Fogo de Chao – where meat is king and vegetarians fear for their lives….

You know how it is, when someone recommends something as “the best”, “the greatest”, and “amazing” you can be pretty sure that you will end up setting your expectations too high and end up totally disappointed.

Well as soon as we moved to SP (now over five months ago) Fogo de Chao was the restaurant on everyone’s lips, it’s probably the most famous restaurant in SP (just a little bit more famous than The Outback even) and its main claim to fame is it’s amazing meat…..

Now as I am sure our regular readers are aware Brazil is now the largest beef producing country in the world, kicking the beefy butt of Australia and USA and Argentina. But it’s definitely not the most famous country for beef, chances are if you think about South American beef, you are probably going to think about Argentinean steak, and we had some amazing steak in Buenos Aires, so this place had a lot to live up to.

Fogo de Chao is a chain restaurant (which isn’t really the greatest start), but luckily for us, we can walk to one of their SP restaurants, so on a nice quiet Sunday afternoon – with nothing else planned for the rest of the day we strolled over to the restaurant, with the good 5km walk helping us to work up an appetite (see that folks, we walked 5km in SP and weren’t murdered)!!!

The restaurant is massive, it would probably seat 300 people and we luckily arrived just before the lunch time rush. The staff were wearing Brazilian cowboy outfits (ohh shit, it’s getting worse) and there was a massive buffet bar (more points off, it’s in freefall now).

We sat at our table, and were handed the menu:

Thats it, the whole menu, nothing but meat, meat, meat and meat, suddenly this place looked like it had some potential; there literally was nothing but meat available, no starters, no vegetarian option, just meat, unlimited amounts of meat!

Now most people have been to an all you can eat restaurant before, but I have never been to an all you can eat restaurant that serves the quality of meat that they do here. Instead of bringing you an individual piece of meat, the waiters are continually walking around the restaurant with giant cuts of meat, cooked and served the traditional Brazilian cowboy (Gaucho) way:

For those of you (like me) who aren’t that informed on traditional Brazilian bbq techniques, the tradition started when the gauchos were out on the range, they developed a simple way of cooking large chunks of meat, skewered on mega skewers (more like a swords) that were slowly roasted over the embers of the fire, something like this:

So imagine this (and if your mouth doesn’t start watering there is something wrong with you – like you’re a vegetarian or you may be dead) the restaurant is full of blokes wandering around carrying around massive pieces of perfectly cooked bits of beef – and I mean massive, the steaks on the skewers are all three or four inches thick and each skewer has a range of cookedness - from rare to well done, so you can choose it just the way you like it! As well as 16 separate cuts of beef on parade, they also have a couple of cuts of lamb, half roasted chickens, grilled chicken hearts, roast pork and a variety of sausages….. And the food just keeps coming, they use an ingenious traffic light/drinks coaster system to control the flow of meat:

Please Keep it coming….

My heart has stopped, please stop/resuscitate!

So you just sit down, order a bottle of Brazilian red wine (that’s a whole ’nother post), loosen your belt off a bit, switch your coaster to green and let the meat feast begin…

Each of the different cuts has a different taste, you can grab a few slices of each and compare the different flavours, from the marbled sweetness of the hump, to the straight lean meat of the fillet mignon and my favourite the “ancho” - a cut like a rib eye, with a good mix or marble and lean meat. All of the meat is cooked to perfection, sure in the Brazilian way it’s loaded with salt, but heh this isn’t a restaurant the heart foundation was likely to approve anyway, so in for a penny in for a pound!

The great thing about the traffic light system is you can control the flow of food, take a 15 minute break, enjoy some more red wine a couple of polenta chips (another topic worthy of it’s own post) and generally relax, if you have had enough beef you can switch to lamb for a while, choose between slices off a roasted leg of lamb, or a rack of lamb chops, then some delicious bbq chicken and a dozen grilled chicken hearts (yet another Brazilian treat). As well there is a salad bar, but bloody hell, that salad is just taking up space that meat could be filling in your belly!

So yes, there are lots of other restaurants in Sao Paulo that specialise in preparing Brazilian bbq or churrasco, and now we have been to a couple of others but I have to say, if you have the choice start with the best, Fogo de Chao is one of those places that definitely lives up to its reputation!

http://www.fogodechao.com/

Getting tired of the city, the smoke, the traffic, the rush, the crush? Why not take a break in the Brazilian mountains - in a mock Swiss Village?!?!?!?

Living in a city can be a drag, living in one of the world’s biggest cities can be a really big drag, so with a four day weekend this weekend we took the chance to go away and see some of the countryside. But choosing where to go in the fifth biggest country in the world isn’t easy, we got lots of suggestions from friends and workmates, but in the end we were intrigued by a little village called Monte Verde, apparently the closest thing to an Swiss mountain village outside Switzerland and only 170km from Sao Paulo – this was too good to miss out on, or was that too good to be true?

