La Paloma: Oh, the next beach town over

The night before we left Punta del Diablo, I was talking to the Californian marijuana entrepreneur. He asked where we were headed and I told him we would check out La Paloma. His response: “Oh, the next beach town over.” That pretty much sums it up: a forgotten alcove only remembered during the short summer months.

My alternate title to this post was “The Ghosts of La Paloma,” because this place was practically deserted when we passed through. Unfortunately, I don’t really have any ghost stories to tell so I couldn’t really tie it all together. We saw no other tourists, no vacationers and a lot of closed places. That may sound like a good thing, and to some extent it was, but for a town that seems almost entirely based on tourism, it felt a little weird. There were rows of holiday homes, hostels and hotels all completely empty except for a few Uruguayan weekenders here and there. Lonely dogs ruled the streets and followed us everywhere, them and bored small town teenagers. (The teenagers didn’t follow us though. That would have made for a much scarier stay.) The poor girl doing all the manual labour at our hotel seemed like she hated her life.

So. La Paloma. It’s a relaxing place; I’ll give it that. We spent three days or so, beach lounging and wandering through the empty neighborhoods. The water was surprisingly warm so I spent a lot of time jumping around in the waves like a little kid.

(Notice, I still have no tan.)

We ambled along the beaches and took pictures.

That white pole in the distance represents the closest thing to a ghost story I could scrounge from this place. Apparently, in the mid 19th century there were no lighthouses in this area but there were an increasing number of ships full of immigrants heading for the promise of Uruguay. In 1868, a ship, the Lise Amelie, loaded with Scots hit some rocks on the coast and everyone on board drowned. The tragedy spurred local authorities into action and they built a lighthouse with “six elegant and spacious rooms, one specially designed for castaways.” Expecting castaways, they obviously didn’t have much confidence in their lighthouse. That doubt turned into cracks and those cracks turned into another tragedy as the lighthouse came crashing down before it was fully built.

But, ever resilient, the locals persisted and rebuilt it, and in 1878 the newspaper El Siglo published:

Survivor of several generations, many more will continue seeing this sentry post, always here. Has anyone seen the death of a lighthouse?

Indeed!

In the end I suppose it was good that we saw La Paloma in the off-season because rumor has it that this place is going to explode. Investors are buying up large tracts of land all around town, hoping it will pay off in the near future, when La Paloma turns into the next big beach resort. One day the lighthouse could be simultaneously dwarfed by enormous hotels and blown up for package holiday posters. And I’ll be able to tell my kids, “Oh, La Paloma? Yeah, your mother and I were there back in 2010, before it was famous. It was so small then. We felt invisible, two ghosts in a forgotten town; no one saw us and we saw no one. Just like the lost souls of Lise Amelie, you could sink into the sand and no one would know you had ever been.”

Punta Del Diablo and a Brush with Satan

Our hotel kicked us out at ten and we didn’t feel like going to the casino, so we left Chuy before noon. We hung out at the bus station for about half an hour, watching bellies amble past, and then hit the road for Devil’s Point!

Punta Del Diablo is a laid back and friendly surfing village on the edge of a small national park. Supposedly the population swells to 20,000 in the peak season, with party-goers flocking there for a couple of weeks in some sort of mini Ibiza, but it’s really hard to imagine that from what we saw.

Apart from the hostel kids, the town was about as sleepy as it looks. We had a great time just walking on the beach and talking to a few other travellers. We stayed in a rustic romantic suite at a hostel called El Diablo Tranquilo, right on the beach, falling asleep to the sound of the waves every night. Add cheap bottles of good wine to that every night and we couldn’t ask for much else.

It’s strange how hostelling seems to bring out cultural stereotypes so clearly sometimes. We had the loud and slightly obnoxious American girl, the permanently drunk Australian guy, two relaxed and friendly New Zealanders, two snooty British kids, a slightly cold Canadian, and a very hippy Californian. One afternoon, something about the place inspired us to be a bit more social than normal (or maybe my wife was just bored of talking to me everyday) and after that we were absorbed by the hostel crowd, spending a bit of time with them every evening.

