Day 64: Learning to Fly

Day 64
Today I'm in: Iquique and Antofagasta, Chile

After yesterday's botched paragliding expedition, it was nice to wake up to sunny-er skies this morning.  There were still some gray clouds here and there (and the weather got worse as the day went on) but when I checked in with the staff at the flight camp they said we were definitely going up to the "takeoff site" today just before lunchtime.  With that settled, I went for a run along the beach, got breakfast, and got ready to head up into the hills.

Most of the city of Iquique is down along the water, running for about four miles along the ocean with the mountains rising up steeply behind.  In the last 15-20 years a pretty sizeable satellite city has developed at Alto Hospicio at the top of the mountains, and it's connected today by a four-lane freeway that threads its way along the side of the cliff.  That's what we - me and two other aspiring paragliders - headed up on our way to the edge of the cliff used by most of the flying companies in Iquique.

At the top we were issued "flight suits" that zipped up around our legs and arms, and then we were clipped into special seats that we wore over our shoulders and around our waist.  When you walk, the seat sort of slaps along behind you, but once you get airborne you can settle back into it, sort of like a rock-climbing harness.  We had a very lengthy safety briefing (although we were going basically as passengers and wouldn't be given much, if any, control over anything) and a demo of how the paraglider actually works.

A paraglider is about three times the size of a parachute and also has a porous surface that channels air.  Unlike a parachute, where the pores are angled vertically, on a paraglider the pores are more horizontal.  Parachutes give a controlled descent; paragliders are designed for sustained flight with lateral and vertical movement.  The view from the takeoff site was basically over the edge of a cliff; I was flying with an instructor named Cristian (they matched us up with instructors based on weight and height), who pointed out several flocks of vultures circling over the city and sand dunes.  The vultures use thermal winds to gain and lose altitude while circling; paraglider pilots look for the vultures to get a general idea of where the best thermals are and where they maneuver to quickly ascend or descend.  I got clipped into the paraglider in front of Cristian - there were about fourteen carabiners holding us together - and we were ready to go.

Since we had a pretty good breeze coming up the mountain we didn't have do much running to get airborne; only about six or seven steps and we lifted off the ground, well ahead of the edge of the cliff.  Once I settled into the seat I had to work my arms back behind the straps of the wing, so that Cristian could steer without any interference, but with that done I was free to enjoy the ride.  We went up a LOT higher initially than I was expecting; Cristian was able to catch a pretty active thermal and we spun upward smoothly, but very quickly.

I'm not afraid of heights as a general rule but there were definitely some maybe-I'm-not-OK-with-this moments, especially when other paragliders came close to us and when we went out over the ocean (if the glider falls, you're probably dead no matter what, but over sand dunes you still feel like maybe the landing will be soft.)  During the setup process I forgot to ask for a strap for my camera, so taking pictures was interesting and terrifying - I had visions of my camera plummeting down into the city or the sand dunes, so I was gripping it for dear life.  Mostly, though, the ride was a lot of fun.

We flew about 8.5 kilometers in total and the flight lasted around 35 minutes.  When it was time to land, we headed for Playa Brava, one of the city's main beaches, and found a thermal that we could use to get down.  We spiraled down pretty rapidly - passing right alongside several high-rise condo towers where residents were waving to us from the balconies - and headed for the beach.  Cristian told me to slide out of my seat so my legs were hanging - the equivalent of putting down a landing gear - which was pretty disconcerting.  The brakes are not activated until just a second or two before you hit the beach, so the sand came rushing up at a VERY fast clip.  At the last second, we hit the brakes, and the touchdown was actually very soft.  The flight company's van was waiting and we went back up to do it again.

