Category: Brazil

Hello, dear readers. As promised, we’re checking in from (mostly harmless) Bogotá, Colombia. Due to an unexpected airline bankruptcy, our simple evening flight from Salvador turned into a two-day, four-flight odyssey clockwise around the continent, retracing much of the ground we’d previously covered and depositing us north of the equator fourteen hours later than expected. But that, my friends, is a tale for another day. This week I’m going to pass the mic to Lea for a special bonus entry on her adventures in Brazil. Read on to find out what she was doing before I caught up with her in Salvador:

Let’s start with a rhetorical question – Why don’t more estadounidenses (Spanish for ‘Muricans) visit Brazil? Granted, many of us don’t travel internationally the same way as Europeans, but that doesn’t stop the hordes from descending upon all-inclusive resorts in the Caribbean and Mexico . Is it that Brazil seems too exotic, too dangerous, too far away? Or that when we think of Brazil, the only picture we can conjure is sweltering jungle and piranha feeding frenzies in the Amazon? Whatever the reason, I’m very sorry it took me so long to visit, and I plan more trips to explore the many areas we missed. We barely scratched the surface of this exciting, beautiful country.

Jared and I are very different people, and I have a much higher tolerance for almost everything than him. In this case, he wanted to take a break and relax in the (tiny, boring) beach town of Porto Seguro, while I wanted more adventure and to see more places. This led to me hopping north to Ilha de Tinharé and the tourist paradise of Morro de São Paulo. Getting there was definitely a slog, but the island was worth every minute!

The trip to Morro de São Paulo is somewhat complicated. First, I took a 13-hour overnight bus from Porto Seguro to São Salvador de Bahía de Todos os Santos (or “Salvador,” because who has time for all that). Upon arriving at the main bus terminal, I took two city buses to the docks just south of the Mercado Modelo. I luckily arrived just in time to buy a ticket for the 9 a.m. ferry, but not so lucky was the weather. It was too bad for the quicker open-water ferry to operate, so instead I took a 40 minute ferry across the bay to the small town of Vera Cruz on Ilha de Itaparica, followed by a 1.5 hour bus ride to Ponta do Curral, then another 15 minute ferry to the dock in Morro.

At this point, even I was ready to break down and cry after almost 16 hours in transit on four buses and two ferries! I paid the island tax, hiked up the short but very steep hill from the dock, and finally made it to my hostel. By this point, it was almost 3 p.m. and I hadn’t eaten for over 24 hours, so I stuffed my things into a locker in my dorm room and headed out for the first restaurant I could find. After eating and taking a badly needed shower, it was time to hit the beach.

Morro has five beaches, conveniently named First Beach through Fifth Beach after the order in which they were developed. From where I was staying on top of the hill, First Beach was closest. It is a beautiful stretch of rocky coast with a nice, big sandy area, beautiful to look at and fairly uninhabited compared to Second Beach. That first day I simply sat on the sand until it started raining, then headed back to my hostel to relax and get some sleep.

I chose Morro for my destination because I had read there was great snorkeling in the tide pools at First, Third, and Fourth Beaches. After a good night’s sleep, I got up the next morning and hung around in the sand until low tide. My arrival on the island had fortuitously coincided with the full moon, so low tide was extra low and there were a ton of rocks exposed at First Beach. I put on my mask, grabbed my Olympus T-4 waterproof camera, and headed into the warm water to check out the fish. And fish there were! Many different kinds, of all sizes, plus crabs, snails, and eels. The water was very clear behind the natural breakwater, which also made the area very calm and easy to swim. Here are some of the things I saw that first day during approximately 2.5 hours of snorkeling:

I’d taken a chance and booked a bunk in a dorm room, as I often do when not traveling with Jared (who has much higher standards). However, upon arriving at the hostel, it was immediately clear that this was a pretty young crowd. The rooms were very small to accommodate four people, and the bathrooms were miniscule. I spent time my second day looking for another place with more comfortable accommodations. On my third day, since I was changing hostels and my room wouldn’t be ready until 2:00, I left my bags at the new place and headed down to Second Beach to check out the party.

Second Beach is by far the most developed in Morro, with tons of restaurants, bars, chairs for rent, and strolling vendors selling anything your sandy little soul could desire. I rented a beach chair with umbrella and enjoyed several hours of chair-side service. One thing in Brazil I absolutely adore are the big chunks of mozzarella cheese impaled on skewers, coated with oregano, and grilled over hot coals in a hand-held brazier. I’m normally not a huge fan of cheese, but something about Brazilian cheese sticks is simply too delicious to pass up. Luckily the cheese lady walked by my chair and I was able to buy a snack to go with my drink.

Later that afternoon, after chilling (literally) in my new hostel, I decided to visit the church and lighthouse at the tip of the island, since the views of sunset were supposed to be stunning. All I can say is: what a waste of dripping sweat and knee pain from climbing a super steep and rather long hill! The lighthouse was almost completely obscured by trees and power lines, and the view over the island was really nothing special. In addition, it was very crowded at the top because everyone else on the island was thinking about watching the sunset, and there was a zipline from the top of the cliff down to the water on First Beach.

After approximately 45 seconds and two pictures, I headed back down the hill. When I arrived near the bottom, it made me wish even more I had not expended the energy to climb up – the view from the bottom was over the boat dock, with trees and a much better angle on the sunset. Here’s a tip if you visit – save yourself the angst and just watch the sunset from there!

The fourth day on the island, I set out in a kayak to Ilha de Caitá. I had read about this beautiful little island right of the coast of Third Beach and the wonderful snorkeling in its tide pools at low tide, being able to walk on the island itself, and the lone palm tree that inhabited the island’s large sandy spit. Since I was kayaking for the first time in the ocean, I opted to take a smaller, lighter, one-person kayak because I was concerned I wouldn’t be able to handle the larger two-person kayak by myself. Mistake! That was the single worst kayak trip I’ve ever taken.