The story behind the village is that apparently the area was settled by migrants from Europe, who decided it would be the perfect mountain retreat, so they built buildings resembling those built where they came from. The truth is that it is a relatively new town, with many purpose built buildings that are indeed in a “European” style, but they are very much designed with tourists in mind. We knew this before we went to Monte Verde so we weren’t disappointed when we got there, but I think people who make the journey expecting to be transported to the mountains of Europe may be disappointed.

So it’s about 170km from our house so we had to hire a car, the cheapest car you can hire in Brazil is something called a VW Gol – not Golf, just Gol , it’s the bestselling car in Brazil and a rugged little beast, though not very pretty it’s cheap as chips (a new four door model is only about £8,000) and it’s built just for the South American market specifically to handle Brazilian roads (80% of which are not sealed – or even graded as we found out).

The super Gol

So we headed off Thursday at 2pm with our trusty driving directions printed off Google maps. The instructions we had were relatively simple and for our first time driving in Brazil we were pretty chuffed to get out on the motorway where our instructions simply said travel for 127km then take exit for Um Street. We thought that was street name was pretty funny as we tootled along the motorway at 120km/hr in our 1.0 litre beast. When we got to the 127km mark we couldn’t see any turn offs so we carried on for another 20km and still no turn off as described, but we then reached the next town we quickly realised that instead of heading north for 140 odd kms we had got on the wrong motorway as soon as we left Sao Paulo and instead headed 140km east!!!!

Never ones to panic we quickly checked our map (better late than never heh) we worked out we could head across the mountains in a north westish direction and we could get to Monte Verde without going back to SP again. Looked nice and simple on the map, we could zoom through some nice mountain roads, along a short stretch of gravel road and still make it in time for dinner – or so we thought! The motorways we had driven on so far were fine roads, but as soon as you step off the major roads the quality of roads and signs drops away quickly, as we discovered. So we winded our way through the hills, the rain started to pour down and we quickly realised we weren’t going to be able to average any real speeds, after a couple of hours we finally got to the point where we could nip cross country on the dirt road. Not finding any signs for Monte Verde we stopped at a petrol station to ask for directions, the guy at the desk thought we were comedians and laughed at the suggestion, he told us the road didn’t even exist anymore and we had to take a big detour on the sealed road to another dirt road which would cut us across the mountains. Another hour passed and we reach the point of our next cunning plan, by now having been scared enough driving on the sealed roads, with massive foot deep potholes, completely washed out sections and long section of those corrugations that make you feel like visiting the dentist we started to lose courage regarding our “short cut”.

Again we stopped for directions at a taxi rank in the middle of a cute little town, again the locals thought we were nuts and advised us to take another even longer detour north to rejoin the main north south motorway where we could then drive back towards Sao Paulo and onto Monte Verde. By now we were really starting to doubt if we were ever going to make it, but after another couple of hours crawling through the hills we finally got to motorway and zoomed down towards our turn off.

Now the road from the motorway to the town is about 37km long, this bit alone took us over an hour due to the even more terrible condition of the road, we constantly had to zig and zag across the road to get around the massive pot holes and wash outs. But I am happy to announce that after eight hours of driving we finally made it to Monte Verte!!!!

A Brazilian road just like the ones we drove on

The red route is our actual route, the blue one our planned route

So we stayed at the excellent Pousada das Montanhas a couple of Kilometres from the centre of town. Our accommodation was really lovely, cute little chalets, had great breakfast, but most importantly had we had a massive open fire place in our room which was great, cos it was cold. Ok before you all start, we have just come from London, so we know what real cold is, but for Brazilians this was about as cold as it gets. Overnight it dropped to as low as 10 degrees.

Our Chalet

So Monte Verde itself is pretty interesting and entertaining, it’s basically one long main street (the only sealed street in the town) the street is lined with Swiss and Austrian style buildings.

The main street of Monte Verde

One of the “typical” buildings on the main street.

Lots of the accommodation places are also built in that style as well. We also a saw a beautiful Huf House tucked away in one of the valleys, that really was the last thing we expected to see in Brazil (and Gregs dream house). The town isn’t like a real town, there is no supermarket or anything useful like that, just lots of shops selling the usual touristy stuff, tour operator offering quad bike safaris and horse treks, but what was quite funny (to us at least) was that it actually felt like a real European mountain ski village because everyone was dressed as if it was about to snow! I suppose if you are used to SP and Rios’ constant heat it is pretty cold up there, but come on, do you really need ugg boots, scarves, beanies and gloves when it’s 15 degrees? The food in the very touristy restaurants was also tailored to the “cold” with all of them offering hot chocolate, soups and cheese or chocolate fondues, and everyone was lapping them up.

Overall it was great fun, the place is cheesy as hell, but a real nice change from SP, so we will probably end up coming back here again, or maybe just to one of the nearby towns without the European feel (and prices)!

The weather was terrible the whole time we were there, with constant rain turning the dirt roads into mud baths – luckily no trouble to our little Gol. But by Saturday we had had enough of playing 500 by the roaring fire while the rain bucketed down outside, so we decided to climb one of the nearby mountains. Sure it was raining, blowing a gale and the low cloud meant that we couldn’t actually see anything, but we headed up one of the mountains anyway.

