Welcome to São Paulo...
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
I cannot believe how lucky we have been with the weather here though. It rained quite a bit in Buenos Aires which sucked a little but everytime we have done outdoor activities with our tour group we have ended up having really nice weather. Like the day we went to the Argentine side of Iguazu Falls, it was a beautifully sunny day and now it´s raining cats and dogs again. A few people from our group went to the bird park in Foz do Iguaçu and got to touch a toucan which sounded like lots of fun... we are just suffering a little from a bit of burnout at the moment and really benefited from the sleep in.
The morning we left the Brazilian town of Foz do Iguaçu was gloomy and grey. We had a bit of rain and thunder to contend with. No problems with the flight except for a little turbulence just before we landed in São Paulo.
São Paulo is HUGE.... the population (about 23 million and growing) is bigger than the entire population of Australia and makes Adelaide seem like a tiny country town. We were just passing through which I think everyone was happy to do, so it was all very safe for us.
After a hold up with our luggage at the airport (all of the luggage came out first except for one of my bags which came out almost dead-last) we were off for our trip to Paraty in two buses. The highways are crowded and chaotic and drivers here don´t seem to have the same organic commonsense as the chaotic drivers in Buenos Aires or Phuket in Thailand. It may explain some of the thousands road deaths a year in Brazil. We even had a narrow miss with a smaller car when our driver was changing lanes... luckily we were only travelling at around 15km/h at the time.
Julio was trying to find us some place to eat lunch and we pulled over into almost every dodgy little truck stop we passed. It was crazy, and not one of us looked forward to eating at all. We did get to stop at a pretty good place though. It was still a truck stop / diner at the side of the road, but it was a pretty good churrascaria style buffet (more buffets......aaargh!!!) with decent meats and the salads were pretty cool too. We got to try our first manioc flour dish which was dry and pretty tasteless (we put this down to the fact that it was a truck stop, but we were proven wrong as each time we have this dish it is the same).... maybe a bit harsh, but I don´t think I would order this on purpose.
At least we can say that we ate at one of the most dangerous cities in the world and survived to tell the tale! =)
On the way again and it is starting to get dark. The drive down to the coastal town of Paraty is very windy and a bit scary in the dark. Especially as drivers here have the tendency to turn off their headlights completely when a car in front is near and use the hazard lights instead to show their presence on corners etc.
I had my iPod on my ears for pretty much the entire trip just to chill out a bit.
Posted byAndrew at 1:15 am