Friends, Surrogate Family, Soon To Be In-Laws, Colleagues and Nemeses, thank you all very much for coming tonight. It’s nice to see you all again in person, rather than just through your Facebook photos or via Skype, though some of you definitely look better in Standard Definition with a lossy codec. My thanks to Ed and Ben for organising a bucks night that would be memorable if I could remember it. Our thanks too to Makala for the awesome cupcakes here tonight and to Tricia, Emily Benjamin’s mum, for the myriad chicken wings, use of beach house and the lovely balloons. And thanks in particular to Emily Benjamin’s dad Laurie for having us stay with him this last month, using his towels, his Internet, his chocolate and of course for organising this evening. Thank you Laurie.

It is said that travelling around the world together will either make or break a couple. In fact, it was said, by many of you, loud and often! After 8 months of seeing each other every day, having not previously lived together, I’m happy to report back that you were right. Whether at 4am (in the morning) for a sunrise viewing of Angkor Wat, or after 14 hours on three planes in one day to arrive at altitude in La Paz; whether tired, frustrated or emotional, we never even got in sight of breaking. In amongst Petra, Easter Island, Halong Bay, Karnak and all the other wonderful things we saw, I had a constant companion to share the experiences with and to support me when I needed it. Thank you Emily Benjamin.

I realised after a few months that I was going to propose to Emily Benjamin. The more technically minded of you can check out the WHOIS record of emilytalbot.com, which will confirm for you that I had an inkling at least before July. I’d had these big plans to do it through a website at emilytalbot.com, naturally, and to propose on one knee as Emily Benjamin turned around. Then I blew it by asking her in The Grand Canyon instead. Still, it’s a memorable location for a memorable event!

We are now looking forward to our next big trip – moving to San Francisco. On Tuesday we head down to Sydney to get visas stamped in our passports and then next Sunday we will hopefully be on our way back to the US where Emily Benjamin will be going to college and I will be working for a company called StumbleUpon. I would encourage you all to sign up to this most wonderful of services because it’s great fun, you will find lots of cool stuff, and because I have stock options. That’s StumbleUpon; S-T-U-M-B-L-E-U-P-O-N-DOT-COM.

Finally, in the spirit of the recently departed Steve Jobs, we too have “One More Thing” to say. Laurie mentioned earlier that I actually proposed to Emily Benjamin before I asked his permission, so thanks again to him for being gracious about that. With the proposal coming before the permission, the bucks night before the engagement party and all of that before the appearance of a ring (be patient Emily Benjamin!), you may or may not be entirely surprised to hear that… Emily Benjamin and I were married on August 31st 2011 at 11:00am in San Francisco City Hall.

(Thank You!)

Now you don’t get off quite that easily. There will be a ceremony in a year or two where Emily Benjamin will be walking down some kind of aisle, in something white at which Laurie will have the chance to give his daughter away. We’re going to be having one ceremony in Australia and one in England, and we’re still trying to get RSVP to pay for the wedding – we are a success story after all!

At that point there is even a chance that Emily Benjamin might change her last name. That will possibly be the hardest thing to get to grips with! We’ve already rejected (yes, we have) James Graham Michael Benjamin – I need at least one non-first name.

Of course, that means that the 8 month jolly around the world we’ve just finished was technically our honeymoon, and of course this means that I proposed on our honeymoon, which possibly violates causality in a minor way, but it all seems to have turned out rather nicely.

We’re both very happy to see you all here tonight and I’d like to finish by asking you to charge your glasses and toast to my lovely wife, Emily Benjamin.

Thank You!

In other news, visas are approved and we fly to San Francisco tomorrow. And you should all sign up to StumbleUpon post haste!

Though its citizens still never tire of calling USA The Greatest Country On Earth™ (I’ve heard it three times today already from the talking heads on network news), their day-to-day behaviour is a little more circumspect. From overheard conversations in Miami you can infer a higher degree of consternation about the future, less swagger and more worry. The former aura of invincibility has gone. It’s not yet like the UK, where we long ago came to terms with our diminished importance in the world, but the optimism and Top Of The World feeling seems tinged now with a growing realisation that the country has somehow lost its way.