The second flight was a little bit shorter than the first - it was getting cloudier and the winds less predictable - but we managed to make it all the way to the beach again (on certain days they have to land on the sand dunes, which means a long walk to the nearest road.)  All in all, it was an awesome experience and one I'd love to try again.  The next time I'm in Colorado or Utah I may have to look for a paragliding company; reportedly Iquique is one of the best places in the world to do it, however.  The winds in the Rockies are more turbulent and so most flights are much shorter and much more strictly controlled.  It was nice having Cristian do most of the piloting, but someday when I've got more time and money it might be fun to take some more intensive lessons and learn to do everything for myself.

After the second flight I ditched the flight suit and walked back into central Iquique for a late lunch and to take photos since I'd forgotten a camera yesterday.  The city center was much busier on Monday than it was on a Sunday morning - there were people everywhere, particularly in the Plaza General Prat, the center of town where the distinctive wooden clock tower (in place since the 1870s) looks out over the city.  In summertime (our winter) Iquique's population increases by almost 50% as southerners come north for beach holidays.

Around sunset I returned to the hotel, packed up and headed to the airport for my flight to Antofagasta, where I'm writing this entry now.  We landed at night, so I didn't get much of an introduction to the city - like Iquique, it's on the coast and backs up to the Atacama Desert, so during the descent and landing I barely saw any lights out the airplane window, just black.  I didn't even know we were as low as we were until suddenly the runway lights appeared below us.  The city itself seems to be fairly large - it's Chile's third biggest - but I'm saving the exploration for tomorrow. 

Day 62 & 63: Not Always Arica

Day 62 & 63
Today I'm in: Arica and Iquique, Chile

As further proof that I'm currently in an orderly, predictable country, the lead story on last night's Chilean national news was about a teenager who, as a nighttime prank, reset the hands on a flower clock in the city of Viña del Mar.  They devoted a full two or three minutes to the story, complete with commentary from residents who used the clock as a reference and got confused.  That's what passes for headline news here - awesome.  

Day 62 certainly felt like "Arica, siempre Arica."  I  mentioned that I wasn't sure how I was going to fill a day after seeing so much of the town in such a short time the day before.    The original plan, after all, had been to be at Lauca National Park before I discovered there was no way to dodge altitude sickness on a daytrip.  I purposely saved a few sights to give me something to do, starting with the climb up El Morro, which I reached by a set of steps up the hillside just behind my hotel.  At the top there was a panoramic view across all of Arica, plus a nice little museum explaining the finer points of the battle fought there during the War of the Pacific.    There was plenty of patriotic music and monumental sculpture as well, including several placards dedicated by ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet.

When I'd had my fill of the view I scissor-footed down the mountain (it's a really steep path) and back into town for some lunch.  I opted for another lomo a lo pobre, and this one wasn't miniature, either.  It arrived swimming in oil (not so good for me) but packed with stuff I like - eggs, steak, sausage and potatoes.  Any more than a week in Chile and I'd probably die of heart failure; I don't know how the people here manage to keep themselves healthy.

Post-lunch I walked out to Arica's beach, which is known throughout the country for being warm enough to swim in, even in the dead of winter.  I didn't bring my suit, but there were people in the water.  Compared to some of the beaches I've seen on this trip, it wasn't much of a looker - the sand is like brown sugar and the wind was a little bit strong - but the weather was nice and I could see why folks from Santiago might enjoy a trip up here.  Several large resorts are located along the beach as well, and during school holidays Arica is packed with vacationers.

That - and a lot of time lounging around the hotel room either using the computer or trying to make sense of the rapid-fire Spanish on TV - wrapped up Day 62.  This morning started before sunrise with a trip out to the airport for my flight down the coast to Iquique.  I was very happy when I got to the gate (warning: airplane dorkdom ahead) and saw a Boeing 737-200 parked at these gate.  The 737 is still the world's best-selling plane, but the -200 series came out in the late 1960s and hasn't been in use by any US carriers for about a decade.  I have lots of good memories from childhood flying -200s on Southwest, United and Delta, and it was nice to get back on one of these old planes.  They're most notable for the clamshell thrust reversers that open up when you land and make a LOT of noise.  Beautiful.

