Our one week experience in Brazil summarised.
We started our 6-month South America trip in the south-western corner of Brazil, mainly because the flight connection to Sao Paulo Guaralhos airport worked best for us. As we’re not big city people we skipped Sao Paolo completely and instead split a week in late January/eary February across Curitiba, Ilha do Mel and Iguazu Falls, before crossing the border into Argentina for the next leg of our trip. We only saw a very small corner of Brazil but here are our impressions:
- Safety first: The biggest surprise was probably how safe we felt. It’s a shame Brazil has a not-so-safe reputation (seen too much Cidade dos Deus, Tropa do Elite type films) but for us everything felt super relaxed and friendly. Taxis had meters or were prepaid, taxi drivers didn’t try and overcharge us (in fact they often rounded down if they didn’t have change), everyone we came across greeted us with a ‘bom dia’ and a smile and we never felt threatened on the buses or at night.
- Sim, obrigado: given how little Portugese we knew (about 2 words), we didn’t know how that was going to go down. Surely the Brazilians could speak some English? Nao, mostly not. But it didn’t matter. Whenever we checked into a hotel we smiled, they smiled, they typed what they wanted to say into Google Translate, we smiled some more and then they smiled again and it all worked out just fine. The Brazilians we met didn’t seem frustrated that we hadn’t learnt any Portuguese. Sometimes when they tried to strike up a conversation and we quickly said ‘Sorry we don’t speak Portuguese’ they even apologised to us.
- Bussing about: We loved the Brazilian buses! We’re now a week into Argentina and Brazil is winning hands down. We travelled with Cometa, Graciosa and Catarinense, and they were all consistent and good. Here are the things we liked: easy machines (see picture) to buy tickets in the station (all in Portuguese but easy enough to navigate), tickets with clearly labelled platforms, the destination name clearly marked on the front of the bus, someone to put your bags into and out of the bus who doesn’t expect a tip, a nice little intro to the journey (albeit in Portuguese but we could manage to understand when the breaks would be), breaks (yes, we’re learning in Argentina that breaks are not a given…), really comfy seats, USB ports, clean and modern, smooth driving, no beeping, no loud movies or music playing the whole way, on time departures! And it wasn’t just the buses we liked, but the bus stations too. Really good facilities in terms of different places to eat and buy things. A couple of them felt like airports. And the (free) toilets were sparklingly clean, toilet paper provided even.
- Pillows: related to the bussing point, many Brazilians seem to be quite peculiar about where they rest their head. When queueing to get onto a long distance bus, it’s quite common to see about half the passengers lugging their own pillow about, or even a full bedding set.
- Beer: nil points here I’m afraid. When we arrived in our hotel the first night, we were very excited to celebrate our safe arrival with a nice cool local lager. But the choices were Stella, Heineken and Amstel. Further afield, we found a few more local options: Brahma, Skol, Antartica Original, … Suffice to say that they’re thirstquenching, but otherwise aren’t in the same league as what we’re used to back home.
- Lime-based everything: I may have flipped out at the lime juices, caipirinhas, lime served with fries, lime on everything…lime, lime, lime.
- Paperwork: We got used to standing about filling in various forms for 30 mins at each hotel we arrived at. They wanted to know pretty much everything about you, including your profession, place of birth…and then we watched while the receptionist often typed it all into a machine…we’re a long way from self check-in here…
- Hotel breakfasts: Definitely exceeded our expectations. Good coffee, ham, cheese, bread, various cakes, then cheesy bread puff things, eggs, some kind of sausage based hot thing and then loads of fresh fruit like pineapple, watermelon and papaya.