The lady renting them mentioned (in mixed Spanish and Portuguese) that the single-person kayaks were unstable, but having white-water kayaked before I wasn’t overly concerned. How bad could it be? The answer to that is it can be very bad. It was the most unstable boat I’ve ever been in, even though there were barely any waves because the tide was going out and the reef was blocking most of the flow. I didn’t fall out of the boat, but it was a very close thing a couple of times and I was completely soaked by the time I got out to the reef.

Once near the island I wanted to get out, tie off the boat, and walk around to let the tide finish going out before snorkeling. It seems that in the time since the articles I read were published, several things have changed. First, the palm tree is gone. I’m not sure what happened, but there was almost no vegetation on the island, and certainly nothing as distinct as a palm tree. Second, the person leading the kayaks wouldn’t let us get near the island itself. Maybe they closed it to protect it, or who knows what, but he led us to an area behind the reef instead. Third, there were no tide pools.

The tide was low so there were areas to snorkel, but being outside the shelter of the island meant that there was still a fair amount of current and waves coming over the reef, making this a much rougher snorkeling area than First Beach. In addition, this area is where the kayak company took people to do the “Bautismo” dives, so there were a number of divers walking on the bottom and kicking up silt and sand, making conditions close to the boat very cloudy. I finally swam away to a shallow area with clearer water. There were fish around the area, but not nearly the number or diversity of those at First Beach. After maybe 35 minutes of poking around, I gave up and paddled my horrible kayak back to shore.

Since tide was just past low, I walked back to First Beach, renting a snorkel along the way, to see if I could salvage the day. After all, it was sunny and warm and I still had a few hours of daylight to enjoy. And I’m glad I went back! Once again there were many different fish, crabs, and TWO eels at First Beach. I was able to spend over an hour snorkeling, including some areas I hadn’t been able to access previously because the tide had been too low. Overall, it was a very nice ending to what had been a rather frustrating 24 hours, and a nice way to wrap up my time on this very beautiful island.

The next morning I got up early for the return trip to Salvador. The weather was sunny and (very) hot, so I was able to take the fast ferry directly back in just 2.5 hours. Jared had arrived early that morning and was waiting at the dock to give me a kiss and help me with my bags. With a smile and fond memories, I said goodbye to Morro knowing that I will never again be content with a Caribbean beach.

Brazil is too damn big. That’s a problem when we’re trying to see as much of this continent as possible and can only allocate so much time to each country. Our average has been about six weeks. We cut that short in Peru, Bolivia, and Uruguay, and went a bit longer in Chile and Argentina. Theoretically we could have added a week or so to Brazil by stealing from Colombia, but a while ago we found cheap tickets from Salvador to Bogotá for April 5 so that’s locked us in a little on our schedule.

So basically, we’re going to have to come back. We were planning to come back anyway to see more of Bolivia, so now we’ll add Brazil to that future trip. We didn’t see any of the sights around Brasilia, we didn’t get to visit the beaches in Fortaleza, and we’ll have gone around the whole continent without once dipping our toes in the Amazon. Brazil is bigger than the Lower 48. You can’t see America in six weeks; it’s the same down here.

What we did this last week was squeeze in as much Brazil as we could in the little time remaining. In my last post I was moping around in Porto Seguro while Lea snorkeled in Morro de São Paulo. (More on that in a future article.) Since then we reunited in the port city of Salvador, saw the sights there, then bused seven hours inland to the small town of Lençóis and the giant wilderness of Chapada Diamantina.

Side note 1: Lençóis is pronounced “Len-Soys,” not “Len-Swah.” And the letter T is pronounced like a CH and the letter R is pronounced like an H. Because Portuguese.

Side note 2: In this part of Brazil, at least half of the restaurants are buffets where you pay by the kilo. In deference to that slice of Brazilian culture, and all the buffets we’ve eaten during the past week, here are some options on the menu:

Dish 1: Churches

When this journey began, Lea and I spent a lot of time visiting old colonial Catholic churches to admire the architecture and the artwork inside. Somewhere halfway down Chile the churches lost their shine, the architecture became more modern and boring, and Lea and I stopped bothering. That changed once we got to Córdoba and the old churches started trying again. The city of Salvador, with its dazzling cathedrals on the hilltop Pelourinho district, wins the prize.

The interiors of these churches are gilded beyond belief. Our hostel was almost next door to the Church of the Third Order of Our Lady of the Rosary of the Black People. (How’s that for a mouthful?) It was built in the 18^th century by black slaves who weren’t allowed to attend services elsewhere. The exterior, perched on a steep cobbled slope, is robin’s egg blue. The interior is an astounding tribute to the work of those who constructed it.

Further up the hill is the Catedral Basílica de Salvador, the principle cathedral of the old city, with enough gold and silver inside to blow the lens right off your camera. Even more impressive, in a different way, is the Igreja e Convento de São Francisco, hidden so well on the other side of the hill that you can easily miss it. The outside is nothing spectacular, but the inside of the convent and church are covered with painted tile. I don’t just mean individually painted tiles, I mean giant tile paintings rendered across every wall of every courtyard and many of the interior rooms. The images are mostly still intact and the sheer amount of work required to create these hidden masterpieces is humbling in the extreme.

Dish 2: Dance

By sheer luck, the hostel I booked in Salvador was one block away from the home of the Balé Folclórico da Bahia, with shows every night. Lea had the chance to see this dance troupe perform in Atlanta two years ago. Here we just walked up the street, bought tickets, and enjoyed the show.

The BFB is the only professional company of folk dancers in Brazil and has achieved international acclaim. Their repertoire includes dances of African slaves, local samba, and capoeira – the martial arts/dance style that originated in this region. No photos or videos of the program were allowed so once again I’ll have to swipe some of the Interwebs.

