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We Are Siamese If You Please
Belo Horizonte, Brazil |
Belo Horizonte, Brazil
After a comfortable bus ride from Rio we found ourselves in Belo Horizonte, potentially one of the least visited places in Brazil when it comes to tourism. We were not here to be tourists, far from it, we need a break from that and instead we are housesitting and looking after 3 cats for the next 4 weeks.
Having found the placement through TrustedHousesitters we were over the moon to have the opportunity to just stop. Whilst we have had a few house sitting assignments over our travels, usually they served as a base to explore or to have our parents come to stay. This placement was entirely about doing nothing. Those of you who have normal lives with 9-5 jobs will almost definitely roll your eyes at my next sentence, but travelling can be tiring. From moving every day or two, living out of a backpack, constantly planning our next move and what do to when we get there, gets exhausting. Seriously you know that feeling you get after a holiday when you just want you own bed, well imagine that for 3 years when you actually don’t own a bed. House sitting for us is that bed, and sofa, and tv, and kitchen and cats.
Whilst I say that we needed this housesit to just revive and do nothing, that is not really an option for us ever, we still had 2 months of travels to plan and with passport space issues getting from Brazil to Colombia without any extra stamps was more of a challenge than we anticipated and we also needed to catch up on months and months of blog that have just not been kept up to date. So many times we have nearly thrown in the towel as bad wifi and just the general lack of time to sit and write and upload photos have stopped us doing what we need to do, but after 2 and half years of blog it just didn’t seem right to give up now.
We arrived at our housesit and were welcomed by Vanesa and Pepe, a gorgeous Chilean couple who were living and working in Belo due to Pepe’s work in a mining resource company. They were off on an extended holiday back to Chile. It was awesome to be able to chat to them about their home country and share our love of Valparaiso which just happens to be where they met and studied and where they were heading for part of their holiday. Vanesa and Pepe reassured us that they had three cats whom we were to look after, sadly these cats are not used to strangers and after hearing the doorbell (their all-time arch enemy) they took up position under the bed and aside from sneaking out with military precision to eat biscuits and use their litter tray they remained out of sight for a good 24 hours.
The next morning Vanesa and Pepe had left early for the airport and the cats eventually came out of their hiding places. We had three beautiful Siamese babies, Agata the tiny mummy cat with a wonky tail and huge blue eyes, Seu Xico a huge fluffy giant of a cat with a perfect tail and equally big blue eyes and Taninho, Seu Xico’s twin brother. Were it not for the different coloured collars we would not have been able to tell the two of them apart, although as we got to know them Tadinho was a little bit more lean than Seu Xico, had a pointier nose and tended to hang around with Agata like a real mummies boy.
The cats were just awesome, so cute and friendly, they loved playing kill the feather toy and being brushed and I was very happy to pamper to their every need. Despite living in a third floor flat the cats do actually go out, although they were grounded for the first few days of our stay as Agata had lost a claw during one of her night time adventures, they were not happy being house cats for these few days whilst we made sure that they were comfortable with us and were not going to set off on an expedition to Chile in search of their real parents. They decided that 4:30 was the perfect time to start shouting, singing, clawing at invisible doors, playing chase each other down the corridor and hurl yourself on the bed and catsitters. We tried to calm the cats with changing their food time and love and cuddles but we discovered there was only one way to stop them playing up. I had to venture down to the street in my pyjamas at 4:30am to ring the doorbell. I felt bad for about 2 minutes until I drifted back to sleep for a blissful 4 hours. Thankfully on close inspection after a day or two Agata’s paw was perfect and growing back cleanly so we released them from their night time prison.
All was good until 2 weeks into the house sit the neighbours opposite decided to start digging up the pavement outside their house, delivering and emptying a skip each day at 5am which the cats did not like one bit and then jackhammering the pavement from 8am until 3pm. I have to say that the Brazillians have an amazing work ethic, the amount of rubble they moved each day by hand was admirable. I was genuinely willing them to slack off and go to the pub.
