisingly good as I don't really like papaya.

I walked the two blocks to the main square where I ran into Christian relaxing in the warm sun. I found out from him that he and Muitia were leaving that night. I don't think she likes Bolivia very much. I said my good byes and headed across the street to catch the Dino Tour bus. A pretty wacky tour where you go and see dinosaur tracks found by a cement company some years ago. The tracks were preserved by a volcano eruption and are visible vertically in a wall rock. Even better than the tour though was that while I met two new people on he bus, I also ran into six other people that I'd met on various tours over the past week. I'd agreed to meet Tara at Joyride for a drink that night so I invited everyone to come along. It's been a while since I've hung out with so many people. A really great night out.

The next day was football day. I headed out to meet some guys to watch the Liverpool vs. Chelsea match, again at Joyride, before heading over to the HI Hostel to meet up with more people to watch a live game, U. Sucre vs.San Jose. We bought some tickets on the street near the stadium and made our way inside, no small feat. We were in the crazy fans section with Sucre and San Jose fans sitting surprisingly close to one another. The sun was blazing and we roasted. A good reason to eat lots of ice cream though. Sucre lost and we made our way out of the stadium carefully so as to avoid any potential fights breaking out. I spent a few quiet thrilling hours back at the hostel fully submerged in my latest vice, 2006 World Cup trading stickers. I've bought a sticker book and 50 packets of cards (5 cards per packet, no gum though) all for about $9. I need to collect just over 400 stickers and am fully addicted. I now find myself prowling the main park and the market area looking for kids to trade with as I refuse to shell out $2 to buy the hard to get cards like Ronaldinho. An older guy was trading near the market and he tried to totally rip me off offering me only 2 regular cards for my precious gold cards which, by the way, I am now an expert at locating amongst all the packs of ordinary cards.

That night a big group of us met up again to check out a nearby salsa club. I didn't stay out too late because we had an early bus to Tarabuco to check out the local market there. The market wasn't huge but they did have some very original hand-made items for great prices. I bought about three bags and a nice scarf before checking out the food market. There were lots of indigenous people there and I've finally got some great people pictures for Bolivia. Pretty much everyone got a nap in during the trip back. Rachid stopped to talk to a French couple he knew when we got back who had lots of cards to trade. We went out for a quick bite and commenced negotiations. Only about 150 more cards now to go. Rachid and I left them and headed up to the mirador for a view of the city at sunset. There is a wonderful garden cafe there and a family of musicians showed up to serenade us. We also took in a short tour of the nearby Recoleta Church before heading back to town. I quickly got cleaned up to meet Sharla, a chatty Canadian girl for dinner. We finished just in time to make it to Joyride for the 8:30 showing of the Motorcycle Diaries, a brilliant film to see while one is on the road in South America. I feel even better about traveling now!

Welcome to Potosi

The tour ended in Uyuni which is a really awful cement block town. I was hoping to spend my five hour layover uploading photos but the connection was horrible. I think I managed to get about 7 photos up in 3 hours. Good thing I was on-line though because Winks sent me an email on a great place for dinner in Uyuni run by an American. Mmmm chicken and gorgonzola pizza. A real splurge after having to eat whatever was put on the table for the last 4 days. Buses are funny here. Unlike Brazil, they have lots of companies running the same routes. But for some reason all the companies leave at the same times. Christian, Muitia, Raschid and I loaded onto our bus for Potosi at 7pm and found that we were the only tourists on this particular bus which was small and stuffed with people. Our guide in Uyuni had told us to watch our stuff carefully. I was going to stay up and read but the lights were turned off as soon as we left Uyuni even though there were people standing precariously in the aisles. Arrived at midnight. Caught a cab to our hotel. Crashed.

First order of business in the morning was a 30 minute shower. what a feeling to be clean. the four of us had a relaxing breakfast in the hotel courtyard. Potosi is designated as the highest city in the world so it's very cold here at night but during the day when the sun is shining on you it's incredibly warm and comfortable. I spent most of the day wandering around exploring the streets of Potosi. it's an old Colonial town and the churches are spectacular. One oddity is that the sidewalks are very narrow and in some places narrow to only a couple of inches wide. There are small micro-buses running up and down the streets and almost all of them have a small boy of no more than twelve leaning out the bus yelling destinations. I had a late 4 course lunch or almuerzo before hitting the Internet for the rest of the day.

