Brazil: The Best for Last, Perhaps

Florianopolis:

On March 25th, I say bye to Stephen, who's catching a flight back to the States from Buenos Aires the following day, and I also bid farewell to Jayne, as I am leaving Valizas and making my way to Brazil. It's on the bus to Chuy, the border town in Uruguay, where the reality of the situation sets in: I am on my own. No Stephen. No Schuster, no Jayne. No Spanish, soon enough. It's just me and the familiarities of backpacking. It's an estuary where the tides of terror meet a river of liberation, and I'm not sure whether I'll sink or swim.

In Chuy, I have about five hours to kill until my bus leaves for Porto Alegre, Brazil, the majority of which are spent at an internet cafe. Strangely enough, the point-of-departure for the bus is at the customs office on the highway, and I end up waiting there for two hours for the bus that's an hour and a half late. The only people around are a few customs officials, one of whom looks after me by inviting me inside for a glass of Pepsi and reassuring me, when I'm sure that the bus is not coming, that the bus will arrive. He and I shoot the breeze for a while, and finally, like he said, the bus arrives.

When we arrive in Porto Alegre in the morning, I realize, now that it's light out, that the three Swedish soccer players from the hostel in La Paloma - Hannah, Lina and Therese - are in the seats right behind me. They, too, are heading to Florianopolis, and so the four of us catch another eight-hour bus together and, once in Florianopolis, we share a cab to the Barra da Lagoa neighborhood on the other side of the island of Santa Catarina.

The girls have a reservation at a hostel in Lagoa, and, as we find out once we arrive at the hostel, they have no more space for yours truly. Down on my luck, I leave the hostel to go to a nearby bed and breakfast, but I am approached just outside by a guy who has an apartment for rent. Taking my normal approach to solicitors like this, I tell him no thank you and that I already have a place to stay. My ears perk, however, when he says that the apartment is only 25 reais a night (that's roughly twelve dollars and ten reais cheaper than the hostel). He also tells me that it's just up the hill from where we're standing and that I can come take a look and then decide. I make a snap judgment and follow him up the to apartment, slightly reassured by the fact that the neighborhood is safe and that what's-his-face is saying hi to neighbors as we pass.

The available apartment, as it turns out, is the one that costs 30 reais a night (still cheaper than the hostel), but I would have two bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom all to myself. It's clean and fully equipped with all new fixings; I can knock on the door of what's-his-face and his mother if there's anything I need. Yes, I'll take it! I tell the Swedes about the apartment, and they move in with me on my third and final night there. They would have moved in earlier, but they had already committed to two nights at the hostel.

The apartment is not the only great thing about my time in Florianopolis, the fishing village with a big surf scene. Alongside the lagoon, old men play dominoes and little kids play soccer, and surfers and sun bathers spend hours at the beach. I often alternate between reading on the soft sand and body surfing in the emerald green water, and I climb around on the boulders that line the shore, one of which is perfect for diving into the water.

I spend a fair amount of time with the Swedes but am not too excited about their company since they speak in Swedish most of the time. Finally, though, on my last night in town, the night we share the apartment, they start to speak more in English and apologize for using any Swedish. We have wine and beer and listen to music at the apartment, and the four of us go out for a big seafood dinner. Our conversations are more meaningful than previous ones, and I find out that Therese is a videographer for the Swedish version of "Idol," that she and Hannah travelled with and fell for a couple of Israeli guys early on in their trip, and that Lina is a music fiend. The four of us horse around on a playground after dinner, and they are impressed by my ability to fling myself far off the swingset. Back at the apartment, I share a bed with Lina, who snores loudly, and I can't help but wonder, despite the bonding and good fun, how they chose who got to share the bed with the American.


