The Lonely Planet loses some more friends

The pleasure of travelling on the hoof is frequently tempered with boring periods of having to arrange stuff (anyone want to come and be our PA?) and there are times when it feels that we spend more time sat in hotel rooms huddled over the Lonely Planet (with which we have seriously fallen out – more of that another time) and slow internet connections, trying to arrange the next step, than actually doing stuff. Yesterday morning started with a complete mish. We realised that although we were telling people that we are going to Paraty for Christmas, we hadn’t actually quite managed to book anywhere to stay, or any means of getting there, and this was causing expressions of alarm on the faces of people we told our plans to.

However, our joint assault on the practicalities reaped dividends. I made a phonecall to a Pousada and somehow seemed to manage to secure a reservation in my crap Portuguese while A and E nearly fell over laughing at my attempts to spell all our names in an alphabet I don’t know (ME: “Ellie. EH ELE ELE EE EH…”etc), and then we all schlepped off to the bus station, which is the only place you can buy bus tickets here. Luckily we were all in a cheery mood as this involves a taxi across town, a descent into the seventh circle of hell inhabited by lots of flustered people, some of whom were dressed as sailors, with huge bags and tiny babies, all dragging things rapidly in different directions, a labyrinthine myriad of kiosks and long queues, and finally a negotiation with a dude in the Bilheteria whose name badge said he was Mr Wendel, which rather tickled us.

After this we tried unsuccessfully to get robbed at gunpoint by taking pictures of the area around the bus station, got freaked out by a local who said that doing so was the craziest thing he had ever seen, and so jumped in another taxi back to the centre of town, probably sensible seeing as the only weapon we had at our disposal was a bag full of rapidly decomposing plums. Looking at our map at the other end of our ride, we were surprised to discover that we seemed to be right near the Museum of Modern Art – a surprise because either the Lonely Planet is again telling lies or this museum has been teleported across town. I can confirm that, contrary to the Lonely Planet’s advice, it is actually located just a short amble from the city centre, if you take the route we did, across some desolate grassland inhabited by homeless drunk people, a car park and a motorway. In any case, the matter of its location is fairly irrelevant as it is actually pretty rubbish so I wouldn’t recommend going there.

Fortified by some tiny coffees we made our way back to Santa Teresa via the Bonde, the prospect of which has been exciting us for some days. We were not disappointed. The Bonde is a hundred-year-old yellow tram which costs about 15p and which winds up at bone-shuddering pace from the city centre to Santa Teresa. It’s like nothing short of a theme park ride where you are allowed to hang off the sides; Alton Towers eat your heart out. We decided we all want to move to Santa Teresa and commute to work on the Bonde. Eventually we realised that we were going the wrong way and were going to end up in a favela if we kept going, so we all jumped off, fortunately, right outside a rather lovely restaurant where we sat down and had a very filling dinner, which nicely rounded off a day in which things just seemed to go pretty right.

I am sleeping well in my comfortable bed at our B and B, after a serious of torturously hot sweaty nights at the Ipanema hostel lying crossly awake listening to the deafening noise of our utterly ineffective fan, which cooled us down not a jot but served only make my hair intermittently tickle my face and thus wake me up thrashing about thinking I was being eaten by mosquitoes again.

However, it is starting to be disorientating sleeping in a series of unfamiliar rooms. Last night A, half asleep, woke me up in a panic. “Trev, can you sleep here?” she whispered urgently. I assured her I could if she would stop shaking me awake. “Oh, it’s alright, we’re here!” she exclaimed. Turned out she had been dreaming and thought we were sleeping outside. Maybe too many adventures for one day.

On a final note, my thoughts on the Lonely Planet are that for something the size and weight of a small brick the benefits of its advice are meagre. You can all too easily fall into the trap of paying it biblical reverence, scouring the tome for pearls of wisdom, which actually lead you into over-subscribed and ill-described places full of other people without the wit to follow their own instincts. We had a conversation the other day with a table load of my least favourite type of backpackers – the ones who hoof it round a load of countries in a matter of weeks (partaking mainly, it seems to me, in binge drinking, stranger-fucking and adventure sports tours) and then have the audacity to tell you with authority that “Chile is shit”. These are the people that hang out in the establishments that Lonely Planet recommends. Egg or chicken? God knows.