Dish 3: Cobbled Streets

If I go the whole rest of my life without walking or riding on another cobbled street, it will still be too soon. However, I’m sure Colombia will provide many more for me to enjoy. In Pelourinho and Lençóis there are nothing but cobbled streets. Steep cobbled streets. And when I say “cobbled” I mean “someone dumped a bunch of random rocks between the buildings and called it a day.” Every single step twists your ankle in a different direction, which is especially fun when lugging 30 kg of backpack up or down an incline. It’s even more fun when it’s been raining and the rocks are slick.

Dish 4: Rivers, Rocks, and Waterfalls

Apparently water runs downhill. You’d think we’d have learned this by now, having spent a week at Iguazú Falls, but nevertheless water features keep drawing us back. No matter how big or impressive one set of falls is, every one is beautiful in its own way. So we bused out to Chapada Diamantina and signed up for three tours of its river canyons, falls, and water-filled caves. The first fall that we visited, Mosquito Falls, was the most impressive, not in the least part because we could swim in the pool at its base and stand (as close as we dared) under the fall itself.

Later that day we hiked up the Rio Lençóis just outside of town to several areas used as natural swimming pools by the locals. While theoretically you could find all these spots on your own, there’s no way you can realistically do it without a guide. The trail vanishes for kilometers at a time and is not blazed in any way. Along the hike you also get to see giant conglomerates – formations of different size rocks that were the results of ancient river deposits and massive offshore debris flows.

By the third day of hiking, heavy overnight rains had flooded the rivers of the area. We climbed down to the Rio Mucugezinho, which was still in full flood. The restaurant at the base of the steps had been destroyed and the bridge we were meant to take to the Devil’s Pool, a popular swimming spot, had been washed away by the torrent.

Speaking of climbs…

Dish 5: Uneven Steps to Everywhere

I swear, many South Americans would fall on their faces if they ever tried walking on level ground. I’m not just talking about Brazilians, or even modern post-conquest South Americans. This tendency goes back as far as every ancient civilization whose ruins we’ve come across on our voyage. If South Americans of any era had built the city of Colorado Springs, for example, they would have built it on top of Pike’s Peak.

That’s all just to warn you that you cannot visit this part of Brazil without climbing up and down stairs, inclines, or boulders with every single step you take. Our first day’s hike finished with a climb to the top of a mountain overlooking the valley with the city of Lençóis off in the distance. Our guide was honest about it too – this wasn’t a hike, it was a climb. We scaled boulders, pulled ourselves up on tree branches, and skirted around stone ledges using both hands and feet to stay on the trail. Lea, the smart one, stayed behind at the swimming hole. I, the dumb one, forged ahead.

I don’t know the name of the mountain I climbed and I don’t actually care. By the time we reached the top, it was clear in my mind that mountain climbing – like lion taming – is not something I’ve ever aspired to, nor do I feel any real sense of accomplishment upon achieving it. Still, I did it and here’s the photo to prove it, so you better enjoy it.

On day three we scaled another mountain, this one not nearly as hard. For starters we were able to drive most of the way to the top, and the rest of the hike was marked by a mixture of stone steps (some natural, some put there) and real wooden stairs. I’ve groused in the past about tourist places without tourist infrastructure. That’s not the problem in Chapada Diamantina. The only problem here is that the infrastructure looks like it was designed and installed by the Flintstones.

The point of that last mountain was its fantastic views of the valley region west of Lençóis. In the original program it was to have been the final stop for the day to watch the sunset, but there was a strong possibility of rain in the afternoon so our group elected to tackle it first. (It never rained, BTW.)

I’m not afraid of heights – as long as there’s a solid railing or a good ten feet between me and the drop. I’m not afraid of falling off, because I’d never be so stupid to get close enough to the edge. What freaks me out about sheer mountain tops are the other people – the ones who go right up to the edge and pose for photographs where the slightest gust could turn them into a greasy splat. Just watching them makes every inch of me shriek like metal on glass. As much as I’ve wished ill on all these wannabe fashion models posing in front of natural wonders, I don’t want to witness the worst possible outcome of people with no sense of mortality.

Dish 6: Caves and Azure Pools

There was a photo that brought us to Chapada Diamantina in the first place. It was of a person floating in a crystal blue pool in a cave where the water was so clear you couldn’t even see it. Visiting these caves was a must – it was the “pillar” that brought us here. And thankfully, this pillar did not disappoint. Even though this wasn’t the best time of year in terms of lighting, the view of these pools was amazing.

The first was Poço Encantado. We donned helmets and headlamps, then descended many, many steps down into a cavern where the water-filled bottom was lit by a shaft of light from the other side. Then we turned our headlamps off and saw this:

After spending far too short a time admiring this wonder, we piled back into our tourist van and rode to Poço Azul. (This involved crossing a river by motorized canoe while our van was transported by – I kid you not – a hand-pulled ferry.) At Poço Azul we stripped down to our swimwear, showered off any sunscreen or bug repellent we’d applied, put on life preservers, and picked up snorkel gear.

That’s right, folks – we snorkeled. According to our guide, the water filters through Poço Azul quickly enough to maintain its clarity without being clouded by things like human body oil so long as the number of swimmers is limited and certain precautions are taken. The waters at Poço Encantado filter more slowly, and so swimming is forbidden.

Swimming Poço Azul was magical. There weren’t any fish to see, but the rock formations and especially the play of sunlight and shadow were breathtaking. The area available for swimming wasn’t very large. It was limited to where the sunlight could reach, but under the surface was a giant structure that, to my D&D-addled mind, looked like a submerged dragon skull. Which I’ve filed away as source material for a future story to write, thank you very much.

The last cavern we visited was dry, though there were signs that water had flowed freely across the floor, and not in the too distant past. It was a long climb in and a long climb out, but the cavern itself was wide and beautiful. What I particularly enjoyed was that unlike other caves for tourists, this one wasn’t pre-lit. Everyone in our group carried a flashlight, which gave the cave a different feel than any I’d visited before. Lea also pointed out that not having permanent lighting prevented moss and lichen from growing on the formations that were normally left in the dark.

