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Landed in Rio yesterday evening, took the cab with Donna and René from there to the camping lot. Just like Anne, Gabi, Gilles and some others would turn out to be, they are quite experienced in travelling or are doing so right now, through South America. I realise that I still have a lot to learn, judging by their stories. ‘Rio by night’ seemed ok, although we didn’t see much of it. Traffic was very busy, similar to the centre of Brussels during rush hour.
The camping itself was another reality check. There simply isn’t anything here yet… And apparently the others had already done quite a lot. A lot of cleaning up, that is. The sanitary block is nowhere near as clean as it should be and there still is a lot of work to be done.
As I arrived quite late, this day of work was already over so we kept the rest of the evening to get to know eachother and have a chat next to the buckets of beer and soda. Darkness falls very early here, but temperatures are still around 25°C so that’s ok.
We sleep in tents, as I announced in the previous blog. At the moment, there are still more than enough tents, so I chose not to share a tent on my first night but to get one for just myself. We also get an inflatable mattress and we brought our own sleeping bags, so sleeping should be ok. “I won’t bother about the mosquito net tonight”, is what I thought for a while until the first mosquito decided to enter my comfort zone not even half an hour later.
Just my luck: the mattress must have had a hole in it because once I was finally completely installed and lying down peacefully, I felt the air leaving the mattress and myself lowering until I was lying on the Brazilian ground. A sore back in the morning as the result.
At a lot of rain fall starting around midnight and you will understand that I hardly slept in my first night. Luckily though, we could sleep until 8am, which is 1pm in Belgium, so that counted as “sleeping in” since I am not adapted to the Brazilian time zone yet.
So today we had breakfast in the rain. Shortly afterwards though, there was a little bit of wind that blew in our favour as it pushed the rain away. Still cloudy, the temperatures started to rise and we got to work: getting the luxury tents for the guests done. Around 100 beds needed to be built (ikea-style, yet without a manual). While doing so, Belgian tv-channel VTM reporter Julie Colpaert came to take a look, we played some football/soccer during our breaks and we all just have a very nice time.
The back to basics way of life is kind of difficult at times, but it’s very charming at the same time. All of this will definitely be ok. We still have a lot of work to do and the World Cup atmosphere is yet to kick off as well.
The only things we are missing here are a radio and… wifi. We were supposed to have wifi though, until some internet cable was brutally murdered by a delivery truck yesterday evening.. No biggie though, we still have a lot of other things to do!
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