Television advertising belies the change in the national mood. Where the adverts that I remember played to people’s hopes and dreams, now they appeal to fear, insecurity and mistrust. The abundance of law firms offering to sue anyone who slights you, the morass of drug adverts to cure all kinds of ailments that you may or may not have, the never-ending hatchet jobs delivered by both political parties on their opponents – these dominate the airwaves and create an atmosphere of negativity. I’m sure they were always there, but now they really drown out the few positive messages.

Politicians follow suit in the news, casting aspersions rather than laying out policy. There is open warfare in Congress, where bills are presented with a view to tying the opposing party in knots, rather than actually solving any problems. The collegiality of the Senate has gone, replaced by barely disguised rancour. Its raison d’être seems to be obstructionism. You only have to look at the ongoing debt ceiling debate for a torrent of spin, counter-spin, posturing and outright lies that illustrate how dysfunctional Washington has become. As an unabashed liberal democrat, it would be easy to point out the irrational and evidence-free talking points of the Tea Party or the self-evident defence by the Republican party at large of those millionaires who don’t need defending, but the truth is the Democrats must also shoulder blame for failing to get their message across, make the most of the powerful position they were in and deliver effective government.

Negativity doesn’t suit USA well. There’s something troubling about seeing a nation paralysed with fear, uncertainty and doubt, like watching an ageing sportsman whose touch has deserted him. It’s faintly embarrassing. While many would claim a dose of humble pie would be good for America, I disagree. Certainly, I’d be a lot happier if it got out of the business of nation building, but the American Dream is a powerful and valuable symbol for the world. The chance, however illusory, that you can be somebody with enough hard work is a positive message. Secretly hoping for the demise of a superpower in return for a small measure of schadenfreude is distasteful and self-defeating. The world won’t be better off with a less powerful democratic ally.

On a positive note, once you turn off the TV, Miami Beach has been sunny and relaxing. The Tradewinds Apartment where we are staying is beautifully appointed, clean and reasonably priced. Service in all locations has been as impeccable as I remember, with friendly smiles and attention to detail. We had phenomenal steak at STK and a good bottle of Californian wine to go with it, and it’s nice to be in a place again where we can casually chat to people, rather than standing like a lemon saying only Please, Thank You and Yes in pidgin Spanish.

As we begin a four week drive down from Denver to LA, it’s going to be interesting to see what people in different states think. Perhaps there’s more positivity in the west.

Linking Mail to my Gmail account was relatively painless, with the following settings for the account:

Account Type: IMAP

Incoming Mail Server: imap.gmail.com
Username: {Google Apps Account Email Address}
SSL: Yes

Outgoing Mail Server: smtp.gmail.com
Authentication: Password
Username: {Google Apps Account Email Address}
SSL: Yes

Everything was up and running pretty quickly. The only major issue I had was duplication of messages. Each Gmail label is interpreted by Mail as a folder and so items that are labelled will appear once in the Inbox and once in the Label folder. As I label everything, that’s a pretty big issue. Plus, the “All Mail” folder that is created as part of Google’s Priority Inbox feature means everything is duplicated there as well.

Luckily, the solution to this is also straightforward. First, in Gmail, I visited Settings => Labels. There is a column specifying “Show in IMAP” and the simple solution was to uncheck this box for every single label apart from Trash, Drafts and Sent Mail. (Inbox can’t be unselected but that’s ok.) Next, I opened up Mail and gave it a few seconds to refresh the mailboxes. There were now only the 3 folders I’d selected. The final step was to tell Mail how to treat those folders. First, I clicked on the Sent Messages in the sidebar underneath my Gmail account, then clicked Mailbox => Use This Mailbox For => Sent. I repeated the appropriate steps with Trash and Drafts. After a couple of minutes, Presto!, everything is as it should be. The Inbox, Sent and Trash folders are exact representations of what’s in GMail and there are no duplicates on the machine, saving space and Spotlight results. The final step to unifying the two was to go to Preferences => Viewing and then check the option for “Include Related Messages”. Now the conversations are threaded by default with Sent and Received messages interleaved as expected.

The only slight drawback is that obviously you can’t view subsets of your messages by label on the client. That’s no problem for me though, as I rarely need to look at all the messages of a given label at the same time, and fast full-text search on the client makes it unnecessary.

By all accounts, IMAP support in Mail.app was pretty poor in the past. However, setting it up in the most recent version is a breeze. Now when I need to access archived information locked away in my email, I can!