My wife quickly befriended the Kiwi girls and I talked to an Argentine guy for a while to practice my miserable Spanish. His English was about the same level as my Spanish so we had an hour or so of pretty garbled conversation. He said he was a poor banker (which in itself seemed a bit interesting but I couldn’t figure out if all Argentine bankers are poor or just him) and liked travelling but couldn’t afford to travel much beyond Uruguay and Argentina. He also said he liked Uruguay much better because it was a bit cheaper and much quieter. Later, I spent some time talking to the Californian hippy, who apparently made all of his travelling money growing and selling pot. His overall travel plan was to get to Africa on less than $1000, possibly on a ship of some kind. Not wanting to be a downer, I didn't ask him if that thousand dollars was just an arbitrary target or actually all the money he had to make this plan work. Strange guy but I hope he made it.

When we weren’t drinking beer at the hostel we were just on the beach

poking things in tide pools

and watching wildlife. 

That picture is just a little guy but we also met the grandfather, a great beast from the infernos just below Devil’s Point – an ancient dragon by the name of Tegu (Tupinambis merianae in full). He set his sights on my wife’s camera, demanding that we make a technological sacrifice (blood is so pre-Internet Age) in return for safe passage. Naturally I refused and commanded him to return to the depths of hell from whence he came. The fury in my eyes sent him scampering back to the hoarded mound of cameras, smartphones, and other tourist gadgets in his lair but not before he cursed us with a mosquito swarm that hastened us on to the next beach.    

The next day, we were climbing on some tide pool rocks and my wife slipped, falling on her bum and smashing the touch screen of her video camera. I heard a cackle from a nearby boulder and saw a tail disappearing into a crevice but I was too late to catch the hell spawn.

The lens was ok (as was her bum) but unfortunately, without the touch screen, the camera was quite difficult to use. The screen was still touch sensitive but it didn't display anything. She eventually memorized the places of certain functions so we could still use it for a few things but we weren't able to determine zoom and focus without the screen.

I suppose we should have expected some sort of unholy sacrifice in return for the great few days we spent at Devil's Point. However, as much as I complain, Tegu stayed true to his offer. After the camera sacrifice, the rest of our trip proceeded without any further significant losses. Some might even say we were lucky to have had him cross our path.

The Road to Uruguay

I woke up feeling like crap. The last bus ride killed my immune system and I had picked up a bit of a cold but we had to forge ahead. We grabbed lunch from the grocery store and then I slept on a bench for a couple of hours until it was time to go. My beard was getting a bit shaggy by this point so I probably looked like a bit of a hobo, but no one left me any money.

Our plan was to get to Porto Alegre and see how we felt. It was about 14 hours, which felt like nothing after the last trip, and we had a great sunset to send us off. I slept amazingly well (no bus like a South American bus) and got rid of my cold, passing it on to my wife. 

One funny thing did happen on the way though. I got racially profiled! Our bus stopped in the middle of nowhere at about midnight and some policemen with serious faces and enormous guns hopped on. We were the only obvious tourists on a bus full of Brazilians so one of them walked slowly down the aisle, hand on holster flanked by another officer, glaring left and right, until he came to me. He looked me up and down, in my travelling clothes and unshaven glory, and barked something in Portuguese. “Não entendo,” I said. He looked at me, smiled slightly, and asked in perfect English if I understood that he was a police officer. I ignored all the witty responses that came to mind and just nodded. He proceeded to pat me down with enthusiasm and dug through my bags with one of those drug flashlights. They didn’t find any cocaine on me so they took a cursory look through the rest of the bus and then told everyone to get off so that they could search the bags underneath. It took another hour or so for them to dig through everyone’s underwear, and slightly disappointed at finding nothing else, they let us move on.

As we left, we saw them stopping another bus so we figured afterwards that it might not just have been a random search; it’s possible that they had been tipped off about some tourists travelling with drugs on them and that’s why they went right for me. We wouldn’t see such well-funded drug enforcement officials again until we got to Colombia. 

The rest of the trip was uneventful. We had some breaded chicken on a stick (a rest-stop staple) for breakfast and I took some more pictures of the Brazilian prairies.

