Travelin Monkey

Our trip down Brasil COULD have been non-complicated, except for the random 6 cop cars that stopped us in the middle of a dirt road down some stretch of highway running through the crops. My dad and Adolfo told me that this is how it was during the military days of the ’70s. You would just be driving somewhere, anywhere… obviously they don’t have paved streets or lights in many places, and then BAM, a group of cops would stop you. They would rob you stupid, beat the hell out of you, and you’d be lucky to make it out alive.

The guy thought my iPod was some sort of bomb device. Thank God we made it out of there alright. We crossed over to Uruguay and hit the hot springs (aguas termicas). The bungalows are pretty decent, and this place would be somewhere I woudl return, if it weren’t infested with June Bugs. Everywhere you freakin walk they are SLAMMING into your body. Every single lamp has them SWARMING around, and when we sit at a bar, we hear them slamming against the metal walls.

The nastiest part is that, because they are everywhere, they die and end up on the floor. CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH. That is all I hear when I walk. NASTY.

We found a pool that they had just empited and were refilling it with the natural stream of water, so we climbed into the pool and used it as a massage. The old men are funny HAHA, I hope to not have to be old and in pain like them!

We left to Paysandu in the morning to go wine tasting and check out the beer factory. Turns out that the beer factory closed months ago. The town seemed strange, like something from a movie. It looked like there SHOULD have been life, but once that beer factory left, so did any desire to live?

Wine tasting was funny. This isn’t Napa, not even Sonoma. People here don’t go ‘wine tasting.’ We had a personal tour by the owner of the vineyard and even got to taste wine STRAIGHT OUT OF THE BARREL with pippettes. YAY!

We are driving straight back home right now. I need to get back in time for my baptism and then the baptism of my God son…

Ok! FINALLY! This place is a strange park. They have a tram that goes around the park, but this ain’t Disneyland. The ants here are about 1 inch in length. It almost seems like Jurassic Park. The bridges to cross to the waterfalls are intense. I swear you feel like you are going to fall in!!

The long stretch of waterfalls is pretty damn amazing, but NOTHING compares to the Devil’s Throat. Talk about FREAKIN AWESOME!!!

We ended up taking a catamaran ride UNDER the falls. I wish I had a waterproof camera.

Tomorrow we start our trek back home. We are going to drive through Brasil and then hit the hot springs of Uruguay, and maybe go wine tasting in Paysandu.

Another 10 hours later, we stopped at some random place that looked like they might have food to feed us. This place, thank God, was better than the last. A tropical storm has started. The guys here are telling us that there has been a drought for the last 5 months, so the falls might not be worth it. We’ll see.

We finally found the place. The Argentinean side has some sort of park they have built to walk around, but the Brasilian side has all the activities, helicopter rides and things like that. We crossed the border and found some random hotel that was well priced. We left to go eat at a churrasqueria brasileira, which was REALLY REALLY good.

The old men thought they might be able to get some middle eastern food because they saw a place with arabic writing. It turns out to be a place full of women and their children. We didn’t ask and quickly left

All the things in the Brasilian side are closed because of the wind, so tomorrow we hit the Argentinean side.

After leaving Floripa, I got to Montevideo and spent Easter with my family down there. Poppa was coming to Argentina and I was going to meet up with him to take a massive road trip with a family friend that lives in Buenos Aires up the coast of Argentina to the Iguasu waterfalls, then back down through Brasil through most of Uruguay.

We took off from Buenos Aires and made our first pit stop on the worst place on earth. The place was INFESTED with flies. There were so many flies everywhere, like a black haze whereever we walked. We ordered some asado, and it was a fight for our food. Get there before the damn flies did. They ended up taking over at the end and even managed to get into our bottles of soda.

I, unfortunately, had to use the bathroom. Yep, a hole in the floor. And I had to drop a deuce It was a fight to not fall in (I have no experience with this squat phenomenon) and then a fight to see who got to clean me first, the toilet paper or the flies! When we decided to part ways with the most fantastic place I have ever visited, we couldn’t find the car. It was white when we got in, but black when we came out… flies… flies everywhere!

Our next stop on the road trip was Federacion, the natural? hot springs of Argentina. This was a neat stop, I had a lot of fun relaxing there.

We ended up in some random town, finding a hotel. I guess the pope passed, it is all over the news. We stopped to eat an asado somewhere, but it was strange. There were 3 dogs barking all night long, and yet, when our food was served, there was silence. The meat was tough as hell, like chewing bubble gum.

Tomorrow we take off further north.