Santiago certainly feels much safer than Rio and we were very comfortable walking around the streets last night looking for a bite to eat. It helps that we’re staying in the student area of the town, with plenty of people around at all times of the day. Chileans typically head out on the town at 11pm, before making their way to clubs which stay open until about 5:30am, but we’d intended to wind things up a little earlier in order to get home for a sojourn to the coast this morning. It didn’t quite work out that way.

After a day of wandering around the town, we had decided to reward ourselves after dinner with a few glasses of the infamous Chilean beverage known as Terre Moto, or The Earthquake. This cocktail, inspired and diabolical in equal measure, was apparently invented here in Santiago in a bar called The Headlouse in the 1920s. It is a fairly simple drink to make and starts with a base of about 3 shots of rum, in a frosty litre glass. Into this goes about 3 shots of grenadine, and because that still leaves a lot of room in such a welcomingly spacious glass, it’s topped up with ¾ litre of white wine to make sure it doesn’t get lonely. You can probably imagine that it is not perhaps the best wine in the world. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that this wine makes Passion Pop look refined. It aspires to bag-in-a-box-wine standards. It dreams of being good enough to be used in a game of Wheel of Goon. Then, to give it a unique Chilean twist, the crowning glory, the masterstroke, the coup de grace: 3 scoops of pineapple sorbet.

They are surprisingly good, and taste like strawberry Opal Fruits, before they became Starburst and lost their flavour. They are also strong. The kind of strong that, upon standing up, makes you sit down again. Violently. Earthquake is a suitable name. Three of those between the two of us and that pretty much was our night. We stumbled back to the hostel in a giggly kind of mood and with a glow that kept at bay the chilly Chilean night air.

We were not so giggly this morning, waking up at 11am, fully two hours past the time we had intended to be on a bus to the coastal town of Valparaiso. If there was ever a time for a fast food hangover cure, this was it. I can’t recall ever seeing KFC spelled out in full before, but through the trees near the subway station we spotted Kentucky Fr        ken and opted for what we knew. I don’t have KFC very often – on the grounds that it’s terrible – but the KFC in Santiago this morning was by far the worst I’ve ever tasted. The mayo was off, the lettuce was flavourless, the chicken like it wasn’t cooked through. The post-mix Pepsi, average on a normal day, tasted like it had been spiked with charcoal. Nobody else seemed to be complaining though, so I thought we’d maybe just got unlucky.

I started having doubts when we bought a bottle of sparkling water and it tasted… off. Now there’s good sparkling water and bad sparkling water, but I can’t ever remember water that tasted sour.

With the impending travel to the dizzying 4000m heights of La Paz later in the week, we’d started taking altitude sickness preventative medication called Diamox. The sour water reminded me that one of the stated side-effects was taste alteration. It only affected a small percentage of people though, so we were in a quandary. Was Chilean water really bad, or were our taste-buds screwed up? Water quality varies considerably throughout the world after all, and this was the first bottle I’d bought in Chile. We were both on the medication so we couldn’t do a comparison. What we needed was a control substance (no, not a controlled substance) – something that we both knew the taste of instinctively. There could only be one choice. Good old, reliable, always-the-same-no-matter-where-you-get-it, grown-up-with, meets-the-Pepsi-challenge, could-tell-it-blindfolded, Coca Cola.

It was not the real thing. It was worse than Coke One, the short-lived prelude to the infinitely superior (divide by) Coke Zero. It was worse, I imagine, than the misadventure of New Coke. It was worse even, than Pepsi. It was, to be clear, disgusting. Naturally, I spent the next hour sipping at the bottle, grimacing each time and yet marvelling at the (admittedly mundane) thrill of the unexpected from the expected. Never before has such a foul-tasting drink made me so irrationally happy. When I’d finished mine, I started on Emily Benjamin’s, who had wisely stopped drinking after the first gulp. The sensation lasted a full three hours, which made me forget about my hangover and kept me entertained for the entire bus trip to Valparaiso.

Valparaiso is much bigger than I’d expected. From what I’d read, it was supposed to be a small town between the mountains and the ocean and I suppose it is in the grand scheme of things, but it wasn’t the small fishing village I thought it would be. The waterfront is dominated by a huge industrial port and train line which makes it very difficult to walk along the water’s edge. It’s also the former home of Pablo Neruda, a man who has been described as Peru’s poet and who is famous for writing sonnets to his favourite foods. He was both in love with and deathly afraid of the sea, regularly spending entire days in his fishing boat on the shore beside his house with a bottle of wine and then announcing that he’d been sailing all day. I’d expected that we’d just turn up and it would be there right in front of us, like Dali’s house in Spain, but it wasn’t to be and we never actually found it.

