Latinalicious: The South America Diaries (26 page)

If the planet earth was a giant, dancing, naked body, Rio would be its throbbing penis. I’ve never felt so much sexiness in the air in one place! Entering Colombia was different in that, compared to the russet-toned, wrinkled faces of the stocky Andean people in Bolivia and Peru, it finally felt like the real Latin America. Suddenly there were tall, bronzed or black and dazzlingly handsome humans everywhere. But it’s nothing compared to Rio in Brazil. Most people here don’t even wear clothes.

I just lost a bunch of my friends, including JP, who I first met in Medellín, Kelly, Ron, Koulla and Russ, in a heaving huddle the size of a Wembley Stadium evacuation. I think the point at which I found myself in the armpit of a transvestite in a peacock headdress adorned with plastic penises was kind of the final straw, especially as his/her pit was a little bit fuzzy and more than a little bit sweaty. I don’t mind when people don’t wear clothes, I just mind when they rub their bits against me in a juice bar. Plus, the deaf ear that troubled me in Bolivia and cleared in Iquitos after the ayahuasca camp has blocked up again. I don’t know why, but not being able to hear out of one ear is throwing me even more off balance than all these caipirinhas.

I was just forced to abandon ship and flee in fear, so I’m now holed up in my apartment waiting for the noise to stop. You have no
idea
how crazy it is on the streets right now. One million people in one place is not normal, no matter how prepared Rio claims to be a year ahead of the 2014 World Cup, not to mention the 2016 Olympics. And apparently, I’ve not seen the half of it.

‘I went to a blocko last year with two million people,’ Ron told me the other day as we all sat sipping said caipirinhas outside a restaurant called Arab in Copacabana.

‘How did you cope?’ I asked. Blockos are street parties held all over Rio during Carnival. I find these things suffocating.

‘Oh, I’d just arrived so I wheeled my suitcase right through it and danced as I went,’ she said. Ron’s hardcore, if I haven’t mentioned. Personally, having spent the last month or so in quiet Colombian havens, most of the time here in Rio I’m walking around with eyes wide as saucers, not sure whether to be enchanted or petrified.

Still, I can’t deny that this city is impressive. Two days before Carnival started I found myself with JP and a rock-climbing champion from Illinois with the biggest arms I’ve ever seen, watching the
cariocas
(Rio residents) and tourists from a beach towel by the sea in Ipanema. I thought to myself, well, how crazy can it actually get? I mean, look at this place, look at the lolling blue waves and the smooth white sand and the grinning coconut sellers. Look at the circling, swirling cormorants, the jutting brown rocks poking out of the turquoise water like ten-storey buildings in a fantasy movie. Look at these waxed to perfection women, sporting bikini bottoms invisible from behind, eaten up by pert, luscious buttocks standing firm in a way that make my own droop even lower in misery … How can a simple thing like a party change any of
this
?
This
, that has to be the most spectacular cityscape in the whole wide world?

An abandoned feathered headpiece on the top of a mountain? Only in Rio.

On day one, a couple of cable cars took me, Russ and co up to the infamous Pão de Açúcar, or Sugarloaf Mountain. Here we snapped a million photos of a glittering sunset and donned some abandoned Carnival costumes, for kicks. These were truly spectacular, complete with huge pink feathered headpieces. Whoever left them must have been mad. I wore mine for at least an hour and I would have worn it for longer if an Aussie bloke hadn’t literally stolen it off my head and run off with it. The swine.

There are monkeys up here, too, which made up for my loss. They’re so small that they’ll sit on your hands, reminding you that behind the concrete and glitz, and the rundown
favelas
on its outskirts (in which a staggering twenty per cent of Rio’s people reside), the city is in actual fact a paved over paradise by the sea, which once teemed with wildlife far more wondrous than the jaguar-printed swimsuits that prowl its beaches today.

Equally impressive was Cristo Redentor, of course, Jesus the Redeemer, who stands tall on Corcovado with his arms outstretched in an eternal pretend airplane pose for the city … although I was a bit shocked by the size of him up close, to be honest. He seems smaller than I’d imagined, and he’s not very detailed. Almost half-sculpted, in fact. Not that I could have done better, but I guess I was expecting something huge. Apparently it’s more impressive from a helicopter, but we couldn’t afford that. Personally, I think it’s more thrilling to spot Christ hovering in a cloud of afternoon mist from elsewhere in Rio, like a distant reminder of heaven.