In any event, the flight down to Iquique was only about a half hour, and we arrived to mist and gloom.  Both of my days in Arica started out murky and cleared up by lunchtime, but today in Iquique that hasn't been the case - it's 5:30pm and still pretty gross-looking out.  My whole rationale for coming to Iquique was to try paragliding, which is where you parachute off of a mountaintop and then, using a series of controls, glide for anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour on your way down.  Iquique, being located right on the ocean with steep, almost vertical mountains right behind it, is the biggest paragliding center in South America, so it seemed like a good place to try it out.  I'm staying at the Altazor Flight Park, which is a paragliding school and hostel made entirely from shipping containers.  I was a little bit nervous when we pulled up, but my container is, well, fully self-contained and  actually quite nice inside, with a bathroom and bedroom inside.

Originally I was hoping to do a flight today, and when I got there at 10am the school's director penciled me in for a flight at 2:30.  He then loaned me his bike so I could go into Iquique for lunch, and I got about halfway there before I remembered I forgot my camera - so no pictures of town.  It's a pretty agreeable city, much larger and nicer than Arica, with plenty of high-rise condos underscoring its status as the country's number-one summer beach resort.  When I got back at 2:30, there was nobody around, and finally at 3:30 the instructors came back to say the winds weren't cooperating and they weren't going to do a flight today.  So I'm rescheduled for tomorrow.  The forecast is for good, strong winds, so keep your fingers crossed.  (The photo, by the way, is from Arica, not Iquique.)  

Day 61: Arica, Siempre Arica

Day 61
Today I'm in: Arica, Chile


Santiago was coated in a thick layer of frost and fog when I got to the airport this morning, which meant we had to be de-iced before takeoff.  When we climbed above the fog, the Andes, covered in snow, were visible to the east.  The flight up to Arica took almost three hours, and about an hour after leaving Santiago the fog and the clouds broke up and the terrain below took on a much drier and more hostile appearance.


Arica is literally as far north as you can go in Chile. I'm only a few hundred miles from La Paz in Bolivia, and as we turned off the runway at the airport today I was looking over the airport fence into Peru.  It's that close.  This end of Chile was wrestled from Peru and Bolivia during the War of the Pacific in the 1870s, during a series of battles that cost Bolivia her coastline and cost Peru the city of Arica, then one of its largest ports.  Chile picked up some of the most copper- and nitrate-rich areas in South America (something that's paying dividends today) and an excellent all-weather port city to boot.

Pride and passion seem to figure prominently up here.  Central Arica is dominated by El Morro, a huge rocky headland that looms over town and juts out into the Pacific.  It was the site of one of the fiercest and most decisive battles in the War of the Pacific, one which delivered Arica squarely into Chilean hands.  The Chileans are immensely proud of this and, to make sure the Bolivians and Peruvians don't forget who's boss here, have erected an enormous flag atop El Morro.  A line from a poem by Pedro Ariel Olea - "Arica, always Arica, great is my loyalty to you" - is spelled out in rocks along El Morro as well.


Arica also goes by the moniker "City of Eternal Spring."  It's true that it's far, far warmer up here than it was Santiago, but 'spring' isn't exactly what comes to mind when surveying the landscape here.  This is the northern edge of the Atacama Desert, one of the driest spots on earth, and beyond that is the Andean altiplano, where rain is a less-than-frequent occurrence as well.

There are just under 200,000 people in Arica, and with more than a few high-rise apartment towers and some sprawling suburbs it feels like a city of some substance.  I had originally hoped to drive up to Parque National Lauca on the altiplano and spend a night up there.  Once I did a bit more research, though, I learned that I'd need at least two full days in Lauca just to get acclimatized and avoid altitude sickness.  So Arica it is.