The (lack of) view from Bishops Peak

Cath enjoying the stiff breeze

So now we are back in SP, we made the return journey in a much less painful three hours, and today I bought myself a decent Brazilian road atlas, hopefully we won’t be making that mistake again!

Feeling like you are one in a million… Anzac day and being part of a minority ethnic group in Sao Paulo

Sure I may have been out of New Zealand since 1996 and Cath out of Australia since 2001, but living in Australia and then London, you never really feel like a foreigner. But coming to live in Sao Paulo, we were suddenly and dramatically thrown into being foreigners. Where in London you hear a kiwi or aussie accent every day – in a pub, on a bus or on the tube, at least once a day you would always hear a familiar accent, but since we have been in South America, apart from our friends and people at Caths work, you can go days or even weeks without hearing anyone speaking English, and we have only ever heard one other Australian accent since we have been here, a random bloke from Sydney who had just spent six weeks tramping in the very south of Argentina.

Never hearing English spoken is a great help when it comes to learning Portuguese, we are slowly picking up bits and pieces of the language, but its not easy, the printed word is much easier than the spoken word, but its still a hard job learning another language.

So given our “isolation” from our fellow country men and women, when we got an email invite to the joint Australian and New Zealand embassies ANZAC day dinner, we jumped at the chance to immerse ourselves in our native cultures. We invited Zoe and Luccas – our resident QLDer and her Brazilian better half, and made a date – that date of course being Friday the 25^th of April, and the location being the very swanky Grand Hyatt hotel.

So the hotel is only 6km from our house, and the start time was 8pm, so we got ready into our bestest outfits and jumped in a taxi, allowing 45 minutes to travel six kilometres may sound a bit excessive, but it is Sao Paulo on a Friday night, so we left a good amount of time. We got in the cab at 7:15 and 1 hour 45 minutes later we had travelled about 4 kilometres, the whole of Sao Paulo was in grid lock, there was a ring of stationary traffic stretching 10kms from the city centre and tail backs on the motorways into and out of town stretching up to 45kms. All around us stress levels were starting to rise, people were driving the wrong way down one way roads, motorbikes were streaming down the footpaths, and people were standing beside their cars, stuck in the middle of eight lanes of stationary cars. So with the clock ticking we were left with no option but to walk.

Now if we were in London or down under, we would never hesitate at the thought of walking 2km in the evening, but in Sao Paulo the idea is about as strange as walking on the moon, people just don’t walk around in the dark, its not safe, its not sensible and its bloody scary. Sure some people do walk around after dark, but they are generally only doing it because they are too poor to catch public transport, so the image of two gringos, one in a suit, tie and shiny shoes and a blonde bombshell in a cocktail dress walking through the not so nice parts of the city must have raised some eye brows. But heh, this was our chance to drink free kiwi and aussie wine and eat some real kiwi lamb, so we were desperate! We ended up arrive at 9:15, two hours after leaving home. We arrived just in time to hear poor Luccas (the lone brazilian in the room) singing the Brazilian national anthem, and then for the first time in many years (apart from sporting events) Greg and Cath took turns to join in the singing of the Australian and new Zealand national anthems. This was followed by speeches from the Australian and New Zealand ambassadors on ANZAC day and what it means to our countries, it was made even more poignant knowing that Gregs brother Joel had been among the crowds of Aussies and Kiwis at ANZAC cove earlier that day.

The dinner was lovely, and the Spy Valley sav blanc and big aussie red went down a treat, a starter of fresh Australian prawns and a main of New Zealand lamb, were a nice change to the beef focused diet we enjoy in Sao Paulo.

After the dinner there was lots of mingling and chatting i think there were about 60 or so guests, everyone was dressed to the nines, and either an Aussie or Kiwi or married to one, we had a great night talking to lots of Aussies and Kiwis, some of whom had been here for decades, and lots of others like us who are much more recent arrivals.

We were amazed to learn talking to Embassy staff that they estimated that there were only about 75 Australians and 55 New Zealanders in Sao Paulo, its no wonder we don’t hear familiar accents very often, we are totally lost in the population of 20,000,000 in Sao Paulo. They think there are about 200 Aussies spread over Brazil, and only about 100 New Zealand passport hodlers, we were also surprised to learn that only about 2,000 Australians visit Brazil any year, so we really are a rare minority group over here!

Greg and Cath dressed up to the nines…

live naked flesh auctions, lasers, smoke machines, a podium, a cage, a dodgy MC, terrible music and of course cows?!?!?!? It must be late night TV Brazilian style

Every day we are here, we learn a little bit more about Brazil, late last night for example we switched over to Canal Rural, one of the many local channels (we have four channels solely dedicated to religion alone) to see what looked like a combination of a strip club and a rotary club dinner, a large room was full of tables of blokes dining and drinking, at the front of the room was a large podium, with a cage around it, the room was full of loud music, laser lighting and a lot of smoke and the crowd was pretty excited, of course this had to be something dodgy didn’t it, well it was in fact a live cattle auction. As well as the people there attending, you could also phone in and bid, I was of course tempted, but given the size of our flat I didn’t think that we really had room for family of Brahman cattle beasts. At least it means that Brazilians are going to be among the few other nations in the world that would understand how come “a dog show” could make it onto TV in New Zealand.