Two nights into Carnival, much of Rio was hell. Having ridden the Metro round all day with old women in sparkling hot pants, and men dressed as women dressed as semi-naked sexy Spongebob Squarepants/court jesters, I was sitting on the same beach in Ipanema watching a stream of blokes pissing up against the wall, unashamedly making a public urinal out of paradise. A group of teens in harlequin masks were puffing away in a cloud of marijuana smoke on the sand, an array of speakers were blasting samba in all directions, and strolling along the beach was not unlike I imagine wading through a landfill might feel.

Still, the waves rolled in and out like a pensioner struggling for every breath, clearing the filth as it did so and harboring some vague hope that, soon, things in Rio would return to normal.

‘I’ve never seen streets that have to be cleared by a JCB before,’ my mate Russ observed the next day as we made our way from the apartment over to the beach at Copacabana. The JCB (or digger as you may know it) was pulling half of a shipping container full of trash along behind it and the smell of piss and shit was clinging to my nostrils like a tiny, invisible homeless man.

We were nursing hangovers from our night in the Sambadrome, which, incidentally, was insane. If you can imagine 85,000 people screaming, drinking beer, eating terrible ‘Bob’s Burgers’ of the sort you’d usually only find in vending machines, and attempting the Mexican wave, you’ve only pictured a portion of it. The floats that made their way down the catwalk of the Sambadrome for almost seven hours straight in a constant procession by fourteen of Brazil’s samba schools came surrounded by marching bands, semi-naked dancers in heels the height of buildings and thousands of people in costumes the likes of which I’ve never seen anywhere else in my life … not even at Disney World. Your average man in a Mickey Mouse suit has nothing on Rio during Carnival. If birds had to die in the making of all these feathered headdresses, there would be no birds left on earth.

At AU$130 each for the tickets, a seat in Sambadrome is not cheap, but if you’re going to Carnival, you have to go. It’s essential, the very essence of the celebration itself. Each samba school has an hour and twenty minutes to make it down the walkway, accompanied by their own
samba-euredo
(or theme song) and this procession makes even the most riotous blocko seem tame … almost.

It was one such blocko that had made a proper mess of things outside our apartment in Copacabana. These blockos are basically moving parties that start at a designated spot and follow a live band on some sort of float, or truck, around the block. Sometimes these parties are stationary but more often than not you’re moving with the crowd, very, very slowly, squished up against pirates, or pineapples or just naked men covered in paint, creating one huge, sweaty ocean of people who can barely put one foot in front of the other. Some blockos have themes. For example, there’s a Beatles one soon, during which the band will play samba versions of all the Beatles songs and people will sweat profusely into smelly Sergeant Pepper outfits.

Generally it’s expected that you’ll dance at these things and, believe me, we’ve tried. But dancing is kind of hard when you can’t physically move. I’m not usually claustrophobic but just now, during a particularly crowded blocko, I had what I can only call a panic attack and found myself squeezing my way back here for some personal breathing space and an anti-oxidising açaí berry smoothie (a super food, don’t you know?)

While it’s totally great being here with my friends … when I can actually locate them … I can’t help but think I’m perhaps a bit too old and boring for Rio Carnival these days. It’s one big hen and stag night gone awry and there’s just no escaping it.

I’m kind of excited about joining the Dragoman tour now with Russ and making my way through the more serene regions of Brazil, and back to Cuzco. If anything, it will be good to drink something other than caipirinhas for a while. There’s another reason why Jesus watches over Rio above any other city. It’s positively sinful, I tell you.

22/02

This morning I decided I should finally get my deaf ear sorted out. It got worse again after I slept on a particularly hard pillow, and Dave and Daniele, our Dragoman truck drivers, said it would be best to get it fixed now, rather than risk going totally deaf somewhere in the Pantanal or the Amazon, where I wouldn’t be able to hear their cries of ‘tarantula!’ or ‘anaconda!’ or ‘fanged sloth!’ or whatever else lives out there in the middle of Brazil.