There's not a lot to see in Arica.  The downtown area is nice and compact and centers around the Paseo 21 de Mayo, a pedestrianized street lined with cafes and bars and most of the same Chilean chain stores I found in Santiago and Valparaiso (my favorite is an electronics store called "ABCDins.")  One of the more notable attractions is the Iglesia San Marcos (St. Mark's Church), which was designed by none other than Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, of Parisian tower fame.  Fittingly, the entire church is built from cast iron, like the Eiffel Tower, that's been painted.  Eiffel also designed the former waterfront Customs House, which is now marooned inland thanks to landfill projects that expanded the port and has been converted rather cleverly into an amphitheater and performing arts center.  The only occupant when I visited was a sleeping stray dog - Chile has a huge population of urban stray dogs, most of which were turned loose from homes and are consequently very tame and friendly.  They seem well cared for - a lot of shops have adopted them as mascots and keep them fed and watered - and it's kind of nice to have a dog or two trotting along with you while you go sightseeing.

After getting settled at the hotel and doing some sightseeing I stopped by a cafe for lunch and tried a miniature platter of lomo de lo pobre ("poor man's steak"), a Chilean dish consisting of steak, a fried egg, rice and french fries.  This was a small plate - some restaurants serve it on a dish so large you need both hands to carry it - but I figured I should try it before I jump in with both feet.  It wasn't too bad, especially when chased with a pisco sour (another bone of contention between Chileans and Peruvians, who each claim it as their national drink.)

It took just a few hours to get acquainted with Arica, which has left me wondering what the hell I'm going to do with a full day here tomorrow.  I've saved a few activities (climbing El Morro, checking out the beach south of town) but in general I suspect tomorrow's going to be a fairly lazy day.

Day 60: To the coast and back

Day 60
Today I'm in: Santiago, Chile

After going back and forth about whether I should go to Valparaiso for the day (and getting lots of positive reinforcement from friends who had been) I woke up on Day 60 and decided to go for it.  There are buses from Santiago to Valparaiso every ten minutes on weekdays, so getting there was a cinch, and the bus station is conveniently connected to the city's metro (I told you I love this city!)

Santiago was shivering under dense fog and temperatures in the high 30s, so I packed for the worst - I even bought a scarf at the bus station.  We rolled out through the misty, gray suburbs of Santiago and climbed into the Cordillera Coastal, the range of mountains separating the capital from the ocean.  When we popped out of the tunnel through the cordillera, the fog was gone, the sun was out, and the skies were as blue as they'd been in South Africa.  Go figure.  On the way into Valparaiso we passed mile after mile of wine estates; Chile's become famous for its wines in the last few decades, and judging from the number of tour buses in the parking lots plenty of people are coming to check things out.

To call Valparaiso a spontaneously-planned city is to put it lightly.  Things start out manageable enough on El Plan ("the plain") where a gridded street network faces the city's waterfront and its all-important port.  El Plan is appealingly scruffy in a maybe-this-isn't-the-best-place-to-walk-around-at-night kind of way.  Rising up behind El Plan, however, are the city's 42 hills, where any trace of cartographic realism goes out the window.  The hills are linked to El Plan by a labyrinthine system of cobbled streets, narrow crumbling stairways, and the city's famous acensores - late 19th-century funiculars that crawl up and down the slopes saving residents' knees the trouble of walking.

Or they would if they were working.  Riding an acensor is supposed to be a definitive Valparaiso experience - like riding a gondola in Venice or an elephant in India - and I went to four different stations trying to catch a ride on one.  Two of them looked like they had been closed a long time (the doors were closed with rusty padlocks) and the other two had signs announcing "temporary" closures for restoration work.

First I headed for Cerro Bellavista, where Pablo Neruda once lived and that's home once again to a growing colony of artists and writers.  The houses on the hills are famously ramshackle - many of them are little more than grafted-together assemblages of corrugated steel and tin.  The steel is painted in bright colors, though, so looking across Valparaiso's hills is always pleasant, and since the whole city was branded a UNESCO site a few years ago many of the houses have been redeveloped into hotels and restaurants.  The views across the hillsides and toward the bay, which is lined with container-lifting cranes and full of enormous tanker ships, come out of nowhere and are pretty spectacular.