Up early to make it downtown for my mine tour. when i walked in the door of the tour agency i was happy to find some Canadians I'd met on the trail over the past few days. We were all booked on the same tour. they drove us to a small hour outside of town to pick up boots, pants, jackets, helmets and head lamps before heading over to the mines. We stopped at the Miner's Market to pick up some gifts for the miners: soft drinks, coco leaves and dynamite (and a stick of dynamite for us to blow up afterward). our guide Efran was excellent and ave us an in depth explanation on the importance of mining in Potosi and the processes involved in turning the blasted rock into a fine dust mix of silver and 2 other minerals. Even though this silver mine has been in production for hundreds of years, there are no smelters in Bolivia to process the silver which explains why the streets aren't lined with cheap silver as I'd hoped.

We headed into the first level of the mine which wasn't too bad, just dark and a little low in places. We were practically running though so that we wouldn't be in the way of the miners hauling rocks out in primitive carts they pushed and pulled on tracks. We scrabbled down to the second level where there was hardly any air and had to crawl on our hands and knees in places. A girl from Holland freaked out Efran calmed her down and we moved on to the third level where which was much more spacious and had fresh air pumped in. We talked with some miners and gave them our gifts. Some were as young as 15. about half us pushed on the fourth level which was down some rickety steps. There we met a miner working alone banging out by hand a hole for dynamite. Coming out of the mine was just as treacherous and we all felt very affected by the experience. This definitely wasn't Disneyland Mine.

The Southwest Circuit

4 days in a car. Woohoo! Our group consisted of Raschid, myself, a Norwegian/Tahitian couple, Christian and Muitia, a German woman named Innes plus a cook and 2 drivers. We thought we were the only group leaving that day from our company, Tupiza Tours, but there was another group hanging around waiting to load their gear. I found out from one of t he guys that they had left the day before but there car's brakes were failing about 3 hours into the tour so they turned around and came back to town. A very auspicious start to be sure. We left at 10am and drove through some spectacular scenery. Beautiful multi-colored mountains and canyons and strange pod-like short spiky plants. We stopped for lunch of sandwiches and Bolivian tamales in a big open field full of llamas before continuing on to the small town of San Antonio at 4200 meters. The driver was great about letting us stop anytime we wanted to take a picture. We arrived as the day was cooling down and we all started shivering like crazy. We took a short walk around the town to warm up where we chatted with some local kids. By dinnertime my teeth were chattering so badly that I just wanted to go to bed but after a few spoonfuls of soup we were all feeling much warmer and happier. We ate quickly and went to bed after sharing a little wine.

I tossed and turned all night and woke up several times. At about 4am I woke up with vicious headache. Whether it was from the wine or the altitude I have no idea. Luckily I had a bottle of Tylenol near by and by the time we were woken up at 5:30am, it was nearly gone. This was our marathon day. In the morning we visited an ancient village, some gorgeously colored lakes and then stopped at a natural hot spring for a lovely dip. There are no showers offered on this tour until the third night and even then it will be cold water so this was heaven. More stunning landscape was to come, each area different and more strangely beautiful than one before. Weird rock formations, crystal clear lakes and natural geysers filled the rest of our afternoon. We arrived at our hostel new Lago Colorado almost 12 hours after we started. We were up a few hundred meters higher and it was almost unbearably colder. When my mother came to visit me in Peru, she brought me two new long sleeve shirts and kept stuffing my backpack with more and more socks. I remember rolling my eyes and trying to explain to her that I was following summer and these things were completely unnecessary and just added excess bulk to my bag. Well, I'll have to apologize now mother for that night I was wearing both long sleeves, jeans, my fleece, and all three pairs of socks. A belated thanks.

Day 3 was really great and really relaxing. We changed drivers, Innes decided to return to Tupiza meaning more room in the jeep for us and we didn't have to get up until 7am. As I'd shivered myself to sleep the night before at 7pm I was feeling great. Our cook even made us pancakes for breakfast. A new personal best for her! In the morning we visited five small lakes some of which had hundreds of pink and white flamingos wandering around. I've always imagined flamingos living in the tropics so it was quite a shock to see them. They live in the areas of the lakes that are heated from underground. They looked quite happy and quite warm. After lunch we passed a mildly active volcano issuing small tufts of steam before heading to the arbol de piedras, a very famous and shapely rock. We ended the tour with a drive through a small salt flat to give us a taste of what we would be seeing the next day. It was such a lovely relaxing day compared to the frantic pace of the day before. A really enjoyable change and just what I needed to keep my tour-itis at bay. We arrived so early to our hostel that it was still warm outside. We had dropped about 1000 meters so it actually felt, dare I say it, warm. Raschid and I walked through the small town and up into the old cemetery before returning for dinner, cards, chess and wonderfully, more wine.