Dish 7: The Perfect Flan

Brazil being as large as it is, there are noticeable regional differences in cuisine, even to fast-traveling Americans like ourselves. In the South there was a great variety in “lanches” – afternoon snacks – from burgers with corn and peas to loaded fries and vegetable risotto. Here in the North, we’re in the land of meat buffets and lukewarm empanadas. However, what the North does have going for it is the best flan anywhere, that even beats Mexico. Hell, I don’t even like flan but I love it here.

Lea mentioned to Radi, our hostess in Lençóis, that flan was her favorite desert. When we came home from our excursion, Radi had made us a giant plate of flan all for ourselves – it was dinner and breakfast the next morning. Lea has now committed herself to tracking down a flan recipe specifically from the state of Bahia, Brazil. I see lots of flan in the future once we come home, and I don’t mind.

Speaking of Coming Home:

We have a date! Our plane will land in Fort Lauderdale Airport, which has the best airport pizza in the world (Desano, on Concourse G), on Friday, May 17. Our transfer to Atlanta will land just around midnight. We’ve already lined up an apartment (knock on wood) and will burn some Holiday Inn points and make ourselves ill at our favorite Atlanta restaurants while we get our new flat ready.

Between here and there, though, is Colombia. Onward!

P.S. Our Route Through Brazil

Here it is. You can see how much of the country we did not cover and will have to come back for.

P.P.S. My Film Recommendation for Brazil

City of God (2002, directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund)

Normally I’ve recommended a book for each country we’ve visited, but I just finished the original novel City of God by Paolo Lins and the only point in its favor is that the movie wouldn’t have existed without it. Looking at other reviews online, this was a “love it or hate it” novel and I fall into the “hate it” camp. The book chronicles three decades of gang life and warfare in Rio de Janeiro’s most dangerous slum. The film manages to find a coherent narrative in the middle of all the violence; the book does not. Instead of a novel, it reads more like the plot synopsis of a twenty-year soap opera where every single character is shallow and despicable. Even though it was based on the author’s personal experiences growing up in Cidade de Deus, the book rambles and repeats itself while failing to find the essential humanity in its characters. The movie fixed those problems. Watch it. You can read my full review of the book here on Goodreads.

For my next check in, we’ll be north of the equator for the first time since Mitad del Mundo in Ecuador. Be excited!

Hold on to your britches. This has been a busy week of sightseeing so this post is going to be a barrage of “What We Did On Summer Vacation” bullets with little in the way of philosophical musings on the long-term travel life – except to say that we set our record for the sheer number of long-distance bus trips in a single week. The only close tie was our last week in Chile with all of its long-distance excursions. This week we saw the inside of the Belo Horizonte bus terminal more times than was probably healthy.

Email readers, this post is chock full of videos so click on over to TheEscapeHatch.net or miss out.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. When I left you hanging last week, we were leaving Foz do Iguaçu for Rio de Janeiro by air, having missed out on the local Carnaval and expecting to find nothing in Rio but leftover streamers, glitter, and discarded T-shirts littering the sidewalks in the wake of the festivities.

We were wrong. We landed in Rio and, on the way to our guest house, discovered that most of the entrances to the metro line were closed and those that weren’t were cordoned with traffic directed by uniformed security. Why? Because while Mardi Gras/Carnaval/Whatever You Call It ends on Fat Tuesday everywhere else in the world, in Rio de Janeiro it continues all the way through the following weekend.

The bad news: it took us a good two hours, at least, to get to our room in the south of town. The good news? We went to Carnaval! IN RIO!! Beat that, vicarious travel blog readers!

Sunday morning, bright and early, we got ourselves downtown to the path of the main “Monobloco” parade and picked out a patch of sidewalk to watch from. The crowd hadn’t become a mob yet, but it was thick enough for us not to get lost finding our way from the Metro stop to the parade route.

Now Lea and I have both been to Mardi Gras, and being a Louisiana native I had certain expectations of what a Carnaval celebration should entail: mainly bands and floats promenading down a street whose sidewalks would be a crush of bystanders and onlookers jostling for the best view. My expectations were dashed last week in Foz, and they tripped me up again in Rio – this time in a different way.

I mentioned last week that Carnaval in Brazil seems to center around the “Block Party.” In that vein, a parade in Rio is quite different from its New Orleans counterpart. A Rio parade is a block party that moves.

There was still the crush of people ready to party all day, don’t get me wrong, but  there was only one band and one “float” – a giant party wagon with singers and dancers on top, pulled very slowly by a semi. Once the parade begins, the band/float procession inches its way along the route, stopping every half block for fifteen or twenty minutes before crawling onward. The crowd, instead of idly viewing from the sidelines, moves with it. In New Orleans, you watch the parade. In Rio, you are the parade.

Lea and I stood our ground in the mob-shadow created by a stationary beer vendor and let the parade wash over and around us. Once it passed, and once we’d enjoyed enough thumpy Latin pop for the day, we made our way out against the tide of new revelers, beer coolers in hand, who were only then showing up to join the party. I can only imagine that not long after we left, the entire affair must have ground to a standstill – and everyone was probably overjoyed. You can’t party all day if you don’t start in the morning!

That evening we braved Rio’s horrific bus system to see at least one of the iconic landmarks of the city. The most famous is the giant statue of Christ the Redeemer (which we couldn’t stop referring to as “Buddy Christ”) but to get there seemed long, arduous, and expensive. Instead we opted to ride the teleférico to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain, a giant block of granite that overlooks Guanabara Bay with views of the entire city. The nerd in me couldn’t help but point out that it was on top of this very cable car that James Bond fought the assassin Jaws in the (otherwise terrible) film Moonraker.

Next came Beach Day. But how to choose which beach? Rio is known for two: Copacabana and Ipanema. By sheer luck, I managed to rent us a room in easy walking distance from both. We checked out Copacabana first, then rode the bus to Ipanema and found that it was less crowded but extremely dirty. We went back to Copacabana and, as per our beach routine, rented an umbrella and chairs from which to watch the surf.

