Sir Winston Churchill
It was starting to feel as if my trip were over. The convergence of truck routes had become steadily more noticeable. At Iguazu there had been two or three others. When we camped near Villa Velha, a national park with peculiar and mostly obscene rock formations, there were about five clustered together at one end of the large open field site. We missed them at our next camp, mainly because we missed the camp itself. Since the last time Dragoman had used it a new entrance gate had been built which was too low for the trucks to gain access. We drove on and on looking for somewhere to camp and eventually fetched up on a grassy area that ran parallel to a beach in a town that I never did get the name of. We made the best of it. After all it was a pleasant enough spot even if the main road was only twenty feet away. There was a small beach side bar there and it was Amanda's Birthday and we had a couple of bottles of champagne to polish off. It was a bit of a pity that the other trucks weren't there, the parties always went better when everyone was at them.
Paraty, our final stop before Rio de Janeiro, was a beautiful town, full of perfect old buildings. There is a church that could have been lifted from one of the Mexican towns in the Magnificent Seven. There are single story whitewashed houses and shops with bright yellow doors in blood red frames, or others decked in flags and bunting. Where there are two storey buildings all of the upper windows have gaily painted wooden balconies. It was as picturesque a place as I had seen and if it lacked the random chaos of La Boca or the pastel gaiety of San Cristobal, it made up for it in the uniformity of its prettiness. Every building combined individuality with conformity. The only other town I have ever seen that looks so deliberately designed is Portmeirion in Wales and that was deliberately designed as a single piece of architecture. Almost all the walls in Paraty were white contrasting sharply with the woodwork which was bright and shiny in a hundred different colours. I loved it.
It was there that the situation with the trucks reached its ridiculous apex. On what was actually a fairly small campsite in a fairly small town there was a collection of fifteen trucks. Besides ours there were two more from Dragoman, three each from Toucan, Exodus and Encounter Overland, a solitary representative of Kumuka and the very large military looking truck from South American Safaris that had rather unkindly been referred to as 'the Garden Shed' whenever we had run into it before. I'd met the driver back in Quito. S.A.S. was a one man and his dog outfit new to the circuit. The driver was a pleasant enough sort, cheerfully acknowledging that as this was the first time round things might be in need of a little fine tuning before they were perfect. His passengers seemed happy enough.
Yesterday we had celebrated Amanda's birthday. Today we could celebrate a whole town's birthday. Paraty was 333 years old. In the town there were decorations hung in all the streets and if those decorations looked remarkably as if they had been left over from Halloween what did that matter. If Paraty wanted to celebrate with plastic skulls, pirate masks and streamers then why shouldn't it?
In the main square, which was packed with a fifty-fifty mix of overlanders and locals, there was a huge marquee filled with balloons and people dancing. On a stage a band were pounding out a samba which was amplified around the square merging with the thunderous noise of wandering groups of drummers in the streets. The whole town was vibrating to the rhythms of the music. I walked around, pushing my way through the heaving crowd. On the main square the bars were all solidly filled. It was far too crowded to stand a reasonable chance of a comfortable drink. I bumped into Vern and Beer and a few minutes later into Danielle and we decided to head out down one of the streets that led off the square. The party atmosphere was just as strong there but the crush was a little less and we found a bar with some seats at a table outside. We had hardly begun to sip our drinks when a power cut plunged us into sudden darkness. Total darkness. The music had also ceased apart from the drumming which went on alone, needing no amplification to fill the town. As our eyes adjusted so that we could make out the shadows of people moving around In the narrow strip of sky visible between the buildings the stars were sparkling.
As abruptly as it had vanished the power came back and the music and lights were restored, more manic than ever by comparison to that brief moment of calm. Paraty was determined to celebrate until morning.
For most of the time since Alaska, Beer and I had been running the bar on the truck. This involves collecting up-front money from the passengers, buying the stock, running an honesty system on the drinks and keeping the accounts. It can at times be a thankless job. There is always someone who thinks that you have too much beer and not enough soft drinks, just as there is always someone who thinks you have too many soft drinks and not enough beer. If you buy red wine someone demands white. If you buy cheap brands someone will want expensive ones. If you buy expensive ones someone will complain that you are charging too much. As I said, a thankless task. For reasons known only to herself Gnomes had insisted on restocking, actually massively overstocking, the bar in Foz de Iguazu in spite of the limited time left and the fact that there was no money in the kitty. We had duly collected more money from everyone, promising that at the end of the leg we would sell it on to the driver for the next leg and return the surplus. As a result there was a lot of beer, wine, spirits and soft drinks on the truck. The point of this rambling aside is that we took virtually all of it with us the next morning when we had a boat trip around the islands.
