The first Brazilian town I went to was Porto Alegre. When I arrived at the bus station I was excited to hear people speaking another language. I walked into the center of town from the bus station and was disgusted by the rotten smell of the discarded food from the market, and felt like I was back in the third world because of the less fancy dress the Brazilians had, and a little disconcerted by all the fat people. After I got my money I went for a walk up to the cathedral and central plaza, which was up the hill from the river where I could see the huge city stretching over rolling hills. I stopped in a cafe and was working on my book when a 19 year old waiter who knew English excitedly approached me and started rattling off all of the American musicians he knew. He said Brazilians like rap.

Then I went to Florianopolis, which is supposed to be the best beach-surf town of Brazil. As I was approaching it I could tell it was very well developed. The city was straddled between the mainland and an island. I saw lots of prostitutes calling me as I walked down the alley to my hotel. There was one older prostitute standing in front of the hotel I wanted to go to who grabbed me and tried to pull me up inside and I said "Is this a normal hotel, I want a normal hotel". She said "No", so I started to walk away, but another prostitute told me that it was a normal hotel, so I stayed there. I didn't go to the beach there.

Curitiba was the next town I went to, It didn't have skyscrapers but it went on forever like Porto Alegre and Florianapolis which got me thinking about how huge the cities in Brazil were compared to those of the other countries in South America. In the other countries, you enter the city and not too long after that you are at the bus station, which is usually within walking distance from the hotel. But in Brazil the bus stations are in a different part of the town so you have to get on the bus and find the hotel district which is like a half hours bus ride away. Curitiba had a nice pedestrian mall and a lot of white people. It seemed the most like a developed country of all the places I went to in Brazil.

Sao Paolo

The bus station in Sao Paolo was the biggest I have ever seen and was connected to the subway which was like three levels up. I took it straight to the central plaza, but it seemed abandoned by all the business and was kind of a wasteland for the wasteoids. There was, however, a preacher fuming to a small crowd about Jesus. So after about two minutes I was board and even felt a bit unsafe even though it was broad daylight, so I consulted my lonely planet map and made way for the cheap hotel district to one of the two hotels that weren't whore houses. Luckily for me, the roads I chose were the main pedestrian mall, but you wouldn't have noticed it if it wasn't for the fact that it was narrow and cobble stoned and careless, because there were NO business open and only about 3 people per block were walking on it. After a couple of blocks the street widened and descended down into a crossroads with a perpendicular mall, which Santiago and Buenos Ares have also. As I was descending a Chilean man and his wife approached me and said he had lived there for like ten years and warned me that I should be careful of all the muggers and that not even Brazilians dare to walk around those parts. When I got to the central fountain I took a picture of the other pedestrian mall, which was ear lily wide and empty. I continued a few paces on and was approached by an older white man who told me that this wasn't the best part of town, that an other avenue, of the heroes, where the biggest skyscrapers were, was actually the real center of town. And that is where I would find b beautiful white Brazilian women and not this black garbage. When he said this he acted like I gave him a look like he was racist, which I didn't, and bid me a good day and strode off.

A few steps later I walked past a young black man sitting against a building wailing with half his hand inside a huge gaping hole in his stomach with blood gushing out and a cop and his friend casually approaching him. I called my friends again, but there was no answer, so I walked a couple more blocks and found my hotel. After I put contacts in for the first time in a year and a half I went out for dinner. After I ate I was heading b back home and was hoping to come across a bar of disco where I could hear some music.