Our last day was what we'd all been waiting for, the Salar de Uyuni, the massive 400 km blinding white salt flat. We were awake, packed and in the jeep on schedule at 4am to make the two hour journey across the salt flat to a small island in the middle that offered a high 360 degree view. We made it to the island about 10 minutes before sunrise and had to book it up the mirador. Running is hard enough but running at 6am, at altitude up a rocky path is down right awful. We made it though and it was thrilling to see all the colors across the sky and mirrored in the sheen of the salt flat. We took lots of pictures before heading back down for a chance to walk out on the salt. It is flat and vibrant white for almost as far as you can see. Walking on it reminded me so much of walking along the salt covered snowy streets of St. John's, Newfoundland when I was a kid. Ahh memories. We drove on to the 'eyes' of the Salar, some water pockets sending up bubbles from the compressed salt (I think that's what he said) and then stopped at a salt hotel where everything was made of salt. Pretty cool. Our last stop was where workers gather the salt into 3 feet high cones to be bagged. An older woman worker there showed us how she shoveled the heavy salt and told us she makes about $2.50 a day. Nothing like traveling to make you appreciate home.

From Brazil to Bolivia and Beyond

I am so bloody tired, the last 10 days in Brazil really took it out of me. Wonderfully, our bus to Buenos Aires was super luxurious and offered wine with dinner and champagne before bed, all for about $40. When we arrived early in the morning I was feeling so good that I'd decided to come to Buenos Aires for a little R & R. Sandanzas was fully booked but after about an hour of chilling in their breakfast area talking to people I found out that a girl was leaving earlier than expected so I got her bed. Nice. Nothing much to report in BA. I just relaxed at the hostel with the staff and took in lots of Malbec and a few hearty steaks. My favorite restaurant changed their menu and my favorite item, steak tenderloin with a creamy Roquefort sauce, wasn't on it anymore. Thank heavens my waiter knew what was talking about and he had the kitchen prepare an order specially for me. I was in heaven. The food in Bolivia isn't supposed to be very good so I'm hoping the memory of that meal will tide me over for the next few weeks. On Sunday I hit the Feria de Matadores, market about an hour away, by bus, from downtown. It was a fun crazy place where the prices were much cheaper than the regular tourist swamped markets and locals dance a matador like dance to live music in the middle of the square. I was so glad I went as it was the one thing I'd missed doing my first time around due to a brutal Sunday hangover. I spent the rest of the day trying to tackle my taxes which I gave up pretty quickly even though my brother Edward was awesome enough to scan in all my forms and such but all those numbers made me dizzy. Time for form 4868! Most of last day was spent running errands, picking up a few jars of dulce de leche to send home and the dreaded dentist. Back at the hostel they decided to have a movie night and show the horror movie Hostel. Ha, bloody ha. I had my eyes covered for most of it. If I ever wake up in a hostel to the sound of a power drill I'm going to scream.

I spent the next day and a half traveling to Bolivia on a series of horrible buses. Thank heavens I had a good crappy book to get me through. The seats were so small and the bus was packed. If I'd been smart I could have taken a super luxurious bus up north as far as Salta or Jujuy and then suffered on the bad bus for a few hours but oh no. I just had to get to Bolivia as quickly as possible and so did the bus driver apparently as he'd try and drive away from the bathroom stop even though there were women still waiting in line. A long series of bad Hollywood movies dubbed into Spanish and definitely no Champagne. My bus took us all the was to the border and waited till we all made it though immigration before carting us the 100m up to the bus station. I was standing in line for customs when everything started swimming before my eyes and I broke out in a cold sweat. I felt my knees begin to buckle and just kept staring straight ahead and trying to keep it together. I was sure if I passed out right there and then that they might think twice about letting me into their country. The worst of it passed after a few minutes that felt like an hour and I walked into Villazon, Bolivia. I changed some money and switched buses for the dusty two and half hour journey up north to Tupiza through some rugged mountain scenery. I met a nice French guy coming off another bus and we headed off to find a hotel. Wow, $3 for a nice room with 2 beds (no bathroom), a TV and breakfast included. I love it here!  Rachid and I went for a walk to check out the town and check out tour agencies for a 4 day tour of the nearby salt flats which is supposed to be spectacular. The idea of 4 days in a jeep makes my skin crawl but my friend Winks has guaranteed me that it's worth it. We grabbed some pizza in the main square where we passed by some local actors recreating one of the stations of the cross to a rapt crowd. We headed back to the hotel exhausted and I tucked myself into bed and looked at the clock. It was 8:30pm.

