It was during this time that Pat had a conversation with a fellow traveler Fran Calder .
"We are in Brazil and are hoping to go to the Carnival in Rio"
"We have always fancied that"
"Why don't you come"
"That's a good idea"
Within 2 days the trip was planned, it started as a long weekend in Rio de Janeiro and finished up as a month long trip to Salvador, Coastal Islands, Buzios, Rio de Janeiro and Foz do Iguacu.
Being independent travelers the trip was planned with military precision. Flights, Hotels, Excursions, Hire Cars and Transfers were all booked . It became so complicated that I even had to make a spreadsheet that reminded us what was going to happen on each day.
The final plan for the 30 day trip was 8 Flights, 6 hotels, 1 stay with a great friend, 3 boat trips, 1 hire car, and many day trips.
At this time the term Corona Virus hadn't hit the news. By the time we set off it was a mere rumor of a problem in the far east.
Medellin to our first destination at Salvador took three flights. After a quick overnighter in a hotel we set off towards the island of Boipeba. A ferry, 4 hour taxi and small boat trip and 8 hours later we landed at the small dock on the island.
In order to keep the island in good ecological health there are no cars allowed. There is however, a handful of quad bikes. We hired two local guys with wheel barrows to carry our luggage to the quad bike station.
Twenty minutes later the Quad bikes delivered us to our island paradise , a small hut on the beach in the village of Morere.
What a slice of heaven. Turquoise seas, golden sand humming birds and no vehicles. Chilling out, swimming and snorkeling were the order of the day.
The boat the to neighboring island of Tinhare only took a few minutes and on this island a small number of vehicles were allowed. Transfer to the hotel was in a Landrover, and the route along the beach took an hour. Pat was grinning like a Cheshire Cat and felt that we were back overlanding
In order to cut down the physical length of some of my blog posts I have now adopted the slide show approach. I hope it makes viewing it a bit easier.
We survived the boat journey back to Salvador without incident, despite some websites referring to it as the Vomit Comet . Two hours of total unpleasantness. Most of the crew were armed with mops and buckets and were very busy.
The historic Colonial town of Salvador Bahia ( aka Salvador or The Land of the Drum ) was the original capital of Brazil and was founded by the Portuguese in the mid 1500's.
Its location and growth was sadly born on the back of the slaving industry that thrived in the Americas.
Still to this day the Afro / Brazilian culture is what makes this place amazing and unique.
The old center of Pelourinho was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985. This would be our home for the next few days . Pat had booked a beautiful hotel that overlooked the main street. The view from our window would make you think you were in Lisbon or Porto.
When the term Carnival and Brazil are used in the same sentence you automatically think of Rio de Janeiro. However, carnival season in Brazil is national and nearly any town of note will have its own Carnival. Salvador Bahia is no exception and by design we hit town right in the middle of it.
As you will see later in this post, the Rio Carnival is enormous. It's all about floats, costumes and parades. The Salvador Carnival is totally different. Here it is all about communities, culture and most importantly Music. The weapon of choice in any Salvador band is the Drum. Literally for 24 hours a day during our stay there was never a minute that you couldn't hear the sound of drums.
I cannot describe the feeling of watching a drum band with over 100 members. It actually stirs up emotions.
The Drum phenomena known as Olodum was created to combat barriers within the community and unite people who shared a common interest, Music and drums.
It was fantastic to see large bands made up of every aspect of the community. Old, young, male, female indigenous and immigrant, rich or poor all shoulder to shoulder.
Olodum works.
A fantastic example of these drums in action can be seen in this, slightly dated, video by Paul Simon which was filmed in the streets of Salvador. It's quite a long video, feel free to move on if its not your type of music
The silhouetted Martial Art / Acrobatic / Dance routine shown at each end of this video is known as "Capoeira." It is a practice that dates back to times of slavery with its origins in Angola. Although the martial art element has been declared illegal, mock combats are common place in the street theatre that can be seen during carnival.
Salvador was alive, The music never stopped and the people never slept. Unlike many European festivals , alcohol appeared to play little or no part in the festivities.
Rio de Janiero was our next destination.
This huge sprawling city on the South east Atlantic Coast is home to about 12 million people. Unbelievably, during Carnival season an additional 5 million tourist arrive.