São Paulo:

It takes about two hours just to get to the main bus terminal in Florianopolis because of bad traffic, and I´m stuck with a guy named Peter or Petr or Pedre, a creepy older man who´s a beach vendor, one of the guys who walks around trying to sell sunglasses. He won´t stop talking to me and asking me questions, and every time he asks me something, like ¨Did you know you can buy a English/Portuguese dictionary?¨(duh), he says my name and rests his hand on my forearm. When we finally part ways, he tells me that he will always remember this date as the day he met Sarah, and he suggests that we exchange email addresses. This is when the Language Barrier Card comes in handy. ¨Computador? Por qué? No entiendo.¨

An overnight bus gets me to São Paulo in the morning, and my first impression of the city is that there are a lot of people (it´s the fourth largest city in the world, in fact), many of whom are homeless, and that there are a lot of autobody shops. I am also struck by the fact that in the metro station, where trains run every minute or two to accomodate the masses of people, two locals ask me questions in Portuguese, as if I, with my big backpack and all, would have a better clue than they would. I guess I do a pretty good job of not standing out as a gringa because this is the first of many instances of Brazilians talking to me Portuguese and assuming I´m from here.

Like the thorn bushes that line many of its sidewalks, São Paulo is prickly, and I´m a little nervous the whole while I´m there because Brazilians and foreigners alike warned me about how dangerous it is. It doesn´t help that I stay the first night in a hostel that resembles a Communist Bloc apartment building and that I´m the only person in the eight-bed dorm room.

São Paulo, despite its prickliness, turns out to be a great four-day stop. I spend quality time with my friend Kendra, who´s teaching English in São Paulo, and I even go to one of her lessons with her. The two of us catch up, and I realize how much I had been needing to be with one of my girlfriends. We eat sushi and gnocchi (as it turns out, SP has the largest Japanese and Italian populations outside of Japan and Italy), and we thwart the advances of creepy, old Brazilian men.

On my last day in the city, I do some touristy things with a group from my hostel, led by Jimmy, who works at LimeTime, the hostel, but who´s from San Francisco. We visit a cathedral, eat some açai, go to the top of an old bank building that towers over most of the rest of the gigantor city, and visit an outdoor market. There, people sell everything from batteries to x-rated cd´s, and when the cops drive through they swiftly make their pirated merchandise invisible. It´s swarming with people and bubbles are floating through the air, and I´m walking through it like a zombie. Later in the night, though, I find energy in some Portuguese-style pizza, and Kendra, Jimmy, the owner of the hostel and a bunch of others play card games, have some beers, and go out for a night of dancing at a place called Fun House, which, with its hipsters and good dj´s, makes me nostalgic for San Francisco. I drink caiprinhas and bust some moves to electronic music until 4a.m. or so and stay up all night to catch my 8a.m. bus to Trindade.


Trindade and Paraty:

Trindade is part of Rio de Janeiro state and the Emerald Coast of Brazil. I make a ten-minute stop in Paraty before catching a bus there, and the ride, only forty minutes, is quite titillating because the driver whips around tight turns and speeds up as we approach hills to try to catch some air. The people in the back of the bus yell "Woooo!" and egg the driver on even more.

Trindade is a bite-size town with laid-back locals, "where jungled hills meet beautiful beaches". It's still making its way into the backpacker circuit, and so it's a sort of beneath-the-radar paradise that's not yet been tainted by tourists. I stay at a hostel called Kaissara that's owned by a guy named George who's from near Liverpool. The hostel "maid," a Brazilian babe named Eli (pronounced Ellie), shows me to my bed, and then he walks me down to a massive rock on the beach where we sit and watch the waves crash. He speaks in Portuguese and I speak in Spanish, achieving some level of understanding, and then he treats me to a Coke and a pão de queijo. Back at the hostel, I meet George, who, like the hostel owner in La Paloma, walks around in his swim trunks most of the time and who does a great job of making me feel at home.

The next day George takes me with one of his friends who's visiting from back home to the piscina natural, natural swimming pool, where we do a bit of snorkeling and climb around on the boulders. After a quick boat ride back to the main part of town, George takes me to a lookout point and to a spot that offers a couple of boulders that are good for plunging into the aqua-colored water.

