Slowing Down in Boa Vista

The bus ride to Viracopos and the flight from there to gave us time to catch up on some of the sleep we'd missed out on by waking up at 04:30.

Because we'd left it rather late, this flight was the only one we could find within two weeks that got us up to northern Brazil at a reasonable price. Every other one cost at least twice as much and most of these still left us a 10 hour bus ride shy of our destination, Boa Vista, capital of Roraima State.

But before we got to Boa Vista, we had a 10 hour stopover in Brazil's capital, Brasília. This probably sounds terrible to many people, but for us it was a feature, not a bug. 

By all accounts, Brasília is a bit of a boring place, save for some of the architecture.  Brasília was constructed from the ground up as a fully planned city, replacing Rio as Brazil's capital in 1960.  Its foremost (many would say only) attractions are the original structures designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer (you may remember him from the UFO Niteroi Art Museum in the previous entry).  Our layover would give us plenty of time to head into town to check these out, without making a separate trip to the city which is pretty much in the middle of nowhere.

We got an uber into town, not realising that we could have taken the city bus and saved some 22 Reais.  But it meant that we were quickly dropped at the National Cathedral (this is becoming a bit of a theme, isn't it?)

Once again, it looked nothing like the classic Brazilian baroque church.  It was smaller inside than either the Rio or Sao Paulo cathedrals, but the relatively new stained glass panels that surrounded the all-white interior gave the feeling of being inside a giant sapphire (in 2012 these replaced the original clear glass panels that had suffered badly from stresses due to temperature changes Niemeyer was still alive at the time and loved the changes to his structure).

We were far from the only visitors, and tourists well outnumbered prayers.  Interestingly, the cathedral was originally meant to be non-denominational, but when later governments cut off funding to the project, the Catholic church stepped in to finish it off. Provided, of course that it became a Catholic cathedral.

Just west of the cathedral was the even more improbably shaped National Gallery. The permanent collection on display was perhaps a bit too Avant Garde for me, with a lot of the work seeming to lack any obvious theme or technical skill.  But the two temporary exhibitions (both abstract, before you get on my case about how non-representational art is art too) were fabulous.

After our visit to the gallery we went to lunch where the wings join the body. This seemingly nonsensical sentence works just fine in Brasília, which was laid out in a plan that looks very much like an airplane, with commercial functions in the fuselage and tail, residential in the wings and governmental in the cockpit.

After lunch we headed back down the Eixo Monumental past the National Theatre (which a bunch of teenagers were climbing. You can see how tempting this would be in the photo) to the Palace of National Congress.

We had no idea there would be tours available, but happily joined in on one, tagging along with a French group, who had helpfully had the forethought to pre-book a non-Portuguese tour. It was actually pretty fun learning about the Brazilian system of government which clearly borrowed elements from the British, American and even French systems.  While I have no problem with the Canadian or NZ systems of government, it's interesting to note that Brazil manages to represent 6 and 50 times their populations with 1.25 and 4.95 times the number of elected officials.

Our visit to Brasília's main attractions finished off with still more Niemeyer at the supreme court and a walk back past his twin rows of identical ministerial buildings to the local bus terminal.

We still had plenty of time, so as dark fell we sat amongst the shops and vendors, snacking on Paos de Queijo (tasty little cheese breads, 8 plus a tiny sweet coffee for 40 cents), Pastels (deep fried savoury pastries, two plus 500ml of sugar cane juice for NZ$2.80) and my first Açai, (pureed frozen purple berries from the Amazon, 500ml with bananas, peanuts and sweetened condensed milk for $3.10). Quite the feast!

The city bus took a lot longer to get back to the airport than the Uber had to get from it, meandering through an air force base that sent an MP aboard to check the ID of anyone who got off, but once again we had plenty of time to get back for our 22:05 departure.

Brazil is a BIG country, and we were going from nearly on end all the way to the other, so the flight took 3h20m, which had us in Boa Vista around 00:30 local time (1 hour earlier than Sao Paulo and Brasília).