While everyone else in the group was out splashing in a nearby waterfall, seeking out capybaras (sort of like giant guinea pigs), and exploring a landscape forged of quartz crystal and multi-coloured sandstone in the Parque Nacional da Chapada dos Veadeiros, I took myself on foot to the local hospital here in Alto Paraíso – a town they say lies on the same energetic lines as Machu Picchu. This makes it one of the most powerful and spiritual places in South America, a fact the hippies have certainly bought into.

Numerous fake spaceships are erected on driveways and an abundance of boutique stores sell nothing but nuts, crystals and incense. Shops here have names like Doors of Perception and Serendipity and Gems of the Earth. There’s even a restaurant called Astral Sushi, although I haven’t seen it open since we arrived, so perhaps they simply operate on another plane.

Indeed, barely anything is ever open here. It reminds me of Capilla del Monte back in Argentina, where for most of the time it was just me and the stray dogs hanging out on empty streets. I’m not sure why hippy towns don’t open their shops very often, especially when they see a giant orange and white truck sporting fifteen camera-toting tourists rocking up, but perhaps they’re all just too busy clutching their crystals and discussing when the
Maestros Ascendidos
will arrive, seeing as they never made it in December. It must be a worrying time for them.

Anyway, the hospital. I wasn’t sure if it was a hospital or a Rotary club when I first walked in, as the building had both signs on the front. I managed to find the reception and held up my phone with a Portuguese Google translation on it for ‘ear plug stuck in ear, needs unblocking, please’ to a lady who looked about sixteen. She had braces on her teeth and was dressed in a neon yellow T-shirt so loud my deaf ear almost imploded. I was hoping she’d understand that it was time to get it syringed, and if the members of a Rotary club were the ones to do it, so be it. At this point, I really didn’t care.

After filling in a form, she and her colleague sent me back to my bench seat and, as I sat, I noticed a model of Jesus with his arms wide open standing on a shelf behind them. The woman in the yellow top stood up to shove a thermometer under someone’s arm right there in the waiting room, just as a dreadlocked man holding a tray of handmade earrings sauntered in and stood there looking pained. For a moment I thought he was going to try and sell me something. A bearded man beside me was told to stand on some scales so old they had one of those measuring bars at chest height with weights on it, and I noted a water cooler held together with masking tape was struggling to stand up in the corner. A guy in a purple shirt with acne sat with his head in his hands on a bench behind mine, and a chat show featuring three glossy-haired, pearly-toothed Brazilian ladies blasted from a TV on the wall above a row of dilapidated wheelchairs.

Three windows appeared to have been painted black to stop the sun streaming in and, as I sat there with one eye on Jesus and the other on the earring-seller now motioning to a wound on his leg, I hoped that the money they’d clearly saved by skimping on curtains had been spent on ear-unblocking equipment.

The woman in yellow was looking at me in bewilderment at this point. I tried to see things from her point of view. I was a freak who’d come in with no ID except an outdated driving license, no understanding of the native language, tapping into a strange gadget and miming swirling movements around my head. Of course, I was indicating how I was slowly going deaf and could barely hear the world around me, but for all she and her colleague knew I could have been claiming to have been abducted by aliens.

I realised then that quite possibly I should have had this problem addressed somewhere more touristy, like Cuzco, but back then I was too busy listening in on sobbing, hippy alien worshippers droning on about alternate dimensions in Starbucks. The irony of this does not escape me.

Eventually I was led through to a consultation room, where I spoke in English and the female doctor — a very kindly-looking, but very, very short lady who could have actually been a Hobbit — spoke in Portuguese. We both pretended to understand each other and somehow came to the conclusion that something was indeed stuck in my ear. Then she walked me through to another room and told me to sit on a bed. Before she left, I thought she indicated for me to take my top off, which I thought was a reasonable request, because no one wants to get earwax on their clothing. Luckily I was wearing my bikini top underneath, so I obliged. A few minutes later she came back in with a male doctor and shot me a look of utter disdain. I realised she hadn’t told me to remove any clothing at all — I’d simply chosen to take off my top and arrange myself on her bed. No wonder these people get upset with gringos.

The male doctor unwrapped a series of instruments and arranged them on a tray and then looked at them in confusion, which wasn’t a good sign. Then his mobile rang and they both left the room again, leaving me sitting there on the bed noting how
these
windows were painted
blue
to stop the sun coming in. I thought maybe they’d run out of black paint and couldn’t afford any more, which in turn made me wonder what ear-unblocking equipment they’d been meaning to order but hadn’t and whether that was why the guy had looked so confused and left the room.

