Cidade Maravilhosa

Well I made it to Rio! Very nearly didn't, but I'll get to that... The Iguazu Falls were awesome, especially the Argentinian side. I spent a whole day there getting drenched in a torrential tropical thunderstorm with REALLY loud thunder (well if I will go in the rainy season...), not to mention the boat trip up to the Falls themselves (pretty much right under them in fact!). It was a really good day and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who just happens to be in the area. Puerto Iguazu itself was a great wee place and I felt completely safe wandering around on my own at night, and the Marcopolo Inn Hostel was really good too - best I've been to.

I did the Brazilian side of the Falls the next morning before my bus to Rio at 13:10. One of the girls at the hostel said it would be fine and another said it was impossible without a car, so I thought I'd give it a go anyway.* *I made it there relatively easily, once again flaunting international protocols by not bothering to go through the Brazilian border control. The Falls themselves are nowhere near as impressive or extensive as the Argentinian side, the nice panoramic views I should have seen hampered by the pouring rain and extensive cloud cover. I blasted through in about an hour and started the journey back to Argentina, which is where everything started to go wrong... Having only two hours by this point until my bus left from Puerto Iguazu, I was in such a rush to get off the bus outside Foz and catch the connection to Argentina that I got off at the wrong street and it was a significant amount of time before I realised this, made my way to the correct street and for the bus to arrive. By the time it did, it was a mere ten minutes until my bus for Rio left and I'd already given up all hope and was planning what I would do with my extra day in Puerto Iguazu! Surprisingly, when I rocked up at the ticket office ten minutes after the bus had left to purchase a replacement ticket for the following day, they got right on the phone and called the bus back to pick me up!

In conclusion, navigating public transport in foreign countries is not one of my strong points and should be avoided in future.

The 22hour bus journey was fine, if somewhat dull. I arrived mid-afternoon yesterday and proceeded to collapse for a while then go for a walk along Ipanema beach in the sunshine - very pretty, if full of some very odd, self-obsessed people. It is the South American version of what I imagine Hollywood to be. One particularly entertaining sight was an elderly woman taking her poddle bedecked in ribbons for a 'walk' in a pram. Oh dear...

Today I went on a full-day tour of Rio, covering the National Park, Corcovado (completely covered in cloud, so much so that the statue itself was invisible, let alone any view of the city), Santa Teresa, Sugarloaf and a couple of other bits and pieces. I swithered about whether to spend my money on an organised tour rather than doing it all myself as I had planned, but given my experiences with public transport, it was probably for the best, and I did see more than I would have managed on my own and with a fun group of people and a friendly, knowledgable guide. I've just been out to dinner and had the most random of meetings with a couple of Croatian girls who were in the beds next to mine in the Puerto Iguazu hostel! They came up the day after I did and are staying in a completely different area in Rio, but just popped over to Ipanema for dinner at the restaurant near my hostel! Had a much more entertaining dinner than it would have been on my own, so I'm glad they did.

I've got most of the day here tomorrow before my flight at 21:00 and I'm not entirely sure what to do with myself, having had a whistlestop tour of the main sights today. I think I'll take a walk up Ipanema and Copacobana, then perhaps sit on the beach for a while. It's a hard life.

Pictures Online

Neil may still be adventuring but I'm safe and sound at home and I've put all my pics here, for those hungry for a visual summary:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/weegav/sets/72157622782453716/

No return to Paraguay. Oops...

So I´ve arrived in Puerto Iguazu, Argentina, but not without royally screwing up the border crossing from Paraguay meaning that unless I sort it out before I leave here, which it´s unlikely I´ll have time to do, I won´t be able to get back into Paraguay within the next ten years without being lined up and shot (or at least fined...). Given that the only reason I´m likely to do that is if I were to do the Junket again, which is itself quite unlikely, I don´t see this to be a major issue.

On the plus side, I made it to my rather nice hostel after wandering around in Foz do Iguacu in the dark, having not actually been stamped into the country. Fortunately the Argentinian border official didn´t think to check the stamps of where I´d entered from! Puerto Iguazu seems like a cool place, if full of tourists as per Cusco and La Paz. I´ve got my onward (23 hour) bus to Rio sorted out and my day at the Argentinian side of the Falls tomorrow. Looking forward to it!

Triumphant arrival to Asuncion! (kind of...)

Following the demise of the Mototaxi Junket and our escape from Peru via bus to La Paz, we finally arrived (not entirely triumphantly) in Asuncion yesterday by air. Even that was accompanied by acute panic as the attendant at La Paz airport decided to scare the living daylights out of us by telling us that the flight was badly delayed, which would have completely screwed up Gav´s long string of flights home, and possibly Phil & Si as well. Fortunately he was wrong and the flight was perfectly on time, so Gav made his connection from Asuncion to Buenos Aires without incident and should still be there now, flying home tonight (hi Gav!!).

And so the mighty partnership that was Mental Militia is no more, and I continued into town with the Pirate´s Rest boys, found a hotel and wandered around in a fruitless search for the finish line banner and/or Junketeers. Eventually, several hours later, Dan and Craig from the Adventurists found us and we had a good old catch up and generally  enjoyable evening. Thanks guys!

Now the time has come for me to leave Phil & Si and head off on my own in the general direction of the Iguacu Falls, probably in some form of bus. In a departure from my usual excessive planning of such things, I have no idea what time the buses leave, what company to go with or how much they cost, so I´m just going to rock up to the bus station (assuming I can find it) and hope everything will work out. Just as well I have a firm grasp of Spanish and Portuguese. Oh, hang on...