I hadn't really been looking forward to the boat trip but it was a very pleasant surprise. For more than half a day we sailed from one gorgeous tropical island to another. We anchored in the crystal clear water under a cloudless sky and swam to a golden tropical beach. While we were on the boat we drank endless cocktails and at least a few of the cans of beer that we had so laboriously carried down. For the first time ever I began to get an inkling of why people found this lifestyle so attractive. Even here though we couldn't get away from the other trucks. We were sharing our boat with the other Dragoman passengers but whenever we anchored it was certain that not far away was a boat full of Toucan or EO passengers. It was a wonderfully relaxing way to spend the day, marred only by the fact that I managed to break yet another camera. This one jammed with a film half used in it, unable to wind on or wind back. When I returned to town I very reluctantly bought another. I still had Rio and the carnival ahead of me and I wanted at least a few pictures of it.
And so we came to Rio de Janeiro. It didn't matter how much I tried to think of it as a culmination or a finale, I couldn't help realising that both are synonyms for 'an end'. From here there would be no more long days on the truck, no more cooking or flapping the plates dry in the wind, no more sight-seeing. There would be only a flight out, a fourteen hour stopover at Newark Airport, and a return to England. No matter how optimistic I tried to be in a few more days it would all be over.
Perhaps that was why I didn't care for the city. I couldn't really put my finger on what I didn't like about it. Certainly it looked shabby and the walk from our Hotel to the centre went through some areas that had a bad feel about them, areas where I really wouldn't have wanted to walk alone late at night. The feel of a town though is largely determined by your frame of mind and mine was definitely downbeat. People had asked me occasionally if, after so long travelling, I were fed up of it yet, if I wouldn't be glad to be home. The truth was that I could have happily travelled on for another nine months. Nevertheless I didn't much like Rio as a place and was glad I was staying only for the Carnival.
We started our celebrations with the Red and Black Ball which was described in the guidebook as a particularly abandoned and licentious affair. This is one of the many balls that take place in the city during carnival. Everyone of us dressed up in Red and Black - the colours of the city's Flamingo football club and headed out in a fleet of mini buses to the rather distant venue. Gaining entry was a somewhat surreal affair as it was taking place in the basement conference hall of a large shopping mall. As it was rather inadequately signposted there were thousands of people in every possible variation of red and black clothing milling about more or less randomly. Once inside though I confess that I was rather disappointed, that for all its publicity as an arena of rampant eroticism it turned out in reality to be little more than a night club, albeit one decorated solely in two colours. The music was, as I had expected it to be, all samba but expecting it hadn't prepared me for how quickly I grew tired of it. Still it was a quite entertaining evening in a getting-drunk and acting-the-fool sort of a way.
I had unfortunately made something of a mess of my scheduling so that I would miss the Sambadrome which is the highlight of the carnival where the top samba schools parade their colourful costumes and elaborate floats from eight in the evening until eight next morning. While everyone else in our group would be watching that I would be on my flight home. On the other hand the I did get to watch second rank who strut their stuff along Avenida Rio Branco on Saturday night, the day before the Sambadrome and that too is an event that takes ten hours. The reason that it lasts so long becomes clear if you are watching it and didn't have the foresight to take a paperback, or maybe a camp bed, along with you. When it starts the first samba school comes along and bright and brash and colourful it is too. There are dancers ( half of whom are transvestites) in costumes that look like they came from the latest science fiction blockbuster followed by floats and more dancers all accompanied by the loud pounding rhythms from the marching samba band. This whole thing takes about fifteen minutes to pass and you gear yourself up for the next school in the parade and...
...and nothing. The first group pass and you can see the second group assembling but there is a forty five minute wait until they start their turn at the parade. It's all because it's a competition. To give the judges a fair chance at assessing them no team can start down the street until the previous one have cleared it and the slow procession along it takes one team about forty five minutes. Still when they do come its more of the same. More glitzy costumes, more floats, a naked (and definitely female) dancer covered in silver body paint and nothing else, more music and twenty more minutes of entertainment before the next long and dull gap.
So it goes, about two and a half hours of admittedly superb entertainment stretched to fill the whole night. When it occurred to me that the Sambadrome itself was likely to be similar although on a more elaborate scale. I found that I wasn't too disappointed to be missing it after all.
My final day was something of an anticlimax . I spent it sightseeing, taking the cable car to the top of Pão de Açúcar, visiting the statue of Christ and laughing at the ridiculous cone shaped New Cathedral (which looks like it just landed from another planet). All the time I had the sense that it would soon be all over, the sense of the last grains of sand in the hourglass slipping away. As I stood with the hoards of other tourists looking at the scaffolding covered Statue of Christ which is being renovated at the moment. It occurred to me that this was the final mirroring of the trip. I had started at the Statue of Liberty and finished here. Beginning and ending with what are possibly the two most famous statues in the world. It was an appropriate ending and it felt like an ending, a full stop on the final day of my trip. From there I would return to the hotel, collect my bags and depart for the airport. Although the carnival had been fun in its way it hadn't turned out to be the grand finale that I'd hoped for when I planned the trip so long ago. I returned to my patiently waiting taxi driver and asked to be taken back to my hotel.
