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Welcome to the 21st Century. It’s a brave new world.

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Day three of Carnival, or day four, I don’t know, there have been blocos for a couple of days running into the weekend and they haven’t stopped. I spend the day chilling on Ipanema beach while a smallish float and Samba band crawls along the road. The sound is jacked up way too loud on the float and the speakers keep feeding back. This creates two bubbles of empty space in the party as no-one other than the deaf can stand to be right next the side speakers. Read more

Day 8: Las Vegas, Nevada

06/11/07

We begin another ‘long ass drive’ to Vegas to recuperate for a day after the past couple of days of insanity. I’d personally like to play Salt Lake, but the promoter still hasn’t been in touch. My throat is officially blown as well, I can barely speak above a whisper. It hurts to talk and swallow, something about the mountain air really did me in. I am medicating myself by swigging cough medicine that leaves me drowsy, and by eating honey on tortilla bread. The cough medicine tastes of nasty menthol but I have to do it otherwise I will be screwed in California. I feel like a hobo with a hipflask as I take infrequent sips of the stuff. As the defacto book keeper I am totting up the sums of the tour so far and it’s not looking good, the drive across the Mid-West has killed us financially. Hopefully we will make some of it up in California. Read more

Here’s the start of my write-up of my diaries from the Frightener USA tour, which happened on October/November of 2007 with Pulling Teeth. I’m taking this stuff straight from my diary, so if I say thanks and don’t put your name down, please don’t take offence, I just forgot to note it down afterwards. I am crap at remembering names at the best of times. Anyways, here goes: Read more

I took it easy on the Sunday, partly because I was shattered from wandering around so much the night before, but also because the real parties here kick off around eight or nine in the evening. Still, I left the house in between rain showers to grab some late lunch. The streets of Rio were eerily quiet save for diehard tourists who are wandering around in party gear at four in the afternoon trying to find some sort of party to attend. Read more

For anyone visiting Rio, Carnival is apparently a military operation masquerading as a party. Times, places, seat numbers, meeting points, rally points and so on and so forth. So with that in mind I woke up on day one of Carnival without the faintest hint of a plan. Apparently there is a pretty good samba parade in Ipanema, which is the hip beach area in the south zone of Rio. It also happens to be quite near to where I’m staying which is handy. The sun is shining, the day is glorious, and the streets are packed. Read more

Finding my way back to Tijuca Forest was definately easier than finding my way there for the first time. For starters, the round trip cost me less than the abortive taxi ride which was rather nice. Exiting the metro system at Sans Paena, I succesfully managed to catch the correct bus, thanks to this bus stop being the one in, well, the first one I’ve seen in Rio that actually has a semblance of a route map as well as a string of bus numbers.

Buses in Rio are a law unto themselves. I think that when they designed the training system for new bus drivers the guy in charge must have sat down and watched the final chase scenes from Terminator 1+2, Speed plus whichever Mad Max film has the petrol tanker in it. As a result, Rio’s bus drivers are trained to ignore any and all traffic in between them and their final destination. True, all other Rio traffic generally follows exactly the same pattern, except the buses are three times the size of everyone else.

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It’s always a great sign when the taxi driver doesn’t know the street when you point to it on a map. Tijuca Park was the destination for the day. Twenty minutes into the cab ride, it wasn’t going so well. We had taken the long route around Lagoa, the guy was enthusiastically explaining it’s presence to me like an excited tour guide up until the point where I pointed out the BTT gym and told him I trained there every day. The road to Tijuca park goes through a few backstreets near the Botanical Gardens (a source of at least three minutes of pointing and explaining). But from there it went bad to worse. The cab driver insisted that there was a police cabin a kilometer down the road. Three kilometers of ascent into forest and, well, I had enough of paying a guy who didn’t know the directions. He dropped me off at a place called China Vista. After asking a few people there, who also didn’t know the way, we agreed to part ways on half the roundabout fare. Read more

Seeing as this is my first post and all, I thought I’d take the time to write a letter home to my friends.

So here it is. A fresh start on the other side of the globe. I’m currently resident in Rio De Janeiro. From the 11 days that I’ve been here I can tell this city is different. For instance, their approach to recycling is to let the Favela kids pick up the cans in return for a pittance. This is laudible until it’s 11.30 PM and a barefoot six year old approaches you for the can of beer you’ve been nursing for the last half hour. There’s not much you can really say in such a situation, regardless of the fact that my Portuguese is quite poor. Read more