So we have been a bit quiet on the blog front for the last couple of weeks, Greg has been focusing on writing his book, which has somewhat taken away the urge to write for fun, but with a long weekend over here and our adventure plans cancelled at the last minute, I now find myself with some time on my hands. So here’s a quick recap of what we have been up to:

Last weekend we headed down to Buenos Aires to watch our friend Robert Lindstedt play in the Davis cup tie between Sweden and Argentina, now we don’t need much excuse to visit BA, it’s one our favourite cities in the world, but we also got the chance this time to celebrate/disrupt the Olympic torch which was a great bonus.
So Greg went and watched the first days play on Friday while Cath worked in the BA office, now the only other time Greg has seen live tennis was watching Robert play in the very civilised atmosphere of Wimbledon, these games turned out to be somewhat different, the Argentines’ hadn’t lost a single match at home in the last five years of Davis Cup, and after spending some time there I think I know why, they have a 15,000 person tennis stadium, and every day there was at least 10,000 argies there, they acted like they were at a soccer match which was great, continually yelling, chanting and screaming, we joined in the very small Swedish supporters group (about 20 of us) but any attempt at a chant or a song was quickly drowned out by the Argentinean supporters, there screaming and yelling was continuous, even the umpires couldn’t shut them up.

So after watching some tennis on Friday I headed down town to try and get amongst the action at the torch relay, now let me explain my politics here, I fully support the Olympic movement, and the right of athletes to compete, but I also think if you are stupid enough to want to host the Olympics, you better make sure you have clean underpants on first, because the whole world is going to be watching. I also think that any non sporting part of the Olympics is fair game for protesting and point raising, so I was glad to get the chance to join in the free Tibet protestors during the torch relay. After watching the “events” in Britain, France and USA, I thought the argies may have clamped down on things when their moment in the spot light came around, but I didn’t expect it to be as heavy handed as it was, it appears that the argentian police don’t focus on the same sort of community policing that we are used to, they more fancied batons and motorbikes as crowd clearing tools. Groups of pro Tibet and Falungong supporters were forcibly dispersed by the police, anyone who waved a Tibet flag or any type of protest was quickly dragged away, and groups of people who congregated to protest were quickly dispersed by groups of police or pro china supporters. As you can see in this shot, by the time the Olympic torch actually arrived, there was no chance of anyone getting through the five lines of protection that the torch had surrounding it.

The great celebration of Olympic spirit (and police brute force)

I have to say though, if China feels a little uncomfortable with people invading it’s parade, imagine how the Tibetans felt when China invaded their country… I did join a group of mainly English backpackers in chanting free Tibet for a brief period of time, but we were again quickly dispersed by a large mob of pro china supporters, these people were a bit of comedy in themselves, nothing says organic community based support like having absolutely everyone wearing matching red jackets now does it?

Pro china supporters – I wonder who funded these smashing jackets?

But it was great to see people making their protests in their own way – something that is just not possible in Tibet:

Libre Tibet!

So after that adventure I caught up with Cath and we headed out for another beautiful feast of Argentinean meat, after this trip there is no doubt, they have the best beef in the world….
Saturday we went to watch Robert play his doubles game with Jonas Bjorkman against the fairly impressive pairing of Guillermo Canas and David Nalbandian and 10,000 of their supporters. Though Robert had a great game, it didn’t go their way, and they went down to the Argies 5-7, 4-6, 4-6. Here are some shots of Robert and Jonas in the game:

Robert Lindestedt

Robert and Jonas

And you think you had a bad day at work, imagine this feeling…

On the Sunday we headed back to SP, where we are now, enjoying a nice quiet long weekend at home in BA, but planning our next set of adventures.
A quick update on work from us both, Caths work continues to go great, she is making a name for herself over here and already delivering some great results in LatAm, I think there is a good chance they will try and adopt her at the end of the 6 months. Gregs book continues to roll along, with 100 of the 350 pages submitted, Greg is realising just how hard it is to write a book, the first chapter was a complete nightmare, but now he is settled into something of a rhythm, so hopefully the chapters will start to flow a bit faster!
That’s all for now. Over and out of here.
Lots of love,
Greg and Cath

The dance floors full at 5pm, we must be in Brazil….

So after many weekends of travel and adventure around LatAm we were really looking forward to a bit quieter weekend exploring Sao Paulo. We started off Saturday with Paula, one of Caths workmates who was our tour guide for the morning.