The world famous city views were streamed into nearly every home on the planet when the Olympic Games was hosted there in 2016.
This city has opposite ends of the social spectrum living on top of each other. Apartments costing millions of dollars overlooking the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema are literally just a few minutes walk from the densely populated Favelas built near vertically on the hills behind them.
Probably the most diverse city in the whole of South America
One of Pat's wonderful friends and fellow traveller "Roberta," who we had met in Chile two years earlier, lives on the outskirts of the city by the beach in the area of Tijuca. Foolishly, Roberta once said "If you are ever in Rio come and stay." Not sure she meant 6 nights, but she was the perfect host, and we loved getting to know her better. Staying in her beautiful apartment was a highlight. Thanks Roberta we cannot wait for our paths to cross in the future xx
Whilst there we also managed to catch up with the previously mentioned Fran Calder and her husband Doug.
The list of things to see in Rio is overwhelming. But the usual beaches, Statues and Mountains were lined up.
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| Sugar Loaf Mountain |
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| Christ the Redeemer |
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| Copacabana Beach |
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| Copacabana Beach |
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| Copacabana Beach |
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| Ipanema Beach |
The big attraction for all the visitors is Carnival. Daily around the city, usually at beach locations, are mini Fiesta or Street Parties known as Blocos. Sadly these have a bit of reputation for being unsafe for tourist, so we chose not to take part in these, bearing in mind that the rate of crimes and murders in this city is unbelievable. In an effort to cut the numbers of crimes down, the city now only permits some Blocos to occur between 7am and 10am.
Instead, we set our sights on the main event. The Samba Parade in the cities arena " The Sambadrome"
This event that runs over 4 nights, starting at 10pm and running through to daylight.
The entire event is a huge competition between Samba Schools from the local communities. Each school spends the entire year creating their Floats, Costumes and Choreography, employing hundreds of participants and maybe thousands more behind the scenes.
The floats are enormous. We were sitting in the higher seats and still found ourselves almost looking up at some of them.
Each school gets one hour to walk the 600 meter route. Six Schools per night take part, with various themes ranging from Indigenous issues to the Circus and Movies.
Winning this competition is akin to winning the world cup.
The stadium has 90,000 spectator capacity and is packed every night. This is the same as Wembley Stadium in the UK or the Rose Bowl in Pasadena USA.
I must point out at this time that Corona Virus was still a low level, almost unheard of, threat in South America.
Despite its reputation for high crime and violence, which I am sure exists in some areas, we never had any issues in Rio de Janeiro and never once felt at Risk. We loved it.
We love seeing locals playing unusual games. You may remember back in Filandia the game involved throwing lumps of metal at explosives.
Here on the beach we saw a two person team sport that was a mix of Football and Volley ball ( Soccer) .
This imaginatively named "Footvolley" was a great spectator sport . We couldn't quite grasp the rules but using any part of the body to get the ball over the net seemed acceptable
Buzios lies in the Atlantic Coast about 175 km directly east of Rio de Janiero. Its a very popular sea side resort and many people from Rio have second homes here .
We went there for 5 nights..... It rained .
Our final port of call was a location that had been on our Bucket List since before this trip was planned, but we had never been able to get there. The nearest occasion we had was when we first arrived in Uruguay. At this time we were about 1500 km away but decided to head south in the opposite direction.
Foz do Iguazu lies on the Brazilian side of a three way border between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.
The borders between these countries is clearly defined by the T shaped confluence of the rivers Parana and Iguazu.
The attraction that brings in many thousands of tourist is the magnificent water falls that lie between Brazil and Argentina. These can be viewed from both sides.
Probably one of the most spectacular natural occurrences I have seen.
From the Brazilian side you can take a boat ride up river near the base of the falls and view them afar on a walkway. However, from the Argentinian side you can get really close and stare right down the phenomena known as the "Devils Throat"
Due to the water levels being a little lower than usual , we were unable to take the boat ride to the foot of the falls on the Argentinian side.
Another great, but completely unnatural, feet of engineering in Foz do Iguazu is the Itaipu Dam.
This 8 km long structure holds back the Parana river between Brazil and Paraguay.