I felt so much better the next morning . A good nights sleep in a real bed was just what the doctor ordered. Spent the morning checking out the town and the local market and looking for a book exchange. This is a very small town and I'd really seen all of it the night before but it was nice to see it in the light of day. By 11:30 I was done and Rachid and I went for a set lunch of salad, soup,  an entree of Locro, a local specialty, and an orange for $1. After a quick respite we met our guide for our horseback riding tour of the surrounding landscape. Being up on the horse, taking in all the scenery  really made me feel like I was in one of those old western movies. Unfortunately no tumbleweed but the rock formations and weird thorny plants were really great. Renting horses, like everything else here is ridiculously cheap. It was less that $2 per hour for a horse and a guide. We're booked into our tour for tomorrow. Talk to you on the flip side!

The Devil´s Throat

Lord, I must get out of Brazil. It´s so huge, a fact that is impossible to appreciate unless you spent the better part of two months trying to get around the country. It reminds me of my summer after university when I took a train across Canada. definitely the long way around. I was woken up and kicked off the bus with everyone else first thing in the morning. My bus had left Cuiaba at 5am the previous day but I´d been thrilled to find a straight bus to Iguazu. I decided to head straight to the the Brazilian side of the falls. The tourist information at the bus station was excellent and they informed me that there were lockers at the falls where I could store my bags while I took in Iguazu Falls. The falls are shaped like a giant horseshoe with the Brazil side giving a view from within the horse shoe. There´s a train that takes you into the main area and a one kilometer path which lets you walk along and see the falls. At the end is a large extended platform and an elevator up and out. The whole thing only took about an hour but was lovely none the less.

I left the falls and took a bus back into the Brazilian town of Foz to Iguazu where I would wait for a bus to the Argentinean side, Puerto Iguazu. I met an Israeli girl at the bus stop named Shar who had just split from her original travel companions. We took the bus into Argentina together and both got off to perform customs at the border. She didn´t have her original Brazil entry form and they charged her $85 which they said she would have to pay if she ever entered Brazil again. Woo, she was pissed. I couldn´t find my form but when I opened my wallet containing all my papers, the official pointed at a little green form tucked away at the bottom and said that that´s what he wanted. Man, whatever makes you happy. There are about 50 hostels scattered around the bus station on the Argentinian side. We picked the closet one and almost cried when we found out that there was hot water in the bathrooms. 2 months, no hot water. I can´t even describe how my skin feels at the moment. We walked into town to get some dinner at Argentinian prices, Hallelujah, before  I headed off to bed. Shar was somewhat freaking out because her bank card wasn´t working but she waited up until the banks in Israel opened and somehow got it all figured out.

Up early to head out to the Argentinean falls. What a difference. While the Brazilian side shows you the whole kit and caboodle from a single path, the Argentinian side is made of lower and upper circuits, boat rides and and full on intimate view of the Devil´s Throat, one of the most powerful, works of nature I´ve ever seen. I took a quick boat ride under the falls which was fun and very wet before heading over to a small island in the center with Shar the check out some closeup views. I´m so glad we decided to do the Devil´s Throat last, the opposite of all the tour groups. The train that took us out there was only about half full so the lookout was nearly empty. The falls come from very far out and kind of constrict themselves into a small little horseshoe which make the water absolutely roar down at they particular point. A really amazing site that I just couldn´t do justice with pictures.

We spent about an hour after that gorging ourselves at the buffet lunch near the entrance to the falls. We´d left lunch tooo long and were positively starving.  Luckily we were planning on a 3 hour hike after wards along the Mocoto Trail which was nice and peaceful, hardly any tourists. The trail ends at a small waterfall and a little pool before you retrace your steps back to the main road. We talked a lot about our lives back home. After 8 hours of walking, we headed back to the hostel. Shar almost fell asleep on the bus but somehow got energized to head out to see the town that night. Not much to it though. I couldn´t help thinking about how quickly strangers become temporary friends when you´re on the road. Shoot, I´d know the girl for about 2 hours before we started talking in terms of ´we should go here´and ´what time should we go for dinner´.    