In the evening, George and I play cards, and I beat him at his own game, Shithead, a couple of times. We have beers with Ignacio, a lawyer from Buenos Aires who now works as a restaurant manager on a small island off the coast of Spain, and a group of twenty year-old Norwegian guys. Also joining the group is Renato and his hundred-pound lab named Jorge. Renato is enjoying the freedom of retirement (he used to own a company that makes some 30,000 pairs of women's jeans every month) and the fact that his wife is out of town, shopping in New York. He drunkenly talks about his beloved dog ("Isn't he beautiful?") and his love for Las Vegas, where he typically visits four times a year and where, on his last visit, a fifteen-day trip, he lost $10,000. The group goes to a beachfront bar that's owned and run by a guy who walks around in his boxers, showcasing his many tattoos, and that has old records and posters covering the walls. There's a warm ocean breeze, good music is playing, and the caiprinhas are flowing. What a night.

On my last day in Trindade I go with Ignacio to a beach called Praia Brava. It's a large crescent-shaped stretch of sand that hosts only us and couple of other people. The water is warm, and the waves are large and perfect for body surfing. Ignacio offers good company and introduces me to some bossa nova, one of the musical flavors of Brazil. I lie on the sand listening to the jazz-infused samba, and I feel an overwhelming sense of, "Wow, life is good." The day gets even better when we hike back through the jungle past some waterfalls and along another larger beach, stopping for some beers along the way. We grab dinner at a per-kilo restaurant and then pick up the fixings for more caiprinhas: cachaca (Brazilian cane liquor), passion fruit (a nice alternative to limes), ice and sugar. More caiprinhas and more cards, and this time we play several games with a couple from the U.K., including a game which involves shouting and making gestures. The mixture of the drinks and the silly card games makes Ignacio, who claims to be shy, extremely giddy, and I can't help cracking up myself.

The morning after, I reluctantly leave Trindade and Kaissara and head back to Paraty, where I spend a couple of hours walking around the historic center with its white colonial buildings and colorful doorways and shutters. In the afternoon I catch a bus to Angra dos Reis, from where I'll take a boat to Ilha Grande.


Ilha Grande:

Getting a boat from Angra dos Reis to Ilha Grande on a Sunday evening proves to be rather difficult. I missed the only ferry of the day, and the private boat that I was supposed to take gets pushed back once, twice, three times before being canceled altogether due to not having enough people to make it worth the owner's while. After sitting at the boat terminal for about four hours, I'm close to giving up and going to find a place to stay in Angra, but I team up with two Brazilian women and two Brazilian men and my persistence pays off. Paula, one of the optimistic and charismatic Brazilian women, searches and searches for someone to take us over and finally finds a young guy named Peter who's willing to take us for fifty reais a pop. The two bonehead guys we partnered up with only had 60 reais between them so the three of us women pay extra for them, and I figure it's my good deed for the day. Despite the expense, the trip is great, and I keep telling myself that patience pays. We ride on the tiny boat, passing around a couple of joints and watching the reflections of lights from small towns on the water. An hour and a half later, around midnight, we arrive in Abraão, the primary town on the island, and I make my way to my waterfront hostel, where I sleep like a baby.

The weather on the island, unfortunately, is rainy, and I hike for two hours in the pouring rain to a town on the other side of the island. At points, it's raining so hard that the water is running off my eyelashes, and rainwater is squishing in my hiking shoes. Luckily, I find a couple of Norwegian girls who are also nutty enough to do the hike and who are good company. Once we arrive in the Dois Rios, we find it to be a little ghost town; misty rain, only a couple of signs of life, the remains of a large prison, formerly home to Brazil's most notorious convicts, that was imploded in 1994, and a mass of vultures sitting watchfully on the beach. We rush back to Abraão so as not to get stuck hiking in the dark, and after some much needed showers we meet up for dinner on the beach.

