Pedal Power in South America

Now Hear This! Bicycles Rule! (Montevideo, Uruguay)

Plenty of bicycles in South America, but also lots of bicycle-inspired contraptions. I enjoyed the variety during our June/July 08 trip. I hope you do too.

Surfboard Carrier - Rio de Janeiro

Carbon Neutral Advertising (Corrientes, Argentina)

Grocery Delivery in Rio (leaf springs for heavy loads)

This one has six wheels! (Congonhas, Brazil)

Climbing Sugarloaf Peak in Rio de Janeiro

Sugarloaf peak showing the Via dos Italianos

I lugged climbing shoes and a harness all six weeks of our summer vacation — so that for just one day I could climb the famous Sugarloaf in the heart of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in early July.

Sugarloaf sits on the tip of the Urca peninsula, which has 270 rock climbs – just this one puny little neighborhood and park in one corner of Rio! Rio is considered the center of Brazilian rock climbing because greater Rio has at least double that many climbs.

I had it all worked out with a guide ahead of time, a friend of Edgar Aulestia, the owner of the Monodedo rockclimbing shop in Quito, Ecuador, where I live. Flavio Daflon was my guide and wrote the book (literally) on Urca climbs.

The Italian Route, or A Via dos Italianos in Portuguese, is the most famous route in all of Brazil. The Italians who created the route knew a beautiful line when they saw one — Flavio called it “The Nose of Sugarloaf,” a reference to the most famous rock climb in the world, the Nose of El Capitan. Italianos goes free at 5.10 for two pitches, then gets a little to a lot easier.

The actual Via dos Italianos is really just the two-pitch straight part of the climb up the arete – about 180 feet or so. Then you have to traverse over to the left to a different route (Secundo) to finish. Anyway, the weather was gorgeous, the climbing technical and absorbing, the views unbelievable, and my guide was relaxed and very professional. My only complaint was that I hadn’t done thin face climbing in a long time. I spent the entire day practically on my tiptoes. By the second or third hanging belay, my toes screamed like they’d been sledged, my Achilles tendons moaned like they were stretched on The Rack, and my calves felt like arson victims. I couldn’t walk normally for over 24 hours after topping out. Still, for me, it was the highlight of our trip!

Why it’s no fun smoking in Brazil

Traveling in Brazil for 3 weeks in June and July was a great experience, and right off I noticed that fewer people were smoking compared to my last visit 20 years ago. Argentines and Uruguayans, on the other hand, are still smoking like chimneys. What’s the difference?

I tend to feel like we do a great job in the U.S. of letting people know about the dangers of smoking. After all, we started the business of warnings, and there’s this blurb (or another one) on every pack of cigarretes:

SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease,
Emphysema, And May Complicate Pregnancy.

But let me tell you, we could do better, as we discovered in Brazil. I found this quote on Wikipedia, in an article that summarizes the kinds of warnings found on cigarettes in different countries:

Though America started the trend of labeling cigarette packages with health warnings, today the country has one of the smallest, least prominent warnings placed on their packages.

Without further ado, here’s how they get the word out in Brazil, which Wikipedia says was the second country to adopt warnings. Clearly, they’ve kept pushing the envelope.

The right side of a cigarette advertising poster

The back of three cigarette packs, indicating that smoking causes: cancer of the mouth and loss of teeth; spontaneous abortions; and vascular disease which leads to amputation.

"Children that live with smokers have more asthma, pneumonia, sinusitis and allergies."

Anyone feel like a smoke?

Back from our vacation

Well, we’re back from 6 weeks traveling in Brazil and Argentina, with some Uruguay thrown in for flavor and a couple of hours in Paraguay for spice. My in-laws, Bettye and Bob, traveled with us for nearly 3 weeks in Brazil, and together we had a blast. The plan is over the next couple of weeks to write a few separate pieces about some of what we saw and experienced.

