Deville Express Cascavel

... rain forest.

Some highlights include:

*Trekking in the beautiful National Park of Chapada de Vedeiros - translated as the Park of the Deerhunters. This is an important area for Brazil, not only for it´s natural beauty: it is key to the up keep of it´s fragile eco system. We were staying in a sleepy hippy town of Alto Paraiso, full of crystal and astrology shops and hardly a soul in sight. Our guide, an impressively bendy 40-something ...

... joking on that last one mum) and went down to the docks to see what we had gotten ourselves into.
The river boats are fantastic, three to four story wooden boats that are best described as looking like something out of a childrens tug-boat story. We boarded the boat along with around 70 locals, and an assortment of practically everything, ranging from satellite TV dishes to sugar cane spirit, to puppies and salt. Salted puppies were never on the menu, so no alarm was ever ...

... hostel itself was not bad, but it was next to a pet hotel, so we could not sleep much during the night as the dogs were barking all night long. I would not recommend anyone staying there actually. - at this point of our trip we started having a strong feeling that we were spending most of the time actually just moving from one place to another.

... with the man in charge, I was told it could be ready today for $130. Seemed as if I basically paid a $20 bribe to get the lazy bureaucrat to do his job. Visa in hand, I boarded a boat and crossed the river to Guajara-Mirim. Late that afternoon I caught a bus to Porto Velho. I arrived around midnight and got a cab (the busses had stoppped running for the night) to the port. I had planned to take a boat ...

... satellite dishes here, and they point directly up into the sky, so are not made of solid metal as one would see in all the other countries but are a grid-like affair (they would certainly be birdbaths very quickly if they solid). Strangely, Brazilians don't spend a lot of time watching tv anyway, from what we saw. Perhaps they just simply enjoy real life more? Of course, we weren't in big cities, where certainly tv will dominate, and control, society. The road north ...

... a tomar la facilidad de volar, y pensando a mi hermana que sería orgullosa de mi por la acción ecológica y sobre todo por el espíritu aventurero de tal viaje. Lo hice. Y no duró 60 horas...pero 73 horas !!! El primer día, todo va bien. El bus sale media hora tarde (que importa). Cruzamos una ruta que ya conocía cuando me fui a las Yungas, a Coroico. Y después de Coroico, que sorpresa.... la ruta más peligrosa del mundo que habían reemplazado por una ruta de asfalta estaba aqu ...

... reserva do Xingú e pintor. O encontramos em um centro cultural da cidade. Logo nos convidou para um teatro no SESC mais a noite. Como sempre o SESC é um oasis de cultura e esporte em todos os cantos do país. Passamos a tarde e a noite com essa figura, que levou a seu incrível ateliê de pintura. Bototô, que quase perdeu a visão, começou a pintar por ...

... stamped at the federal police there, however, when we arrived here we discovered we were in the wrong place - thanks Lonely planet! Basically, there are 2 streets with the same name in 2 different towns and a map description suitable to both towns and both towns could be classed as border towns - and as you`ve probably guessed we ended up in the wrong one, even the Federal Police were amused by the coincidence. We wasted about an hour here and made a taxi man a bit upset ...

... devouring breakfast. After a rapid shower we went to breakfast. This was very sweet coffee, dry biscuits and margarine. They are obviously intent on starving us. Luckily we had brought a bag or oranges. The trip was uneventful for a while. The boat passed 'balsas', floating dredges pumping the mud off the bottom and filtering out flecks of gold. There were not too many of these, but a Peruvian who has lived here in Brazil for ...

... we had to ask at nearly every stop and getting an answer which we couldnt understand. also when falling asleep it is harder and harder to tell which of the towns that the bus kept passing in the dark was the one we were supposed to get off. at 2.15 i woke up and since we were supposed to arrive at 2.30 kept my eyes peeled on the road, when faye woke at 3.45 ...