The surf, let me tell you, was fierce. Though we were some distance from the water and on top of a plateau of sand, rogue waves would wash right under us, dragging away our shoes and water bottles if we weren’t quick enough to grab them.

All told, we spent three nights in Rio, the shortest length of time we’ve spent in any South American city of comparable size. In truth we could have spent a week and not seen everything, but Brazil is just too big and there are other things we want to see. On our last day in town we hit museums – the Museum of Tomorrow, the Museum of Art of Rio, and the Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading which houses the largest collection of works in Portuguese outside of Portugal itself. You’re allowed to take pictures, but you can’t touch anything.

Thus began our paddle-ball travel route north to the mining city of Belo Horizonte and its surrounding environs. We took the night bus to Belo Horizonte, arrived around 5:30 a.m., and immediately bought tickets for the town of Brumadinho several hours to the west. (We can’t pronounce “Brumadinho” without concentrating, so we keep calling it Broom-Hilda.) Brumadinho, by the way, was the site of the recent dam collapse that killed hundreds and made international headlines.

Brumadinho is also where you will find Inhotim, an outdoor garden and modern art “theme park” set far back in the Brazilian wilderness. You could spend days wandering its miles of wooded trails to widely separated art installations and galleries. We stayed for several hours before the walking and the weather got the best of us.

The coolest installation is the one farthest from the park entrance. If you walk about two kilometers – all uphill – to the back of the park there is a hill in which the artist Doug Aitken drilled a 200 meter shaft into the earth and placed microphones along its walls. In a room above the shaft, the vibrations picked up by those microphones are amplified into the chamber, allowing you to sit and listen to the sounds of the earth. There were booms and long, sustained notes which Lea thinks might be the P- and S-waves of distant earthquakes. We don’t know for sure, but it’s as awesome a hypothesis as any.

The next day we caught the early bus back to Belo Horizonte and grabbed the noon bus from there to the town of Santa Barbara. From Santa Barbara we took a taxi for another 20km to stay two nights at the Santuário do Caraça, a Catholic seminary and mission set in the midst of an 11,000 hectare nature reserve. There are endless miles of trails you can hike if that’s your thing but the main attraction at the Sanctuary is the chance to see the rare Maned Wolf.

The Maned Wolf is technically not a wolf. It’s South America’s largest canid and resembles a giant red fox the size of a pony with a crest like a hyena, though it’s not related to any of those (certainly not the pony). The reason you can see maned wolves at the Sanctuary is because the monks have been feeding them for decades. It began when they noticed the animals rooting through the monastery’s leftovers and decided to make it easier on them. A tray of meat cuttings is set  out in front of the steps to the chapel every night at 7:00 and guests are allowed to sit, wait, and watch. The rules are to not approach the wolves and to not take photos until after the wolves feel comfortable enough to approach the food and grab a few bites.

There’s always the chance that the wolves won’t show, but on our first night they appeared right away and returned to the buffet about every 45 minutes. On the second night we weren’t so lucky – it had been a rainy day and thunderstorms were moving in during the evening. Apparently the wolves weren’t as interested in free food as they were in staying dry.

As brief as each appearance of the wolves was, it was always amazing. I’m used to being around domesticated animals and even small wild animals, but to have a wolf walk right beside you, look inscrutably at you while it dines, then move along without a care in the world – the experience carried a sense of intimacy with the Wild that I didn’t even feel on safari in Africa back in 2012.

Our stay ended with the taxi-bus combo back to Belo Horizonte. Originally the plan was to immediately grab another bus for Ouro Preto, but at this point we’ve regained some flexibility in our schedule and decided to stay put. After two nights in the far outback without even hot water for a shower, we (for the second time on this whole voyage) spent the night at a Holiday Inn.

Our time in Belo Horizonte was brief, as we’d booked a night bus to the coast for the very next evening. Nevertheless, the city surprised us. What we’d seen near the bus terminal wasn’t inspiring, but after moving to another part of town we discovered an entirely different city, with beautiful parks, Chinese buffets, a Mercado Central where we sampled outstanding liver and onions (a dish we both normally hate) and a mineralogy museum with a mind-blowing collection of, well, minerals.

One more weary night ride with a driver who handled his bus like a dirt bike has brought us to the seaside town of Vitoria, where we’ll begin to crawl north along the Atlantic coast. More on that next week, but for now I’ll leave you with a musical send-off:

I haven’t been completely honest with you. If you’ve read this blog, you may have come away with the impression that long term travel has its ups and downs, but in the long run – despite the difficulties – it’s very much worth it. Hopefully at some point in the future I’ll be able to look back and agree with that sentiment, but I haven’t written about the full truth of the situation. The truth I’ve left out is the part where I’ve been suffering chronic, intense, agonizing pain for the past several months.

It began in Bolivia, where I put it down to the effects of high altitude. It continued off and on through Chile, where I assumed the source of the pain was related to a known medical issue that I’ve already dealt with for several years. That assumption was incorrect.

The pain escalated throughout Argentina and became pretty much unbearable by the time we reached Mendoza. (“Unbearable” is a funny word, because when you’re stuck in the wilderness of the Argentinian outback you’ve got no choice but to bear it.) Since we had left behind the South American equivalent of the Gobi Desert and returned to civilization, I called our expat health insurance and arranged an appointment with a doctor in Córdoba.

I’m being deliberately coy about what my medical problem is because 1) I don’t want to say and 2) you don’t want to know. Suffice it to say that the doctor in Córdoba diagnosed the problem, prescribed medication, and suggested a course of self-treatment. That was five weeks ago. Treated, this problem should clear itself up in four-to-six weeks, yet while the pain has lessened (on most days) it’s still there. When it flares up it hurts worse than just about anything I’ve ever experienced, and that includes broken bones, an incarcerated hernia, and gout.