From Bellavista I headed for Cerro Alegre, which is right next door, but getting there (thanks to the malfunctioning acensores) required that I negotiate a series of narrow steps and impossibly steep alleyways. Alegre was the first hill to begin drawing tourists, and it felt very fashionable, with lots of classy guesthouses, wine bars and ice cream shops along its streets.  I had lunch at a bistro, Cafe Vinilo, where I ordered a carne mechada steak that was served up with a big helping of Chilean vegetables - quinoa, pumpkin, green beans, potatoes and corn - and drowned in spicy gravy.  Good stuff.

Finally I made my way to Cerro Carcel, which is topped by the ruins of an 18th-century prison (carcel in Spanish) that's being slowly remodeled into a museum designed by our friend Oscar Niemeyer, who built Brasilia back in the 1950s.  It also boasts a great view across the rooftops to the port area - until the opening of the Panama Canal, Valparaiso was one of South America's most important ports, where ships would stop to recover from or stock up for the stormy journey around Tierra del Fuego at the bottom of the continent.  Today it serves a more utilitarian role handling Chilean goods, and it's also the home of Chile's navy, but the overwhelming feeling is of being in a city whose glory days are well behind it.

Mostly, though, it's a pretty absurdly cool city, and I'm really glad I went to see it, if only for a few hours.  Naturally, as soon as the bus climbed up into the Cordillera Coastal on the way back to Santiago, the mist rolled back in, the windows fogged up and the driver turned the heater up to full blast.  I celebrated my return to Santiago with dinner and a few drinks in the Providencia neighborhood, which I hadn't had a chance to see the day before.  Not a bad way to spend a day!

Day 59: Unexpected Santiago

Day 59
Today I'm in: Santiago, Chile

Santiago isn't an especially attractive city, but it's turned out to be one of my favorite stops on the trip.

The Chileans themselves are what I like most.  Brazil may hog the spotlight when it comes to economic growth and vivaciousness, Peru has its tragically dramatic history, and the Argentines certainly seem to think they're the most (or the only, if you believe some of them) cultured and refined people below the Equator.  All the while, the Chileans have been industriously building what appears to be an orderly, clean, and very nice little society down here under everyone's noses. Sure, they got into the right-wing military dictatorship thing back in the 1970s, when all the cool Latin American countries were doing it, and poverty and income inequality are still big problems (although not as big as they were twenty or even ten years ago) but there's a quiet confidence and a real sense of prosperity here that's very appealing.  


Santiago seems to exemplify this.  The people on the street - all of them - are well dressed, the shops are full of goods on par with anything you'll find in the US, sidewalk cafes are full of students with their noses buried in books, and the metro system (South America's biggest and fastest-growing) is clean and modern.  I didn't see any beggars, homeless people or street kids.  To be fair, I didn't venture into any of the city's working-class neighborhoods, but by all accounts, life for Santiago's poor is nowhere near as desperate as it is in other parts of the continent.  

I hate to keep picking on Argentina, because I loved my visit there a few years ago, but Santiago - not Buenos Aires, as the Argentines are so fond of claiming - feels like an outpost of Europe in South America. B.A. may look the part, but Santiago really lives it.  Right down to the gloomy weather and bundled-up, chain-smoking people.  I mentioned this in last night's entry, but it's actually very refreshing to be outside in the cold, under gray skies.  After two straight weeks of merciless sunshine in Brazil, it's nice to have a little variety, even if I occasionally wish I'd remembered to pack a pair of gloves. 