The weather in Belo was crazy, we arrived in winter and were surprised by just how warm it was, then half way through our first week the temperature plummeted, we had torrential rain and the cats no longer wanted to go out at night to the cat disco and we woke up each morning with them contouring themselves around our legs and feet, bliss. Then out of nowhere the temperatures rose and it was hotter than hell, seriously we are talking 30 degrees at night. The cats were no longer snuggling our feet and instead spent their days moping around shouting incessantly at us.
I have always known that Siamese cats are vocal, but these guys take it to a whole new level, I was actually getting concerned that we might get a noise complaint from the neighbour as the cats were almost definitely louder than the jackhammer at times. We did everything to cool the cats, we directed the only fan in the house onto them, topped up their water with ice and brushed them within an inch of their lives.
So aside from the cats I took up residence on the sofa, Tim took up residence in the home office and we set about blogging. We had 37 entries to complete taking us from the west coast of New Zealands South Island, back to the North, to Tahiti, on a cruise across the pacific, through Peru, Bolovia, Chile, Argentina, Uraguay , Paraguay and into Brazil. We seriously had our work cut out. With a to do list and a highlighter we cracked on and every day would mark our progress by highlighting how far we had got to give us the motivation to keep going. There were some road blocks. We had to take a day or two to plan some travels and then unbelievably it seems that I wore out the keyboard on my laptop. I genuinely thought that the world was conspiring against me and was in a foul mood for the whole day whilst I tried every which way to get into my laptop as typically of the 6 keys that were broken, one of them was needed for my password. Eventually I cracked the system with the help of the ‘onscreen keyboard’, yeah who knew about that!! I then spent the next 8 hours on every shopping website in Brazil trying to order a new keyboard. It was a super quick and easy fix, and a new keyboard only cost £10 but do think I could find a way to buy one, no.
Something that we learned about Brazil is that you can’t shop online without a Brazilian credit card and also a Brazilian ID and if you get something delivered from outside of Brazil they charge 100% tax on it. Hmm, to say we were buggered was an understatement. The next day with the shops open I set out to find a keyboard to plug in and at least make my laptop usable and never have I been so happy to stumble upon Brazils answer to PC world. Just £8 lighter I was back in the game. Thankfully I also managed to speak to our house sit hosts who agreed to order and pay for a new keyboard to get my laptop fixed, yay I love it when a plan comes together.
Having a house was bliss, we had sky TV with a good selection of English channels and I managed to watched at least 100 episodes of the FBI Files on ID and must have watched Pitch Perfect at least 8 times but never all the way from start to finish and often with no sound as the jack hammer was going
. We also had the joy of a kitchen and with the super market just 5 minutes away we ate like kings, a treat we needed after the numerous fried flour dinners in Paraguay. We were so happy and thankful that Brazil supermarket prices were cheap as can be, as had we agreed to housesit in Argentina this would have been a struggle.
With just two days to go we did it, we posted our Rio blog and were up to date, I don’t even know how long it has been since those words came out of my mouth, but I was ready to shout it from the roof tops “WE ARE UP TO DATE!!!”. Now we just need to keep it that way.
The praise and comments from our family and friends certainly had a big part in keeping us going on the blog marathon, in fact I think that it was probably a super marathon or that big race in the desert with back to back marathons. Now give me a bottle of water and a gold medal I need a lie down. Actually scrap that we have travels around Brazil and Colombia to plan…..
Not only has house sitting been amazing in that we have had a place to stop and work we have also saved a small fortune, so we have decided our next steps are going to be a bit of a luxury. A return to Rio to hopefully see big JC and then onwards to The Pantanal; said to be Brazils most wildlife rich destination, even more so than the Amazon.
Time to pack our bags, say a teary farewell to our cats and get back on the road to do what we do and make some more memories that we will be blogging about as we go, we really will, we absolutely will not get behind again,,,,, or will we…….
Farewell Belo and our Siamese babies and thank you Vanesa and Pepe for picking us!!
Next stop, Rio de Janeiro, take 2.
Beans Around The World 