The result, dear readers, is that a lot of the awesome sights and experiences I’ve shared on this blog I’ve experience through a fog of pain. On some days, such as when we sat on the beach in Uruguay, I was merely squirming in discomfort. On others, such as when we visited a bird sanctuary I’ll get to below, I felt like I would rather pass out. I could have left the park but, as I told myself, the pain would follow me wherever I went, so why not suffer through it while looking at beautiful birds?

Now that I’ve bummed you out, on with the story!

Hell:

Last week I left you hanging as we were about to depart Porto Alegre for Florianópolis. That was after we’d driven our rental back to Porto Alegre, three hours in the wrong direction, instead of simply heading north. After dropping off our car, we went to the bus terminal and waited, waited, waited in sweltering, sticky heat. It had rained all day but that hadn’t dropped the temperature – especially not in Porto Alegre’s extremely busy terminal where the heat from all those buses washed through the station like steam from Lucifer’s hot tub.

Our bus didn’t leave until 11:00 p.m. The bus itself was air conditioned, but only when it was running. This particular bus stopped at every small town and off-the-main-road terminal along the route, and the driver kept turning the bus off and on again – I guess to save gas? At one point, perhaps at two in the morning, they shut the bus off for half an hour while the staff went to have dinner, turning the inside into a sauna. Yes, everyone else could get out and snack at 2:00 a.m. as well, but the whole point of taking the night bus is to sleep.

We arrived in Florianópolis at 6:00 in the morning. We weren’t staying long. Florianópolis is a large-ish city on an island just off the Brazilian coast, but it’s on the side that faces the mainland across a narrow channel. The apartment we’d rented was on the Atlantic side of the island, in the Ingleses Sul neighborhood an hour away by local bus. We wouldn’t be able to check in until 10:00, so we hung out in the station with our post-bus-ride headaches and, as long as we were there, bought really expensive first-class seats to our next destination. The trek to Foz do Iguaçu was going to be a fifteen-hour ordeal and we would be traveling on a holiday weekend, so we wanted to make sure we had seats we could tolerate.

The only break we could catch.

As in Porto Alegre, it was raining in Florianópolis. The bus to Ingleses Sul only ran once an hour, so we hiked several blocks through the drizzle and waited at the bus stop under a blessedly sheltering overhang. The bus arrived and should have dropped us off at about the right time for our check in, but that morning no one but us and two other people were taking that route. The bus blew by nearly every stop and dropped us off in Ingleses Sul an hour before our apartment would be ready.

And it was still raining.

Though near the beach, we’d washed up in a mostly residential area with not a single open café where we could wait. We ended up sheltering under a leaky tin awning in front of a closed convenience store eating pastries Lea bought at the grocery just down the street. The rain finally eased up, check-in time arrived, and we dragged our tired bodies and four backpacks down the road to our apartment.

Heaven:

We really got lucky with this apartment. It had a real kitchen with a full-size stove and refrigerator. It was better, I dare say, than the one we had in Santiago, and a million times better than any we’d had in Argentina. It had air conditioning that worked. It had a shower that worked. It had a couch. It had a shady courtyard. Unlike every other option in our price range, it was only two blocks from the beach. And get this – the owners had beach chairs and umbrellas you could borrow for free.

Ingleses Sul isn’t an exciting place, but let me tell you – they know how to beach. The beach there is long but extremely narrow. Wherever you plant yourself, you can be sure that sooner or later a wave is going to wash under you. But that’s okay. We stayed for four nights, and every day the forecast was the same – not too hot, not too cold, mostly cloudy with a little bit of sun and a chance of rain in the afternoon. On Tuesday and Thursday the beach was crowded. On Wednesday it was surprisingly empty. (Higher chance of rain, sure, or maybe Wednesday is the designated day off for all the vendors?)

Oh yeah, beach vendors – Here’s a thing we didn’t see in Uruguay and that I’d been craving since Ecuador: guys going up and down the beach offering cold adult beverages. Caipirinhas. Caipiroskas. Piña coladas. Not to mention the guys selling fire-grilled cheese on a stick or chorizo in a bun with slaw. That’s the way to do it, señor. That’s the way to do it. On Tuesday I walked nearly all the way up and down the beach several feet out into the surf. On the other days we just sat where the alley from our apartment let out and waited for tasty treats to come by. When the rains came in the afternoon, we moseyed back to our apartment and napped.

Boring? Perhaps, but it was everything I’d been wanting.

Purgatory:

The day it finally got hot in Florianópolis was the day we had to leave our cool apartment and hang out in another bus station. We dropped off our luggage and went in search of a museum that wasn’t there (no one had bothered to tell TripAdvisor). The city was gearing up for Carnival, downtown was very crowded, the wind had died almost completely, and the temperature spiked over 90. We ate at a lovely poke-bowl restaurant and slugged back to the bus station sauna.

Our bus company had a V.I.P. lounge that we’d hoped would be cooler than the rest of the terminal, but so many bodies were packed in there that it felt like it was over 100. So instead, we baked in the main waiting hall and savored some quickly-melting ice cream. We didn’t have as long to wait since our bus left at 6:00 p.m. When we got on board we found out – to our amazement – that the expensive seats we’d paid for didn’t simply give us more arm and leg room, but were designed to lay all the way down and become actual beds. This, let me tell you, was wonderful beyond belief, since it let us actually sleep and helped keep my pain under control despite the fact that the road from Florianópolis to Foz was insanely bumpy.

Our room in Foz do Iguaçu was one that we’d booked well ahead of time. Iguaçu Falls is one of the sights we knew we had to see on this trip, but it took us a while to decide if we would approach it from Brazil or Argentina. We decided on Brazil (though we’ll visit the Argentinian side too) but we’d also needed to make reservations well in advance for Carnival. It was my bright idea to combine the two, which let us avoid spending Carnival in the crush of Río or another big city. However, it also landed us at one of Brazil’s major tourist attractions on one of the biggest holiday weekends of the year.