Hoping for some sunshine on my last day on the island, I ride in a boat to Lopes Mendes, touted as one of the top beaches in the world, or in Brazil anyway. A sizable group of people makes its way to the beach, walking through the jungle past some monkeys with tiny circular faces who leap from tree to tree, looking curiously at the passers-by. The sand is soft and the water extremely clear, but there are gray skies and a few drops of rain. I decide to take the advice of some guys from São Paulo and check out Praia Santo Antonio, a smaller beach nearby, and I'm delightfully surprised when, after hiking twenty minutes to get there, I see no one else in sight. I have the beach to myself, and the sun is starting to shine through the clouds.

After getting a boat back to town, I go with my roommates - three cute-as-can-be Irish girls and a tall and friendly Canadian guy - to the hostel BBQ. There's all-you-can-eat chorizos, steak, chicken and fish, and salad and cheap beer, and in true Sarah Lee fashion, I eat way more than is necessary and stuff myself to the brim. A dance party erupts on the hostel patio and after dj'ing for a few songs, I decide, mostly in part to my beer and food coma, to hit the sack.


Rio de Janeiro:

A few hours by boat and van, and I'm in Ipanema, one of the nicer neighborhoods of Rio, which is the Marvelous City indeed, but not without a price. My first evening there is spent running errands, and I end up paying 30 reais for laundry (keep in mind an exchange of 2.2). The hostel is the most expensive of the trip at 45 reais a night - still a fair rate but pricey when compared to the $7/night hostels in Ecuador at the start of the trip. The hostel, Harmonia, is nice anyway, and I end up spending the rest of the evening hanging out with its Swedish owner, an easy-going guy named Rob, who pours me a couple of glasses of red wine while we listen to my newly purchased bossa nova cd and talk about traveling and the people (cariocas) and places of Rio. The only thing that sours the night, other than the cost of having my laundry done, are the two girls that come into the dorm room at 5:00 in the morning; they turn on the lights, rummage through their things, and talk in normal voices about how one of them got rejected at the bar, all for about half an hour. Talk about good hostel etiquette.

Determined to get out of the hostel the next day, I do a tour of the city that includes Tijuca National Park, Corcovado and Cristo Redentor (the Christ statue), and little bits of Lapa and Santa Teresa. The tour is led by a very enthusiastic guy who looks and acts like a New Yorker, which makes sense since he lived in the Bronx for eight-years as a kid. I'm normally not too keen on tours, but this one is good since the guide is informative and since getting around to see the sights on your own can be just as expensive and a little dicey. So the guide takes us through the 32 square-kilometer Tijuca rainforest, the largest urban forest, to the platform from which hang gliders and paragliders take off. From there we go to Corcovado, the mountain that Christ sits atop, and there are so many people, most of whom are taking ridiculously cheesy photos, that I feel like I could puke. From Corcovado we descend back into the city, passing by a few favelas in Santa Teresa and visiting the colorful, tiled stairs in Lapa.

After the tour I meet up with an Italian girl who I was put in touch with by Jimmy (Remember, the guy who worked at the hostel in São Paulo?) and her carioca friend, Julio, for rodizio-style pizza, where you pay a fixed price and where waiters come around throughout the meal offering different types of pizza (rodizio is to Brazil as dim sum is to China). Back at the hostel, my sleep is interrupted again by the same girl who woke me up on the previous night - only tonight she's having sex with one of the guys from our dorm just a couple feet from the bottom of my bed. Gross.

