Category: Travel

During my trip in South America, i’ve been taking advantage of the
very good coach companies, travelling in the highest class I can,
which normally affords extra leg room and a flatter bed, but sometimes
also a meal or two with a glass of bubbly. This post has been written
on a coach with on-board wifi. I even managed a brief Skype call,
before the few internet users on this bus maxed out the upstream
bandwidth – not suprising, as I suppose that a single GSM modem is
serving us all. The access point disappears from time to time, but my
phone reconnects pretty quickly and my web sessions don’t seem to get
lost.

But there’s no way that I could do much work on this 4 hour journey.
For starters, my laptop is in the hold, but even if I had it here, in
a little over an hour the batter would be flat. Why, when a coach’s
engine must be generating excess power can power sockets be made
available? An ordinary laptop only pulls down 40 amps or so, so you
wouldn’t need a really big inverter. If they provided even only 120V
or something, that would still slowly charge a laptop or mobile and
would encourage me to bring my laptop on board. Yes, there’s a cost to
such a service, but if it were offered, I’d be prepared to pay a
premium on my ticket. I’m normally travelling alone, so medium to long
coach journeys would let me get some work done, even if I had no
internet connection.
And don’t just say ‘buy a netbook’. My efficiency on a small screen
and keyboard would plummet. I certainly won’t tell you how long it
took to type this short post on my mobile!

Just took the ferry to Colonia in Uruguay. Went First Class which was
more spacious. I was the only backpacker… Now an alright coach to
Montevideo.

I can see how this travelling can become addictive and “sufferers” can end up on the road for months or even years. I like to break things down. There are four states of being I’ve identified in myself as the “working from abroad travelling test subject”. Booking, planning, sleeping and “being a tourist” come under one state. Working and finding places to work is the second. Socialising, “finding people”, eating, drinking is an important third. The forth is more nebulous. It is the “local/global living” aspect of travelling and requires new skills. Remembering the names of places, filing recommendations for hostels and towns. Keeping in mind where your new friends are and where they will be in two days when you plan to meet up again. Doing all the things manually that you normally do on your mobile at home – mapping, searching, choosing. Having an “ear to the ground”. All this seems to hone my senses, and yes, even my sense of survival, which I had not had reason to discover before. Every day I can feel myself getting better. Better at learning, planning, communicating. Better at assessing restaurants from the outside, the clientèle and the menu, reading timetables.

I’ve been posting far less often. That’s due to more infrequent internet access, but actually being on coaches and in some hotels makes using the net at reasonable cost impossible. Hostels have been my best bet so far.

Here’s where my route has taken me:

– Rio, then by Costa Verde coach to
– Angra dos Reis, then by catamaran to
– Ilha Grande, then by ferry back to Angra and an old, Colitur bus to
– Paraty, then by pretty nice Reunidas coach to
– Sao Paulo, then by great Pluma coach to
– Foz do Iguassu (and the Falls, of course), then leaving Brazil by bus to nearby
– Puerte Iguassu in Argentina, then by very nice, but cold Crucero del Norte coach (with dinner and bubbly) to Buenos Aires

That’s a lot of movements. I’m considering not making many more. If I were to catch up with Anna, I would have to fly at considerable cost down to Patagonia. I’m not anxious to tick all the tourist boxes on this trip. One day soon when I’m wealthier and have more time, I will certainly take my travels here further. As it is, I might take a couple of nights away from BA in Montivideo, taking the slow boat, I think.

The purpose of this trip was experimentation. The aim was to be online often enough to keep work projects moving, but the other aim was to see if Kohera could stay integrated without me in the middle all the time. And it can. This trip heralds a new development of my business, where I learn to focus on what I am good at, and learn to spot the talent in others for those things I should not be doing.

As most of you know, the universe tends to silently rearrange itself in my favour. For example, I walked into a hostel in Paraty today without having booked. I was told it was full, but then the spheres turned and suddenly someone remembered that they’d had a no-show that morning and there was bed for me.

But on rare occasions I’m clearly not completely in sync with the world at large. Picture the scene: Carnaval weekend in Rio. I need to work for a client all day in a quiet environment on the Monday so that I can have a conference call, keeping UK hours (so that’s a 0600 start for a 0900 start in the UK). My rationale was this – the major hotels in Copacabana will have empty business suites, because everyone staying will be there for the Carnaval and will have no interest in working at all. For a couple of hundred Reais I can have the place to myself.

It was not to be.

Do not underestimate the rigidity of hotel booking and payment systems, the inability of a hotel manager to cut a deal, the absurdity of simple requests being misinterpreted, the maddening inconsistency of hotel staff training.