The hostel we found was ideally situated just outside of the central area of the city of Foz do Iguaçu on the road that leads directly to the park, so all we had to do was walk to the corner and hop on a bus. Usually after a night trip we’re too ragged out to do anything but wander around like zombies, but since we were both able to sleep for once we decided to go ahead and start seeing the sights. We’d save the Falls for the next day, but we started with a visit to the Parque das Aves (Bird Park) just outside the entrance to Iguaçu Falls park itself.

The Parque das Aves is a bird rescue and conservation reserve. The birds are all in aviaries so that some of them you can only view through mesh screens. Several of the aviaries, however, you can walk through and get very close to the birds themselves. The birds are amazing, from many species I’d never seen before, and many of whom are endangered (or even extinct) in the wild. I wish I could have enjoyed it more but as I said earlier, the chronic pain I’ve been feeling kicked into full blast during our visit and it felt like I was seeing all these amazing creatures from inside a scorching hot torture box.

Seeing Heaven from Hell:

On Sunday it was time to do what we came for: see the falls. Iguaçu Falls, on the Brazil/Argentinian border, are actually a confluence of many cascades that make up the largest waterfall system in the world. You can view them from either country and there are different activities to do on each side. Some you can do and stay dry. Some will get you soaked.

On Day One we opted to get soaked. We brought shorts, water shoes, Lea’s waterproof camera, and a small dry bag. We’d read that there was a lower trail where you could view the falls but get wet doing so, and that there was an into-the-falls boat ride you could do for an extra fee.

We also decided to sleep in and go to the falls in the afternoon. Big mistake.

We arrived and bought our tickets at an electronic kiosk rather than wait in the line for the ticket counters. There was a deep discount for buying two days at once, though it locked us in to coming right back on the following day and not skipping one in between. Then we got in line to get into the park.

Ladies and gents, that line was an hour and a half long. There were three parts: a loop-de-loop through the bus drop-off area, an outside rat maze, and indoor rat maze. Halfway through the indoor maze they scan your ticket, and at the end of all this you get on a bus to take you to the drop-off point of your choice in the park itself. Entry to the park closes at 5:00, and the last bus to bring people out runs at 6:30. We left our hostel at 2:00, and it was 4:30 before we even got into the park. We decided to skip any trails and go right to the boat ride.

The boat ride was disappointing. First, the wayfinding at the park is awful in general, but particularly at the boat launch. First you ride a very slow open-air wagon down to the upper platform where you can rent a locker to store anything you don’t want drenched, then you take a short funicular down to the river where you get in line for your boat. At every point along the way you have to ask someone “where do I go next” because there is absolutely no signage to direct you and there is no logical flow to the human traffic.

The boat ride takes you up the rapids towards the falls, which is fun, but doesn’t get nearly as close to the big falls as we’d hoped. You can glimpse them in the distance, but the boats never venture farther than several of the lower, smaller falls, which they slowly dunk you under. The ride does have some nice views, but for several key minutes of the journey there’s a member of the boat crew in a blue rainsuit standing right in front of you taking pictures with a GoPro to sell to you later. The whole thing is a disorganized, overpriced theme park ride. Leaving the boat launch at the end went so slowly that we barely made it out of the park before they shut down and locked up behind us.

On Monday we got up early and hopped on the bus to get there when the park opened. This involved arguing with the bus driver, who didn’t want to drive his route all the way to the end and instead wanted to dump his passengers at the Bird Park and make them walk. Thankfully we weren’t the only ones to argue about this and when we got to the park entrance there was hardly a line at all.

The line, or rather the mosh pit, would be at the falls themselves.

Beyond the stop for the boat cruise, there is a bus stop at the beginning of the hiking trail. The next one is the stop for the restaurant, shopping area, and main viewing platform. What the park wants you to do is get off at the trail, walk to the falls from that direction, and then spend your money at the gift shop and buffet. We chose to ride all the way to the end, start from the viewing platform, and work our way backward. I’m not sure if that made things better or worse, but we would have been fighting the swarming mass of humanity either direction.

The falls themselves are magnificent. They’re amazing. They go on forever, it seems. And while viewing them it feels like being crushed against the stage in the front rows at a Metallica concert. Given that there were this many people there in the morning when the entrance line was low, I can’t imagine what it must have been like later in the day. Busload after busload poured into the trails, with more people taking selfies instead of enjoying the beauty around them than even at Machu Picchu.

We never did find a trail that would soak you with anything more than a fine mist (unlike visiting Victoria Falls, which felt like walking through a carwash). We did find that people were rude in the extreme and we had to stand our ground many times to avoid being shoved off the narrow path.

The path was also crawling with coati, cute little members of the raccoon family. We saw one of these fellows from a distance way back in Guatemala, but the coati at Iguaçu have identified humans as a food source (despite all the signs advising not to feed them) and will come right up to you. If you have a bag, they will at the very least sniff it, if not outright steal it. I think my favorite moment was watching one lady get her purse invaded by a clever coati while she was posing for a picture.

Four days of peace, three days of excitement, two long bus rides. We’re about to take a dip back into Argentina and experience the falls again, despite impending rain in the forecast. On a lighter note, the pain I’ve been bitching about has been getting better, and aside from that one horrible flare-up at the bird park has been steadily improving.

But wait, you say, wasn’t this also Carnival weekend? Hopefully I’ll have more to report on that. Stay tuned, dear readers. Stay tuned.

So here’s a thing I need to get off my chest: Back in grad school I heard a joke: “If someone speaks two languages, they’re bilingual. If someone speaks three languages, they’re trilingual. If someone speaks one language, they’re American.” The implication being, of course, that Americans are isolationist country bumpkins who never get out in the world or make the effort to converse with other cultures.

I’ve come to two conclusions about this attitude toward my countrymen. First, since I was exposed to it in academia, it probably filtered down from snotty Europeans who were schooled in five different languages before puberty or the invention of Google Translate. Second, the definition of “American” needs to be expanded to include everyone living in the western hemisphere.