Paula took us to “downtown” to visit the Mercado Municipal – Sao Paulos biggest food market. It may seem a little odd, but after three months in Sao Paulo we have never visited downtown - the centre of the city. The centre of Sao Paulo is a maze of small streets, full of old buildings, has many green parks, but as with many of the bigger cities in LatAm the centre has been virtually abandoned in the last 20 years. Despite all of the factors that could add up to make the centre of Sao Paulo beautiful and scenic, many of the buildings have been abandoned, others are simply falling to the ground, its dirty, full of rubbish, covered in vandalism, there a shacks and shanty towns tucked into many of the corners, and the poor and homeless are everywhere. All in all it’s a pretty depressing place, the locals advised us not to bother visiting, the guide book tells you to avoid it and our friends drive through with their windows wound up and their doors locked. I will head back down another time with my camera to try and capture the scene, but I am pretty sure you can imagine it. Contrasting downtown Sao Paulo with the area that we live in is amazing, sure we have some homeless families living near us, but we also have dog manicurists, children’s hairdressing salons, book shops and bakeries with valet parking and buildings with helicopter pads on the roof. I don’t think we will ever quite get used to the extremes of Brazilian society.

So on our way to the Mercado municipal we passed by the infamous Rua 25^th March, this street which is right near the very posh indoor central market is a massive street market at the other end of the price scale, it’s really quite manic, the shops are in decrepit old buildings (crying out for renovation) but as well as the crowded shops, the footpaths and the road are crammed with people buying and selling everything. I am pretty sure you could just about buy anything you can imagine there, some of the highlights for me were a shop full of 1,000 varieties of coat hangers and a street vendor selling corn juice – yummy not!

So the Mercado Municipal is a massive undercover food market, crammed with butchers, fishmongers, fruit and veggie stalls and restaurants and bars, it was awesome, again you could buy almost anything here, but this time just in the world of food. With the help of our guide Paula we ended up buying a ton of fruit, all weird South American varieties none of which we had seen before, none of this stuff was cheap, though, and we ended up spending £50 on fruit and in total we probably only got 2 dozen individual pieces… The other thing that the mercado is famous for is its bacalhau and mortadella sandwiches, now for those who aren’t up on their traditional Sao Paulo foods, a pastel is a deep fried pastry pocket usually filed with beef or cheese and mortadella is an Italian meat (like a posh version of luncheon from New Zealand). So there are only two real dishes to eat, either a pastel filled with bacalhau (a chunk of dried salted cod from Norway) or two pieces of white bread wrapped around 500grams of mortadella. For me the choice was pretty easy, 500 grams of luncheon meat, or some yummy fish, so I had a pastel, I think it was a bit early in the morning for Cath who opted for a much less stomach churning Portuguese custard tart!

So on Saturday afternoon we had a completely different view of Brazilian culture, with two more of Caths workmates, Renato and Danilo we headed to a venue called Traco De Uniao, our instructions were to be there at 2pm to make sure we got a seat, now I was a bit sceptical of any venue that you have to be at early to get a seat, and sure enough we arrived at 2pm and the place was virtually empty. The bar was very basic, its apparently modelled on Favela bar, it had an area for the band to set up in the middle, not much in terms of decorations, cheap and cheerful tables and chairs, and a concrete grandstand along one wall. My initial impressions were a little disappointing, this place was totally empty, and it didn’t really ooze atmosphere, but as usual, little did we know what we were in for!

We started off with some beers for the boys, and a caipirinha or two for Cath, then we had a great feijoada – the national dish of brazil, as discussed in an earlier post, is quite a feast, lots of meat, rice, beans, fried banana, sausage, washed down with caipirinhas and beer. By the time we finished lunch the place had really started to fill up, and by 3pm it was packed, there was a salsa band belting out hit after hit and the place was heaving. The great thing was that this wasn’t some tourist show (we all remember senor tango don’t we) this was just 500 Brazilians all about our age having a great party and we certainly joined in, we danced, we drank, we partied, and let our hair down like we haven’t since we arrived in Sao Paulo.

So now its Sunday afternoon, we are sitting at home, eating out fruit and trying to get over our massive hangovers…

Thanks Paulo, Danilo and Renato for a great weekend!

Living in Sao Paulo, its just like living in London except….

1 You don’t need a prescription to get medication at a pharmacy, so if you want any medication you just go an buy them, the pharmacies are meant by law to have a resident pharmacist to help and advice, but often they only work part time in each pharmacy so in reality you are served by a kid fresh out of school whose main interest is in giving you a basket to help carry all the drugs you are buying.

2 Most people work 6 days a week, sure office workers work five, but most real workers work six days, holidays are also a luxury we take for granted, lots of people we have talked to think we are making a joke when we ask them what they did for their holidays, they appear not to get any – except the public holidays.

3 Footpaths are not publicly maintained, if you have a footpath outside your house or building it’s up to you to build and maintain it. This great if you always wanted to do something nice with your piece of footpath, like put down some marble slabs, or concrete it and paint it green, but in reality it means the footpath is more like a minefield, some pieces are not maintained at all, others have ramps, or steps or walls built into them, for this reason prams and buggies are very rare over here, they just don’t work, its easier and probably safer to carry your kids than push them!

4 Most places have valet parking, that’s right drive up to your local bar, leave the man the keys for small fee (about £3) and when you have had a skin full of beers, ask the guy to bring the car round to the front so you can weave your way home. Valet parking is also big for restaurants, clothes shops, shoe shops, supermarkets and even our local bicycle shop!!