I walked past a glittery place where there was a cute young chunky Indian looking girl standing outside and started talking to me and told me that was a strip club and there was good music. So I thought, wow, I have never been to a strip joint before. Naked girls, yea lets go. So I went in with her and we started talking and she asked me if I wanted a beer and gave me a little score card and said I could keep track of the drinks and pay when I left. But when she got up to get a beer she got into a yelling match with the bar tender and I was thinking, yea more good 'ol South American confusion. Then she left and came back with a mini skirt and I thought Dam, this girl isn't as hot as I thought, she has a belly. Then she started lap dancing on me which didn't turn me on at all, but I was excited because a girl has never done that before to little 'ol me. Then really good American rock music and disco music came on and some of the hottest girls I have ever seen before came out and did a sexy dance routine slowly took all of their cloths off. And then after a few super hot girls came on stage the girl who was sitting next to me drinking my beer got on stage and almost immediately took all her cloths off and was rolling spread legged all over the stage and winking at me and I was thinking "Oh nasty, go away", not that I have a problem with girls with bellies, its just that this girl was too overtly sexual to be sexy. Then she ran out to the crowd and started lap dancing on all the guys, giving special attention to me. When she left nobody clapped but she didn't seem to care. I ran out of money but I was having a good time so I went home and got more money. When I came back I sat at the same place I was before which was next to that girl. She had a leg slung over another guy and put another leg over me as if to say "look at me, I have two guys". I looked at the other guy and he looked at me and mimicked with his hands that he didn't want this girl and she was all mine if I wanted. And I said I didn't either. I had some more beers. and then I noticed want this girl and she was all mine if I wanted. And I said I didn't either. I had some more beers. And then I noticed that the guy was gone and I was enjoying the show, which that girl didn't like so she was lap dancing on me furiously trying to take my attention away from the dancing girls and getting in my way so I couldn't see, so I moved my head and she shifted to block me so I moved to the other side and she blocked me, al the time lap dancing on me in frustration. But she didn't bother me because the show was so good with naked dancing girls and good American dance music, the town going really well together. Then one of the hot dancers sat down so I told this girl who was on top of me that the other girl was hotter and I wanted to hang out with her so I went over and told her she was the hottest in the club. So she said "Why?" and I said because she has a nice body and her glasses and short straight blond hair made her look sophisticated and smart like a secretary. So she said, "I don't thing I'm smart," and she got up and moved us farther away to another part of the club, and she asked me to buy her a beer, but I told her I didn't have any money left so she promptly left like the ho she was, and the original girl came back. She was sitting next to me and somewhere along the line I went back to my hotel for more money and came back and was drinking with the two girls. At this point I was really drunk and started telling the young black girl that she was the hottest girl in the place and that I was going to go back there to work in Sao Paolo and marry her when I am done traveling through Brazil and unlike the other girl who just rolled her eyes and said I was just saying that, she was leaning over me and loving every minute of it and was all over me. The chunky girl was listening to every word of it and must have been burning up with jealousy because when the dancers stopped coming out and the place was closing up she got in my face and with furious eyes, barked at me that I owed 30 more dollars which sounded like way too much to me, but I wasn't counting and was way too drunk to argue in any language, much less Portuguese, so I said I only had 20 bucks so the bouncer came up to me and was angry too, and said he was going with me to my hotel to collect the money, so I said "yeah, whatever, just weight because that young black girl is coming with me". And when she came out and we left, the bouncer was just glaring at me when I walked off, so he must have forgotten, or decided he wasn't going to try to rip me off. I had a bad hangover the next morning but I wanted to leave early so I could put that wild night into my past ass quickly as possible. So I started packing at like nine and after I said buy to the cute young black girl I didn't want to spend anymore time in Sao Paulo so I decided to go straight to Rio, but I wanted to see the main skyscraper avenue of the heroes first so I went there. But it wasn't very interesting, the buildings weren't as high as I expected them to be, so I went back to the bus station and got a bus. I fell asleep almost immediately and didn't wake up until i got to Rio.

Rio de Janiero

I was really excited to get to Rio ever since I saw the movie 'Blame it on Rio' which made it seem like a light hearted tropical paradise. When the bus stopped I immediately and didn't wake up until I got to Rio. When the bus stopped I immediately knew I was in Rio because of the jungle cliffs all around, and I became very excited because I have always wanted to go to Rio, and had the preconceived notion that Rio was the ultimate party town, which I later discovered to be true, provided that you have tons of money. But I also discovered it was the craziest most violent place I have ever been. When I stepped off the bus an outgoing guy approached me and offered me advice on where I was, but the couldn't find the bus station on my map and then said I should stay at his friends hotel which was just across the street, so I followed him just to look at the hotel, but what he meant was his car which wasn't a taxi was across the street and he was going to take me to his friends hotel, which I didn't like so he showed me his drivers license as if that was supposed to prove to me he was cool and he said "see, he'll say I'm cool and pointed to a cop who was walling buy, but the cop threw up his hands and said "I'm not vouching for that guy", so I told him I just wanted to know what part of the city I was in. So he insisted I get in his car about 5 more times and I said no, so he blew up with fury and told me I had a bad heart and wasted his time and yelled at me on his way across the street. Then I asked a cap driver where I was and he was able to show me so I took a bus to the cheapest place in the book. I checked in and then went to the front desk to drop off my key and noticed a tourist was asking the guy where the police station was, so I asked him what happened, he said he met some Brazilian guys who went back to his room with him and slipped something in his drink, and when he woke up his passport and money were gone. Then I walked out to see the town.