Aside from that, the town has some nice colonial architecture, but the vast majority of buildings are small box-like artifices crammed together on the hillsides. The saving grace of the town is its vibrant colour. Seen from a high viewpoint, many of which can be found by ascending one of the numerous funiculars, the town looks like it was made of Lego, with primary and secondary colours thrown together as if a rainbow melted over the hills and stained the houses perched on them. An abundance of graffiti adds to the effect and in many of the districts there is no wall left unpainted, each daubed alternately with political slogans, expressions of love, caricatures or abstract art. As the afternoon wore on and the sun began to fall, Valparaiso felt warm in the yellowing light. I’m not convinced there’s actually that much to do there, but it is certainly a nice day trip out from Santiago.

If you manage to arrive sans hangover and at the time you planned, you might even get to see Pablo Neruda’s house.

Now that I’m a loud-mouthed, know-it-all brown-haired man-child, and thanks to an exceedingly generous and awesome 30th birthday present from Emily Benjamin, I’m happy to say I was right. While not quite as mysterious as it once was, with a flight to and from the island every day and up to 70,000 tourists a year, Easter Island remains a fantastic place to see, entirely worthy of its World Heritage listing. It’s expensive, to be sure, and not as easy to get to as many other island destinations, but that’s pretty much the point. Though we were only here for a couple of days, we managed to see all of the important sites thanks to a packed schedule, early starts and our great guide, Marcelo.

The source of Calvin’s inspiration, the giant stone heads (or moai) for which the island is famous, were each built from a single slab of rock, painstakingly carved directly out of Rano-Raraku, one of the four volcanos on the island, and then transported to their final location. Thought to have been created to protect the island from evil, or else as a way for the deceased to keep an eye on the living, there were hundreds of them clustered into groups dotted around the perimeter of the island, all facing inwards. After being put in place, the final step was the addition of eyes, which “lit up” the statue and gave it its protective/corrective/demonic/heretical power (delete as per the tenets of your dogma). Those that are still in the volcanic nursery and that never made it to their intended location have no eyes, but still manage to bore into you in an unnerving way if you look at them for too long.

Starting in about the 5th century and continuing the tradition for a staggering 1300 years before they realised they weren’t alone in the world, the Rapa-Nui people took rock carving and turned it into high art, moving from basic, barely-recognisably human outlines to smooth obsidian-polished statues with well defined features and individual characteristics. As each moai was a representation of a recently deceased VIP, they are all slightly different. (Recently here being figurative – the typical time to get from the commission to the “standing up” in its location was about 2 years.) One figure, possibly the most famous due to its image appearing on the front of the Lonely Planet guide, has a quizzical expression and seems to be craning its neck over another’s shoulder, demonstrating his creators’ remarkable skill. Though they aren’t defined, you could easily imagine a furrowed brow and drawn eyebrows.

Even more remarkable than the construction of 900 monoliths that have survived for hundreds of years is the manner in which the original settlers made it to the island in the first place. They supposedly came from somewhere near Tahiti, around 4000 miles away. It had been noticed that the waters on their home island were steadily rising, and that they would be inundated within a few decades, should an inland tsunami not get them first. Fortunately, the King’s adviser had a dream about an island paradise that would be their salvation; the only problem was that he didn’t know exactly where. Somewhere, uh, that way. Not letting a simple thing like practicality get in the way, the King ordered him to take a team of men in dugouts and find it.

Now, I’m not a stranger to moving to a different country based on a dream – that was how I ended up in Australia after all, but at least I knew that Australia existed and had a reasonable expectation that JAL would get me there in one piece. This guy didn’t even know that there were such things as continents and yet set off to find a new island in the middle of the ocean thousands of miles away, navigating only by the stars and eating, presumably, a hell of a lot of fish on the way. What is even more remarkable is that having actually found it, he managed to make his way back to the original island and then lead his people back to the same island again. I could barely find my way around Manhattan with a map. They named the island The Navel of The World, Eyes looking To The Sky or Land’s End, depending on whose version you believe. They certainly didn’t name it Easter Island.

