A very foreign place, with dramatically different fauna and flora. The camera I have with me does a miserable job with close-ups, otherwise I’d be posting hundreds of studies of Protea, Watsonia, and many more.
Sights along the Cape Peninsula, a.k.a. the “Deep South”:
watsonia
malachite sunbird
hadada ibis
plover
gull
egyptian goose
yellow bishop
?
red-winged starling
speckled pigeon
ring-necked dove
We made a special trip to see the penguins at Boulder Beach. The “dassies” (hyraxes) almost stole the show.
Sao Paulo is the largest city in the Western hemisphere and also the largest city in the Southern hemisphere. It’s so vast that it’s impossible to get a sense of its scale, even from the air. It’s noteworthy that you can expect to drive for an hour from the airport without leaving the city limits, but something similar is true for other big cities with terrible traffic.
We spent a bare minimum of time (plus a few hours in traffic) in the city itself, and headed out to a town called Capao Bonito, on the forested hills to the west. Unbeknownst to us, Capao Bonito is the source for the red granite used in expensively-renovated kitchen countertops throughout the U.S.. In town, of course, it’s used for benches, staircases, cobblestones, and so on.
After an exciting day at Intervales state park (featuring venomous snakes – no I did not stop to take photos) and a quiet afternoon visiting new friends in the hills above town, we bid adieu to the burrowing owls for the last time and began the long trip to Africa.
Sao Paulo cathedral:
Capao Bonito, Ribeiro Grande, and Parque Estadual Intervales:
A side trip from Buenos Aires. A quiet, relaxing town. Two things I disliked: 1) restaurant prices were higher than in Argentina; 2) our ferry had mechanical problems and we almost didn’t make it back to Buenos Aires.
A gigantic city – nearly sixteen million people, a third of the population of Argentina, live here. In a week we barely scratched the surface, visiting a few parks and landmarks in the city center: Japanese garden, botanical garden, rose garden, Casa Rosada, Teatro Colon,…
We also happened to encounter some young people training for a national hip-hop competition the very next day. So we went to check it out.
In most of Buenos Aires, taxis are plentiful and cheap, the subway is prompt and clean, and there are more buses than you can shake a stick at, most of them using dedicated bus lanes most of the time. But if you take a taxi an hour away from the center, say to find a hip-hop competition, you may not find a subway or taxi to get back. (There were still buses, but no direct route, and it was getting late.) We were about to start begging the competitors for rides, when someone suggested we try Uber. Success! Uber doesn’t offer service in most of Argentina, but greater Buenos Aires is an exception.
Someone once said to me, about Bryce Canyon, Utah: “It’s beautiful, but you end up taking the same photo a hundred times.” Iguacu is kind of like that: big, beautiful, but hard to capture.
We started with a boat ride right under the “three musketeers.” I had to put my camera away for the good parts, but you’ll see photos I took of other boats doing the same thing.
Next, we headed up the trail to get a closer look at the “Garganta del Diablo” – the Devil’s Throat.
We arrived in Iguacu in the late afternoon to a temperature of 38 centigrade: too hot to think of going anywhere but the swimming pool. Next morning we headed out to the bird zoo before the heat became too stifling. Unlike the waterfall, visiting the bird park does not require getting thoroughly soaked, so we needed to go early.
Southern Screamer
They had several guans, not sure which one this is
Gramado is a well-to-do tourist town in the hills north of Porto Alegre. We arrived just in time for “Natal Luz”, a festival of Christmas lights, plus shows and music and so on, that lasts from October until late January. The town has a certain German architectural flavor, and the Christmas decorations at first reminded me of a Weihnachtsmarkt, but after a few days I decided the sheer overabundance was more American than German.
The town does have a lot of fondu restaurants, a proportion of blue-eyed residents, and even the tourists are paler, on average, than we’d seen so far in Brasil. Plus, the town is proud of a freak snowstorm a few years ago. You can get your photo taken against a snowy backdrop. You can also try out indoor skiing or one of seemingly dozens of theme parks, half of them sponsored by a local chocolate company. On the one hand, there were plenty of things to do, but on the other, parking was terrible, prices were high, and the constant commercialism was wearing.
Still, with bracingly cool weather (including some sharp afternoon thunderstorms), excellent scenery including a spectacular waterfall, and a large zoo, the town is well worth a visit.