I walked a few blocks down the road and noticed a white guy holding a book I read in college so I started talking to him. And it turned out he went to my grade school and junior high and was a friend of my brothers. So I went to an outdoor bar with him and his Italian buddy. And we were talking to a Brazilian ex-cop and ex-pat Argentinean guy. The Brazilian was totally amped and was ranting on out how the American government sucks, but that the Brazilian government sucks also and was streaming at his friend which looked like a fight but turned out to be just a partying. Then the Argentinean invited us to a jazz place, which was an open night with different bands coming on every 20 minutes that were really good. When it ended Patrick and I decided we wanted some weed so I asked a guy and he turned out to be one of the guitarists and could speak English, and he gave me his number and told me to call him later. The next couple of days I explored Rio. There is a tram that goes up to the top of Corcovado mountain at nearly 800 meters, this is otherwise known as the Christ Redeemer statue. I only know from pictures that this mountain has the most beautiful view of a city in the world, because it suddenly clouded up only long enough for my visit so much that I couldn't even see his face 30 meters up. I did catch glimpses of the downtown area and the Botafogo section which was literally right below me at the bottom of a sheer cliff. The I went up the other beautiful view on top of the sugarloaf rock which is 300 meters up. From here I really got the feel of how this city is truly unique because of the fact that it is a giant mass of huge buildings sprawled over and upon jungle cliffs between steep mountains and beautiful beaches. If there wasn't any city there now no one would even think about putting a huge city there. But I guess over time the circumstances allowed for this intense landscape, allowing it to be workable with tunnels drilled through the granite and bridges arching their way over the mounds and concrete walls to catch the loose rocks that tumble down the near sheer faces from time to time.

After a couple days I finally made the 15 minute subway ride from the center to the famous Copacabana beach, 4.5 kilometers of one of the most crowded beaches I have ever seen. The most striking part of this beach weren't the women like my friend was going on about a couple night beforehand, but the men. Every few meters there was an outdoor workout center filled with serious looking super buff dude, more that I have every seen, which suddenly made me reel really little. I came across a couple of young girls with a massage chair so I started talking to them about massage. It was right before their lunch break so they invited me to eat with them. One of the girls was black and had naturally green eyes and blond hair which was a first for me. I mentioned to them about all the buff guys and they said "Well, they're not nice, they think they're better than everybody else". after we went back to their table they offered to do a trade the next day. When I came back the next day I gave one of the girls a massage and the other one game me a massage, which incidentally was the third time I have trades massages like that on this trip. A couple days later I sent back to that beach at night to see what that was like, and it was very busy. I was sitting at an outdoor table watching the people and a guy sitting at the next table watched me over. He could speak English and was a young guy and was sitting with one of they buff guys. He was telling me he was famous in those parts because he used to get drunk and go crazy and cause all sorts of trouble, then he offered me some cocaine. I was apprehensive but he said everyone there knew him and so I took some. Then he wanted more and got four bucks out of me to buy some. Then he wanted to get more so I left for the disco. At the time I didn't know that 99% of the women there were prostitutes. All of them are dressed very sexy and a lot of them had different themes, at one point a girl dressed as wonder woman tried to dance with me. I was very taken back by how they were all coming up to me and wanting to dance. They dance with you for a couple minutes and then they kiss you, then they ask you to buy them a beer, and then they dance with you a couple more minutes and ask for another beer, and if you say no, they go dance with another guy. Almost all of the girls are young and dressed very sexy. Most of the men there were flabbergasted Americans acting totally blown away by how forward the women were acting, but not all of them seemed to know they were all prostitutes; I remember one guy saying "good luck" to me. Maybe what he meant was 'good luck screwing one for less than fifty bucks'. I talked to one American guy who had been mugged on the beach earlier that day. He it was daylight taking a piss on a non-crowded part of the beach and a few guys came up and held knifes to his throat and asked for his wallet.