On arrival, they divided up the island into territories for each tribe, thanked the spirits that they were safe from the rising waters and got on with living, presuming that the rest of the earth had been submerged. They weren’t disavowed of this notion until Easter Sunday, 1722 when the first Dutch ship, lacking a navigator of the first arrivals’ calibre, weighed anchor in the bay looking for a totally different island entirely. 300 years later, it’s still considered remote – a rare feat in this day and age – and it’s easy to see why the island has attained a reputation as a unique destination. I’m really glad that I’ve been fortunate enough to see it.

I do wish I had a philosophical tiger though.

Coming to power in 1970, Salvador Allende managed the impressive feat of taking a stable capitalist democracy and utterly destroying it before he died. His introduction of radical socialism overnight (literally, overnight) caused so much chaos that the economy crumbled. A large part of that was undoubtedly due to the severing of ties by the US after Allende infuriated Nixon by cosying up to Nixon’s nemesis Fidel Castro.

The very real tragedies aside, you have to accept that there is a particular skill in destroying an entire country, deserving almost of a perverse kind of admiration. It takes pronounced, prolonged effort, wilful ignorance and a catastrophic series of bad calls to get an entire population to the point where they have to queue in line for hours for bread. And yet, Allende managed this in just 3 short years. His is a shining example of an epic, tragic, glorious brand of mismanagement, the David Brent, the Michael Scott of presidents. For any Republicans out there, this is what happens when you introduce radical socialism to a country. The tepid right-of-centre tinkering by Obama doesn’t even come close.

The best thing you could say of Allende is that at least he was elected, and his brand of radicalism didn’t extend to killing. The second best thing you could say about him was that he wasn’t General Pinochet.

General Pinochet led the coup that overthrew and killed Allende in 1973. Pinochet fixed the economy by bringing in leading economists from Chicago, but at the extreme cost of intellectualism, art and culture. Apparently he didn’t assign much value to them. In a pattern familiar to tin-pot dictators all over the world, he disappeared anyone who disagreed with his policies, and set about culling the artists, musicians, playwrights, poets, writers, journalists and philosophers. No dissent was tolerated. He was later found to have bugged huge portions of Santiago to record people’s private conversations in their homes. And, yes, he was still in power in 1984. During his tenure, he was propped up by Margaret Thatcher who in return got access to airspace during the Falklands conflict. Being stridently anti-communist, he naturally got support from the US too.

Remarkably, Allende has become something of a sympathetic figure and is known, apparently without irony, as the People’s President. Then again, I’d look like a reasonable leader if the next guy was responsible for the deaths of thousands and the torture of 30,000 more. I don’t have a niece who’s a famous author I suppose (though I do have a cousin who’s a footballer). Still controversial, Allende’s statue outside the parliament building is regularly hugged by those who consider him a victim, and spat upon by those who curse his mismanagement of the country. At least he gets a statue. There are no statues to Pinochet.

Aside from the history lesson, we saw a large part of the city in a walk that lasted about 4 hours, taking in the commercial, entertainment and student districts each of which have a distinct character. The influence of waves of migrants are evidenced by French architecture, German food and beer and Italian tailoring. It’s not all alpaca woollen beanies and ponchos, though they certainly are around, and who could blame them? The maximum today was 6°c. Pro-tip: When arriving into Chile at night, make sure you’re wearing more than just a T-shirt; its English moniker is certainly apt. Today was the first time I’ve seen my breath in quite a while.

On the plus side, it was an unusually clear day and we were able to see the snow-capped Andes mountains in the distance, a comparatively rare sight despite the city being ringed by peaks. The blue of Chile’s flag is said to represent the sky “except in Santiago”, where smog and haze usually turns things grey and obscures the mountains even though they are only a few kilometres away.

Chilean cuisine is as cosmopolitan and varied as Santiago’s people. On the one hand, you have beautiful Cazuela soups, which are rich, nutritious and healthy. Corn is used in lots of meals, as is rice. On the other hand, you have what can only be described as a tower of cholesterol. Take one plate full of fries and put a layer of chorizo on top. Put a layer of beef on top of that and then, because too much is never enough, put half a loaf of melted cheese on toast on top of that. Garnish with two quartered eggs and serve with a defibrillator on standby. You’ll obviously want to polish that off with a hot-dog, fully loaded. Like Brazil, they seem to be in love with meat. It’s kind of like the nation’s Jamie, Delia or Nigella went to Denny’s and then taught the whole country how to do it.