Despite the police delay, we still made it to Porto Alegre in good time. There wasn’t anything that we especially wanted to see there, and we felt well enough to push forward, so we made plans to head for the border the same day. A couple of tickets and a bus station hamburger later and we were on the way to Chuy.

My wife was feeling fairly sick and slept most of the way but I saw some cool stuff out the window. I saw my first real cowboys. They didn’t look exactly like the guy on Wikipedia, but they definitely had the hats and various other pieces of gaucho apparel. Imagine this carried forward a hundred years:

(Wikipedia photo)

Later, I saw some gigantic waterfowl that looked a little like something I remembered from the bird park (but didn’t take pictures of because they seemed boring at the time) and finally capybaras frolicking in the ditch beside the road! I woke my wife up for those and she just muttered something about “big rats” and went back to sleep. I was excited though.

(Not a particularly wild capybara – taken at the Buenos Aires zoo.)

We finally got to the border town, Chui/Chuy (Brazil/Uruguay) at about eight in the evening. Passport control was a breeze and we found a cheap hotel quickly enough. 

Chuy is a bit of a strange place. It’s a town divided in half, with a Brazilian side and a Uruguayan side, making it a kind of neutral territory as a whole (border crossings are outside of town). The first two things you notice are casinos and beer-bellies hanging out of open button shirts. Casinos are outlawed on the Brazilian side but dominate the Uruguayan side, and older Uruguayan men have a very. . . relaxed sense of style. Overall, Chuy is pretty much exactly what you would expect from a town that thrives on duty-free, smuggling and casinos. There are an awful lot of homeless people for a population of 10,000 and there’s way too much swagger for the average belly size of the town. It’s the sort of place you might expect a South American Han Solo to hide from debt collectors. 

I couldn’t complain too much though; it was definitely a place with character and we were happy to finally escape Brazilian prices. At about $25, the fairly nice private hotel room we got seemed like a steal and dinner from the supermarket felt basically free. Still, I was more than a little bit sad about leaving Brazil. We had a lot of fun there and I would really like to go back. I still miss Rio regularly, especially when it’s damp and dreary here in the fall. Apparently this is a common side effect of visiting Rio. The guidebook warned me about the saudade disorder but I didn’t listen, and now, every so often I get sucked into a memory of the Ipanema sun. 

Here’s a little map of how far we’d come by this point. Still a long way to Cartagena!

Foz do Iguacu

Although there isn’t a lot to do apart from the waterfall excursion (and maybe a trip to the dam), Foz do Iguacu is a nice enough city. There’s a lot of greenery and at a modest 350,000 people it felt pretty relaxed compared to the other cities we’d been to. 

We staggered into town and grabbed a taxi to an arbitrarily chosen pousada called Sonho Meu. It ended up being the nicest place we stayed in Brazil and also one of the cheapest. There was a pool, air-conditioning, great showers, and a solid breakfast buffet – absolutely fantastic after our epic bus trip. It also happens to be near one of the best restaurants we ate at the whole time we were traveling. It's an all-you-can-eat Brazilian barbecue place with waiters who come to your table and slice freshly grilled meat for you until the button pops off your pants. After a few kilos of every animal and a bottle of wine, we stumbled back to our room, ready for a day at the waterfalls.

Lonely Planet says: 

“A total of 275 individual falls occupy an area more than 3km wide and 80m high, which makes them wider than Victoria, higher than Niagara and more beautiful than either.”

As someone who has been to both (though I was too young to remember Victoria Falls very well), I’ll happily support that statement. Foz do Iguacu is an incredible place. The jungle backdrop is gorgeous and the walk to the falls is half the fun of the trip. There are tons of little creatures that cross your path, everything from birds and butterflies: 

to furry things called coatis:

They're perfectly harmless as long as you don't feed them hamburgers.

Along with the pitter-patter of little feet, you can hear the falls long before you arrive. You get a few tantalizing glimpses and then suddenly: breathtaking view

...after view...

 ...after view...

 You can also walk underneath on a platform right above the torrent of water. Yeah, we got a bit wet.

 (No, that naked guy isn’t me.)

After a couple of hours hanging out at the falls, we decided to take a romantic walk through a bird sanctuary that was just next door. 