A little frustrated by the last two nights of interrupted sleep in the dorm and slightly annoyed that it seems to be taking me a couple of days to adjust in Rio, my bad luck starts to turn around on the third day. Because the hostel is overbooked and because I've won Rob the owner's favor, I am moved to a private room that is normally occupied by a hostel employee who's currently out of town. A private room where I don't have to be disturbed by drunken girls and sex in the wee hours of the morning? Woo! I spend time at Ipanema beach during the day, navigating through the hordes of umbrellas, beach chairs, and barely covered beach-goers., and people-watching and playing some beach volleyball. And in the night time a bunch of us - the Italian and the carioca, a few people from the U.K. and Nicholas, my French friend - go to Lapa to check out the nightlife. While one can easily make a party on the streets, with makeshift bars and loads of young people all over the sidewalks, we decide to hit up Rio Scenarium, an old, three-story colonial house, decorated with mannequins and other stage props and antiques, that now serves as a nightclub featuring live samba music. The band of the night is lively and the party in full-force, so we stay out late, and then I retire to my private room.

I spend more time at the beach on Saturday, watching the paddle-ballers and foot volley games (like volleyball but with no hands!), and I take advantage of the fact that there are vendors everywhere in sight, buying a sarong and a couple of beers. Walking down the beach with beer in hand, like many Brazilians do throughout all days of the week, I make my way to Punta Aproador, a massive rock that juts out at the end of Ipanema Beach where people gather to watch the surfers and the sunset.

After a mellow Saturday night, I decide to get up on Sunday morning, Easter Sunday that is, and attend mass at a beautiful church down the street. I try my best to recite everything in Portuguese, and I can't help but notice a few of the differences between masses at home and this one in Rio, one of which is the fact that there is no order what-so-ever to the Communion service. Everyone gets up at once, and no lines are formed. It's chaotic, and it's so South-American. After mass, I venture to Sao Cristovao with a couple from the U.K., who have been traveling the world together for three years, and with Johan, my friend from Denmark. It's a sketchy neighborhood, but the fair there, which happens every weekend, should not be missed, according to Rob. The fair takes place in a large open-air arena, and it offers cheap and tasty food, delightfully tacky goods such as cd's and hair accessories, and a few stages of live music. It's a bizarre scene, with some people opting to sit in chairs around a television screen that's playing a concert instead of enjoying the live music, and those that are "enjoying" the live music are dancing energetically but with stone-cold looks on their faces. Absurdities aside, it's probably the most authentic thing I'll do in Rio; there are no other tourists to be seen.

That evening, I am determined to go to a baile funk, the famous favela party and home of Brazilian funk music, which is supposedly raw and lyrically dirty and nothing like American funk. I am not drawn to the idea of the music as much as I am drawn to the fact that the baile funks are where it's at, the party of the cariocas. I'm told that 95% of the party-goers are locals and 5% are tourists, and what's more is the fact that some of the venues can hold up to 10,000 people. It also helps that there are tours to the funk parties, which are supposed to be good if not for transportation alone, and that they're supposed to be relatively safe - no guns allowed, phew!

So before I know it, there's fifteen to twenty people from the row of hostels going to the party and packing into the utility vans that will take us there. It's a fun group, with Johan; a guy from Quebec named Ian, a couple from Russia who's been living in New York for some years, and a group of friendly Australians, among others. Just outside the club we have some drinks at the makeshift bar and get friendly with a group of locals, who insist that we take a round of photos with them. We then step inside the dance hall, and I am startled by the fact that it resembles a huge toilet; there's a strong stench and a layer of grime on the floor, and the toilets themselves are...well, let's not go there. What's also startling is the fact that the place is pretty empty. Our group of gringos makes up almost half of the crowd, and our waiting around for a little while to see if the party starts bumping is to no avail. The music is pretty good, but it's not enough, and half of the group heads back to Ipanema. Johan and I, determined to celebrate his 21st birthday, go to a bar that's packed full of backpackers and that plays American pop music - a stark contrast to the baile funk. Ian the Quebecois, on the other hand, stays all night at the funk party, trying and succeeding in hooking up with a local honey, and finds out that the place had cleared just before our arrival because of a shooting. I have to say, it's a little unnerving. What happened to the no guns allowed rule?