Strange as the food is, the cafe culture is stranger. Starbucks might have the monopoly around the world, but you’re nowhere in Chile unless you serve Coffee With Legs. It’s not particularly easy to make coffee interesting, especially when it’s as bad as Chilean coffee. How then do you sell a disgusting brown stew to already stressed business people who really could do without the caffeine? Why, the same way you sell everything; by having sexy women in mini skirts pour your coffee and flirt with you. This had been an enduring and profitable enterprise since the 1960s, until a disruptive newcomer entered the business a few years ago. In a feat of marketing genius so obvious you wonder why it took 30 years – then again, see above – this new enterprise entices customers by having sexy women in bikinis pour your coffee and flirt with you. Clearly this is an arms (and legs) race that can only end in one place. How then does this new enterprise stop competitors from one-upping them (so to speak)? With the inevitable Happy Minute. Not to be confused with a Happy Meal, though possibly equally satisfying, Happy Minutes are announced at random throughout the day by the manager. At the sounding of the bell, the customers are locked in and the lovely ladies… dispense with the formalities. On tables. Tinted glass prevents prying eyes and children are not allowed on the premises, and with thumping house music and disco lights, these places are more like nightclubs than your typical Caffe Nero. You might expect that men would sit inside all day drinking cup after cup of coffee in the hopes of seeing the promised land. You would be right.

• I can’t even speak Fast Show style fake Spanish as fast as real Spaniards can speak real Spanish.
• The only songs that play on Spanish radio are from Michael Yackson (sic), Katy Perry, Ke$ha, Shakira and Nelly Furtado.
• Spanish radio interrupts songs halfway through which can be a curse or blessing (see above).
• Brazilian Pepsi and Coke cans have noticeably larger hole at the top to pour from than in Europe, and people seem to pour the liquid sideways from the cans.
• There are surprisingly few waxing salons in evidence in Brazil.
• You can’t buy a lemon in Rio for love nor money. Greengrocers, market stall owners and supermarket students will nod their heads vigorously, rummage around a little and then triumphantly produce… a lime.

The first car took us up to Morro de Açúcar – Sugar Hill, a still reasonably sized peak that is nevertheless in its big brother’s shadow, often literally. (Surely given its shape and relative size, a better name would be Sugar Roll, or Sugar Bap?) This first stop had a large, open plaza that afforded great views of Rio’s harbour and planes taking off from the airport. As well as a cafe and benches to sit at, we also found a somewhat incongruous shoe store. Surprisingly, Havianas are just as expensive here as they are in Australia. They did have some great glow in the dark designs, though I’m not sure how the sunlight is supposed to activate them when your feet are covering them. Regardless, one had skeletons so I was nearly sold, but $30 seemed a bit steep to replace a $2 fake pair from Thailand that didn’t need replacing. I suppose I may yet regret this. Day-glo skeletons are cool.

Around the seaward side of Morro de Açúcar stands the second cable car station that takes you to its big brother, Pão de Açúcar – Sugar Loaf. Naturally, this had a smaller plaza that afforded even greater views of Rio’s harbour and planes taking off from the airport. Aside from those spectacular views, which immediately made the photos from the junior sweet bread seem pointless, there was one special feature. Behind the obligatory souvenir shops were steps leading down into a small forest, which turned out to be the home of a cohort of monkeys. We were content to watch them play and fight from afar. Not so a group of American girls who we happened across, who coaxed the timid simians out with the promise of biscuits. A couple of locals reminded them of the incredibly explicit notices not to feed the wild animals and they stopped, but not before they had a few shots of one of the girls planking on the path, with a monkey eating biscuits off her ass. Stay classy, San Diego!

Later in the week, we also managed to see a football match between Flamengo and Athletico MG. With the Maracana closed for refurbishment for the upcoming World Cup, the match played out at the Olympic Stadium a little way out of town. Brazilian fans are certainly passionate. After a turgid first half, Flamengo, the home team, went behind to a lazy free-kick despite having had the majority of possession. The silence was deafening – or maybe it was the fans going mad at their own players. Luckily, old horse face himself, the gangly, lolloping Ronaldinho, recently returned from Milan, struck a sweet volley 10 minutes later to bring the scores level, and then set up another to put Flamengo ahead. From there they cruised to an easy 4-1 victory, guaranteeing safe passage back to the hostel. I don’t think the home fans would have reacted like Canucks “fans”, but I’m glad I didn’t have to find out.

