We started our first drive in the evening and soon realised that driving in South America has little to do with our usual route we had on the German highways. The road was messed up, full of potholes and big rocks lying around. One thing was sure... driving at night will be done on rare occasions. We stopped in a charming village of Mindo where we camped for the first night and had an amazing chocolate tour the next morning. They showed us the whole process of chocolate-making which included tasting cocoa in all of it's forms and varieties. This time, Manca was in chocolate heaven.
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Colombian capital is enormous and cold. An estimated eight million people are inhabiting a part of wide high altitude valley and even from the city's best observation point - the Montserrat, we struggled to see the end of the city through the smog. The tall buildings of city's business district are giving way to colourful barrios that rise up the hills and spread into the plains. We visited Quinta de Bolivar, a residence of the famous Simon Bolivar, learned a bit more about his life and felt like a tourist attractions ourselves when a class of young Colombians on their field trip started interrogating us about our origin and travels. We also marveled the fine golden handcraft of pre-Colombian civilisations in the famous Bogota's Museum of Gold. Our great couchsurfer hosts Jonathan and Christian (both musical souls) showed us the part of life in Bogota, that's hidden for the turists. We visited a small theatre where we tried to follow the story with our poor knowledge of spanish, we tried the local tamales (spiced rice with meat cooked in banana leaf) from the street and the most fun experience of all - played "tejo"· Tejo is a latino version of boules where the goal is to hit a marked circle in a clay target with a catch... There are small bags filled with gunpowder around the circle and hitting one of them results in a big bang, plenty of points and an obligatory celebration cursing. Add a box of beers and you can imagine where this can lead to :) Many of our friends and family have been keen to know of our whereabouts and experiences on our South-American journey, so we decided to start sharing our moments as we travel along. We are already a month into our trip but in the next weeks we will try to catch up and post our experience in real time :) We are going to skip the preparations for our trip including the last minute shopping lists and problems with stuffing all of your life in a 60 litre backpack. Every traveller has its own wishes and expectations of what lies ahead, but the content of the backpacks is usually very much the same. Besides, there are more than enough blogs that are recomending 17, 23 or whatever the number of objects that are not to be forgotten on a backpacking trip. If you don't know whio we are, check our about us page and if that is not enough for you, we will gladly answer your questions. So without further ado, let's start at the beginning of our trip. We drove to Munich with our friends Peter & Gaja and because we were living there for the past four years we haven't really felt like travelling yet. Taking our stuff from the car, we right away figured that we might have packed too much. Shivering in the cold Munich air Gasper probably got the worst "Hexenschuss" (sudden pain in the back muscles) he ever had. At the time of this writing (almost a month later), it still sometimes awakens on bumpy bus rides. Staying at our friends Tine & Nina and enjoying the familiar locations in Munich for a day, we felt a bit nostalgic about the time we spent in this beautiful city. But on the next day the 28 of November which coincided with Gasper’s birthday (not intentionally), we boarded our flight to Brazil. The German on-board menu that included cold hot-dog , mustard and potatoe salad is not worth to comment on. Our flight itinerary to Fortaleza comprised of two flights with a four-hour stop in Recife. Landing in Recife and with a couple of hours to spend, we first had to overcome the feelings of uncertainty and leave the "safety" of the airport behind with the major concern being all the possible scenarios that could happen which would make us miss the second flight :) A proper motivation however were our hungry stomachs that were satisfied with the amount of airline/airport food for the day. We therefore took advantage of the airport's central location, hopped into the taxi and headed for the Recife coastline promenade. The taxi driver dropped us out in front of a typical market-place where we intended to find something to eat. A fresh tapioca made in a saucepan over a grill happened to be a perfect solution. We ordered two (one with dried meat and one with cheese and coconuts) and right away drew parallels to the local food market Gasper used to work at in Ljubljana. Once a Golden retriever came by, that was very similar to the one we have at home we figured that sometimes 10000km don't even make such a difference. It was not long before we were proved wrong. We walked to the ocean promenade and found a local shack selling ice-cold coconuts. The guy broke them open with a machete and soon we were siping the exotic fluid with all the flavours we had been waiting for since our last visit to the tropics. As we sat down, we noticed a number of warning signs scattered around the beach. Waters around Recife have become infamous for a high number of shark atacks in the last decades. Suddenly, home seemed to be far away again and we decided to obey the threatening signs and to postpone our ocean swim for a while. |
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