In Summary

I thought for a while about how to end this blog with something profound or revelatory, accompanied with panpipes. I then realised that it would almost certainly come out sounding cringy and fatuous. So in the best traditions of GCSE essay writing I have decided to summarise the entire year in five paragraphs and let you draw your own conclusions.

We have been away for 335 days in total. We spent 521 hours on buses of varying sizes and quality, and every journey was an hour longer than it was meant to be. We have travelled a total of 15, 500 miles by bus through eight countries. We spent the night in 51 different cities, of which seven were capitals. We have 25 new stamps in our passports. I have 103 new friends on Facebook. I have drunk 32 new kinds of beer and approximately the same number of red wines. I recommend the 2007 Malbec. I have experienced several Top Ten hangovers but only vomited once (Panamanian Rum in Ecuador).

I have eaten llama and alpaca, raw fish ceviche, chicken foot soup and barbecued cows intestines. I have had to stop the bus in the middle of a Bolivian town at 3am and leave a cowpat in the middle of the road. We have been nearly mugged on three occasions, twice on the same day, never successfully. I have lost 15lbs, four pairs of sunglasses, a cardigan, two hairbands and a pair of flipflops. I have successfully disintegrated countless numbers of socks. I have darned my pants back together an average of once a week for the last three months. I can remember 5 words in Quechua and none of them is 'beer'. My bra is held together with patches cannibalised from an old sock. My backpack smells like an animal's nest. I have acquired one fiancé, two engagement rings and an excellent set of religious fridge magnets. Chris and I have had two arguments. We agreed last night that the score was 1-1.

I have watched the most boring game of football ever played at the Bombanera in Buenos Aires. I have watched Arsenal on ESPN more than any Fulham fan should have to. I have played 780 hands of gin rummy and won about 50% although I am currently on a four day losing streak. I have been bitten by a toucan, a monkey, a llama and approximately forty thousand mosquitoes. This, incidentally, is the same number of times I have watched the film Stepbrothers.

I have been to eight places which claim to be one of the (new) Seven Wonders of the World. I have swum in three rivers, washed my hair in a waterfall, and paddled in two oceans. To my knowledge I have not picked up a parasite or been eaten by a shark. I have been craving chicken kievs since March. I know who to make pebre (but not how to spell it) and a poultice for snakebite using jungle plants. I have reached an altitude of 5003m and a latitude of 54 degrees south. I have not balanced an egg on the Equator but I can spot the upside down llama in the Milky Way. The Animatronic Resurrection at Tierra Santa is two thirds of the size of the Cristo Redentor in Rio de Janeiro. I have found money in the street in all eight countries- the best return being five bolivianos which I spent on a Toblerone.

I have also written 46 blog posts from South America and you have now reached the end of them. I have had a rather great year. I hope you have too. Thanks for reading xx

Her Name is Rio...

Take a deep breath folks, we are almost at the end of this meandering tale. Our next stop was the Marvellous City itself, Rio de Janeiro. The slight problem being the 24 hour bus ride in between. Since we are now seasoned professionals in the art of long distance bus travel we made some pizza to eat (cold) and downloaded a weeks worth of podcasts to while away the time between the onboard refreshment service and the excellent range of inflight movies.

Tiny hitch: no films. This is an unbelievable oversight in a journey of this magnitude. In Argentina we would have been quickly sedated with an continuous drip of poorly scripted action movies and thus stupefied for travel, like when you have to fly a panda to Edinburgh. I am pretty sure they show films to cows on trucks going to the abbatoir. But not for us. Fortunately the view was monotonous, the air conditioning was temperamental, the seats were too small and no one gave us any biscuits so when the bus turned up four hours late (28 hour journey!) in Rio and we eventually reached the hostel we had booked to be told that we hadnt booked it, I was as you may gather a trifle upset. Fortunately Chris managed to defuse the situation by promising me a beer if I didnt explode. So I didnt explode, although it was a close call.

Rio did not improve upon waking up the next morning. I dont know who runs the marketing campaigns for the city, but I would simultaneously like to shake him by the hand and the scruff of the neck. Any brand managers, sleazy politicians or genocidal dictators reading this: find this guy (it will be a guy) and sign him up at once. This guy is really good. How do I know? Because I have now been to the Marvellous City and I tell you this for free- it blows.

Now I know what you are thinking: she´s tired and a bit homesick, she´s angsty because she cant speak Portugese, she just got off a movie-less 28 hour bus ride, she clearly didnt stop at one beer and has a thumping great hangover thats playing havoc with her judgement- and some of that might be true. I am even prepared to admit that other people may find some charm in Rio that has hitherto passed me by; people with no interest in aesthetically pleasing cities, who dont mind that everything is covered in shit, who are happy to wander around with a permanent unease of being mugged under a lowering grey sky in oppressively humid temperatures. I grant you that some people- lunatics, perhaps, or recently escaped convicts, may be happy to discover that the hostels are charmless and devoid of soul, the people are unfriendly, and everything is heartbreakingly expensive. Some people may not want to hunt down the person who wrote ´Girl from Ipanema´, shakes him until his teeth rattles and shout ´Look at this beach! No one is tall OR tan OR anything even approximating lovely!´ And these people, whoever they may be, can keep Rio. But they will not be getting any Christmas cards from me.