We got an Uber to our hostel, found our way inside and went straight to bed.

It may seem odd, but in the end we spent as many nights in Boa Vista as we had in Rio and Sao Paulo put together. This was partly because it was a fairly pleasant place. And partly because we needed a wee break after our jam packed time in three big cities. But mostly because we needed to plan what to do next.

In fact beyond not knowing entirely how to go about the next stage of our journey, we didn't even know which country it would be to!

Our original plan had been to head pretty much straight north from Boa Vista to Guyana. But then we'd reconsidered whether heaidng to nearby Venezuela was really as foolish as we'd originally thought. Especially when we met Luis, a Venezuelan on holiday from Caracas, who reassured us that things were nowhere near as bad as the outside media led us to believe.  All of this hemming and hawing, coupled with the tropical climate (we'd crossed the equator during our flight, and days were hot and steamy, with occasional afternoon thunderstorms) made for slow going.  So long did we sit and debate and plan that we even started considering further travel in nearby areas of Brazil.

So even though we spent four days and five nights in Boa Vista, a lot of it was hanging around in hammocks, making sandwiches, reading and talking.

A few highlights that didn't involve these things included:
Going down to the >1km wide Rio Branco with Luis and his Venezuelan mate on our second afternoon and getting soaked by our first thunderstorm.
Trying to determine when and if we could get a bus to Uiramuta, the northernmost town in Brazil only to discover that no one was answering the phone and, after two visits to the bus station for their morning and afternoon opening hours, that no one was there either.
Going out to buy hammocks and wandering around the commercial centre and struggling to even pronounce the word. (Spelled "rede" it's pronounced something like heje. Our Portuguese hadn't been making great strides. There seem to be a lot of less-than-obvious pronunciations, without which one becomes completely incomprehensible).
Anyway, we barely found any hammocks, then stumbled across three dedicated hammock shops in a row. It was like a real life version of Homer and Hank Scorpio's conversation in the Simpsons episode You Only Move Twice.
Eating at the amazing BBQ restaurant across the street from our hostel. It was packed on Sunday afternoon, and smelled fabulous. I'd thought 40 reais (NZ $15) was a touch pricey for a half chicken, small side salad and two small beers. But we discovered that it also came with rice, beans, Farfao (toasted cassava flour and bacon seasoning) and tomato onion and coriander salsa.  We were eating leftovers from this meal until our final lunch in Boa Vista!
Visiting the lovely Praça das Águas. We first went in the scorching heat of the day and weren't that enthralled but on our second last night we went back and saw the full array of fountains turned on (some synced with music, including the Star Wars theme) and half the town out.  We were too full to eat, but stopped and had a beer each, turning them into impromptu micheladas with the spicy-savoury chili infused vinegar on the table. And went back for an at least as enjoyable dinner the last night.

Throughout all of this, we were trying to decide what we'd do next.
In the end the bus schedule for our first choice short trip in Brazil meant we'd have to spend five days there.
And while I was convinced enough to give Venezuela a try, Sarah wasn't unless we joined a tour, which would have been expensive and not our usual kind of travel.
And it seemed like however okay the situation at the Venezuelan border sounded for the moment, there was clearly only one direction it could go in the near future, which was for the worse (interestingly, there were several Venezuelans at our hostel while we were there, some migrating, a few on holiday. AND there was a large [but scarcely noticeable unless you looked and thought about it carefully] refugee camp in a disused market building about 500m from where we were staying).

So in the end it was back to Plan A. Bus up to Bonfim at the Guyanese border, then onward up the (purportedly terrible... We'll see soon enough) road north.

Big Cities, West and East (Brazil)

After fifteen and a half hours in the air and three plane changes, we finally arrived in Rio de Janeiro at 22:30.

Other than a long walk through the terminal, arrival formalities were pretty straightforward. The immigration officer had no interest in seeing proof of the (refundable) flight to Quito we'd booked to satisfy the Air New Zealand staff in Wellington that we'd be allowed to enter the country legally.