Speaking of which, I’m in two minds now about whether I actually felt unsafe in Rio. Statistically speaking, I’m sure there are much safer places, but apart from the one time we’d just been told of a mugging, I didn’t really feel close to becoming a statistic. By the end of the week, I wasn’t even really worried about being robbed anymore and had gotten into the habit of just carrying around the money we needed. We had numerous sojourns out to purchase food and now have enough Portuguese to say “A full BBQ chicken and two Coke Zeros please, thank you”. How much more than that do you really need in a civil society? Of course, unless our plans seriously change, that Portuguese is now useless and will be pushed to a dark recess of my mind, along with the chain rule of differentiation and which stairs were squeaky in my childhood home (1st, 3rd and the right hand side of the second last, if you’re interested and/or thinking of breaking into a certain Meols property).

And with that, we’re off to Chile.

This is not the conversation you want to be having with a fellow traveller when you are carrying expensive camera equipment and about to catch a bus back to your hostel. In Lapa. At night.

It was Christ the Redeemer’s fault really. The iconic statue and symbol of Rio, overlooking the city from on high, is a major tourist attraction and busy most days of the year. Unfortunately, we had inadvertently chosen to visit the day after Corpus Christi, a public holiday in this Catholic country. In retrospect, I can see why visiting Christ the Redeemer then would be obvious for the flock, but not being plugged into the Catholic social calendar, we had no idea.

The first clue was that upon arrival to the train station at 3pm, the next train with availability was at 7:20pm, well after sunset. Opting instead for a mini-bus that promised to take us up there and then, we made good progress and got two thirds of the way up the mountain in just 15 minutes. What they don’t tell you upfront is that you are one of many, very many people doing the same thing. About 500m from what looked like a ticket office, we saw the end of a queue to get into a second set of mini buses to take us the rest of the way, 15 people at a time. There were easily a thousand people waiting in front of us. Fortunately, the queue was so long that it dawned on us that we had to buy the tickets from yet another queue before we got to the head of this one. Now, I don’t mind queueing – I’m British after all, and everyone knows we’re second only to the Russians in our love/hate for long lines – but, they really could use a bit of signage up there. It was only sheer dumb luck that we joined the right queues in the right order, otherwise we could have been standing around far longer than the hour we ended up waiting.

At the top, it was thronged, to the point where it was difficult to move, never mind the occasional muppet that would be lying down on the floor trying to take what looked like an upskirt photo of Our Lord. Seriously, if you want a photo looking upwards at Christ the Redeemer from an acute angle, there’s an entire city to do it from. There was barely enough room for anybody to do the pose mimicking the statue’s, but they were all trying. So very trying. Once you threw in the helicopters that buzzed around every 5 minutes like incessant hornets – I can now understand King Kong’s frustrations – it was hardly the place for peaceful reflection.

It makes me more and more impressed with the traffic management at places in Spain like Dali’s House Museum and the Alhambra, both of which were busy but never felt rushed or crowded. The Brazilians could probably do with taking a leaf out of the Spaniards’ book.

In fact the only redeeming feature was the the view of the harbour, which was phenomenal. Serendipitously we were there as the sun began to set, which made the haze above the city glow. Once we were able to make it to the edge of the plaza, the shoving stopped and the sounds around seemed to fade away. For a couple of minutes it was possible to just look down at the city and admire, at least until I felt obliged to give up the position to another poor crushed punter.

What goes up must come down and predictably enough there were major queues for the mini-buses to descend, followed by another major queue for the second mini-bus from the ticket office, by which time it was very dark. We struck up a conversation with some Australians and were told of their mugging just as we said goodbye and went to stand under a flickering lamppost to wait for our bus back to that same district. If you want to induce paranoia, that is how to do it.

After spending three days in the comparatively comfortable suburb of Ipanema, just a stone’s throw from both the beach and the restaurant that lends its name to possibly the world’s most famous Bossa Nova tune, Lapa is a decidedly more… colourful neighbourhood. Already earmarked by all the guides as being one of the least safe areas, the Aussies’ story of being mugged didn’t help with first impressions. The second person we spoke to in our hostel told us of an ominous chalk outline and police tape they’d seen just down the road below a conspicuously large bridge.

