unorgeenized

Ta Jean, you just blew my cover.
Forgot to mention, who turns up at the check-in at the airport and gets asked, "can I see your visa to enter Brazil"? what visa?? "the visa that all australian passport holders need to obtain from the Brazilian consulate in town..." Doooh. So will my EU passport work... woohoo! pasa senorita. Reminds me of all the shots and malaria pills I have ignored to take so far. Anyways.

The T-shirt says, "Sao Paulo ruined my life", apparently there´s too big a party scene here. There´s shopping here till you drop, anI i have, and there´s more fresh juice here than you can take - 2 jugs a day is aIl i can manage, consideriIg i´m on the streets and sooner than later it has to come out. The place is close to dirt cheap in terms of good food and drink. But the grog took its toll Ind i´m a bit snotty now. Also met a shimmering exploding free-spirited Israeli woman who can bargain the pants off even my dad.. he´d be guttered if he knew. She also tried to suggest that i´m looking for love in all the wrong places... cliché sure, but made me think of coming back home afterall. I spent most of my time here with her and the 68 year-old Lebanese woman from sydney - the 3 of us just about cried when we split. We went to the Japanese precinct - yummy food, the Arab precinct - yummy food too, and i also went to the museum when it was closed.

So i end up at the bus station and ask for a ticket that arrives somewhere south of here the next morning. Hense i´m on the little island of Florianopolis now. But it´s autumn, not that cold of course, but cloudy and everything´s closed cos the summer season´s over and the streets are empty. At least i shacked up with the NorwegiaI and Sweed i met at the bus terminal and i´ve been teaching them Janif (card game) and we´ve been playing Weed (another card game)too.

Think i´ll be on my way to Uruguay soon. I´ll be back to enjoy Brazil more on my way back to SP. And Tas, I´m on the wrong continent to buy a digital camera... why didn´t i listen!

Welcome to Brazil..

Land of the most beautiful bums in the world - no matter the size.

Suprisingly, leaving Chile was not only a last minute dash to pack my stuff, but a bit painful. As i got onto my minibus and started off to the airport, the last sight of Santiago city, which i finally familiarised myself with, got me all choked up and i burst into tears, continuing uncontrolably in front of the poor ol passenger in front of me for the rest of the ride. Goodbye Santiago...

and here comes bloody huge Sao Paulo! despite that, there´s no need to rush - everyone´s going at my slow holidaying pace. I´m eating well and just now getting orientated around the centre here. Not that unsafe when using a bit of sense, and after speaking to a few people who´ve been up the coast or have moved here, i could stay here much longer than i´d anticipated.

By the way, drunks are the same the world over. They laugh a lot, talk incomprehensively, raise their voice if they jerry that you´re ignoring them and pout when they inevitably try to kiss you... am i right?

on my way.

So i goes into the office of Varig brazilian airlines, since there was absolutely no one answering the their phones, and my authorised travel consultant tells me there´s heaps of flights out of Santiago. So i watches her type furiously for a good half hour on the hi-tech computer-booking system to move my flight. Done.
Haven´t packed my bags but anyway, 22 march - in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Then i think i´ll take another holiday.
Oh, and thanks wife for the sex-ed tip.

Here I go again..

Hi all,
Since I´m no good at regular email, here´s my account of most of what´s happening. Of course after I left home and 35 hrs later on transporting, I made it to Canada for 3 weeks and then to the northeast of the states before I got to Chile.
In brief, taught here in Santiago for the semester, more or less stopped working mid Jan and went off for 5 weeks to see some of the south of Chile, shot off to this side of Argentina and then again to Chile before coming back to Santiago. I´ve been bumming around here for 10 days just cos I´m too slack to plan the rest of my holidays...

The south was really pretty, I climbed a volcano, saw a bit of spitting lava before I chocked from the fumes, went to bubbling hot springs under a starry sky at 2 in the morning, walked in the forests - but all this when I had friends. Once your on your own and off the gringo-trail in a place like this you might as well start knitting. So I streched 2 weeks in bloody-expensive-Chile and then tried to get the first bus to Bariloche, Argentina. Course I had to wait 5 days for a bus, cos I´m a last minute gal and everything was booked out. So I inadvertently had to hang around Puerto Varas for the next bus, a lake side town with a view of 2 active volcanoes from its banks. Pretty and pricy again so I hung out with the street jewellery vendors, some of who were Mapuche (southern indigenous folk, who were actually the last peoples to be subjugated to Spanish Imperial rule in south America) and generally from other parts of Chile. With them I practiced my Spanish, told me I had "buena onda", that I was cool basically, and we sat on the banks of the lake at night, playing a little guitar, smoking and drinking the cheapest red wine you could find from the only 2 plastic cups available. As eager as I was to get outta Chile, things were just starting to make sense. These were the people I needed to be with all along.

Bariloche had the vibe I was hungry for so spent 10 days on the piss, oh but I did hike up Cerro López - 4 hours to get up there to see endless mountain ranges, lakes, snow and to be above the clouds, and then spent maybe 1 hours stumbling down on my city-chic sports shoes. Once people in the hostel I was staying thought I worked there, I decided I knew too much about where to get the best chocolate and ice-cream and it was time to think of somewhere else to go. I kind of dragged myself away cos I did meet some very interesting people, but I was just being a slackass.

So I went to El Bolson, hippy capital of Argentina probably, where the mountains and earth there have very high levels of spiritual energy.. Well there I found out that the superduper hiking shoes I just bought were painfully too small and walking to my hostel 4 kms out of town got a bit tiring. That´s when I decided to visit my santiagian mate who was across the boarder, but of course it would take me 4 days to get there, booking a bus and all. On the way I had to stay in San Martin de Los Andes which I fell in love with. The ride there on a minibus was supposed to take 4 hrs, but it took 7, but I wasn´t so disappointed. Those last 3 hours we started on an unsealed road with virtually no traffic, rain and no suspension on our mini. But as it happened I was going through one of Argentina´s biggest attractions - the seven lake region, sprinkled with hills, mountains, cliffs, cascading flora, and lucky for the rain it kept the road dust down on the ground and the clouds once again below me.

Now I have to make some hard decisions - where to blow the rest of my savings. But I´m also keen on checking out the job market in Buenos Aires, sounds like a saucy place.

So here goes nothing...