The next day I was hung-over eating in my local dinner and a scruffily-dressed white guy in his 50's was sitting across from me and suddenly out of the blue asked me if I was sick because my eyes looked foggy. I said no, and he excused himself to just say that to me but a lot of people there had yellow fever or something that is spread from mosquitoes and I should go to the doctor if I felt sick. Then he came over and started talking to me. He had been an indepentantly-employed English teacher there for a couple years. I asked him why he chose to live in Rio and he said "it's my mission". He used to be some kind of cop for the CIA and had been traveling for the last ten some-odd years. When I told him where I lived he said I should move to his hotel because it is cheaper and better located and nicer. He said it was where all the thugs lived but they don't mug tourists in their own neighborhood so it's same. He did say though that he saw a dead body just outside of the hotel just last week. The place was much nicer and better located, it was just near famous steps that go up to the hilly Santa Theresa neighborhood where all the artists live and the slums. There is a nice trolley-ride I did to get up there and see the city which I took. When I got to the last stop I walked up farther until I got to the beginnings of the Flavelas, which are very primitive slum neighborhoods that are basically nothing more than wooden and corrugated steel huts thrown tightly together. They don't have open yards, just dirt walking paths between them. I was very tempted to go in there but I had my camera and passport on me and didn't feel like getting mugged. I should have done the tour. I was a very beautiful view though. The day after I moved into the new hotel I was walking down the road with the English teacher and bumped into my French friend Juan-Charles, he had been there one night and was staying where I had stayed before, so I showed him where my hotel was and he moved into the room next to mine. We went down to Copacabana beach and he talked me into going to the prostitute disco again with him. I told them they were all prostitutes, but he kept treating those girls like they were normal buy asking them if they had a light. He didn't try that very long though, because every whore he asked just rolled their eyes at him like he was an idiot for forgetting a light, which pissed him off. At one point he started talking to a girl in a little school girls uniform and this Spanish guy in his late sixties started yelling at him telling him that she was his 'girlfriend'. I got really drunk and lectured her friend who was also dressed as a school girl that she shouldn't feel ashamed to be a prostitute and that I knew she had a soul inside. A couple days later Carnival started. I spent the days along because Juan-Charles got up earlier than me. During the day there are parades of people all over who dance along with large floats playing loud carnival music. I went to one parade on Ipanema beach one day, it was kind of boring. I was pretty surprised at how guys would just piss on the side of the road without trying to hide their penises, so I did that too. One night I was at a parade at night and saw I girl who looked to be about fifteen walking down the road topless. During the night there were three different places where they had concerts that lasted all the through the night until about eight in the morning.

AFTER RIO

Juan-Charles and I left Rio at about two in the afternoon and arrived at Salvador de Bahia about a day later. The bus dropped us off about five blocks form the central plaza of the old part of the city. We decided to stay in a dorm room at a hotel one block from the plaza. Salvador was a very beautiful town because it looks very similar to how it looked in colonial times, with narrow cobble stoned streets and churches and old buildings. It was also pretty because it is hilly. The modern downtown is just below on the waterfront of the bay at the base of sheer cliffs. There is a lookout point from near the center of the old city where you can see the other side of the bay and the tops of the tall buildings are just below eye level, thus not obstructing the view. There were a lot of Paquera dancers there also. We were watching one guy gracefully doing back flips and the like. While he was talking to us he flexed his enormous bicep of us showing it off.