On Sunday evening I walked the length of the Copacabana front. I was reasonably smartly-dressed: cream trousers and a shirt. I was there in part to enjoy the blocos – street parties which usually follow a noisy truck piled with speakers and singers. I still take a delightful, voyeuristic joy in being the only sober person at a party, and blocos are great for people-watching and dancing, neither of which depends on drunkenness (but try telling the locals on the ultimate party weekend of the year). But I had a duality of purpose – I visited every hotel and asked a simple question – could I turn up quite early tomorrow morning and take an office for six hours, and, if so, what would I be charged?

The pricing ranged from convoluted to something I’d call gouging. I was offered, variously
– A high price for an office, not including wifi charged by the minute.
– A price for everything for the day, which was simply exorbitant, as it included a 10% charge and a 5% charge for various “services” which we all agreed that I wouldn’t need.
– A price per hour which was pretty high (110 Reais/hour) not including a fixed charge for the wifi
– A showing of the room (which I approved) and the promise of a call-back which never came
– Being told that without a room number they could do nothing for me – I had to be a resident of the hotel
– Being told that, when someone left the fully-booked hotel that I could have their room number
– Told that I could use any public area of the hotel, even the restaurant and pay for the wifi by the minute.
– nothing – in the case of the Palace, the meeting rooms were used for the Masquerade ball and were still full of junk. One hotel had even “run out of key cards” so couldn’t give me access to the suite. Another relied on a 3rd party company to run the business suite and they had all gone home.

What was clear to me is that all of these office suites and meeting rooms would have been empty over Carnaval, but that there is no flexibility in Brazilian hospitality culture. Why couldn’t they just run my card through, take, say 200, 300 or 400 Reais, give me all-inclusive internet and make a note for the accounts? But I got one offer I couldn’t refuse – The Windsor Plaza understood my needs. At 2200 I struck the deal. As a non-resident, for 25 Centavos per minute I could use the internet, and I could find any quiet place in the whole hotel. They said I could have a table in the restaurant for the day. I was delighted. Considering that I’d been quoted prices in the region of 900 Reais, £50 on wifi seemed like a bargain, and the plus-point of it being so expensive would be that few residents would pay the extra, keeping more precious bandwidth for me. I promised to return in the morning. They promised to welcome me with open arms.

So, at 0545 I rose, got online and started the meeting although no one wanted to brief me at that point. At 0800 I had breakfast and left for the short, hot, wet walk to the Plaza. When I got there, a different guy refused me completely. No, I had been given wrong information. The internet was only for the use of residents. No, they didn’t want my money. No, they couldn’t bill such things without having a room number to put it against. So I walked back to my very quiet hostel and used the free wifi there.

What I’ve learned:

– hotels have no interest in business, unless you’re a resident. The attraction of several hundred Reais is lessened when something out-of-the-ordinary is required.
– Keep your phone on you when trying to track down places to work as it is handy to use to scan for wifi. Wireless access points are often named after the establishment – there’s no point in asking somewhere where no internet is available. Another advantage is that you might stumble across a free connection – the whole of Copacabana’s front is supposed to have wifi, but I saw no evidence of it.

It was only by leaving the UK that I realised how much I am protected from myself there. Sure, things like safety are important, but we must weigh up how important it is for unattached people with no dependants or other significant responsibilities to be mollycoddled in a cosy nest of protective legislation, cameras and social care.

Yes, I do wonder whether Brazil is a place for the very old. Often poor and always weather-beaten, they struggle their way down the street, sometimes with the assistance of a younger carer, though walking sticks and other aids appear to be quite rare. But for a visitor like myself, little could have prepared me for the different decisions I make here. I must decide whether to walk down a particular street, at what speed and in what direction to leave the Metro in a outlying area, who to follow where there are no street signs. What noises are good and what are bad. Whether behind the eyes of someone watching my beautiful friends Julia and Nina is anything more than inquisitiveness, and if there is something more, is enough to make us cross the road? Decisions. The rattly street car (BRL$0.60 each way; about 27p), the ultimate safety-free option from Santa Teresa to Centro jerks to an unmarked stop above Lapa. The grinning kids from the local morro, tired of entertaining the tourists by hanging by one hand from the car, jump down and saunter off – they don’t pay and neither are they expected to. There is some shouting from the front: it is descision time. Do the four of us get off here and stumble down the steep paths into the relative unknown, or sit for an indeterminate amount of Brazilian time for the thing to move off? We jump down, and find ourselves half walking, half tripping past homes with simple steel meshes rather than glass windows (did they ever have glass?), heading down tiled steps into Lapa. The girls stop for photos but Pierre and I find ourselves fulfilling a quietly observant, protective role which I don’t even remember having need of even by a cash machine in Shorditch at ten o’clock. This job feels oddly male and natural – a purpose for which I was designed. We both seem to know how to act, although guarding our tribe. We make eye contact with the rather ragged occupants of the Lapa arches. We silently note their age, their weight, how fast they might be, how interested they are. We clock the passers by, identifying the body language of more experienced Cariocas to help us make our decisions. After a minute, I hear myself suggesting that we move on, notice myself planning a route through the relatively open space using the same techniques, inspecting the side roads, trying to plot the best path to the cathedral. I always seem to have somewhere I’m going, here. I decide to, say, walk to the tram stop, the shop, the Metro. Even when I’ve been lost, I can see Christo on the hill, and I know from which side of him is visible where I am in the suburbs. I’m constantly compiling this information, ranking it for relevance, then looking at faces, looking for peace. Considering my options.