Perhaps I have been a trifle unfair. The beaches are quite nice in themselves. I saw a couple of nice arses and my inner lesbian is prepared to concede a couple of decent pairs but hardly enough to justify all the fuss, I thought. I cross referenced these findings with Chris who confirmed that I was definitely right although obviously he hadnt seen any breasts anywhere at all. The one plus for Rio was that we discovered a new street snack made of chicken and something unknown, in a ball shape. So we named it ´ball´ and enjoyed an afternoon of childish humour about chewing balls. It is the sort of place that puts you in that mood.

So we gave up and went down the coast to Paraty- cobbled streets, lovely beaches, peace and quiet, excellent caipirinhas and all you can eat barbecue. The sun came out, we swam in the sea. Everything was perfect except that all the sand in the ocean ended up somehow in the lining of my swimsuit, and coagulated into a giant mass. It was like growing a pair of street snacks, or turning into one of those baboons with the pink bottoms. However, changing gender and species is a small price to pay for not spending the whole week in Rio.

Wet and Wild

And so to the Itaipu Binational Dam. I had heard a lot of facts about this, and learnt even more which I am happy to regurgitate for you here to save you having to look it up. The dam, shared by Brazil and Paraguay, contains enough steel to build 380 Eiffel Towers, a reservoir that is 120km long, and twenty turbines- ten owned by each country. The Paraguayans generate 90% of their country´s entire energy requirements using two turbines and sell the rest to Brazil- the resulting output of 18 turbines generates around 20% of Brazil´s energy requirements. Quite a disparity in the number of lightbulbs each country uses there. The dam cost US$20 billion and about 150 people died building it. And they keep fish out of the turbines using nets (I asked). The dam also destroyed a number of indigenous settlements and drowned a set of waterfalls called Siete Quedas which were apparently as impressive as Iguazu. I was quite impressed with the dam itself, so this latter fact didnt really hit home, and I was pretty well convinced by the statistics and the lovely renewable hydroelectrics after a short propaganda film. They built a zoo, you see, and give money to charity to make up for uprooting parrots and families, and they did have a lovely airconditioned complex and showed you round for free. My loyalty to environmental issues is easily bought off, it seems.

That is until we reached Iguazu itself a few days later. I had seen plenty of photos before but it really was astoundingly beautiful. Fortunately we arrived early and there were comparitively few people around, so we got some gorgeous views of the rivers thundering over the falls and the mist rising above the trees. Iguazu National Park (Argentine side) is very well done, with a dinky little train to convey you around the different waterfalls and some lovely walkways to get you right up close. They are awfully good at these walkways in Argentina- they had them at Perito Moreno as well- and have managed to blend them into the landscape so that they dont intrude on your pictures, even when they are coverd with fat-bottomed Americans determined to stretch Lycra to the very limits of its capacity and beyond. We wandered around in a sort of awestruck silence for quite a long time, examining the falls from all different angles including right up close into the spray. The park is full of butterflies that land on you (to eat your sweat, romantically. We learnt that in the jungle where the butterflies went crazy for my socks.) There are also all sorts of lizards that pose for photographs and startle you when you walk round a corner.

We shared lunch unwillingly with a coati. This is a sort of poodle-sized raccoon type thingy that hangs around the bins and eating areas. There are big signs telling you not to feed them, and also that they will bite you and steal your food, but Chris didnt believe this negative press and was therefore the only person who was surprised when a coati jumped on the table and made off with our baguette. He (the coati, not Chris) proceeded to retire under a bush within plain view of the two of us, mockingly unwrapped the clingfilm and polished it off. Another big sign nearby said that salami sandwiches would probably kill coatis, but as with most public health and dietary advice in the world these days, the coati chose to ignore it. I hope that sandwich goes straight to its hips.

As if all this Edenic splendour were not enough- a speed boat ride right under the Falls! We had been warned by previous visitors that you got a bit wet, although this turned out to be a slight understatement. It turns out that there is an awful lot of water coming over those waterfalls so when we got within twenty feet the soaking was total. Being such a hot day it was actually quite refreshing although having soaked our pants too it did dry into some very fetching ´look at my crotch´ type patterns.

And now some tragic news. The dousing in the Rio Iguazu did result in one casualty. It is my sad duty to report that my walking boots, yea verily the same walking boots that climbed Cotopaxi (twice, once with my friend Kya in them), traversed the salt flats of Uyuni, scaled the heights of Machu Picchu and pounded the streets of Buenos Aires, even those same walking boots that reached the end of the world in Ushuaia, finally gave up the ghost. By this I mean that the nauseating aroma of rotting feet that had gassed out dormitories in six countries and driven Chris to the very brink of nasal amputation, was so overwhelmingly enhanced by their dip into the churning waters of Iguazu that even I could not ignore their scent for any longer. Birds were falling out of the sky as I passed beneath them. Flowers withered where my feet passed. Reckoning that the Brazilian border police would assume that they were being subjected to some sort of biological attack if I tried to wear them over the frontier, I decided the time had come. My original idea had been to tie them together and throw them into the Falls, until someone pointed out that this might spark a Missing Persons search. So, in a rather ignominious end, I hid them behind the bins in the hostel. This seemed on reflection to have been a poor parting gift to Argentina, a country that has amused and delighted us for nearly three months, until it occured to me that if they took the boots on a pole and pointed them in the direction of the Falkland Islands, the British could be defeated without a shot being fired. I wonder if this is how Oppenheimer felt.