The end of the road.

We´ve just arrived in Puno after a more leisurely final couple of days since leaving Cusco. The driving´s been much easier, almost dull in comparison with the first stage - paved the whole way and without the high passes we´ve been used to. Yesterday we took the opportunity to swing by a couple of Incan ruins as we´d not had the chance to do much in the way of sightseeing so far. An even greater luxury was spending the evening at some hot springs and camping there overnight! It was most odd sitting in a steaming pool of water outside at 4000m in the dark! We even had our own private indoor hot tub where we relocated to later on and cooked dinner.

Today we thought we´d try to take a drive up to the North coast of Lake Titicaca, but after an hour´s drive out of Juliaca, gave up as we realised there wasn´t much to be seen. We were on target to hit Puno just as it was getting dark, but of course it would have been a bit dull if our final day had ended without excitement! About 30km out and just as we were starting to run low on petrol, Phil & Si´s back right wheel, which had been looking a bit on the wobbly side for the past few days, chose that moment to lose not one, but eleven spokes! This left the wheel a decidedly non-circular shape and we were sure it wouldn´t hold up for five minutes, let alone the entire hour to Puno. But surprisingly, after stripping out all the weight (including Si who rode with Gav & I), it did! We´ve found ourselves a decent enoughhotel for a minimal $10 a night per person and are off for some well deserved food soon. We´ve already bumped into quite a few teams so looking forward to catching up with them tonight.

More delays and a revised POA.

The bikes are back and we´re heading to Puno. Given the extended delays with paperwork to cross into Bolivia nad the fact that Gav flies from Asuncion on Sunday, unfortunately it looks like the most we can do is get the mototaxis to Puno, two days from Cusco. We´re hoping we´ll be able to leave the mototaxis there and set about an escape route from South America. The current plan is a bus from Puno to La Paz, then a flight from there to Asuncion. Gav, Phil & Si already have flights booked out of there to either Buenos Aires or Sao Paulo from where they´re flying home. April´s planning on heading back through Peru and Chile towards Santiago. I´m not entirely sure what I´m doing, but I´ll probably stick to my original plan of hopping on a bus from Asuncion to the Iguassu Falls and from there to Rio from where I fly home on the 15th. Obviously this is a huge disappointment to us all, but we´ve just had to accept that it´s no longer possible to get anywhere near Asuncion in the time we have left given all the delays we´ve had to deal with. In fact it´s looking increasingly likely that we wouldn´t even have made it across the border to Bolivia! We´re going to make the most of our last two days on the bikes though, take things at a slower pace and try to see some of the Incan ruins between here and Puno. We´ll be sad to say goodbye to the motos - despite all our initial doubts, they´ve held up well and are great fun to drive.

Extended stay in Cusco.

A brief update to the last blog - looks like we´re staying another night in Cusco. We´ve got the bikes at the mechanics and they´re going to do a full service on all three of them. The downside is that it´s going to take all day, but we reckon it´s worth it as we´ll hopefully get them back in better nick than they were originally, given that we put the things together ourselves in a couple of hours!

Cusco at last!

We rolled into Cusco late last night after a rough couple of days. We started getting up at 4am to make the most of the daylight and make up for the hours we've been losing over mechanical failures. Gav and I have actually been quite lucky - all we've had is a flat tyre and the chain come off a couple of times, but our other two teams have had more serious issues and we've been limping to a mechanic every day so far. Gav and April are off to check out the Lifan dealership here in Cusco just now so that we can hopefully give the bikes a good overhaul before hitting the road again for Puno by Lake Titicaca.

The terrain we've been driving through has been really impressive, if tough. Long climbs to cold, high passes (most over 4000) followed by long descents to hot, sunny valleys then back up again to another pass. Although we were lucky with the weather in the first couple of days, we've been hit by bad thunderstorms in the last couple, putting our rain gear to the test. The bikes are really exposed and even the passenger suffers a bit. It's hard enough work for the driver controlling the thing as it is, but gets really tough in near-freezing temperatures and lashing rain! It's all good stuff though and we've survived so far. 

One incident that put a damper on things was when last night, having decided to push through to Cusco after sunset, our first attempt at night driving, a group of youths thought it would be a great idea to throw a fist-full of dirt in our faces as we were driving down a hill in the gathering dusk. Gav was driving and did a great job of stopping us in a controlled manner, despite being unable to see. He had it pretty bad, having taken it right in the face and getting a load of dirt in his eyes. I was less affected and could at least open my eyes, so I took over the rest of the driving to Cusco while he recovered in the back. We're both ok now, but it was a sad incident given that we'd had nothing but kindness and generosity from the people of Peru until then. It just shows that in every society there are a small minority of thoughtless ignorant people, even out here.

All is well now though, and spirits are higher after our first night in a hotel, a hot shower and some decent food. It's looking less and less likely that we'll make even the Salt Flats now, as Gav's flight home is on Sunday, so realistically we need to be somewhere big enough to fly from on Friday. We're carrying on as planned at the moment and heading to Puno, where Andy from the Adventurists is waiting with the paperwork we need to cross the Bolivian border. We'll weigh up things once we're there and make a decision about what the next step is depending how long we take to get there.

SMS Update

Tough day yesterday through high passes, very poor weather. Series of mechanical failures so only just made it to abancay, at mechanics again...

SMS Update

Just coming into Ayacucho after good day's drive yesterday. Aiming for Andehuaylas tonight.