Thinking about that tram ride reminds me of something. It is wonderful how the best and most exciting things in this city are often nearly free, and the more expensive things are typically international or simply unintrepid choices. There are lots of examples, especially in transport: a larger, airconditioned, more expensive but probably slower bus, or a smaller, more aggressively driven bus for half the ticket price, cooled by sea air through the open windows as the driver dodges through the traffic? A yellow taxi (still very reasonable) or a white, unlicensed (although that is changing as the government sees the value they provide) VW camper (still made here to a slightly modernised 1950s design) with the destination simply printed on a card in the window with the price? Ok, so no seatbelt, not much padding on the bench, not much suspension, but far more life, and two Reais (less than £1) rather than 7. I jumped in one of these with a Caucasian Brazilian girl who moved to Philadelphia years ago and who I had been chatting to in Santa Teresa’s winding cobbled streets. She seemed as much the tourist as I am, but reassuringly streetwise. And we both made a new friend as we walked from where we were dropped through the streetlife to Gloria Metro.

Still more examples of price being an indicator of appeal. Food, one of my favourite subjects. There are three lads from South London here. They enjoy hamming up their accents and making everyone laugh, but one joke revealed something typically British. Last night they ate at Domino’s Pizza. To do that, they would have had to walk some distance down Praia Botafogo Shopping past any number of Brazilian bars, all selling fresh food at a quarter of the price. They admitted to having arrived at one of the popular local eateries here, sat down, accepted the menu and walked out five minutes later. Ok: they couldn’t read it or even guess at its contents, but they could read the prices and maybe the headings and have a stab at ordering something in their budget. I don’t blame them: the temptation to be risk averse can be quite strong, and often for good reason, but I’m sure there was some pizza in that menu, and probably visible in the hot cabinet by the bar. There is no way they needed to pay Dominos for something they could get better from a Brazilian joint. People have been telling me that Rio is a risky city, but in some things, I think the risk is actually of missing Rio after you get home without having got much out of the place.

Which reminds me that I’m sitting in front of a computer writing e-mails when there’s a breeze and a view from the beach three minutes walk away. Mind you, it has to be Rio when to get to that view you have to run across eight lanes of dense traffic…

Here’s a slightly techie article.

We’re normally almost oblivious to the demands we make on an internet connection or a local area network when out of our home environments. Even in the most well-equipped home, where each occupant has a mobile and a computer (say, eight devices in total?) the actual bandwidth utilisation can be quite low in the case of normal surfing. Firstly, the mobiles might be connecting by 3G over the cellular network some of the time: we can subtract that activity from the home network equation. Secondly, normal surfing comprises a tiny request for some data sent upstream to a server which responds by sending a large quantity of data downstream. For that reason, ADSL, the most commonly deployed basic internet connection I’ve encountered, offers much more downstream bandwidth than upstream. Thirdly, usage can be easily moderated by off-line family communication: If the net “feels” slow, you can ask around and find out who is downloading a movie or streaming from BBC iPlayer, negotiate and come to an acceptable agreement on who consumes what capacity when.

Now take an independent hotel or hostel. The hardware might be similar or identical to the setup of the home due to the familiarity of such hardware to whoever was charged with “setting up the internet” so it is unlikely to have the corporate QoS features and cooling which will make it more suitable for heavy, reliable use. Almost all the occupants are away from their low-cost cellular connections, so they must use the local wi-fi. In some cases, the more technically able might use analogues of the cellular services they are used to like Skype and other VoIP services which are higher bandwidth consuming applications – this is unlikely in the home, where a switched cell or landline call takes that traffic away from the network. Whilst residents may be willing to talk to each other, the social dynamics make observations about the internet usage of another resident largely off-limits. There are other high-bandwidth applications, some of them strongly web-based. Users may be anxious to demonstrate their intrepidity to friends and family at home by uploading pictures to photo-sharing services like Flickr and Facebook Photos which are big consumers of the ADSL’s smaller upstream channel and these days permit any number of photos to be uploaded one after the other, hogging the upstream bandwidth for far longer.

What I’ve learned:

– turn off non-essential network services on your own machine. You’ve probably forgotten about the two VPNs and the zero-configuration service that runs all the time, broadcasting and tickling the internet connection. I did. Don’t contribute to the problem!

