tomandzoe.com - live from the northside

After 2 days of flights and taxis I´m in Cuiaba, gateway to the Pantanal. The city of 1 million people seemed relatively pristine from the air, although I´ve only see a little on the ground - including the inside of the minibar, which is stocked with no less than two terrible types of beer (I just hope it gets hot in the next few days so that it tastes better).

I spent last night at a hostel in Sao Paulo and the morning catching cabs between bike shops (lajo de ciclima) in search of cool cycling jerseys. I found a few and then went to what is basically their Cenetennial Park to get my twitch on. Stand-outs were swallow-tailed hummingbird and blonde-crested woodpecker, amongst others.

My TAM flight from Sao Paulo to Cuiaba was uneventful, which was surprising given that this isn´t the safest airline on earth. Last July, 250 people were killed when a TAM pilot landed an Airbus with one of the throttles in the ´climb´position. I´m no expert, but ´landing´position would probably have been better. The plane climbed over the runway and ploughed, somewhat ironically, into the TAM head office. On our flight I was reassured by the crew who, during the safety briefing, reminded us that although the seats weren´t fitted with lifejackets, the cushions of the seats float!

Tomorrow is a rest day, given that I have to prepare my talk for the conference. As luck would have it, my presentation is the very first of the conference, after the plenary sessions. This means I can get it out of the way and get back to the other terrible beer in the minibar.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 20th, 2008 at 12:56 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.