5 Road rules are for sissies. We live above a busy intersection, so I could fill a full blog with just what happens outside our building, where we see or hear a traffic accident at least every two days. Some of my favourite Brazilian driving tricks are:

a. Quickly turn at the traffic lights across the path of the oncoming traffic before they get across the intersection.

b. Ignore traffic lights completely, well maybe not completely, only when its dark, raining, your running late or any other reason you can think of.

c. Every road is a double lane motorway, no matter how wide the road is, there is always room for second car to just slip past you, don’t worry about the laws of physics, common sense or gravity, there is always room to sneak through. This rule of course means that a real three lane motorway becomes a six lane scramble!

d. If you own a fast car, the speed limit doesn’t apply to you, this seems to be the case for owners of Porsches, Ferraris, black BMWs and WRX owners who love seeing how fast they can get from traffic light to traffic light.

An adventures blog with no adventures…

So Craig and Janine have gone back to London, Easter has come and gone and we are now back in Sao Paulo with no more holidays planned in the near future… this doesn’t bode well for excitement and adventure now does it?

So I am not sure what I am going to fill the pages of our blog with except for the not so exciting stories of our day to day life in Sao Paulo. So here goes….

Today I did some washing, flooded the laundry, and well, um, er… no this probably isn’t going to work is it….

I promise I will be back tomorrow with something exciting to say…

I am of course open to any suggestions….

Till then see ya!

g

Beijing 2008 Torch Relay Truth

Beijing 2008 Torch Relay Truth

Cowboys, caiman, capybaras, cows, creeks and Irish beef farmers - it could only be Easter in the Pantanal

So we are just back from the Pantanal, the world’s largest wetlands (at just about 195,000 square kilometres). The Pantanal is a big almost flat spread of land where in the wet season the water level rises three metres flooding the whole area. In the dry season the water disappears and the area becomes a massive dust bowl, so I am glad we visited in the wet season!

Looks like land, splashes like water!

The area is 99% privately owned, and almost totally used for beef farming, the area has over 2,500 fazendas (farms) with up to 8 million head of cattle spread over them. Traditionally the favourite cow for this extremely dry or extremely wet landscape has been the Indian Brahman cows, these are hardy beasts, but pretty slow growing and not that meaty, so they have recently started cross breading them with Scottish Angus beasts which are fast growing and meaty to create the Brangus breed which has taken on the best of both breeds, its sturdy, stocky, cooks a good chapatti and is very good with money.

A Brangus Cow

So we visited in the wet season, which means that 80% of the land was under water, what looks at first to be dry land is either completely waterlogged mud, or simply just a floating sea of plants in about 2 metres of water, it’s pretty amazing stuff, and a wild life fan, twitcher or nature lovers dream holiday.
For the four days we were there we stayed as guests at Pousada dos Monteiros– a family run working farm which also hosts tourists and introduces them to the Pantanal. To get to the Farm we flew to Campo Grande (1.5 hours from Sao Paulo) where we were picked up by our host Artur. Artur is one of three sons who now run the farms, but as well as that he also hosts the tourists who stay on the farm and he was a great host. So after throwing our stuff in Arturs Hilux we drove 120km north on tarred road, then 100km on dirt road to get to the farm. The drive was an experience in itself, with the roads very rough due to the fact that its the rainy season, so if you ever want to try rally driving in a double cab hilux then this is the destination for you!
Here is a google map showing the location – the farm is in the south of the Pantanal, so you can see the size of the Pantanal spreading out to the north of the Farm:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=S+19+24+44+w+55+32+59&ie=UTF8&t=h&ll=-19.409612,-55.546875&spn=2.455615,5.141602&z=8

By law in Brazil if you are a farmer, you need to leave 20% of your farm wild, you also cant farm on any river banks, you need to leave them to grow wild. The 20% of your farm that you are leaving wild does not include the area along the river banks, so most farms in the Pantanal are about 30% wild. The way the Pantanal works is that there are many trees and shrubs, but because of the long wet season they only grow on the elevated areas, so you have many small “islands” of trees with large areas of grassland around them, the grass goes underwater, but the trees stick up above the water, so most of the farmers in the Pantanal, don’t clear their paddocks of trees as it seems to anchor the land, so the paddocks are not paddocks like we are used to, they look like lightly forested scrubland with areas of grass and lots of clumps of trees. With so many trees and lots of grass its a great habit for many animals, so the area is literally a riot of animal life, from anacondas, pumas, jaguars, 100’s of varieties of birds, caiman (small alligators), ant eaters, armadillos and all sorts of things in between, then you have the farm animals - its like a mini African safari (only mini as in the size of the animals).

So we arrived at the first of the families three farms, where we were warmly welcomed with a great meal and a cool drink, then some quality time in the hammocks under the giant mango tree:

Cath, Craig and Janine at Hammock Time

Then we jumped back into the worlds fastet hilux and zoomed to São João Farm where we were staying for the three nights.

Sao Joao Farmstead as the afternoon storm rolls in.