I'm staying in Centro, the high-rise downtown area that's a mix of residential and office towers.  The heart of Centro is the Plaza de Armas, a large, open space dotted with palm trees and filled with benches, pigeons, vendors and musicians.  Radiating out from the Plaza are long pedestrianized shopping streets lined with glass-and-steel towers and solid old buildings.  Like most South Americans, Chileans are descended from a mix of different cultures, and the street names - MacIver, O'Higgins, Pestalozzi, Amunategui, Subecasseaux, Lord Cochrane, Mallinkrodt - bear that out.  It definitely doesn't have the visual appeal of a Rio or a Paris; it's more like Berlin or Milan, full of people going about their business. 

Of course, the Germans and the northern Italians aren't exactly renowned for being party animals, so after a few hours in downtown Santiago I decided to wander into some neighborhoods to see if the Chileans can keep up with their neighbors when it comes to having a good time.  First up was Barrio Brasil, a slightly rough, bohemian area west of town near the University of Santiago that's Santiago's equivalent of a hipster enclave.  The Plaza Brasil in the middle is surrounded by cafes, nightclubs and restaurants, and on every block old buildings were being renovated and repurposed.  I had a tasty chorizo pizza and a big mug of Kunstmann bock beer for lunch there.  


From there I headed back up to the Mercado Central on the north end of downtown, where fresh fish from the Pacific is brought in and sold every morning.  Unlike other markets I've been to, though, here there are restaurants attached to most of the stalls.  If you like what you see for sale, you can either have it wrapped up to take home, or buy it and have it cooked to order.  Interesting system.  There were musicians wandering through among the tables with guitars and drums, which made for a lively atmosphere as well.


Next I crossed the somewhat underwhelming Rio Mapucho - a fast-moving but very un-photogenic concrete canyon - into the Bellavista neighborhood.  Like Barrio Brasil, Bellavista is home to several large universities and has morphed into Santiago's preferred day- and nightlife hub.  There were restaurants and bars of all persuasions and price points there, and plenty of street vendors, too - I bought an empanada which unfortunately squirted oil all over my jacket when I bit into it.  Rearing up behind Bellavista is the Cerro San Cristobal (St. Christopher's Hill), where you can ride a century-old funicular railway to the top for a panoramic view across the city.  The view was really nice, despite the lousy weather and the fact that it started sleeting on me up there.  


I closed up my day in Santiago with a haircut - trying to convey instructions in my non-native language was a bit of an adventure - but I walked out looking mostly like a shorter-haired version of my old self.  Tomorrow I'm still debating whether or not I should take a bus to Valparaiso, a port city on the coast about two hours away, or if I should stay here in Santiago and keep exploring.  Decisions... 

Day 58: Change of Scenery

Day 58
Today I'm in: Santiago, Chile

"Please fasten your seatbelts - the aircraft is about to pass over the Andes and moderate to severe turbulence is expected."  The crew on my flight from Sao Paulo to Santiago weren't kidding - Santiago sits right at the foot of the Andes, so we had to come in low over the mountains and we got thrown around for a good 10-15 minutes just before landing.  It was dark out, unfortunately, so I didn't get a good look at the Andes but I did see a few snow-covered peaks down below.

Yesterday was another day in transit.  I started off at about 8am in Rio, where just before boarding a flight to Sao Paulo, I ran into Claudio Garcia, the Chief People & Technology Officer for AB-InBev.  Claudio was my manager's manager's manager last summer, but he interviewed me when I was applying, and was never more than a few seats away from me in ABI's open-plan office.  I couldn't believe that, out of 200+ million Brazilians, I ran into one of the few I actually know (although I'd been hoping I would.)  I made him take a picture with me for the blog because I knew my fellow former interns wouldn't believe me otherwise.  He was a good sport about it and it was good to hear about some of the things that've happened at the company in the last year.

From there it was a quick hop to Sao Paulo, a not-so-quick hop between airports in heavy city traffic, and then a four-hour flight across the Southern Cone to Chile.  And now here I am, in the penultimate country of the trip.  