I continued to sit there for almost forty minutes with the tray of instruments beside me. Various people wandered in and out collecting items from metal drawers and tubs and other containers but no one looked at me. Not knowing how to request a timeframe in which I was likely to be attended to, I busied myself with counting the large brushstrokes on the blue windows (there were twelve on one) and then attempted to translate a sign with a photo of what might have been a poisonous scorpion on it. I was just about to blow up a rubber glove and create a chicken head with a crest of five puffy plumes when both doctors came back in with what I assume was the missing item and proceeded to clear my ear. It took all of five minutes, after which the Hobbit lady took great delight in showing me a clump of silicone, the very one that had, of course, been stuck in there since the salt flats tour in Bolivia.

I could have hugged her as the noises from the street and the waiting room and the fridge in the corner flooded my eardrum once more, but I didn’t because she was only little and she might have fallen over. The joy of hearing is something I will never take for granted again. Oh, and she didn’t charge me a penny, either. She simply sent me off with what I assume was a warning in Portuguese, to never, ever wear ear plugs again, or at least not the teeny tiny ones of the sort she’d just sucked out of my ear with a probe she could well have borrowed from the aliens.

I decided after that to stroll into town and buy myself a rose quartz, as you do. It’s my ‘I’m not deaf anymore, hurrah!’ rose quartz and it’s now hanging around my neck to help open my heart chakra and make me feel more positive and loving. Feeling very much full of love and appreciation for my working ear and for Hobbits, and for sunshine and towns full of aliens, I also bought another açaí berry smoothie (an addiction you
will
form in Brazil, no matter where you go) from one of the only places that was open, which is when I met Ivan.

Ivan is a Brazilian–German tour guide who also welcomes travellers into his home, on the assumption that they will smoke copious amounts of weed with him and talk about crystals. He has ginger dreadlocks and perfectly even teeth. We got chatting over our smoothies, and Stef and Ladina, two other girls from my Dragoman group, turned up. After a while, he invited us all to his house because he wanted very much to show us the place in his garden where he holds campfires, with room for a hundred people to gather round. Not having anything else to do, seeing as nothing was open, we followed him and spent a good two hours oohing and aahing over everything he told and showed us, which, as well as the camp fire spot, included various gnarled branches he’d picked up from the nearby forest and given names.

‘This one is the whale,’ he said, pointing to a lump of bark he’d strung from the ceiling. It had a vague hump on its back. ‘This one’s the ballerina, and this one’s Jesus.’

Jesus, which looked to me a lot like a stick pinned across another stick, was nailed to the wall above the door and I concluded that Ivan must have a lot of time on his hands to think very deeply about a lot of things. And a lot of weed.

Before we could think about escaping, Ivan’s friend showed up — a man with the biggest dreadlocks I’ve ever seen. These ratted, matted tufts of hair were as wide as tree trunks, and it did cross my mind, as he swept me up into an inescapable hug that lasted at least five minutes and sucked me into a dark, dark vortex of BO, unwashed hair and the vague smell of incense, that if I stayed somewhere like this too long, my hair might actually start to dreadlock itself. Perhaps that’s how it happens. Or is that what the aliens are doing as they hover over this spiritual town, emitting some sort of strange frequency that only dogs and hair can hear?

Ivan and his friend decided they were going to show us some videos on YouTube of a dance and theatre group they belong to. These videos were very impressive the first time we watched them, but when they played them again and sang along with their online-selves at high volume, we started to feel a bit trapped. This feeling intensified when the computer was turned off altogether and we were treated to high-speed freestyle versions of tracks by Cypress Hill and House of Pain as we all sat cross-legged on his woven mat. These tracks helped Ivan to learn English before he learned it properly from couch surfers and Quentin Tarantino movies.

Finally we made our exit, but not before we were hugged again and kissed goodbye on the lips. I’m starting to like Alto Paraíso, especially now I can hear again, but alas, we’re going to have to move on soon. We’ve still got a long way to go before we get to Cuzco, and I guess it will be better for our hair if we go, anyway.

28/02