Getting an Uber to our hostel in the Leblon neighborhood was simple (though we later realized that the driver had left the meter running for his trip back to the airport. Grr). On arriving we were straight to bed so that we could make the most of our limited time in Rio. (Also, we were bloody exhausted).

Our first day started with sorting out the usual administration stuff. Getting some Brazilian cash, buying and activating a Brazilian SIM card, etc.

After this we got our first taste of Brazilian public transportation when we took the bus out towards one of Rio's most famous sights: Pao de Açucar (Sugarloaf).  We decided to forgo the pricey cable car up to the summit and hike up to the top of Morro de Urca, the slightly lower, rounder hill next to it.

The trail through the tropical forest was fairly well maintained and quite busy (we saw maybe 50 people on our journey up and down). But that was nothing on how busy it was up top, where passengers headed to Pao de Açucar the easy way changed cable cars.





After a while admiring the beautiful views we tromped back down and walked along the shore trail at the base, where we saw lots of lizards and birds. The brilliant red Brazilian tanager was very pretty and hard to miss.

A metro ride back to Leblon and a dinner at one of Brazil's many Kilo restaurants finished off the evening. At a kilo restaurant you pay by the weight of what you eat, so they're great for vegetarians or pescetarians like Sarah. And if you avoid the Brazilian staples of beans and rice they can be great value too.

The next day we set out for probably the most Rio activity of all: a day at the beach.
We were actually staying only a couple of hundred metres from pretty and (relatively) quiet Leblon beach, but decided to check out some of its more famous brethren before settling down.

We began by walking the length of the busy shopping streets a couple of blocks in from the beach. Sarah had a coffee that made Brazil an exception to her rule that places that grow coffee MAKE terrible coffee. And we stumbled across a produce market selling fish, cheese, vegetables and lots of fruit. One vendor in particular kept feeding us sample after sample, including mango, melon, custard apple and some of the best, sweetest strawberries I've ever had.

We turned right and joined the beach about halfway along Copacabana. It wasn't nearly as busy as the beaches Sarah remembered from her previous Brazil trip in 2001, where you often couldn't see the water for the people, but there was still lots going on. Cariocas (residents of Rio) do everything on the beach.  Swimming, jogging, playing volleyball or Futvollei (like volleyball, but without using your hands), dating, sunbathing. Even doing business. Quite a lot of it actually. People were renting out beach chairs and serving drinks from their tent/beach kiosks, selling sarongs, and (of course) selling bikinis from umbrella-like racks that moved up and down the beach. And of course food. Ice cream, corn on the cob from a wheeled steamer that must have been murder to pull down the sand, and cheese cooked over little charcoal grills that vendors carried up and down the beach.
We walked almost 5km back to Leblon, all but one short section on beautiful wide, soft golden sand.  I loved the fact that Cariocas have so jealousy guarded their public access to the beach and kept the fancy hotels on the far side of the road that parallels the seashore.

We also popped back inland to the market to pick up some picnic foods: bread cheese, green peppers, tomatoes, snow peas, passionfruit. This was only slightly spoiled when we were charged almost $12 for 500g of the aforementioned strawberries, which I later realized were only so sweet because they had an invisible layer of sugar/artificial sweetener coating their outside. They were over half the price of our entire 2.5 meal picnic! But I got over it (or maybe not, given that I'm complaining about it here...)

Back in Leblon we briefly returned to the hostel to pick up a towel and some books, and set to relaxing at the beach (which is actually the same beach as better known Ipanema). Plus of course two more key activities: eating some of that beach-grilled-cheese (rather like halloumi, salty, squeaky, crispy and occasionally charred outside, gooey melty middle, and drinking our first caipirinha. The national drink of Brazil, it's made with cachaça (Brazilian sugar cane based, rum-like spirit), sugar syrup, fresh squeezed limes and lots of ice. The ice keeps it cold and makes it less potent as you drink, which is no bad to thing, as they're usually pretty powerful to start out!