– if you can get access to the config pages of the router (with permission, of course) you could experiment with changing QoS (Quality of Service) settings and maybe also isolating wi-fi clients to prevent traffic passing between them unnecessarily. A nice side-effect is an improvement in security between the clients.

– if the router is a home-user model, you should not be surprised if it cannot handle the number of concurrent connections and routing requirements of even a moderately busy hostel without becoming congested and unresponsive. They generally only have passive cooling and are liable to overheat – remember that hardware functioning is not always an “on” or “off” matter. Overheating can reduce performance, so don’t let them make a neat little stack of the gear and spread it out a bit.

I’m sure there are other steps you can take to get around the bandwidth problem, but when power-cycling the switching and routing hardware, remember that they may be users on hotel-owned, ethernet-connected elsewhere in the building who may be paying by the minute for the service.

Something that has occurred to me is that if the congestion or unreliability is mainly the wi-fi (that part of these little routers often seems to go wrong when the ethernet is still perfectly fine) and you happen to have a small wireless access point, you could plug this into a free ethernet socket on the switch, thereby offering a less-congested wireless option to those in the know.

A few more insights into the culture I’m exploring here. Feel free to direct my musings from the virtual armchair of the comments, but reports are coming in that the commenting here isn’t working well. I have created a Facebook app so so that comments made on Facebook appear here. Would be glad if someone would test that theory….

Driving. It’s a well-known fact that all men like talking about driving, and all men secretly think they can do it really well. I’m no exception. So let’s talk about driving for a bit. The Cariocas are definitely good drivers – if they weren’t you would walk past a recent accident on every street corner. But they are undisciplined. Even bus drivers ignore red lights and drive so fast that the bus leans (“rolls”, Andy) dramatically, even on gentle bends. They have a manual gearbox and resolutely stick to third (“best gear”, eh, David?). If there is a party crowd on the bus, everyone shouts and cheers, encouraging the driver to go faster. The buses stop a lot more abruptly than I’m used to, and for reasons I’m not used to, either. Like trying to miss the corner of a lorry that has pulled across with an idle thumb indication from the driver. All the cars are equipped with indicators but rarely are they used at useful times. Crossing the road is normally the better safety decision – the alternative is badly-lit subways where muggings are more common in the evenings. The thing that makes it interesting is that these roads have four lanes in each direction and no barriers ( just high curbs and trees). The drivers do not slow down, so you must play real-life frogger and learn to read the pattern of cars coming up to spot a crossing opportunity. If you like the person you’re crossing with, you might on occasion grab them by the wrist and either pull them out of, or into the road with you. I haven’t yet deduced the policy for dealing with the fallen, but I have no doubt that anyone on the ground would be hit within seconds, probably by a yellow Opal Meriva – the taxi vehicle of choice in these parts.

Road planning is just as exciting. In order to avoid a set of traffic lights at a complex sliproad/intersection combination (which might, heaven forbid, slow everyone down), the authorities do not hesitate to add an entire road where drivers stay to the left although they’d popped out of the Chunnel on the limey side. They do put up a non-standard design of sign explaining this, and I will admit that it saves tarmac footprint in the built up area in Botafogo, but if you happen to miss this sign or don’t have time to read it, your life immediately gets very strange indeed.

Road crossing deserves more analysis here. There are two kinds of crosser – those who slavishly wait at crossings for the green man, and those who cross like Londoners. Both techniques are used at the same crossing at the same time. Initially I took responsibility for my own safety and crossed as I would in London: plan ahead and walk across, and turn that walk into a jog when necessary. But that takes a lot of mental effort when the crossing is before an intersection where cars may be changing lane and speed quite erratically. It is even exhausting to save those few seconds or minutes when the road is relatively “normal”. So now I stand with the others more often than not, not bothering my heat-addled mind with more planning and analysis. When the green man chooses to arrive, I make my move. Then I feel like a Carioca.

Everything purposeful here goes more slowly. Everything. The ultramodern tube trains eshew the potential possible efficiency gains of running more services, and instead stand idle and announcement-free for minutes at a time at each stop. Actually, there are no announcements of any sort on the network – bus or tube. I quite like it: on the Tube, someone or something is always barking at you. In Rio, you take your time, running for nothing (except safety in certain situations I’ve not yet encountered?) unless you’re running for running’s sake of course. And physical exercise? It is part of the culture here. If you’re just about wealthy enough not to have to work continuously selling biscuits and acai on the beach, then you’ll dedicate at least some of your time to running or making use of the exercise stations around the promenade. They look like bus stops, but are more like multigyms with no moving parts, all in brushed steel. The muscular Cariocas do pull-ups and sit-ups in the glaring sun, taking turns with their friends.

More later on an amazing Samba experience I had last night. Off for a shower and into town now.