Built over 13 years starting in 1971, this joint venture between both countries is physically the second largest Hydro Electric Dam in the world being only slightly smaller than the famous Three Gorges Dam in China. However, the Itaipu Dam actually produces more electricity.
The 1350 square Kilometres of reservoir feeds 20 Generators that can annually produce in excess of 90 Billion KW of energy.
The power is split 50/50 between Brazil and Paraguay, however Paraguay then sells most of their share back to Brazil giving the Brazilians 90% of the production .
After 3 long flights we eventually returned back to Cloud 9 in Medellin Colombia.
By now the Corona Virus had really taken a grip in Europe.
The Colombian Authorities were quick to respond imposing regional and national lockdown measures.
However, we soon realized that if the virus got a similar hold as it had in Europe , that it was unlikely that the Colombian Health Services would cope.
In view of this, and our imposed travel restrictions, we decided to try and get back to the UK.
The problem, was that we weren't the only expats trying to return home, so all the flights were over subscribed ten fold. With near 70% of international flights out of Bogota being cancelled we were reluctant to move from the comfort of our truck without an absolute assurance that we could make it all the way back to the UK. The thought of spending days sleeping on the Airport floor wasn't appealing.
The camp site we were on had other campers from Germany, America, France and Austria. We kept hearing of rescue flights from all these countries picking up stranded Nationals, except British ones.
The British Embassy in Bogota rang us several times a day but just couldn't assure us of a viable escape plan. They had no rescue planes organised.
The internal flights were due to cease on the Wednesday , meaning that it would then be impossible to escape as there would be no way to get to Bogota.
Despite Pat having spent every waking minute of an entire week scouring the flights, we had just about resigned ourselves to the fact that returning to the UK was just out of reach. Then, at the last minute, Pat managed to spot a French flight to Paris leaving at 5 minutes past midnight on the Wednesday morning.
Thinking if we can get to Europe then we are home and dry, the decision was made " Go for it "
Luckily for us we had already booked a flight from Medellin to Bogota . This flight was originally booked for 3 days earlier but had been cancelled and re scheduled twice. By chance its latest time slot fitted in exactly with these new plans. However, we knew that if this flight was cancelled for a third time our entire escape plan would collapse at the first hurdle.
The whole journey was a very fragile chain of events that could have left us stranded at any stage. Pat was keen to take the chance as she was eager to get home. I , on the other hand, was very reluctant to even set off with the odds of success against us.
This and disputes over how much luggage we should take made the whole experience very stressful to say the least
Making the choice to leave our comfortable home hoping that our journey will be successful was a big leap of faith. Especially knowing that by the time we arrived in Bogota our return option to the truck would be closed as internal flights would have ceased .
This move had the potential of leaving us stranded in a cheap hotel in Bogota for several months if the international flights failed. We know fellow travelers that even now ( 6 weeks later ) are still trapped midway on their journey, confined to their hotel rooms.
It was a big gamble to say the least
Even as we set off we hadn't yet finalised the last stages of the Journey between Paris and the UK.
Whilst sitting on the marble steps ( All the benches and trolleys had been removed ) in Medellin airport waiting for our flight to Bogota , Pat managed to book the last two seats on the last British Airways flight to the UK from Paris.
We got to Paris to discover that there had been 5 flights from Charles de Gaulle to Heathrow scheduled that day and the first 4 had been cancelled, leaving our flight as the last chance. We watched the departures board constantly and sighed with relief when our boarding was announced.
The airports were deserted and Charles de Gaulle looked like a scene from a Science Fiction disaster movie. The usually busy halls full of rushing travelers were deserted. Very Spooky.
Unbelievable it appeared that most of the previous cancelled passengers had made alternative arrangements and we flew back to the UK with only 20 people on the whole plane.
Upon Arrival in the UK we fully expected to be delayed by the Immigration Services and questioned about our journey. Surely in a crisis of this nature monitoring or even controlling entrants into the country would a high priority, especially as the UK had already implemented lockdown measures at this stage.
You guessed it. Nothing. Between landing and walking out into the street we didn't speak to one other person. Our passports were swiped in a machine and Customs were completely deserted.
Although a very long journey it all went remarkably well and we are currently , like everyone else , in a lockdown situation, staying with family.
Who knows when we will see Cloud 9 again.
Hasta Luego