I bumped into Patrick while I was there, we were talking for a couple minutes when a guy walked up to him who was selling hair ties. They knew each other and were talking for a few minutes and the guy said he knew where to buy weed so we followed him a couple of blocks away to where the weed sellers were and a guy approached me and showed me some weed so I bought it. Then the guy who lead us there showed us another guy who was selling so Patrick gave him money and he went into a house and came out a couple minutes later with a couple of friends and just walked past us and acted like they didn't know us. Then the guy who brought us there told us we owed him money for taking us there but we didn't want to pay him because he introduced us to a guy who ripped us off so he got mad and said he would tell the cops who were everywhere, and Patrick said "go ahead then" and I said "no!" because I had weed on me so I told Patrick to stand in line at the store to get change and I waited until the guy wasn't looking. On the 3rd or 4th attempt to escape I was about 30 feet away before he noticed and started yelling at me so I ran back to my hotel and hid the weed and went back and saw Patrick there but the guy was gone. Patrick said he gave him some money to get him off his back. That night I went for some drinks at an outdoor pub with some travelers from the hotel and one of the Brazilian guys who worked there. The Brazilian guy was the guitarist of a death metal band and showed me the lyrics of one of their songs. One day we were there we went to the beach. It said something about being anti Christian. Jean Charles said he want' going to be able to do the Amazon river trip so the next day I took the bus to Natal which is on the eastern edge of South America. I went there because the surfing was supposed to be good there.

As with all the other cities in Brazil, Natal was a huge sprawling one with the bus station nowhere near the city center. So when I got there I had to take a 20 minute bus ride to where the hotels were. Natal didn't really have a city center. I remember seeing a plaza, but it was deserted and there were no businesses or government buildings anywhere near. It was really strange. I checked into the hotel and walked to the beach which wasn't too far away. The beach was pretty nice but there weren't very many people there. There were some small waves with some kids riding them, but I wasn't very impressed that that was the place where most Brazilians said was the best surf spot in Brazil. I left the next day, but after I got to the bus station and got out my money belt for my passport I remembered I left it and my money under my mattress in my room, so I went back and luckily the maid hadn't gone in there yet.

The next place I went to was Sao Luis. I went there because it was a colonial city. It definitely kept it's colonial feel to it with the narrow pedestrian cobblestone streets. It had a couple of narrow market pedestrian streets crisscrossing. It had a cool bay there that filled up during high tide but was dry for low tide. I was talking to a cute young girl who worked at the information booth for a little bit.

The Amazon river

The next day I went to Belem. Belem is a very large city on the bank of the Amazon as it begins to widen into the ocean. I had to stay there a night because the boats up the Amazon didn't leave every day, but I could stay on the boat for no extra charge. Belem had a couple of plazas which was kind of like having two city centers. One was large and surrounded by government buildings and palaces that are now museums, and the other was smaller and closer to the businesses. When I first got there I was sitting on a bench in the plaza and a black girl walking buy me staring at me. She walked to the corner and was there for a couple minutes and then came back and gave me her phone number and asked me to call her. She was pretty hot, and had a funky-looking afro, but she had a little spittle on her lip which freaked me out so I didn't call her. On the boat I me a guy from San Francisco and a guy form Canada who were traveling together. I went to a movie with them before the boat took off but I didn't hang out with them much during the five day trip to Manaus because they were kind of annoying me with their condescending attitude towards the Brazilians and they didn't seem to like me very much. I remember one one occasion I sang a goofy song called "I am X-hero" and the Canadian guy proudly announced that he wasn't American. Brazil had a lot of these kinds of travelers who come for a short period of time and haven't traveled very much.

There were a few boring Israelis there too, which I took note of because Israelis are usually fun to hang out with. I was hanging out with an older German guy for a little bit who was traveling with a German girl for a little bit who he met along the way, but they never hung out together on the boat. He told me a funny story of a time he was in Mexico and he got really drunk and crazy one night with some young English kids and got on a bus the next day for a long ride and took a lot of Valium so he could sleep through the whole ride, but the bus broke down just after they got out of town and they all had to get out of the bus and take another bus back to town to get another bus, and he was barely able to walk because of all the valium he took, and the English kids who happened to be on the bus to were looking at him like he was a total wasteoid There were some other Germans there too who I talked to some.

