Travel, Photography, Life.
Brazil
My travels through Brazil.
One More Brazilian Bus Ride
Apr 29th
April 23, 2007
Day 514
I got another bus that took most of the day to Corumba. The bus took me right through the vast wetland area known as the Pantanal. It was a beautiful ride being in the middle of nowhere after spending the last few weeks in the city, and it was capped off by a spectacular sunset.
Corumba is on the Rio Paraguai, which borders Bolivia. The best way to get into Bolivia from here is the “Death Train,” which goes to Santa Cruz. As soon as I got to town I found out that in typical Bolivian fashion the Death Train employees have been on strike, and the train has been canceled the last few days. Supposedly the train will go tomorrow, but after that it looks like it might be halted for a few more days.
The main way to get tickets for the Death Train is to cross the border to Bolivia in the morning, buy a ticket for the afternoon train, then come back to Brazil before heading out for good. However, because of the strikes, that would mean getting up at 5:00 AM, waiting in line for hours, and then maybe getting a ticket if I got lucky and it wasn’t sold out yet.
I decided to opt for a somewhat safer route. A guy at one of the travel agencies in town will do all of the dirty work for me and claims that the train company guarantees him a certain amount of seats, so I should get to go tomorrow for sure. His commission is steep, but I’m more concerned that he’s going to take off with my money and that of the other unsuspecting backpackers and hide out in Bolivia a la Butch Cassidy. I feel like I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place, but I’ll just have to wait until tomorrow to see what happens.
Long Bus to Campo Grande
Apr 29th
April 22, 2007
Day 513
I rode a bus all night and most of the day to Campo Grande, a small city in Brazil’s interior. I wanted to continue to my next destination right away, but the bus ride was too exhausting, so I stayed overnight one night.
Hanging out in Sao Paulo
Apr 29th
April 20-21, 2007
Day 511-512
I spent a couple more days in Sao Paulo, mainly meeting people at my hostel, getting another traditional Paulista lunch with Vivi and Silvia, and going to the MASP, which is a museum containing the biggest collection of western art in South America. There’s not a lot of touristy stuff to do in the city, but I enjoyed spending some time here. It’s huge, but the area I stayed in was pretty clean, safe, and quiet. The city also has a different vibe to it than Rio. Cariocas love their beaches, but it’s business as usual for Paulistas.
Bodies
Apr 29th
April 19, 2007
Day 510
I met Silvia at her office today. She’s a biologist, so I got to see the labs she works in. It was quite interesting for me to see rat hearts being embedded in wax, sliced up, and analyzed for diabetes research.
Later I went to a big park with many exhibition halls. One of the halls had an exhibit called “Bodies.” I think it’s pretty famous in the US now too. The exhibit was full of preserved human corpses showing various anatomical regions of organs, tissues, and bones. Some of them were done quite creatively like the guy holding his own flowing guts in his folded arms like it was a Thanksgiving cornucopia. At first I didn’t think I could handle it because these were real dead people on display, but eventually I got used to it and it became…uh…educational.
One Massive City
Apr 29th
April 18, 2007
Day 509
I took the bus into downtown Sao Paulo today. I thought Rio de Janeiro was a huge city but Sao Paulo is twice as big. Everywhere I walked, there were masses of people hurrying to get somewhere. Unlike Rio, Sao Paulo doesn’t have any mountains, oceanfront, or forests within the city, so it’s just a huge mass of city that never seems to end. Just to see how big the city really was, I went to the Banesco building, a thirty-five story office tower in the middle of the city that has an observation deck at the top. From there I could see buildings all the way to the horizon. There were no huge skyscrapers in the center like there are in big American cities, but nevertheless the tall buildings never seemed to end.
Tonight I met up with Vivi and her friend Silvia to watch some soccer on TV. One of the teams from Sao Paulo is in the South American championships and was playing a huge game in Peru. However, the crowd at the stadium was pretty sparse. I guess Brazil is just too good for any other fans to pay much attention to their own teams. Sao Paulo ended up crushing the other team, 1-0.
The photo album for this entry is here.
Brazilian Sushi
Apr 29th
April 17, 2007
Day 508
Today I took the bus to Sao Paulo, the largest city in South America. A bus leaves from Rio to Sao Paulo every fifteen minutes, so it was pretty easy to find one. The drive was mostly populated with small cities constantly dotting the landscape. However, there were a few small pockets of Atlantic rain forest that haven’t been cut down yet.
When I got to the main bus terminal, I was delighted to find out that it connected directly to the metro. I jumped on a train and was in the center of the city a few minutes later. I found a hostel made out of an old mansion near Avenida Paulista, the most famous street in the city. The area was surprisingly quiet, despite being in the middle of a huge city.
Tonight I met Vivi, of friend of Francisco’s from Sao Paulo. I had heard that the best thing to do in the city was eat, and tonight I wasn’t disappointed. Vivi took me to a sushi restaurant in an area with lots of descendants of Japanese immigrants. The food was delicious and a nice change from the beans and rice I had been eating so much of lately. When the restaurant was going to close, the waitress apologized excessively for making us leave in true Japanese cultural form. It was an interesting evening.
