20th Feb – Me No Hablo Portuguese

Yesterday was our first rest day. It was an AWESOME rest day. I got to sleep in a bit, have a lazy slow breakfast. We all then piled onto a coach mid-morning and did our tour of the Iguacu Falls. After a short tour guide information speech we had a short walk through the tropical forests and queued up like an exemplary British man for our town to get on a RIB boat for a boat trip under the falls. I don’t really know how to describe it other than the pictures I took. We actually drove underneath the falls and even the people that spent 8 Reals (4dollars) on a glad-wrap poncho got more wet than if they fell into a pool. The interesting part was on the way back to the mooring from the falls, one of the engines on the twin 250 honda boat had some horrible clunks and then died….. with no desire to work again. So we plodded back, like a broken down vintage rally car…. awwwwkkwwwaaarrddd.

What else can you do at Iguacu Falls which is worth it you ask? Well, you can do the helicopter fly over it! Why yes thankyou, I think I will!
WORTH EVERY CENT. Even though it was 10 dollars a minute and the flight lasted 12 minutes. It was so cool, you seriously got some perspective of the amount of water flowing over it, and the river system that feeds it.

Unfortunately I don’t have any interesting stories from todays drive that could even begin to match the Cow Incident of the other day. It was just a transit day. For some reason the road we were driving on was scheduled to close at 9:30am and that was 300k’s into

our route so we turned Penny’s heart on and drove out at 4:50 this morning to avoid a huge detour. A policeman stopped us just at sunrise on the road and started saying something in Portuguese, we said something like “me no hablo Portuguese” or something butchered from a Spanish/Portuguese mix, but all was well and he merely waved us on. I didn’t think he saw me undertake a truck a few kilometers back on a hard shoulder 🙂

More large scale farming through rural Brazil today. LArge scale as llaaaarrrgggeeee scale, huge acreage for sugar cane, and this other plant thing dad called cassava? A primary source of making ethanol in the 90’s? I don’t know…. Every now and then you would see a huge processing factory or drying sheds for all the crops, or even a meat works for the cattle. If you are lucky the giant doors would be open and you would snap a peak at hundreds of cow hides hanging up on hooks like clothes on a line. Ready to be made into shoes, or bags, or something cool like a wallet. 😛

Until tomorrow

James

P.S. Still placing first in class and three way tied for first overall! Huzzah!!! =D