But for all that we were briefly scared on the short walk back to the hostel from the bus stop, it doesn’t encompass the whole feel of the place. It’s true that we left our watches, passports, jewellery and wallets in our room when we went out last night, but that’s just good common sense in an area where you shouldn’t be surprised to find a Favela kid’s hand in your pocket. This does feel more authentically Rio than the lovely, but slightly sterile Ipanema. You get to use all those adjectives that The Guardian loves to use to describe The Wire. Gritty. Edgy. Urban. There is a gritty, urban edginess about the place, and a nightlife to make you sing, or at least listen and dance.

The road next to ours was blocked off last night for a street party and there was live music spilling out of the bars and restaurants, bouncy castles for the kids and a crowd of people laughing and chatting all night long. A live jazz band was playing on the corner of the road. We ended up in a great samba club called Carioca da Gema with a bunch of fellow travellers and danced to a live band and a very soulful singer. A local woman did her best to teach me some dance moves and collapsed in laughter at my efforts. Because we’d left our watches, we had no idea of the time and ended up staying out much later than we’d planned, but it didn’t matter. Walking back along the same roads as just a few hours earlier felt much safer; proof that context and perception is everything. Or maybe just that alcohol makes the world seem shinier.

Not feeling too shiny this morning though. Sheeeeeeeet.

The last thing you want after a 10 hour flight in a windowless window seat, with the world’s most reclined seat in front of you, is to hang around in the airport longer than necessary, so it was a shame that Rio’s airport has what seems to be the world’s worst baggage reclaim. It had an incredibly inefficient baggage delivery system that stopped every time an item already on the conveyor belt got within 10 feet of the delivery chute, preventing luggage from being delivered until there was a free space. Seriously, if a bag has survived the tender caresses of numerous international baggage handlers, I’m sure it can manage a little contact with another bag as it arrives.

To add insult to injury, with fully 70% of the conveyor belt inaccessible to the 350 plus people who had gotten off the flight, baggage began building up immediately and stayed there while people craned their heads to see what was going on. And because nobody could see where their bags were, new items were stuck on the feed belt, turtle-heading through the flaps, teasing with the promise of imminent delivery, before being pulled back briskly out of the way by the treacherous mechanical baggage gods determined not to see any lurid bag on bag contact.

Our luggage finally arrived more than one hour after landing and making it through immigration.

While waiting for immigration, I had overheard a conversation between a Spanish girl and a German girl discussing their travel plans, the only remarkable thing about which was that I could understand them. Even though I can take no credit for it, I’m always strangely and undeservedly proud of the English language when I hear foreigners using it to communicate. As Eurovision went a good long way to proving earlier this year, English really is becoming the lingua franca of Europe (and isn’t that a deliciously ironic statement – no, it isn’t, see the comment below!). Of course, we’ll all be speaking Chinese in a decade (and I for one will welcome our Mandarin overlords), but it’s still a nice novelty at the moment.

After fully making it through the arrivals gate and finding out that our shuttle driver wasn’t there due to car trouble, we had to the run the gauntlet of taxi drivers vying for business. This is not something I have missed while renting a car.

We ended up with Jose, a cheerful local, who helped us with some basic Portuguese and pointed out some landmarks, including the Corcavado, the Maracana Stadium and Ipanema beach, which we are staying only a few minutes walk from. The only downside was that for our entertainment, he reached for the CD player and put on Katy Fucking Perry. Now, I don’t particularly have a problem with her special blend of faux-sexy, faux-innocent saccharine-sweet inoffensive pop music, but strike me dead if I haven’t heard her songs at least 5 times a day for the last 3 weeks. Even Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter would piss me off if I had to listen to him that much and he has a voice like melted Galaxy chocolate. I smiled through gritted teeth – how was Jose supposed to know – but I really could have done without it. Especially after 10 hours on a plane in a windowless seat with the world’s most reclined seat in front of me and then another hour standing around waiting for two bags out of 500 from a capricious and inefficient delivery system in a jostling crowd of 350 equally tired and frustrated people.

I might be overreacting. But I’m very tired. We’ll see in the morning.