The Grand Finale

Days 219-225

There have been times on this journey when we've questioned the wisdom of arranging to meet friends in Rio for carnival, thinking maybe we'd prefer an extra month or two resting along the way instead. As soon as carnival began, though, these doubts vanished and we're so pleased we kept pushing ourselves along! There were street parties all around the city every day, called 'blocas' with small samba schools providing music, but the main samba parade in the purpose build sambodrome was definitely the highlight. Together with a load of friends from London we had tickets for the Monday night, one of the final nights in the main competition, in which 6 schools paraded past taking around an hour each, while we danced relentlessly on our chairs along with the rest of the crowd and even tried to sing along to the repeating anthems. While it wasn't as music-focussed as we'd hoped, the costumes and floats completely blew us away: the mile-long parades were full of the most flambouyant and bizarre disguises and contraptions, with thousands and thousands of dancers leading each school. After the parade we tried to get back to Copocabana beach for sunrise but unfortunately were just too late - a sign of a good night out though.

As well as all the carnival activities we managed to drag ourselves out of bed while it was still light to fit in a little bit of sight seeing. The statue of Christ was a bit smaller than any of us had imagined but still great to see up close. A trip to the massive Maracana football stadium to watch a local derby confirmed what we'd been told about a) Brazilians being crazy about football and b) Brazilians being crazy. And a tour to some of the favelas allowed us to see into the darker and sadder side of the city. The police are getting a bit tougher on the favelas and so we didn't see many people toting guns, which anyone who's seen the film City of God (set in one of the smaller Rio favelas which now has a permanent police presence) will know used to be commoneplace. Still, we didn't fancy hanging around there on our own, even though we'd heard that they are hosts of the best parties in town. It was our friend Russ's birthday during carnival week and we planned to go on some sort of boat trip to celebrate - plans for chartering a schooner were dashed by some bad weather, so we settled for the swan paddle boats on the lake instead. With some cans of bubbly called "Glam" and nibbles. Very classy.

Days 226-227

The sad day came when we all went our separate ways from our lovely apartment: Hazel to continue on her travels around South America, having spent the last few months in Central America and Cuba; Gav back to Dubai; and Russ back to London. The drizzle had cleared the air in Rio and cleaned the streets a bit of the post-carnival pee and beer stench, but it was getting hot again and we still had two motorbikes in our care so we headed out to the mountains for the weekend. A beautiful drive just a couple of hours north took us up into a land of cheeseries, honey factories, and sculpture gardens - our last jaunt before working in earnest to get the bikes back to London.

Days 228 - 232

Back in Rio we agreed to go ahead with the one quote we'd managed to get for flying the bikes home - a similar price to the sea freight quote we'd receieved but more importantly we were told we could complete the process in a few days whereas to send the bikes by sea might require up to 15 days of hanging around just to get them through customs. Unfortunately the quote turned out to be more of a guestimate, with extra costs being added on at the last minute for forgotten necessaries, but at least it happened. We arrived back from the mountains on the Monday, checked into a hostel carefully sourced for being able to park our bikes safely outside, and immediately had to get back on the bikes to take them to the crating company - our last ride of the trip. The next day we hoped to do our last bit of sightseeing, as well as finalising things with the airfreight company, but Emily was very ill from what we assumed to be food poisoning, leaving Ric to work out how to get thousands of pounds of cash out in 24 hours - at the last minute we found out that the freight company don't take any form of credit or debit cards! On Wednesday morning we packed our bags, picked up our enormous wodge of bank notes and went to the freight company at 10am to hand over the money. We then accompanied our freight guy to the airport to get the bikes through customs: the last task we needed to complete before we could leave the country. After five hours of our guy altering forms, making photocopies, being told by different people what else he needed, and getting us to sign things, we finally got to the grand finale of taking a customs officer to check the VIN numbers on our bikes and we were free to go - the bikes would follow on a flight the next day.

We dashed to the airport aware that we'd already missed the cheap TAP flight we were hoping to get onto. There were a number of other flights leaving that evening but they were variously full or too many thousands of pounds so after a few hours of toing and froing and hanging around in case people didn't turn up, we headed back into town for the night, and a couple more caiparinhas. First thing on Thursday morning we went to the TAP office to book the evening flight but on our way back to the hostel Ric started to feel funny and rapidly developed symptoms suspiciously similar to Emily's two days previously - it seems what we thought was food poisoning was probably actually a tummy bug. So poor Ric had a miserable flight back to England, but at least he'd pretty much recovered by the time we touched down in London on Friday lunchtime. That evening we had just enough strength to pop down to Softwire's anual 'birthday party' (for those of you who don't know the company we work for, this is the party of the year to go to, second to carnival in Rio of course).

Now we just wait for the bikes! As it turns out they didn't leave the day we did as planned, or the next day as we were later told they would. We think they've left Brazil at the time of writing, but are reserving judgement until we actually see them back in Britain.


Epilogue

The last eight months have been a brilliant adventure for us and so far it's been a great home-coming. We hope you've enjoyed reading our blog - although we can't always say we've rejoiced in the task of writing it, we're sure it'll be a great thing for us to look back on. Thanks in particular to those who've kept us up to date with goings on while we've been away - in particular our Mums, Alice, Lizzie, Katie, and for all those who commented on the blog. Which wasn't many of you compared with the number of people claiming to read it - for the rest of you, now is your last chance! :-)

We'll leave you with some of our favourite trip statistics.

• Expected mileage (before we left): 25,044
• Total miles ridden: 31,370
• Days on the bikes: 180
• Days without setting foot on the bike pegs: 50 (19 of which were in Rio de Janeiro and Quito / Galapagos)
• Days Ric put a plait in Emily's hair: 142 (probably - no she couldn't just learn to do them herself)
• Average daily mileage: 135
• Most miles in one day: 480 (on boring Ruta 3 in Argentina)
• Most miles in a 24-hour period: 685 (racing to meet Ric's Mum in Chile)
• Amount of petrol consumed: about 5 tonnes
• Amount of money consumed: a lot (but it was worth it)
• Highest altitude ridden: 5,046m (South Bolivia)
• Lowest altitude ridden: -9m (Peninsular Vladez, Argentina)
• Hottest riding temperarure: 46C (Arizona, USA)
• Coldest riding temperature: -5C (South Bolivia, but only Emily's bike started)
• Ratio of days in Argentina to number of steaks Ric ate: 1:0.97
• Number of photos taken: 10,678
• Number of bikers we saw before Brazil wearing a pink crash helmet (other than Emily): one (a crazy Australian woman in Argentina)
• Number of bikers we saw in Brazil wearing a pink crash helmet: about a million
• Number of times:
• We got a puncture: 5
• We had to pump the hand pump to get a full tyre of air: 840
• We ran out of petrol: 0
• Ric's bike said it had run out of petrol: 2
  
• Emily dropped her bike: 6
• Ric dropped his bike: 8
• Ric also dropped his bike with Emily on the back: 2
• Ric would have dropped his bike if someone didn't save him: 4
• Emily got Ric to park / manouvre / generally deal with her bike in order to keep her drop rate down: many
• Ric swore from fear of falling off in a very painful / fatal manner (Emily doesn't swear): 30
• Emily cried from fear of falling off in a very painful / fatal manner (Ric doesn't cry): 3, she just grit her teeth and went rather pale the other 27 times
• We got stopped by the authorities: 25
• We got fined by the authorities: 1
• We phoned home: 1 (are we bad children?)