 Barf - Ok, it wasn’t that romantic I guess. Actually a few of the birds seemed a bit crazy: 

 Check out this guy trying to eat a German tourist’s toes:

 (He’s not stuffed; don’t put your toes in there!)

 There was also this creepy lizard watching us.

We talked to some of the tried to talk to one of the residents but he just laughed at us:

We took a hint and set off back to town. Next stop Uruguay!

(Hamburgers!)

Belo Horizonte and a loooooong bus ride

A few hours up the road is the sixth largest city in Brazil: Belo Horizonte (downright tiny after Sao Paulo and Rio).

(From here)

We didn’t really plan to stay for more than a day or two. Brazil’s almost European-level costs were pushing us over-budget a bit so Belo got dropped and was mostly just a stopping point to arrange transport to Foz do Iguacu. There is some cool stuff to see, especially architecturally if you’re a fan of Oscar Niemeyer who has a bunch of creations clustered in the Pampulha district.

A great side trip from the big city’s modern architecture is a visit to the prehistoric cave paintings at Gruta Rei do Mato. On the way there, we got another little taste of Brazilian Wisconsin with more cows grazing under palm trees mixed in with evergreens. I didn’t have any idea how far it was or where to get off but the driver was friendly enough to drop us on the side of the highway just across from the cave. So far, so good. We got some tickets and sat with some other (very) young couples waiting for the mandatory guide to arrive for the tour. Apparently the cave is dating hotspot because the only other people we saw there were teenagers giving each other googly eyes. The guide was great, a really friendly kid who was happy to practice his English for us. The cave itself is impressive enough but being able to see the 6000 year-old paintings (and a zebra monster - Xenorhinotherium bahiensis -skeleton replica!) was a great bonus and made me glad that we at least stuck around in Belo long enough to do make that trip. 

(Gruta Rei do Mato)

(From here)

(From here)

(The great Xenorhinotherium bahiensis!)

Getting back was a bit of a trick. We knew that the bus would go past on the road outside the cave but getting it to stop was a problem. We waited for about fifteen minutes and finally saw a green and white bus that looked like the one we came on. With my timid Canadian upbringing I weakly waved at the bus from the side of the road, sort of the way you might hail a cab. It blazed past. Ok, no worries, we had about an hour and half until the buses stopped going, which meant three to five more chances. Another one came. It was a different colour but I thought I should practice a bit and figured it might go back to the city anyway. I waved with a steady hand full of confidence, but again it wasn’t interested in stopping for us. My wife was getting a bit agitated by this point and fortunately we saw our tour guide starting to walk home. I went over to ask him if the buses did actually stop. While we were talking another one came and he leapt onto the shoulder of the road and started jumping around, waving and shouting. The bus missed him by about a foot as it barreled on, but it stopped about twenty metres down the road in a cloud of dust. We hurriedly thanked him for risking his life to get us home, and ran to catch our ride.

We celebrated yet another successful adventure with an excellent per-kilo meal at a shopping mall near our hotel. Brazilian barbecued everything with tons of different sides. I wish they had spreads like that in Canada so cheap.

After cave day came bus day and our first brush with the kind of truly long distance land travel that comes to define most trans-continent adventures. It was supposed to be 27 hours but it ended up being about 32. It was comfortable, and it stopped every once in a while to let us get food and stretch a bit, but there are only so many hours you can fill sitting on a bus. After you’ve looked out the window on and off for 3 or 4 hours, read for another 5 or 6, slept for 8, listened to miscellaneous songs on your iPod that you didn’t know you had for a few more sluggish ticks on the clock, and read again until your eyes dry out, you realize that you still have and 10 hours to kill. That’s when you’re about ready to die.     

(One of our many stretch stops – could almost be Canadian prairies if it weren’t for the slight hills.)

We didn’t die but it was a close one. It was around the 25 hour mark, just after I had reminded the remnants of my sanity that we must almost be there, that the bus started to splutter and jerk as we climbed a steep hill. It got slower and slower inching its way to the top. And then it never sped up again. Some part of our bus’s spirit was extinguished on that hill and with each hill that came after it, we could feel the bus gradually fading from this world. The driver stopped on the side of the road a few times to give it a pep talk and each time it started up well only to get even slower at the next hill. We crawled in to Foz do Iguacu a good five hours late and thanked Christ the Redeemer that we didn’t have to hitchhike. 