Nice relaxing final day. We made it down to a small look out where you can see both Paraguay and Brazil while keeping your feet firmly planted in Argentina. Pretty cool. Some tour buses showed up and we booked it out of there to avoid too much of a mob scene. We only had about an hour to get ourselves together before climbing onto our bus for Buenos Aires.Why am I going back to B.A.? Well, frankly I loved it there and I have a list of housekeeping chore to get through over the next few days including laundry, taxes and mailing a few things home. The fact that I´ll be able to have a few steaks in the meantime is merely an afterthought, really!   

The Wild Wild West

I found a cheap flight to Brasilia, Brazil's capital and figured I would just catch a bus the remaining km west. Not before getting a look at this crazy new city. Built in about 4 years starting in the early sixties, the place is just sprawling, like a suburb. Everyone drives as there are huge distances between everything and it's dead expensive here. I took in the JK Memorial which houses the remains and memorabilia of President Juscelina Kubitschek who was part of the design team for the city; the center of which is shaped like an airplane with a huge amount of green space running down the center aisle. It's bloody hot there, no wonder everyone drives. I walked about 3km down the from the memorial though the parks before giving in to the heat and heading back to the bus station. 22 hours to Cuiaba. Woo hoo!

I arrived in Cuiaba, one of the gateways to the Pantanal about 7am and headed straight to my chosen hostel for a much needed shower. Luckily or unluckily the hostel was just a cover operation for a very expensive Pantanal tour agency with a tour leaving in one hour! The owner showed me lots of recommendations from past tourists and even one from the Brazil Lonely Planet writer who had just passed though a few weeks before. It was more money than I wanted to spend  but then what's Birthday money for. Thanks Aunt Rosie! I showered and changed quickly and jumped into the awaiting bus to head off to the Pantanal. We stopped in the small town in Pocone so I could buy some crappy closed-toe shoes for our hikes and we were off. The van was swelteringly hot so I changed places with Tillman, a tall German guy in the back so he could stretch his long legs and get some of the breeze coming into the van. The rest of the group was an older Australian couple and two young Israeli guys. Our base hostel wasn't the greatest but the it would suffice. The food was terrific though. After the heat of the afternoon wore of we headed out on a boat trip to see some wildlife. Our guide Alex was great. Really personable and fun and a real expert of the flora and fauna in the Pantanal. While he was great at listening for and spotting hard to find monkeys and such, he was equally adept at knowing where the shy unassuming things liked to hide like tree camouflaged bats, owls or snakes. In the evening we took a short walk near the hostel to look for caimans (small alligators) which you can spot in the dark by looking for red eyes shining back from a flashlight in then dark. He caught one and showed it to us while we provided a nighttime nibble to the hundreds of mosquitoes waiting for us.

We were supposed to get up early to row out to the see the sunset but the Israeli guys didn't hear the wake up call for some reason and in all our doddling around we ended up missing it. We weren't so much angry at them for making us miss the sunrise as we were absolutely annoyed with the fact that we waited for 40 minutes for them in a swarm of hungry mosquitoes. I must say in their defense though that they were never late again for anything. We had a quick breakfast and headed out on a forced march, I mean hike, though the grasslands to look for wildlife. As I said, Alex really is a top guide we saw loads of animals and he pointed out weird plants and explained their uses to the Indians of old. We were walking in the Pantanal in the rainy season so in some places the water was up to our upper thighs. I almost slipped in the water at one point so I grabbed a tree branch which all of a sudden was covered with fire ants which stung my poor little hand into smithereens! Vicious little buggers. I couldn't get them off and spent a long 60 seconds slapping myself silly with my right hand trying to get them off. Even after I got them all off, the pain didn't subside for about ten long minutes. This is on top of being constantly attacked by mosquitoes. By the end of the hike I practically had a hump on my back from all the bites even though my mosquito repellent never left my side. Constant vigilance!

