The Catch-22 of getting into Peru
Plus, violence in Rio: one man's battle against a shower screen
Greetings come to you this week all the way from Lima, in Peru, where we hopped to from Rio de Janeiro on Saturday - about 3,800km across the continent. The sun is shining, it’s about 50 per cent less humid than Brazil and (relatedly) I just had the best night’s sleep I can remember having in months.
Yes, it feels a little ridiculous to have jumped from east to west like this. I had hoped not to have to fly anywhere during our trip across South America – partly out of a sense of environmental duty, partly out of a desire to go slowly and really see everything. But flying to Peru couldn’t be helped because – most excitingly – we are meeting up with friends here today, and climbing Machu Picchu next week (!), and that shit takes some serious forward planning (thank you Zlata). Dave and I are very much planning to go back to Brazil and pick up where we left off later in the year.
In last week’s newsletter I left you in Rio; there are not many convenient ways to get from Rio on the east coast all the way to Lima over here on the Pacific side. There is, however, one direct flight departing daily from São Paulo at 4:50am, and this seemed better than the (expensive) alternative of getting a lengthy connecting flight from elsewhere, or the (bonkers) possibility of mainlining buses all the way west across two borders (did I mention it’s 3,800km?)
And so it was that Dave and I left our apartment in Rio at midday on Friday and took an eight-hour bus back down to São Paulo, followed by a slow chug across town on the metro to get to the airport, where we figured we would treat ourselves to the airport lounge and have a snooze until our flight was called at 4am. Simple.
Except no, because (of course, duh) we couldn’t check our bags in until a maximum of four hours before the flight. This hadn’t occurred to me, because I make a point of driving my friends crazy by never arriving anywhere with time to spare if I can possibly help it. No drama, but no snoozing given the truly maddening atmosphere of an airport terminal landside in the middle of the night. We ate a big pile of spaghetti at 11.30pm. We watched cleaning staff spark mayhem by closing all of the women’s toilets at the same time (?!) for routine cleaning, and we watched a madman and a dog haunt the passengers and the cleaning staff respectively for attention.
When the time finally came to drop those bags like hot potatoes at precisely 00:50 hours, I was ready for that snooze, which explains why I was less than friendly to the very blunt member of staff who turfed us out of the queue halfway along.
Peru, it turns out, is one of those countries that requires you to have proof of departure before they let you enter the country, lest you attempt to stay there illegally. Putting to one side how ridiculous this rule is (should I want to immigrate illegally, I would simply book a return ticket and not use it) I should have known this. I may well have known this and simply parked the information somewhere too deep in the “later problems” category of my brain. Come to think of it, I had this same problem when backpacking through Costa Rica many years ago (I even wrote about it in this very cringe blog for Wanderlust – thanks for the headline). Either way. it just didn’t occur to either of us to check around the time we booked our flight.
The little man whose job it clearly was to point this rule out to a handful of idiots like us every day said we couldn’t rejoin the queue until we had some kind of proof in hand of our exit strategy for Peru. I had look at websites like onwardticket.com, which effectively sell you a reservation number for around $16 USD by placing a temporary hold on a flight, but it’s still $16 for a piece of air.
Zapped by tiredness, we dug out the guidebook and attempted to make a plan for how and when we would leave Peru for real, but frustratingly you can’t book buses that far in advance – and so, at quarter to three in the morning, I got out my credit card and paid no less than £520 for two fully-refundable two-hour flights from Lima to Quito in June.
Needless to say, when we finally did land in Peru at 8am later that morning, the lovely border control officer waved us through without question or even a stamp. Perhaps they don’t have to bother enforcing the rules because they know there’s a real jobsworth over in Brazil who takes them seriously enough for everyone. My refund is already on its way.
A brief word of warning: this next story contains a little bit of minor gore, so be warned if you don’t like blood. And no, I haven’t killed Dave.
