Living with shackle draggers: July 2014

Wotto. Appologies for those of you who could do with more frequent updating. The internet is generally crap, to shit..that kind of range. When I started this entry we were back in Lima having been to Joao Pessoa via Iguazu falls. The girls did all their stuff at the robotics, but had very bad luck with their controllers. Before they'd even got on, the motor controller for the Hades cave burnt out....(we suspect that the thing was wrongly connected in terms of polarity). Then they had a similar problem with the walking Pegasus....and there were other problems. In the end, they were not able to even do a complete performance. It was a great shame.

However, they did impress with their resilience, their positive approach to their adversity , and their friendliness, and they thoroughly enjoyed it all. They did well in the 'SuperTeam' part of the competition that happened after the main event...and made a heap of new mates.

I'll show some pics from Joao Pessoa in a min...but first...here's some from the falls:

There were lots of these little creatures. I made the mistake of putting my bag on the floor to take some pictures of them...and there were apples in the bag....which they got into by shoveing their heads into a small opening where the zip wasn't completely closed. I had to put my foot on the leader to get him to come out of the bag...and then the others all crowded around him to see if he was OK. It was very touching to see. I would have let them have the apples, but we'd been told that we shouldn't be feeding them...

I'm sure you can imaging what this sounds like! There's just so MUCH of it!

Waiting for a lift....

The picture below is taken from the platform above....

Here's a few pics from the Joao Pessoa chapter of our lives...

This is the girls with the Brazilian team....

They had a party at this place in town after the competitions finished...it was fantastic to see all the kids getting into the Brazilian party spirit.

I have to say that we've met some amazing people in Brazil..and there wasn't any sign of violence or any of the stuff that we'd be led to expect. We were cautious never the less, not carrying anything overtly ostentatious or flashing our iphones around etc.

Here's the beach in Joao Pessoa...

...and this is looking the other way....

As you walk into the city from the beach, it gets progressively less and less clean...and stuff is much more run down. The pavements are broken up and the buildings are often falling down. There's quite a bit of decay...but still lots of new cars.

This was a stagnant open river kind of thing...smelt like it didn't move a whole lot.

The competition was 15 mins from our hotel...at the convention centre. Here are the girls outside the main building.

After the performances the kids from different countries got together to make their robots move to a different set of criteria.... and this photo shows everyone onstage at the end of those performances....

This was flying peggy being modified to be scooby do..

We had a great time on the last day when the Australian team that were running Nao robots from UNSW won against the reigning world champions (for the last 4 years)....Germany. The score was a blistering and very funny 5-1. I did film it from our spot, but the file is 1.6gb and the internet being what it is here we'd be back before it would be loaded...so here's a link to the posting from the official people:

Scrub that, I can't even get on line for long enough to find the site I saw it on....so look it up. It's in lots of places including 'The Australian' 'The Economist' etc. Below is a panorama from our stand.

This was a view on the way back into town one day....

Then we were off back to Lima...
At the airport on the way back to Iguazu in transit to Peru again...

They let us out of the airport as we had a 9 hour stop in Iguazu, so we went back there for a bit...thinking we'd go to the bird sanctuary. As it was the sanctuary was $60 so we went and had a lie down on the grass instead...which Phoebe didn't like...but in the end we all liked lying down for a bit, these internal flights in South America are not very restful to say the least, and the food they give you is almost inedible quite frankly.

This is Lima from the shopping centre near the Marriot....it's full of the same kinds of shops that you find in Australia, Europe, America....and all at whopping prices.

and the girls....looking out at the view.
Actually, this was almost the last picture that I took of Phoebe. The next day at the hotel, she decided to go up to our room before Daile and I were finished. Matilda had already gone up. A couple of mins later, just as we were going up, we heard screaming....I mean REAL screaming saying 'HELP ME!'. It was a kind of noise that I didn't even recognise as being Phoebe, but it was her!
When we got to the room, she wasn't there and Matilda had no idea where she was!
We ran out of the room shouting her name, and after a few seconds she shouted back from the floor above.
She had been stuck in the space between the lift and the lift door, unable to open the door, and then the lift went down 3 floors leaving her hanging on for dear life ...with a shear drop of 3 stories into a dark abyss!
A cleaner heard her, came up in the lift (she had to squeeze in to avoid being caught by it) and got her into the lift. He then went up to the floor above and they got out.

We were all very shaken up as you can imagine. So this picture is quite important now! All the pictures of her after this are a blessing!

That night we went to a water show in down town Lima...which included them projecting laser imagery (moving) onto fountains of water..it was quite amazing!

They had a water tunnel that you could walk through...

and a game that you play where you try to get to the middle of this ring of fountains.....which go off momentarily...and then come on when you least expect it. (We all got soaked in this one!)

At a restaurant, we tried 'IncaKola' which I thought was close to the colour of my teeth....! It tastes of cough medicine.

Bit of graffiti downtown...

Some big square somewhere....Matilda looks really small in this one...distortion. She's actually still about 50mm taller than Phoebe somehow.

This lady was really friendly to me...and rude to Daile. I thought i'd rub it in by getting her to pose for a pic.

I did a painting of this church. Below it are catacombs with lots of bones, skulls, etc. The church is 17th century, founded by Franciscan monks and absolutely steeped in old stuff including a library that looks like something from Hogwarts. There was a book in there with pages made from Lama skins.