Our final day in Rio we set out to explore the centre of the city. First stop was the Metropolitan Cathedral. Rio is packed with churches (we saw lots more throughout the day), and the large majority of them are in the baroque style, which I'm really not a fan of. The cathedral was another beast entirely. It was constructed in the 60s and 70s. From the outside its looks verge on ugly, but the inside is amazing. The entire truncated cone forms one huge open space, so capacious it brought to mind Aya Sofia in Istanbul.  The sense of space is enhanced by four floor to ceiling stained glass windows at the cardinal points and the fact that the clever design leaves the whole structure open to airflow, making it beautifully cool and breezy inside.

Back outside the cathedral we took to Rio's shopping district.  Parts of it were surprisingly quiet, but others were buzzing with activity, music piped through the market from speakers hanging a above the narrow streets in between the fluttering Brazilian flags. We also popped into the park where Brazil's independence was declared by Dom Pedro I (I hadn't realized before that Brazil began its independent existence as a monarchy!)

The buzz of the market extended into the adjacent business district that we passed through on our way to the docks. For the afternoon we were headed out of Rio entirely to its much smaller sister city, Niteroi, on the far side of the Guanabara harbour.

The commuter ferry over wasn't quite Hong Kong's Star Ferry, or the Bosporus Ferry in Istanbul, but it was still a lovely ride with wind in your hair and great views of the city and towering domes of rock that surround the bay.

We'd thought about heading straight back to the city, but as we had some time, walked up over a low hill to the Niteroi Art Museum. Designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer (you'll hear more about h in the next entry) the museum is known as the UFO because of its otherworldly shape and spectacular location.

We continued our walk back around the shore past much less imposing, but still charming old homes, many of which had been tidied up and turned into characterful little buildings with great views back across the bay.

The best views of all should have come from a little church on an island separated from the mainland by a causeway, but as with all the other spots with the best views (on top of Morro de Urca, at the Niteroi Art Museum) it was closed for renovations.

We rode the ferry back to town, then the metro back to our hostel.
For slightly complicated reasons related to us waiting too long to book a flight to northern Brazil, we were to depart Rio that night.  So at 21:30 we took an Uber to Rio's Rodoviaria (bus terminal) and bought tickets for a 00:25 trip to Sao Paulo.  The journey was 6.5 hours long, so after a blissful jet-lag aided sleep we arrived at SP's Rodoviaria Tiete just before 7 o'clock.

While Rio and Sao Paulo are both in south-ish eastern Brazil, SP is almost due west of Rio, which I reckon is close enough to allow me to reuse the title of the final China entry for the first Brazil one.

We hadn't planned to visit Sao Paulo at all. It has a reputation (or at least I thought it did) of being grittier and more dangerous than Rio (not that Rio ever felt dangerous, only walking around in wealthy neighbourhoods and/or daylight hours as we did.)  This was probably true, but Sao Paulo more than made up for it with its vibrant, cosmopolitan character. While Rio had a beautiful setting and its own inimitable character that pervaded the city, that seemed to be about all it had. Sao Paulo had such depth that even in two short days we grew to love it. Perhaps a bit of explanation of what we got up to while there will help explain why we liked it so much l.

Fifteen metro stops and five minutes walk brought us to our hostel in the posh Vila Madalena neighborhood.  After some morning juice (papaya with lime) and coffee and administrative stuff we set out to explore the city.  As in Rio our first stop was the Metropolitan Cathedral. Like Rio, its architecture was quite different from the typical Brazilian baroque. But it was also very different from Rio's brutalist concrete, being pretty much pure neo-gothic, a style that I quite like. 

The charming process of buying tickets to see the crypts involved sitting waiting in the secretariat until the seemingly harried administrator carefully took our money, wrote our nationalities in her book and carefully tore two tickets out of the small book.

Down below the cathedral were the remains of all Sao Paulo's archbishops and cardinals save one (who was lost at sea), along with three priests and one Amerindian chief (who were all significant figures in the history of Catholicism in Sao Paulo).