People like to tell you about the crime in Rio de Janeiro. The city has a reputation, as everybody knows, but the violence is very much between gangs and localised to certain favelas. Like any major city in the world, there are areas and certain roads best avoided at night, particularly on weekends in the city centre. But generally speaking, the main danger for tourists is getting your stuff nicked on Copacabana beach. I am haunted by my friend Loulla’s story of having her bag stolen – with all her clothes in – while she was in the sea… someone had to give her money to buy a sarong to wear while she reported the theft to the police.
To me, Rio didn’t feel at all threatening, even at night. The main tourism attractions like Sugarloaf Mountain tend to have a heavy security presence, and at any rate it’s very easy to avoid the dodgy areas of the city because Rio is so segmented – its neighbourhoods sit wedged in-between the many hills dotted through it. It’s quite different to, say, London, where you can be walking past gated mansions in Chelsea and turn a corner and find yourself in a notorious estate.
Something else interesting we noticed in Rio, and some other cities in Brazil come to think of it, is that the authorities are clearly attempting a crackdown on sexual harassment against women. A new anti-harassment law was introduced in April last year and we noticed a lot of posters around the city and on buses with warnings along the lines of “catcalling is a crime”. The Rio subway also has women-only carriages during peak times, though these have existed in some form since 2013, and I have some mixed feelings about that. But ultimately, if they had women-only carriages in London I’d absolutely use them.
The biggest danger for Dave and I in Rio, it turned out, was lurking in our bathroom all along. The incident took place on Tuesday evening after an afternoon pottering about in Ipanema: Dave was in the shower and I heard an almighty crash – followed by silence. Wondering if Dave had fainted, I opened the bathroom door, and in doing so scattered tiny pieces of glass across the room… when exiting the shower, Dave had pulled the shower door handle and the large glass screen had shattered into a thousand pieces, landing in the shower and onto Dave, creating a rather dramatic pool of blood all around him.
His hands and feet looked like they’d been shredded, but luckily most of the cuts were superficial, just a couple of nasty gashes on his fingers. We created some stepping stones for him to exit the scene of the crime and wash off of the remaining glass into the kitchen sink. Dave was very brave.
Being good Airbnb guests, we messaged our host straight away to explain what had happened and to ask what he wanted us to do – but he didn’t reply (poor behaviour!). By this point my loving concern was dwindling as I remembered that I had wanted to shower myself and we had half a tonne of glass to get rid of before that could happen. A midnight operation involving 24 bin bags ensued, and we were resigned to wearing flip flops and picking bits of glass out of our hands for the rest of the week.
To clarify, Dave doesn’t have anger issues or hidden strengths: my investigations found that the shower’s sliding glass door didn’t have any kind of backstop to stop it hitting the tiles, a flaw I was very ready to argue about if it came to it. Luckily, after a night of silence, our host said very little about it all (possibly he was also worried in case we tried to sue him), only that he had no access to a vacuum cleaner but we could get a professional cleaner round if we paid for it. We declined, and he sent a someone round to install a replacement shower door a couple of days later.
I have conflicting feelings about it all – on the one hand, Aragon didn’t seem to give a monkey’s about the fact his shower screen had damaged his guests (and yes I sent him that photo, followed by one of the clean-up). On the other hand, we are yet to receive any threat of a bill for damaging his shower screen, so I’m happy to call this one a truce.
Something else completely ridiculous happened to us in Rio during the week just gone – a second sliding doors moment, if you will. I was standing in a shop in the city centre, vaguely hunting for bikinis in a sea of quite frightening stuff (Brazilians don’t do modesty) when I heard a cheerful British voice behind me ask us, “Excuse me, do you speak English?”
Anthony Gibson and I went to school together in Suffolk and played in a band called Puppy Death (it was supposed to be ironic) – I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in probably 16 years until he spotted me walking past him down Rua Gonçalves Dias in central Rio and followed us into the bikini shop. As fate would have it, Anthony happened to be in Rio for a friend’s wedding – but what are the chances of bumping into each other in a city of almost 14 million people?
The result was this hilarious photo, in which I look very sweaty and squinty, but let’s face it we both look ridiculous because we are in a bikini shop. Of course we went for a drink to catch up and remember some ghosts from the past. Anthony Gibson, it was such a wholesome and lovely thing to bump into you.
