Eight Years Down
The month of April has come and gone and it now 8 years since I left the UK on my RTW trip on my bike and I have still not completed my journey. Various countries which I would like to ride through are still fighting with each other and some new ones which I would like to ride through have started fighting with some others that I would like to ride through and in this respect very little in the world has changed.
As any reader of this blog will know in January of this year I had to abandon my broken bike in Chile and I flew to Buenos Aires in Argentina with a view to working out what I wanted to do after my South American bike trip had come to a sudden and unexpected end so the latest part of my journey is now over.
After escaping from Chile I spent a month in Buenos Aires relaxing and thinking about buying another bike with which to continue my trip on but I quickly realised that if I had chosen to buy a bike in Argentina and if I wanted to ride to Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia as was my original plan then I would have to subsequently return to Argentina with the bike in order to sell it.
Whilst this prospective plan was initially appealing to me the longer that I thought on it the more that I realised that I would just be giving myself additional problems that I neither needed nor wanted only for the sake of getting to Patagonia on a bike as I had initially planned to.
To be honest, my recent riding experience in South America had been somewhat unpleasant and for the first time in my forty odd years of riding bikes it was a riding experience which I really did not enjoy and which in reality I was looking forward to completing as soon as possible.
I also suspect that my lack of enjoyment of riding in South America may have had some influence on my decision to abandon my bike rather than try to repair it and continue with my trip, albeit at cost of much greater time and expense than I had planned.
So with all of this in mind I decided that I did not need to incur any additional hassle or expense by buying another bike with which to complete a journey that I had never really enjoyed therefore I decided to take some well earned rest and stay in Buenos Aires for a while.
Once I had spent about 4 weeks in Buenos Aires and seen all that i wanted to see I boarded an overnight bus to the Southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre where I met my good friend Filipe Grandi, an American Football coach whom I had met in Poland in 2019. It was good to see and spend time with my friend again and I stayed in his home town of Caixas Du Sol for a couple of weeks before moving to the small town of Carlos Barbosa for the next 8 weeks.
I found this part of Brazil to be very clean and civilised, very like Europe in appearance and in the behaviour of the locals who are predominately the descendants of German and Italian settlers. I then spent a very relaxing time in Carlos Barbosa coaching the local American Football team every Saturday until it was time to leave Brazil.
I had considered continuing my South American trip by public transport but having spent some time in Buenos Aires and then in the oasis of civilisation in Southern Brazil in which I had stayed I soon realised that I did not want to revisit the squalor and decay that I had previously encountered in the rest of South America so I decided that it was time to return to Europe.
On leaving Carlos Barbosa I spent a couple of nights in the nearby large city of Porto Alegre before flying to Sao Paulo where I would later catch my flight to Madrid and although this city is only about 50 miles from where I had been staying it was a completely different world.
Gone were the clean streets, the lack of crime, and shop windows without shutters or bars these now replaced with streets filled with the stench of stale urine, people sleeping on almost every street on cardboard, people sleeping on park benches, with bars, locks, and shutters everywhere.
I had now returned to the South America which I had so recently forgotten about but which now hit me in the face like a punch from a clenched fist. I walked around Porto Alegre only to be once again reminded of the decay in to which the continent was sliding with disrepair and neglect everywhere as can be seen in the following pictures where an old neglected building now has weeds growing out of the cracks in the stonework.
When it was time to leave Porto Alegre I was glad to get an Uber to the airport and by mid afternoon later that same day I had arrived over the truly enormous urban sprawl that is the mega city of Sao Paulo. From a height of about 10,000 feet the city initially didn’t look too bad but as the aircraft descented the huge swathes of poor neighbourhoods could clearly be seen below and as the aircraft was about to land I could see the squalor in full view from a few hundred feet above it.
Wisely I had chosen to stay in a hotel close to the airport but even the short journey to and from the airport was made along pothole filled and litter strewn main roads whilst a shiny new elevated railway ran above it. Again the contrast between the newly built and the constantly neglected was apparent. The following day I boarded my flight and then I was gone, leaving South America with no intention of ever returning.
As I look back on the last 18 months of my life in Central and South America I understood that one of the main reasons for riding through Central and South America on my bike apart from the ride itself was to actually see these countries for myself with a view to possibly living in one of them. Needless to say I did not find what I was looking for which surprised me as everything that I had ever previously read and or seen about these countries were that they were paradises that would enchant anyone who visited them.
For as long as I can remember I read countless magazine articles or watched videos about travelling on a bike in these countries and these sources of “information” was what I had based my impressions of what these countries would look like. Needless to say I was bitterly disappointed.
Never having previously been to Central and South America I can only now presume that the information which I consumed depicted these countries as they were many years ago however as for the more recently produced material I can only assume that those who were responsible for producing such material are prone to using drugs or are taking medication for a serious mental illness.
Having now personally visited the majority of countries in Central and South America I now understand why most people who live in these countries want to leave them and go to the USA or to Europe and quite frankly I don’t blame them for that.