The first and most startling difference is that it's very much the middle of winter here.  Brazilian and South African winter were kind of a joke, but this is the real deal.  It was five degrees Celsius (about 41 degrees) when we landed, and the high today is only supposed to be about 49.  During my brief foray into the streets last night to get a snack, the residents were very bundled up - jackets, scarves, gloves, the works.  Most of the trees have dropped their leaves, although there are a few palm trees around so it must get pretty nice here in the summers.  Walking around last night, I felt like I was a long, long way from Brazil.  Cold, dark, bare trees and fleece-encased people - it was like I'd landed in Sweden.

Interestingly, the "hotel" I booked myself into isn't a hotel at all.  It's a furnished apartment, which came as a complete surprise to me.  But it's actually really nice to have a kitchen, a living room and a separate bedroom - the heaters are on, the TV is on and I just made some breakfast in the microwave.  After staying in a succession of hotel rooms it feels good to have a little home for myself, even if it's just for a few days.

I saw very little of the city last night - just lights through the taxicab window and the few blocks between my place and a nearby corner store - so today I'm out to take a closer look around.  

Day 57: Brazilian Sendoff

Day 57
Today I'm in: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Today was all about downtown Rio.  Metropolitan Rio is divided roughly into two halves: the Zona Norte (mostly poor with a few nice areas) and the Zona Sul (mostly nice with a few poor areas) but everyone comes together in Centro, the high-rise business district on the shore of Guanabana Bay.

The Zona Sul has the beaches and the scenery - and a lot of tourists never leave it - but Centro looks and feels every bit like the quintessential Latin American metropolis.  The guides recommended coming on a weekday since it's apparently a bit deserted on weekends.  There was no danger of that today - it was overflowing with people.  There were businessmen in designer suits, kids playing soccer on the sidewalks, merchants shouting at customers, beggars on the corners, police twirling nightsticks... you name the character and they were probably there.  I found myself strangely drawn into this part of town.

Rio was Brazil's capital until 1960, when the government moved lock, stock and barrel to the newly-built Brasilia.  How they got all those people to abandon beautiful Rio and relocate to a treeless nowhere in the middle of the country's interior (all designed by Rio native Oscar Niemeyer, who at 105 years old is incredibly still designing buildings) is a mystery to me.  Central Rio is dotted with relics from its time as the capital - big, solid neo-classical buildings with columns and ornate gold-leaf carvings along the rooflines.  Mixed in is a surprising amount of Art Deco goodness and a whole lot of 1950s and 1960s glass and steel.

Many of the streets in the center have been pedestrianized, so it's an easy place to walk.  From the downtown core I walked over to the Saara district, which is full of early 20th-century buildings in varying states of repair, and down into Lapa, the city's up-and-coming nightlife hub.  In the vast and shady Campo de Santana park, I watched groups of agoutis - strange rodents without tails that are about the size of a housecat - nosing around in the grass.  I had hoped to go to Santa Teresa, a very traditional neighborhood on a hill that's linked to downtown by the city's sole remaining streetcar line.  It took some effort to find the streetcar terminal, and when I did I discovered it wasn't running today.  Instead I stopped into a lanchonete for a kibe, a cracked-wheat dumpling filled with ground beef, like a little meat bomb.

And with that my time in Brazil comes to an end... I've been in this country longer than anywhere else on the trip (I was in and out of South Africa a few times so it doesn't count) and although I still feel very much like I'm on the outside looking in, it's become familiar, too.  Rio has been the highlight of Brazil - I'm glad I saved it for last, because all of the other spots (yes, even Noronha) would have paled in comparison.  This is a really, really spectacular city, and you should all come see it for yourselves.

My last meal in Brazil?  Well, the advertising worked.  I got tired of seeing that vaguely Asian-looking Brazilian child encouraging me to eat at China In Box, so I hiked over to Copacabana tonight to try it out.  For a store with a somewhat loose grasp of English grammatical practices (articles between subjects and objects?... nah) it was pretty tasty, although they forgot to give me a fork with my takeout, which made things interesting when I got back to my hotel room.

Tomorrow it's on to Chile and cooler weather!