After lunch we headed out on a horse ride. Two more people turned up to join our tour at the last minute which meant there weren't enough 'good' horses for our trip. My horse was slow and lazy but two of the guys had horses that would inexplicably lie down in the middle of the field if we rested too long in one place. At least there were less mosquitoes up there. At dinner, one of the new travelers, a Dutch woman started complaining about immigrants in the Netherlands so I told her there was nothing like a little ethnic cleansing to sort that out. She took me seriously and kept going on about how they had to get the immigrants out. I, uh, pretty much lost it and told her exactly how offensive I thought her views were. We weren't really very friendly after that. Ethnic cleansing, are you fucking kidding me? Early The next morning, just after a gorgeous sunrise, the headed out on a short hike up to the main road but the Dutch woman and the older Australian couple decide to skip it because they didn't want to get their feet wet. Whatever. We all met up at the end of the road and had a quick picnic breakfast before heading out on a proper hike. The three of they abstained again and we were happy they did. The last thing you want to hear is someone whining about wet feet when you're under a glaring sun, slogging through mud surrounded by mosquitoes. This was probably my favorite hike of all because it really looked like what I imagined the Pantanal to look like. All tall wild grass hiding lots of wildlife. In the rainy season, the animals all breed and as they are very protective of their young they don't come out as much. You have to be very quiet and search them out stealthily. We had moved to another hostel, a much nicer one with air conditioning and pool and had to walk there along 'the road'. I got to 'the road' first and just shook my head, the water on the road was just over my knees. Have you ever tried to walk though a shallow swimming pool. That half and hour of walking took more out of me than the previous four hours of hiking on on mostly dry land.

After an unsuccessful afternoon of Pirhana fishing on the river (Why are we feeding cow to fish?) we settled into a relaxing dinner but I was constantly disturbed by all my mosquito bites on my ankles. I couldn't get comfortable for a second because anytime the breeze shifted or something touched my ankles I would have long drawn out itching spasms. I finally excused myself from dinner and hit the shower. I was soaping my right upper arm when I felt  something foreign that seemed quite immovable. I recognized it immediately as a tick like the one I'd burned off Roy earlier in the day. I threw on some clothes and ran to the main common area where everyone was wondering why I was half covered in soap bubbles and waving my rioght arm like a lunatic. I light a cigarette, took a few halls to steady my nerves and handed it to Roy to get him to burn it off. Fair is fair. He was deathly afraid of burning me and finally Tillman came over and somehow massaged the thing out of my arm. He's a doctor, thank god! What a nightmare!    

Our last day. One last boat ride to look for wildlife before heading back to Cuiaba. I'd asked if I could be dropped at the bus station instead of the hostel so I could try and make a bus to Campo Grande on my way to Iguazu Falls but I realized on the bus home that I had accidentally left my Lonely Planet Guide, my bible, in Cuiaba. I figured I'd just check the timetable and go on a later bus.  Tillman, the Israelis and the Dutch woman all wanted to stop by the bus station as well to check on bus times to Bolivia so it all worked out. But when we finally got to the bus station and I'd figured out which bus to take, the older Australian guy walked up to me and started cursing me out because I was taking too much time and he wanted to get to the hostel. This guy with whom I'd never exchanged anything but pleasantries with for the past four days. I just figured he was annoyed and made my way quickly to the bus but when we got to the door he kept insulting me and I, well, I couldn't really stand for that. I was so angry, I got very calm and I told him very carefully that he must have really gone off the deep end to think he could speak to me that way. Lets just say it escalated on his part but I just kept my mouth shut and stared him down. He was looking like a real idiot by this point and I really didn't need to help him along. Tillman backed me up, why the hell was I the brunt of all his anger when it was all of us, not just me, running around the bus station. We all made it back to the hostel but I was so angry I was practicaly shaking but I sucked it up. All the guys came out with me afterwards to drink beer, eat food and even sing a little karaoke to lighten the mood (ok, I didn't sing). I shared a room with Tillman for about 3 hours til I had to catch a cab to the bus station. I've pretty much avoided taxis in Brazil because I hate getting ripped off. The guy quoted me a ridiculous flat rate which I shot down and demanded that he turn on the meter. After about 5 minutes I finally ask where the hell he is going. He's taking me to the airport. Great. By the time we got to the bus station the fare was astronomical. I waited til I had my bags and gave him the $4 it should have been . He fumed and stomped but I just walked away. I'd had enough. Good news is that I'm heading on a bus that goes straight to Foz de Iguazu. A feat beyond my wildest dreams at this point. I'm almost out of Brazil. Hooray!