The view from Sugarloaf over Rio de Janeiro

Here is what we visited with a brief description:

• Sao Paulo, Brazil: Bob gets mugged in broad daylight on day 1. Uphill from there, perhaps the highlight was being approached one day by Brazilian tourism students and having them show us around the wonderful Sao Paulo Market while they took pictures of us for their class project.
• Paraty, Brazil: On Brazil’s island-studded “Green Coast,” Paraty was a beautifully preserved colonial port that shipped out all the mineral wealth from Brazil’s gold mines.
• Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: “A Cidade Maravilhosa” (the Marvelous City”) was even more beautiful than I remembered it. Surely no other city sits in as beautiful a natural setting. Stay tuned for pictures of me doing a long technical rock climb of Sugarloaf peak in the heart of Rio’s coastal neighborhoods.
• Ouro Preto, Brazil and other colonial mining towns of Minas Gerais (the Brazilian state whose name translates as “General Mines”): a highlight from my previous visit to Brazil 20 years ago, gorgeous colonial towns with cobblestone streets winding around beautiful old buildings and ornate yet elegant churches. We visited 4 different towns in this region (perhaps one or two too many, but each had its own charms), Bob and I swam in an underground lake in the bottom of an old gold mine, we all took a steam-train ride on “Smoking Mary,” and Joy and I paid a “moto-taxi” visit to an amazing natural rock garden and cave.
  

  Incredible Iguazu, showing a tiny fraction of the falls

• Salvador da Bahia, Brazil: several days in this northeastern heart of “African Brazil,” the city that spawned the dancing martial art of Capoeira, and the animistic faith of Candomble. It felt ancient and poor, lively and warm, a city that is unselfconsciously making the most of its cultural richness and heritage, despite or because it was the center of the Brazilian slave trade for centuries.
• Iguazu Falls, Argentina-Brazil border: truly one of the most beautiful places in the natural world. Soon enough we’ll show you enough pictures to either convince you or bore you, but no number of pictures can capture the scope and magnificence of this complex of over 200 waterfalls.
• Corrientes, Argentina: fifteen years after meeting him in Austin, I finally got to visit a friend from Argentina in his hometown. Now a successful but admittedly disillusioned lawyer with a beautiful wife and baby , Nestor showed us the full extent of Argentine hospitality, including a fishing trip on the immense Rio Parana where Joy caught a Dorado.
• Colonia and Montevideo, Uruguay: quiet little Uruguay sits across the mouth of the Rio de la Plata (River Plate) from much larger Argentina, but we really enjoyed our time there. Great old buildings, wonderful museums, fantastic food and smart, funny, friendly people more than made up for the cold, windy, rainy conditions we endured for most of our visit.
  

  La Boca neighborhood, Buenos Aires

• Buenos Aires, Argentina: it was great to be back in the city where I’d lived and worked for five months 20 years ago. I’d been dreading a diet of nothing but world-class steak, pizza, and pasta, but I had it wrong. Though it’s true that ethnic restaurants are in remarkably short supply in such a world-class city, Argentine restaurants serve up wonderful tarts, quiches, and stews, and the ice cream was even better than I remembered. Food aside, we visited Evita’s grave (coincidentally on the anniversary of her death), saw some great museums, a bunch of incredibly huge “gomero” trees that grace the plazas and parks, took in a tango show, and hung out with some Academia Cotopaxi colleagues and another old Argentine friend.

Can you tell we had fun?

Holy week in Colombia

Only a month or two behind schedule, here are some highlights of our “Spring Break” (what does that mean on the equator?) trip to Cartagena and Bogota, Colombia in March, 2008. Cartagena is a beautiful colonial city — the old town is completely walled in from back in the day when Sir Francis Drake was trying to attack the city (you can bet the residents of Cartagena weren’t calling him “Sir”!). Everywhere you looked it was gorgeous, and the weather was thankfully hot, just what the doctor ordered after months of cold and wet in Quito!

Bogota was cooler (but not as cold as Quito!) and cosmopolitan, with vibrant street life and some great museums and restaurants. Here are some images from our visit.

Cartagena Pictures

Here is a video of the shark feeding frenzy (a still photo is in the Cartagena slides above): we took a boat from Cartagena to some nearby islands for a day of Caribbean sand and sun. Part of the deal was to go to this aquarium, which featured a guy feeding “pens” of different kinds of sea creatures. The craziest event was the one featuring these really fat sharks.

Here are our Bogota pictures, including the amazing Botero museum. Botero is Colombia’s most famous artist, and perhaps the world’s most famous living painter. Our favorite restaurant in San Antonio, Texas (Rosario’s) features huge replicas of some of Botero’s sympathetic yet critical paintings of big, fat people.

Here are pictures from my rock climbing adventures at Suesca, near Bogota. I got to go two different days, with two different Colombian climbers that I had met a month before when they were visiting my favorite climbing area near Quito. Suesca has over 400 routes of varying length, both bolted routes and trad climbs (where you place your own gear as you go). The Columbians who showed me around, Gonzalo and Ivan, were extremely generous and justifiably proud of this great climbing area.