Just in the short drive we had already seen 100’s of animals and birds, after the cityscape of Sao Paulo, it was a reinvigorating change:

Capybara – the world’s largest rodent, a giant guinea pig – or the worlds smallest hippo

Caiman – if only I could get a bit closer…..

So we had an early night and the next day we headed out for a day of safari, driving around the farm and spotting animals, it was great, there was animals everywhere, and thanks to gregs new zoom lens, we were able to get some great snaps.

A bird (no I don’t know the name, you can tell I ain’t a bird man)

A Rea – AKA big fast scary bird

A swamp deer

A wild piglet

The deer and piglets are the only animals on the farm that you can legally hunt, if you kill a native animal in Brazil its an automatic jail sentence, they say you are better to kill a person than an animal in brazil as you usually get a shorter jail sentence!

In the afternoon we went for a horse trek around the farm, including crossing some of the deeper parts of the wetlands, as the last time Greg rode on a horse he ended up in an Indian hospital, and with Caths last horse experience also turning into a “man from snowy river” re-enactment and then you throw in the chance of a 6metre anaconda trying to eat your horse, plus of course the ever present piranahas and caimans this little horse ride ended up feeling like a Crocodile Dundee adventure! Luckily our hosts picked the horses perfectly and Greg ended up with a horse so slow he was overtaken by growing grass, and Caths horse had a horse bum fixation so it just loved playing follow the leader!

So the farm runs a massive heard of beef cattle, they have a small dairy herd for their own diary needs, but they are too far away from a major road to sell any dairy products, but thanks to a foot and mouth disease outbreak 400kms away and European food laws, they can’t sell their beef in Europe, where they can earn good prices. Brazil has the largest beef herd in the world, with 180,000,000 cattle, so we had lots of chats with our hosts about Brazilian farming, about how the markets work, how the industry is changing, but mainly about how their efforts to sell beef in Europe are being blocked by the European farmers (specifically the Irish beef industry apparently). You can imagine their surprise when I told them the village that I used to work in had a foot and mouth outbreak only last year, but the area has been opened for selling beef again.

The problem apparently runs something like this, Europe has decided that you can only sell beef in Europe if you can trace the beef back to it source farm, which sounds like a fine idea when you think in terms of small European beef farms on small European paddocks, to show the source of the meat the farmers tag each of their cows with an ear tag. This is a simple task when your heard is from 20 - 100 odd head of beef, like the Irish average (and that’s total stock, including diary, breeding and calves). For a Pantanal farmer the average heard can be 20,000 heads of beef, and instead of living in nice Irish pasture with little or no trees or shrubs in the paddock, the Brazilian beef lives in massive fields full of trees and scrub which cause havoc with the ear tags, the tags catch on tree branches, tearing off and often causing infections in the cattles ears. But the European farming lobby (led by the Irish beef farmers) has said that no beef can be sold in Europe unless its tagged and traceable and the brands that are put on the beef in Brazil, don’t count, it has to be ear tags, which is proving to be a real problem for Brazilian farmers. Europe has recently partly relented and allowed 106 Brazilian farms to export beef to Europe, but only fillet mignon and sirloin steaks – the rest of the cuts of beef are not allowed. So 106 farms out of the estimated 8,000 farms in Brazil are allowed to export two cuts of meat to Europe – not exactly a level playing field, and probably another example of seeing the world with a slightly wider perspective after our time in Latin America.

So enough about the politics of beef, what about the caiman I hear you say! Well the next day was Easter Sunday, so keeping the Whitaker tradition going we got up to watch the “sun dance” at sunrise, quite a sight in a place as beautiful as this:

The sun dances as it rises across the Panatanal

So on our second day we went for boat cruise, this is pretty easy given how much water there is around, you just drive 100 metres and launch your boat – just about anywhere, so we went for a ride along the Negra river, which in the dry season is about 10 metres wide, but in the wet season can be up to two kilometres wide, we cruise up the river watching birds, anteaters, Capybara and Caimans feeding in the shallow water, and kept a constant eye out for Piranhas and Anacondas (we didn’t see any unfortunately, or fortunately perhaps)!

At lunch time we stopped on one of the many small islands and made camp, well Artur and Bluey made camp:

Our Island Camp in the Negra River, with Bluey cooking lunch

So Craig, Janine, Cath and I went Caiman hunting…. it didn’t take long to find a caiman, in fact there were lots of caiman sunning themselves only 10 metres from our camp! Now a caiman is a small alligator (well upto 2.2 metres is big enough for me) and they have a temperament similar to a dog, don’t bug them and you are fine to stand close, step on their tail, threaten their young, or get too close and they are likely to bite you… ok, let’s hope we don’t stumble upon a caiman nest heh!!!

Which is of course what happened, Greg literally stumbled across a nesting mother with her 12 little ones:

Mum Caiman, watches and waits…

While baby Caiman at play

Surely it can’t hurt to pick on up can it? Can it?????

Ok, it can, mummy caiman attacks!

Now do I:
A) stay for another photo,
B) crap myself,
C) run?

Greg chose to run, that was bloody scary….

So lesson learned, don’t get near a mummy caiman, they growl and run really fast when they want to!