I love life’s spooky coincidences. In Nicaragua in 2013 I met an American guy who had been to the Band Box in Felixstowe – my home town’s only night club, voted the worst club in Britain on more than one occasion. When I was getting my toenails done in San Sebastian in Spain at the very beginning of our trip, I got chatting to the woman next to me – a language teacher who had stayed in “a strange little town in the east of England” as a student some 40 years ago. You guessed it: Felixstowe. If you've ever had the (mis)fortune to spend time in Felixstowe, you’ll know it’s very much not a place people tend to go on international holidays, and meeting people who have heard of it – even in most of the rest of England – is pretty wild.
Stranger still is the story my granny used to tell: in Johannesburg, South Africa in around the early 1950s, she walked straight into a man she realised was her French cousin. Raymond had by chance moved to the same area as her to start a new life after the war – the last time they’d seen each other was in England. They became good friends again and the two sides of our family are still close!
Finally, Rio was also the city in which I experienced my very first football match: Flamengo v São Paulo at the Maracanã stadium. It won’t surprise you to know I’m not a football fan, but Dave very much is, and when he realised the first game of the season was taking place that week he looked into getting tickets (£16 each, purchased through a tiny opaque hole in a wall outside the stadium).
Obviously, Brazilians are crazy, and especially when it comes to football. The stadium was about two-thirds full from almost exclusively Flamengo fans, and the atmosphere was wild, but very good natured (we won!). Who knew that football could be so entertaining when it’s in real life and not just noise on a screen? No, I won’t be making a habit of watching it back home, but I’m definitely up for seeing more matches in Latin America if the crowds come with this level of energy.
Like much of Europe, the southern countries on this continent seem relatively conscientious when it comes to recycling and reducing plastic waste. Uruguay and Argentina (possibly Chile as well, I can’t remember) have deposit return systems in place for both glass and plastic bottles, and often in supermarkets you’ll see an area with cardboard packing boxes free for the taking in place of plastic bags.
Brazil doesn’t seem to have got the memo. Every soft or hard drink is handed over with a plastic straw, even in kiosks and supermarkets. Every pastry or herb or deli item comes wrapped in plastic inside polystyrene inside a plastic bag. When we first arrived in Porto Alegre I bought some water and the man at the till literally laughed in my face when I told him I didn’t need a plastic bag before wrapping my bottle in two of them… it’s depressing.
A non-extensive list of things Brazil is very good at:
Cold drinks. Brazilians pride themselves on serving ice-cold beer, which goes down very well in the heat, but now I think about it doesn’t help with the aforementioned environmental ambivalence… And I’m talking cold to the point that on more than one occasion we’ve been given a can that is frozen solid and the waiter has had to replace it with a warmer one anyway. Even better are the cold cosies presented by every bar to house your bottle in.
Related: day drinking. You can be on a boat or in a bar or just a breakfast café and someone who isn’t necessarily homeless will be cracking open a can of Brahma. It’s always 10am somewhere.
Supermarkets. I’ve banged on about it before but variety of stock is no problem this side of the border, and let me tell you it’s a joy after the sad and pricey shelves in Uruguay.
See also: supersized fruit and veg; generally excellent and var meals out.
Selfies. Everywhere, everyone, every opportunity. Instagram is kept afloat by Brazilian women.
Travel bits and tips from this week
We stayed in Laranjeiras, Rio de Janeiro, after central Botafogo.
Showergate took place in this Airbnb, which was lovely asides from all of that.
Don’t expect to get a perfect picture when visiting Rio’s famous colourful steps, Escadaria Selarón – but do go to enjoy the zoo of tourists who flock there.
We loved the Bondes de Santa Teresa tram, which takes you up into the hills for views across the city for a couple of pounds.
There’s an abundance of good middle-eastern food in Rio – we loved Amir.
You can get tickets to matches at the Maracanã stadium (80,000-person capacity, host to both the Olympics and the Pope), at ticket office number two on the south side of the stadium.
And I wouldn’t recommend spending too long at São Paulo international airport but if you do get stranded, the pasta at Spoleto is pretty decent.