Buenos Aires to Brazil

I got to Buenos Aires on a night bus from Cordoba and made straight for the airport. i wasn´t in much shape to make smalltalk with my Uruguayan taxi driver, and the conversation stalled fatally on the topic of Argentine prostitutes, partly due to language difficulties and partly due to my ignorance of a subject which interested the Uruguayan greatly.

I´ve waited for Neasa in a couple of international airports this year, and have enjoyed passing the time watching the other people waiting. Something of a nations character can be seen in the way returning loved ones are met at the airport. The Danes bring their national pride with them, greeting passengers with a flurry of flag waving (the newsagent in the airport sells flags in case you forgot yours, and also stocks flags of other selected nations in a nod to multiculturalism). Argentine arrivals is a different story. Here it´s all raw emotion: the recently landed are hugged and kissed vigorously (men kissing each other freely on the cheeks), tears are shed, and children are frightened by being man-handled by relatives they don´t recognise.

We spent a very pleasant 6 days in Buenos Aires (I´ll come back to that), and have covered some serious territory in the week since. Having travelled more or less south since I left Dublin, I took my first turn north towards the Iguazu falls, where Argentina meets Brazil and Paraguay looks on. We spent one night in the town and an afternoon and morning at the falls, then over the border for the night bus to Sao Paulo, another 16 hours (and not nearly as nice as the Argentine bus, which made the journey surprisingly easy). The land borders I´d crossed up to then had been unremarkable affairs, generally little more than a small building in the middle of barren wasteland. The Argentina-Brazil frontier is a cracker: a short drive along a bridge spanning a river (the natural border) overlooked by forested slopes and then a sign saying "Bemvenidos a Brasil". Yeah!

Sao Paulo was just a stop-off on the way to the seaside, but luckily it coincided with Lynam and Kelly´s passing through in the other direction, so we met up for our dinner, a strange concert by a very eccentric 70 year old Brazilian folk music hero, and beers in a little gay bar in the red light district (Lynam´s idea, and a good one at that). The following day we left for Paraty, where we stayed for three nights, and now we´re in Ilha Grande where we´re staying put for a while to let our brains catch up with us as we lie on the beach. I´m sitting in an internet place sweating so much that I look like I´ve recently done something I really shouldn´t have done, so I´ll fill in some of the blanks some other time and go next door for a Caiprinha with Neasa.