Sure the Amazon is the most famous place in Brazil, but it’s going to have to be pretty bloody amazing to beat this place…..

Buenos Aires, a city so cool, even a cheesy Tango show can’t ruin it.

Sorry for the delay in posting, we have our first visitors in town, Craig and Janine have come over for Easter from London, so entertaining my real friends has to take priority over my virtual friends!

So on Wednesday last week, we flew from Santiago to Buenos Aires, only 2 and half hours (yay) and we arrived in BA, Argentina. Now everyone who has been to Latin America raves about BA, so I of course went in with low expectations preparing myself for something of a let down, and initially I was lucky I did, our hotel was crap, a very inauspicious start to our time in Argentina. But on the Thursday morning I walked Cath to work, and my impression started to change, the centre of the city is nice, sure its a bit grungy, but on a LA scale, its pretty nice, wide pedestrian streets, beautiful architecture, and lots of cool shops.

Our first meal was greatly anticipated, we were finally going to get to eat the famous Argentine steak in Argentina! So I course opted for the lamb, having growing up in New Zealand I am still of the firm belief that the king of meats is definitely lamb, good lamb being way better than good steak anyday. And I wasn’t disappointed, the lamb racks (yep they like big serves over here) were awesome, massively awesome and tastefully awesome too.

So Cath went off and did some work and I sat in the hotel trying to get on top of my book – without much success. Cath had a meat-fest work dinner that night with some work mates, and I had room service (more super sized serves of meat of course), now an interesting claim to fame for Argentineans is that they eat their evening meal the latest of any culture in the world, even a business dinner is usually scheduled for 10:30 or later, and in the weekends the restaurants don’t even open till 10:00pm.

Friday after work we checked out of our crap hotel into a really nice hotel, and got ready to go watch Tango!!!!!

Now every country has something that’s its world famous for outside the country, but that maybe not so famous in the country for locals, in New Zealand it’s going to watch a sheep shearing show (wow wee how exciting is that), in Australia it’s going to Australia Zoo to feed a kangaroo (never mind the kangaroos are so overfed they struggle to stand up) in England it’s going to Madam Tussauds world of wax (where American tourists go to have their photos taken beside wax figurines of famous Americans – how English is that)?

So in Argentina the thing that every tourist has to do is go and watch a Tango show!!!!! Cath asked her workmates for some local info, not a single one of the people in her office had ever been to a Tango show, but they tried to help out anyway, booking us into a dinner and show evening at Senor Tango – “the biggest and most famous Tango show in the world” their words not mine.

We got picked up in a shuttle bus and shuttled our way across town to the superdome of tango tackiness. We were quickly seated (with a nice couple from Italy and another from Puerto Rico) and the waiter straight away took great pains to explain that we could pay by visa, mastercard, or usd – straight away we got the panic urge, you know you are in for trouble if the first thing they tell you is how to settle the bill – before you even know what it is your getting.

But being brave and adventurous souls we fought the urge to run and settled our nerves with a bottle or three of cheap wine. The show started off well with a couple of horses (that didn’t even try and tango) and what appeared to be a brief interpretive dance version of the history of Argentina, I am amazed that so many of the first settlers and indigenous tribes women had such massive fake breasts, but that’s a whole ‘nother story!!! Then we got some shorts bursts of very good tango dancing interspersed with a flying plastercast of an accordion player, a 20 minute long accordion solo, some of those annoying blokes with pan pipes playing some of Kenny G’s worst hits, some really badly cooked Argentinean steaks, 2 more minutes of tango dancing, identical twins with large noses belting out some classic Argentinean love songs, a 10 minute piece of soft porn which involved a whole lot of g-string clad dancers writhing all over each other, a 20 minute piano solo, another 2 minutes of tango dancing, then to “finish” the evening off the whole troupe got together on stage and murdered “don’t cry for me Argentina” (now there’s not many times in my life that I wished I was at a Madonna concert, but this was one of them). Then finally it was all over, we jumped in another shuttle bus and headed back to our hotel room for a stiff drink or five. Now I have heard that there are some really good Tango shows in BA, and I really don’t doubt it, we saw loads to beautiful tango dancing in the market on Sunday morning, and friends have been to some nice authentic shows, I think we just ended up in the worst of the lot. Lesson learned…

But apart from that experience our weekend in BA was great, we walked around the old town, ate some giant steaks, spent an afternoon shopping (it’s really really cheap and stylish), visited some old buildings, ate some more steak and spent a morning wandering around an antiques market and watching the world go by.

So our summary of BA was that it’s a great city, what Santiago had in nice, orderly and clean, BA had in funky, dynamic and exciting.

So we are back in Sao Paulo now till Friday when we fly to Campo Grande for four nights in the Pantanal, a massive wetland (195,000 square kilometres (75,000 sq mi), thats about the size of England, Scotland and Wales combined where we are going to do some piranha fishing, try and catch the worlds largest guinea pig the Capybara and try and spot a jaguar.

So till after then, see ya’ll later and hope ya’ll have a cracking good Easter wherever in the world you are!!!!