I didn't talk to many Brazilians on that boat because I was kind of worn out from trying to speak Spangese or Portugish or whatever you want to call it. But one day I went to the top level at the back of the boat and drank with some jolly Brazilians getting drunk while standing in the showers that were constantly on pumping water from the lake. I kept an eye out for the logging boats but only saw two on the entire trip. I saw some pink Amazon dolphins a couple of times. A kind of boat I did see a lot of was a tug boat that pulls a huge float behind it filled with trucks and giant crates. On one of those boats I saws a guy waving to us holding up a small dead alligator that he had apparently caught. All along the river almost ceaselessly I saw primitive houses on stilts with children in front of them waving to us and jumping into the river. All of the houses had a couple of cows and goats and a satellite dish. I could see the TV's on through the doors of a lot of them. All of the houses had boats and some of them had motor boats. Halfway through the trip we stopped at a town called Santarem. For a few hours. A huge cruise ship from the Caribbean shared the port with us so I got and walked over to it to see if I could get on it and check it out, but I wasn't allowed. On the dock I encountered a group of about 15 high school girls who where hanging out looking for foreigners to practice their English with. I stood there for about a half hour as they mobbed me asking me all kinds of questions. Then I got on the bus and rode it for about a half hour into the center as it weaved around a dirt road residential neighborhood. I checked out the town for a bit and then started walking the five kilometers back to the boat along a river side walking path. Along the way primitive-looking fishing-house boats, all equipped with a few pigs stomping in the mud eating the garbage their owners had thrown overboard. When I got back to the boat dock I saw a dread-locked artesian and asked him if he could hook me up with some weed so he took off on his bike and came back a half hour later with a bit. That was some of the weakest weed I have ever smoked before though. It was all leaves. that wasn't the only time I smoked leave-weed, all the weed I smoked in that area sucked. I thought it was weird that in the part of the world that is the most biologically varied the weed sucks. When I got to Manaus I went straight to the bus station and got the first bus to Boa Vista, which is the closest Brazilian city to Guyana.

After Guyana

I had to stay in Boa Vista for a couple days because I got there on a Friday afternoon and had to wait until Monday to take care of my visa situation. this town was very spread out and huge but the roads were almost empty and it didn't seem like many people lived there. I went to the visa place and was waiting in the waiting room and the guard who was a big muscle dude came in and started angrily yelling at me and told me to get out because I had shorts on so I had to go home in the center of town which was a long way away and get some pants and come back, but when I got back the place had closed, so I had to go back the next day and when I was in the waiting room I took my shoes off and the guard bounded in again and started yelling at me all pissed off again so I told him to calm down and that there's no sign that says you can't take your shoes off and he turned around in the doorway and kept saying "what!?, what!? what!?" That night I got on a bus to Manaus and goat a place in the boat but had to wait a couple of days again for it to take off. While I was there I did the tour at the famous opera house. The Opera House used to be on the backs of the river but is now about a quarter mile from the river because they filled in the river to make more land. I went to the other museum (?) but all they had were coins. Then I went to the Indian museum which was interesting. It showed a map of all the wild Indian settlements; most of them live in the Columbia, Ecuador, Brazil border at the beginnings of the Amazon. I heard it's difficult to find someone who knows where they are because they are dangerous to outsiders so no one wants to explore too much up there. Plus there's Columbian gorillas up there. I thought about going to the disco when I was there but I was trying to save my money and was kind of getting sick of traveling. Brazil is the kind of place you want to go to at the beginning of your trip when you are hungry for some excitement and new crazy stuff. I took the bus to the mall and watched all the movies at the Theater: Training Day, Black-hawk down, the Royal Tenenbaums, and some period English movie about a murder.

I was smart this time and bought a big bottle of Cognac for the trip so when the bus left I just hung out and read and slept and frank. I discovered there was a group of Israelis there. One guy who had an American father talked like a New Yorker and was taking about how he loves to sky dive, he had a broken leg, maybe from the sky diving. there was an Australian girl there who was traveling with them. That trip took me to Porto Velho and lasted about four days. We got off at the town before Proto Velho because we could catch a bus to Porto Velho before the boat arrives there the next day. I just wanted to go to Foz de Iguazu but I was so far from there I had to take three busses and like two days to get there.