All the way counter-clockwise from Ecuador to Uruguay, the vast majority of the people we interacted with only spoke Spanish and that was cool. We were in their country, so we learned and adjusted. When we crossed into Brazil this week, we had no expectation that suddenly we’d be surrounded by English speakers (although the few Brazilians we met earlier on our travels spoke English very well). What we did think, though, was that since Brazil shares a continent with so many Spanish-speaking countries, Spanish would not be uncommon and that it could serve us as a decent “intermediary” language to communicate.

Boy. Were. We. Wrong.

So far Brazil seems to be just as monolingual a society as the United States, and more so than other Latin American countries we’ve visited. Granted, we haven’t yet been to Rio or Foz do Iguaçu or any other big tourist hub. As in Peru we snuck in through the back door, coming up the coast to Porto Alegre – a harbor city that, while the largest in the South, isn’t anything like a tourist destination.

But come on. First, it’s an international port so presumably you’ve got sailors from all over the world arriving at the docks. Second, Porto Alegre is the gateway from Brazil to Uruguay and Argentina, so you’d think someone would speak Spanish. But nope. Everywhere we went – restaurants, grocery stores, laundries, what have you – we would tell people “No Portuguese. Inglés o español?” and they would look at us dumbfounded, as if learning for the first time that other languages exist. Then they would carry right along in Portuguese, often talking louder just like a stereotypical tourist from the United States.

Ah well. We didn’t come to Porto Alegre to see the sights – good thing too, since there aren’t many – but just as a stopover between hellacious bus rides and to give ourselves time to adapt to a new country. We expected a bigger cultural shift coming into Brazil than when crossing other borders, especially with our new linguistic handicap, and wanted a few days to adjust without adding on other travel pressures.

Here are a few things we’ve learned.

Food and lodging in Brazil are cheap, at least relative to the last three countries we’ve visited. Transportation and laundry, however, are not. My god, the laundry. We have four outfits each that we wear two days in a row, so every time we do laundry we’re washing six outfits and a week’s worth of socks and undies. Everywhere else it’s cost us $10 – $15 USD to get everything washed. In Porto Alegre, it cost over $40! We hoped was a fluke, but in Florianopolis (skipping ahead to next week’s article) the same amount of laundry cost $50. (!!!)

Who knew that of all the expenses on this trip, it was going to be the laundry that was going to force us to cut back on other things. Hopefully there are self-serve laundromats in this country (there haven’t been elsewhere) because we’re not really willing to spend hours and hours doing laundry in the bathroom sink and stringing it across a tiny room to dry.

Back to the food: Thank the Gods that Brazilians eat dinner earlier than Argentinians. This whole business of restaurants not opening until 8:30 at night was driving me batty. In Brazil, restaurants open for dinner between 6:00 and 7:00, but even better – there are lancherias that are open all afternoon.

We kept seeing the word “lanche” in restaurant descriptions and at first thought it was some specific Brazilian dish. But no, “lanche” simply means “snack” and in Brazil “snack” usually means “hamburger.” (Side note: Brazilian burgers are huge, pressed somewhat like oversize paninis, and come with lettuce, tomato, corn, and peas. Lea doesn’t like the corn and peas, but I have to say I do.) Our favorite lancheria, though, was “Mr. Batata.”

Right down the block from our Porto Alegre apartment, Mr. Batata serves french fries in containers shaped like a giant waffle cones and your choice of up to twenty or so different toppings. And a plastic fork, ‘cause you’re going to need it. The ability to find a meal whenever we want and not having to wait until the dead of night to eat if we don’t have a kitchen is such a relief. Thank you, Brazil. Thank you.

So far, air conditioning units in Brazil work far better than those in Argentina and Uruguay. (The west coast didn’t have them at all, so no point of comparison.) Our hosts in Porto Alegre also had Netflix, so I’m sorry to say we eschewed “immersing ourselves in a new culture” for a couple afternoons of watching movies in English. When we did go out for things besides laundry and french fries, we spent some time walking in the shade in the city’s botanical garden, took a boat tour of the river/lake/bay where Porto Alegre sits, and found Porto Alegre’s small museum of contemporary art.

Our time in Porto Alegre at an end, we headed north to start exploring Brazil’s natural wonders. (Because at this point we’re sick of colonial architecture and centuries-old churches and I’m honestly looking forward to some forest.) Our first target was Cânion Itaimbezinho in the Aparados da Serra National Park, which was recommended to us by an online friend from São Paulo. You get to the park from the tiny town of Cambará do Sul, but apparently there is only one bus into and out of town each day. Maybe.

Having learned our lesson in Argentina, we rented a car (a mini-SUV because of possible bad road conditions in the park) and made our own way. The weather reports weren’t good, but with fingers crossed we got to Cambará, stayed the night, and went to the park the next morning. The rain gods smiled and the weather held off, though the wind was pretty fierce and we could watch the clouds rolling in. We hiked two trails at the top of the canyon, getting great views of the valley and its amazing waterfalls.

Logistically it would have made sense for us to drive our rental north to our next port of call, but just like in the States car companies hate when you do that and charge quadruple for one-way trips. So after enjoying the park and a delicious lunch in Cambará, we drove three hours south in the rain back to Porto Alegre to catch the night bus north to Florianapólis, the first stop on our Brazilian Beach Tour. And since we’re near the beach…

Welcome to The Escape Hatch In Brazil Drinking Game^©!

How to play: Have your adult beverage of choice near at hand. If possible it should be a caipirinha, the national drink of Brazil. Or, if not, a shot glass and a bottle of vodka or rum will do.

Now, read back through the article and take a drink every time you see an alphabetic character with some kind of silly non-English šymbõl âttáçhėd. If it’s only an áccent, just take a sip. If it’s anything else, you have to do a shöt. If I do the same while I write, it should make these reports from the eastern hump of South America more exciting. It may also improve my Portuguese.

Tchau!