So today was check out day at the wonderful, spacious and excellent room at Charm Suites. We had breakfast, and thought check out was at 12, so chilled out as we had a 14 hour bus ride (overnight) to Campo Grande that night. However when Neil checked the leaflet check out was actullay at 11 and it was already gone 11am. So we rushed to get ready and pack and check out a lot later then 11am. When we got to reception the lady said “You leaving today? Why?” she said with a sad smile. I had to admit me and Neil both thought the same thing, not because of the town but we knew we were never gonna get lucky again, in terms of getting a really nice place for a cheap rate. We paid our bill and arranged to have a taxi take us to the bus station in a few hours time.
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| Our lovely room at Iguacu Charm Suites |
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| Foz do Iguacu on a Sunday.... |
We ended up going to a bar having a few beers and checking through the guidebok for the next part of our journey which was how to cross the border from Brazil to Bolivia in a easy fashion without having to end up sleeping rough in the “shack” border town. We then had to find somewhere to eat and so went to Pizza Hut as we had not eaten properly for days and it had a wide range of vegetarian food, which is hard to find in Brazil.
We headed back up to the hotel, where we got our taxi and went to the bus station. W arrived and for some reason I began to get panicky, not sure why as I normally feel calm as the hard part of getting the bus ticket was done. I kept looking out for our bus...as we had 10minutes before it departed, I was panicking and asked Neil to go have a look while I kept the bags. He felt like I was acting strange and wondered why I was behaving that way. I didnt know why but I felt something wasnt quite right. Then I saw him talking to a guy who was calling another group of people, by the look of the commotion and Neil's face something was wrong. As they all approached me Neil said the bus had been cancelled, I aske him why, he had no idea and no one was going to tell us. So we had to rearrange the ticket to the next day, but we had no where to stay for the night and we had already payed a deposit with the next place who were expecting us the next morning. Someone who spoke English explained they coud get us a place in Hostel Bamboo which cost the same as the lush hotel we had been in but it included the transfer their and back so we agreed as we felt we had little choice on what else to do.
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| Our new room.... |
Anyway, we hopped into a minibus and went to Hostel Bambu. It was a fairly nice hostel but like a proper hostel, not a hotel, so the room was horrible and dingy and consisted of one single bed and a bunk bed. Not really enough room to turn around in, to be honest. However, the shared areas were nice – a nice outdoor bar/kitchen with a small pool and, vitally, a weights bench. When we arrived I saw some people that we had been laughing at when we went to the Argentian side of the falls, including Eyebrow Man who had been going on about how Amsterdam was to him what the Vatican City was to Catholics. We sat in our room while B looked sad for a bit and she had a little sleep while I looked on the internet at how we could get from Cusco (Peru) to Buenos Aires (Argentina) in about 5 days to get our flight to Sydney after the Inca Trail. I found out that we could get a flight for about 200 quid each if we went with a Bolivian airline and took three flights (and one whole day) through Bolivia. It seems like a good idea since it would probably cost that to get buses from one side of the country to the other but take a fraction of the time. B woke up and we went down to the supermarket to get something to cook for dinner – we just missed it as it was shutting when we got there but B remembered that we had passed by a garage that had a cash machine and sold super noodles so we went there. The Brazilians have this strange thing where they go to hang out at petrol stations. There was about 6 or 7 groups of people, sat in the boots of their cars, drinking beers or whisky, having a smoke, playing music and chilling with their mates – all in the forecourt of this petrol station. We went in, got money, bought 3 packs of supernoodles (we were hungry...) a couple of bags of crisps and headed back to the hostel. We sat around in the bar for a bit, having a few drinks (B had a Caipirinha but he put vodka in it not cachaca), watching the other hostellers ansd looking to rent an apartment in Buenos Aires for a week. Eyebrows was hanging around, mixing himself cocktails and getting drunk, there was an American bloke who sounded like every American hippy in their 40s/50s with a ponytail and a beard, “Hey man...”, a couple of Irish, a couple of English, and some other, English speaking, Europeans. I think we've pretty much decided to get the flight and an apartment to finish off our “Great South American Adventure” (I call it this whenever I'm trying to cheer B up when something goes wrong...).
Anyway, it's now today and we're just chilling outside, wasting time before we go and try to get our bus again. We've already got someone to phone the bus station and check we are actually going today, the Hostel in Campo Grande has changed the date to tomorrow and we're pretty much good to go. Breakfast was rubbish btw.
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| Waiting for our bus, again. |