Hanging out in Rio
Apr 29th
April 15-16, 2007
Day 506-507
I spent my last days in Rio on the beaches of Leblon and Ipanema. Francisco has many friends and family members in Rio, so he introduced me to a bunch of them. He was a gracious host and I appreciate him letting me stay at his plays while I visited the Cidade Marvelosa.
Downtown Rio
Apr 28th
April 14, 2007
Day 505
The subway in Rio is meant to be a great way to get around, but the problem is that it only covers a small portion of the city. Leblon is far away from where the subway line ends, so until today I had never gotten a chance to use it. However, today I wanted to see the center of the city, so I decided to give it a try. Even though there isn’t a subway line in Leblon, there is a convenient “Metro Bus” that takes passengers directly to the station and includes a ticket to ride the train. It turned out to be much faster than taking the bus. I made it to the downtown area in only about half an hour, whereas it may have taken two hours in a bus last night.
Downtown is where all of the major business happens in Rio. However, because it was Saturday, it was almost deserted. Lots of guys were selling bootleg CDs and DVDs and lots of other junk in the streets, but the office buildings were all closed. The place seemed very dirty to me, but that’s probably just because a cleanup crew was uprooting all of the garbage that had been discarded during the week. On Mondays, I bet the area is bustling and clean.
One thing that was open was the naval museum. It had a small free section where I could take pictures of the busts and paintings of old naval leaders, but to see the rest of it I had to pay and leave my camera behind. The pay section of the museum was large and interesting with models of Brazilian ships that have been used from the 1600′s till today. Everything was written in Portuguese, though, so I had to settle for visual stimulation and save the intellectual stuff for later.
The photo album for this entry is here.
A View of the City
Apr 28th
April 13, 2007
Day 504
Today was a clear day so I decided to go to Pao de Acucar, or Sugar Loaf Mountain, the famous 395-meter mountain that sits in Guanabara Bay and overlooks the southern half of the city. I rode the city bus once again through the horrendous traffic for over an hour just to cross two neighborhoods and ended up arriving with only an hour left before sunset.
The first cable car went to Morro da Urca. The area was quite large with a park, restaurants, a helipad, and a movie theater. There was an interesting movie about the history of the cable cars and how people dreamed for many years about being able to go to the top of Sugar Loaf Mountain. The mountain is so famous it was even featured in the James Bond movie Moonraker, where Bond and Jaws had an epic battle on the way to the top.
I walked to the other side of Morro da Urca and took another cable car to the very top. There was another gift shop where one could buy a $1000 hand-carved stone parrot statue or a $1 postcard. There was also a small park with monkeys running all around. But the big attraction was the view of the city. Rio is located in a unique setting because there are beaches, mountains, and Atlantic rainforest (Tijuca is the biggest urban forest in the world) all within the same city. Pao de Acucar seems to be located in the perfect place, where one can put aside the nastier parts of the city like the high levels of violence and ridiculous traffic and just enjoy the view.
The sun was blinding as it was going down behind Rio, but I still got to see Corcovado Mountain, Copacabana Beach, Guanabara Bay, and the Santos Dumont Airport before dark. After the sunset, the city lit up in a dazzling display of colors and lights. It was clear at that point that every inhabitable part of Rio was lit up, with patches of darkness where the forest still remained. Many people say that Rio de Janeiro is the most beautiful city in the world. I don’t know how you could say it tops Paris, but it at least gives it a run for the money.
The photo album for this entry is here.
Saying Goodbye
Apr 28th
April 12, 2007
Day 503
It was time to go back to the mainland. We had a great time on the big island, a tropical paradise full of amazing beaches, but my parents had to catch their flight back to the US today. The first step was to take the ferry back to Angra Dos Reis on the shore. It was very hot and sunny, so the sea breeze blowing onto the boat felt great.
Once we got to Angra, we realized we had a problem. If we took a bus back to Rio right away, we’d have about three hours to spare before having to go to the airport. With the horrendous traffic in Rio, three hours isn’t enough to do much, but it’s too much to sit around and do nothing. We decided that our time would be better spent in Angra. We walked around their small market of touristy crap and had a drink by the dock. Next we took the twenty-minute walk to the bus station and nearly died from the heat. We took a bus with wonderful air conditioning back to the Rio bus station, and got another bus from there to the airport.
I stayed with my parents to make sure they got checked in and didn’t encounter any surprises with canceled flights or airport taxes. I found out there was a steep $40 departure tax for all international flights, but it was already included in my parents’ tickets. When they were checked in, the flight was still a few hours away because of the aforementioned time gap, but I wanted to get back into the city before it got too late, so we said our goodbyes.
I think the visit worked out well. We got to see the waterfalls, a bit of the national park around Iguazu, many exotic tropical animals (albeit in captivity), the exiting city of Rio de Janeiro, and a beautiful tropical island with lots of beaches and forest walks to do. Not getting robbed or kidnapped was a plus, too.
When I left the airport, I took the bus back to Francisco’s apartment in Leblon. The bus had engine troubles from the start and broke down in a bad neighborhood. I waited on the bus for a new one to come, but the new bus took a different route than the first bus would’ve taken, resulting in a ride of two hours just to get to the other side of the same city. There’s a huge traffic problem in Rio, in case you didn’t already notice.