However, for our saintly patience, we were rewarded with a great hotel and one of the best meals of the trip. And a waterfall. . . yeah, that too.

Mariana and back to Ouro Preto

After exploring Ouro Preto, we ventured a little further down the road to a place called Mariana. On the way, we stopped off at one of the biggest mines in Brazil, Minas da Passagem. 

The mine itself wasn't as atmospheric as I'd hoped. The guide asked if we all spoke Portuguese, we said no, and he just shrugged his shoulders and carried on. Fortunately there was another couple with us that gave us a rough of translation. We got a few translated comments from another, Brazilian, couple that was down there with us. We were told that people used to get lost in the mine pretty easily because it stretches for 30km, almost all the way back to Ouro Preto. It was once the most important mine in the region, producing most of gold for Ouro Preto and launching it to political and economic significance. He also showed us a place where you can scuba dive through a section of the mine that's now underwater. Sounded cool, but neither of us are divers. All-in-all, it was a bit pricey, and we could only visit a disappointingly tiny amount of cave systems, but we did get to ride in a mine car, which was as awesome as it sounds.

Mariana is pleasant enough, but looks a lot like Ouro Preto. Actually the main reason we wanted to go there was because we have a Brazilian friend with the the town as her namesake.

More churches. . .

. . .squares. . .

. . .and great hilltop views.

We wandered around for most of the afternoon, and then headed back to make plans to move on.

If you only see one colonial town on a trip through South America, I think it has to be Ouro Preto. It has a certain historical character that hasn't been touched by the thousands of people that visit every year. I wish we could have spent more time in the area, visiting some of the more out of the way colonial mining towns, but I'm quite confident we got the best of it in Ouro Preto.

Ouro Preto

Our first overnight bus trip was mostly uneventful. Good morning Ouro Preto.

That was the view from the balcony of the hostel we booked into. We were staying on a huge “plantation” just on the edge of town. There were some fruit trees and a lot of tangled undergrowth that I’m pretty sure hid a marijuana grow-op. The guy who checked us in was a bit surly but the other staff were friendly and the breakfast overlooking that view every morning was wonderful.

Ouro Preto is built on a bunch of hills, not pansy hills like Sao Paulo, but proper mountain foothills. Actually the hills are so absurdly tough that all the locals are in great shape. You have to climb at least two brutal hills to do anything in town, and that’s probably why we only saw one fat person the whole time we were there. . . and she was sitting in an internet café at the bottom of the valley in the centre of town. I assume she lives in the valley and never leaves. 

We saw more than one little car get stuck trying to navigate through town. Most of the streets don’t wind cutely or anything, they just head straight into a climb as if they’re trying to get it over with. I suppose that reflects a sort of Brazilian personality. . . assertive/direct. 

(Notice all the fit people struggling up the hill and all the cars with well-used handbrakes.)

On our first day, we went and looked at a billion different types of rocks in the “Museu de Ciência e Técnica da Escola de Minas” and then went rock shopping as is the requirement of all visiting tourists. We bought a few things but the great deals we were hoping for weren’t really there. Brazil is just an expensive place. Later that day we also went to see the great architect Aleijadinho’s bones.

Actually, the story of Aleijadinho is quite something. He was the son of a Portuguese architect and a black slave. He’s presumed to have learned the fundamentals of architecture and sculpture from his father but when still quite young, he joined the military. In his early 30s he developed some kind of debilitating condition, either syphilis or leprosy, and lost his fingers and toes (Aleijadinho means 'little cripple' – as affectionately as possible). Undaunted, he continued sculpting with hammers and chisels strapped to his arms and he went on to become one of Brazil’s most famous artists. If this all sounds a bit improbable to you, well, apparently there are some academics who question it as well. There has been some discussion about whether or not the little cripple really existed, as there isn’t much of a historical record about him.

Here’s some of his work - the church of St. Francis:

(from wikipedia)

Anyway, we took a look at somebody’s bones in a crypt and later that evening we found an awesome restaurant for dinner, got drunk on red wine and went to bed happy with our day of climbing hills.