Feeling like I need more favela fun, I opt to do a tour of the slums the next day. (No, I am not completely crazy - I decide to this before finding out about the shooting at the baile funk). The tour is led by Marcelo Armstrong, the "pioneer" of favela tours in Rio, and we make two stops: one to Rocinha and one to Vila Canoas. Rocinha is the biggest favela in Rio with 60,000 inhabitants, and Vila Canoas is home to roughly 2,000 people. Upon entering Rocinha, we pass a huge heap of garbage, sprawling chaotically next to and onto the street, and the garbage collectors stand by idly, shooting the breeze. Marcelo informs us, unnecessarily, that garbage collection in the favelas is a major problem.

On our way in the van to the heart of Rocinha, Marcelo gives us the low-down on favela life, driving home the points that we are not unsafe in the favelas and that they are not as bad as the locals make them out to be. I don't, in fact, feel unsafe in Rocinha, and I often have to remind myself where I am, and it seems that many in the slum are trying to maintain "normal" lives. No one pays much attention to us, and there are things like doctors' offices and school supply stores that you don't expect to see in a community that is run by drug dealers. Speaking of drug dealers, we naturally talk about the drug trade and how it affects everyday life in the slums. The dealers range in age, generally from seventeen to twenty-five years, and despite their young age, anyone who has any sense will side with them over the cops, who could, arguably, be just as corrupt. Marcelo also explains that the reason there is no crime in favelas like Rocinha (and that all muggings happen outside the favelas) is because anyone who does anything to attract the attention of the cops and, thus, tamper with the drug trade is in a very bad spot: opposite the drug dealer and likely to get killed. This explanation seems logical, but I can't help but think that there's more to the story. I confirm my suspicions later when a random cab driver explains to me that the favela tour guides pay off the drug dealers.

Drugs aside, the favela is swarming with moto-taxis, electrified with bundles of exposed wires, and made up primarily of brick buildings and shacks (yes, brick; not cardboard) that are piled on top of each other. The second favela, Vila Canoas, is more mellow, and we have the opportunity to walk through the maze of narrow alleyways, in which it's hard to tell what time of day it is. We also stop by the local school that is funded primarily by the favela tours - a good thing because it helps you to feel like you're not just exploiting the locals by taking part in the tours. The school is full of excited students (though they're pretty much oblivious to the tour groups by now), and it even has a new computer room and, believe it or not, a photo of Barack Obama on one of the classroom walls. It might go without saying, but the school's m.o. is to give kids from the slums a chance at obtaining a higher education, which, unsurprisingly, is mostly only accessible to the children in the wealthy neighborhoods just outside of the favela who can afford private education.

So the favela tour is over, but Johan's birthday celebration is still going strong. A group of eight or so backpackers goes to a churrascaria, which is the steakhouse version of rodizio-style eating. The formula is almost deadly: an all-you-can-eat buffet with an assortment of salads, sushis, hummus...you name it, and rounds upon rounds upon rounds of delicious cuts of beef and lamb; not to mention the caiprinhas and the company. Our group is sauced up, and we create quite a scene in the moderately upscale restaurant. There are about a dozen birthday toasts, half of which are, for whatever reason, directed to Ian the Quebecois, instead of Johan, and the Aussies are practically yelling the whole while we're there, especially when demanding something in English from the wait staff, who, curiously enough, are amused, not annoyed, by our antics. One of the Aussies invites me to the restroom to do a line (I politely decline), and the girl from the U.K., the one who had been keeping me awake in the dormitory but who has since grown on me a bit, starts to panic after a couple of hours and tells us all that she's manic depressive. Nothing can top dinner, and after a few drinks and dances at a nearby nightclub, I call it a night, determined to be well-rested for my big climb the following day: a multi-pitch route up Pão de Açúcar, also known as Sugar Loaf - the perfect way to end my South American adventure.