The palm lined square in front of the cathedral was filled with lots of Sao Paulo's many impoverished and homeless. The rough impression was added to when, as we left the square we saw several police officers and a crowd of civilians surrounding one of these unfortunates who very much appeared to be dead.

From there we carried on into Sao Paulo's commercial heart.  The pedestrian malls surrounded by office blocks and the merchant streets lined with older, lower buildings were, even more than in Rio, thronging with people.  In many sections you were surrounded by a roar not unlike that in a stadium or large concert hall before patrons have settled down to watch the event.

Meandering through the streets led us to the Mercado Municipal, which bore a striking resemblance to Toronto's St. Lawrence Market.  Except here instead of peameal bacon, the feature sandwich was a Mortadella. I had one of these for lunch, and so thickly was it piled with meat and melted cheese that I could scarcely help Sarah with her hefty salad that was full of root vegetables quail eggs and cheese.

The neighbourhood around the market was a bit rough around the edges, but it had nothing on the area near the train station. This was probably the most unsafe I've ever felt in an urban area in daylight hours. We didn't really feel like we were in immediate danger with lots of traffic passing by on the major road beside us. But if it were after dark, it felt like it would have taken us about ten seconds to be robbed at knife or gunpoint.

This was in stark contrast to the manicured gardens and whitewashed colonial buildings of the Museum of Sacred Art, which we stepped into minutes later.

I hadn't known what to expect from the museum, but Wow!  The Neapolitan nativity scene with its hundreds of scale figures was amazing. We spent half an hour poring over its ~20m of intricate details and could easily have spent more. The permanent collection in the main building was impressive. But (leaving aside feelings for the poor elephants) the special exhibition of Catholic ivory carvings was amazing! I think I've only ever seen a couple of Christian artworks in ivory, and here were dozens. Many from Goa, which makes sense, but plenty more from all over the world.

From a museum of sacred art we headed to a museum of almost un-sacred art.  Batman Alley and its surrounding neighbourhood were just covered in street art in a vast variety of styles. Indeed, I think Sao Paulo is the best city I've ever visited for street art, topping previous favourites like Melbourne, Vienna and Medellin (and, come to think of it, Wellington).

With not long until sunset, it was prime time to check out Sao Paulo's burgeoning beer scene. We made it to two brewpubs, the city's oldest and a newer, über cool venue. Delightfully the beers were all fault free (I've been to way too many places with newish beer cultures where the small breweries make terrible beer). They ranged from Iteresting-if-not-exactly-good (cacao göse) to Oh-my-god-I'm-so-ripping-this-off-when-we-get-back-to-NZ (I'm not telling... The easier to rip it off ;-) )

We were back in affluent Vila Madalena, and felt entirely safe walking home in the dark at 21:00. When we were almost there we found one last bar that was absolutely heaving. By day it was a record/film shop. By night they put futbol on big screens and served 600ml bottles of icy cold (if slightly oxidized) pilsner and deep fried savoury pastries (called pastels) to the crowds at the tables and the dozens more who spilled out onto the street in front.  We couldn't NOT go in.
Sarah and I were lucky enough to get a table and spent a good hour or two chatting with our neighbours (two English speaking Brazilians from Rio, one who lived in SP and one who was just visiting) about... Well, the sorts of things one talks about at the end of an evening of beer drinking.

Our second and final day in SP began in the Liberdade neighbourhood, which is home to the largest concentration of Japanese diasporans in the world. There were Japanese grocery stores and gyoza and sushi restaurants, but obviously a fair bit of assimilation had gone on as well, as evidenced by the Lanchonete Nagoya, which sold pure Brazilian food.

From there we moved on to Bela Vista (supposedly the Italian neighbourhood, though we saw little sign of it except the Lanchonete Napoli, virtually identical to the Nagoya).  And then on to Avenida Paulista the home of big business in SP.

There weren't any super huge skyscrapers, but the wide boulevard was lined on both sides by a concrete and glass canyon that extended for several kilometres.

At the end of Paulista, amongst a series of road over and under-passes things got a bit seedier. To the point that I felt somewhat uncomfortable walking through the huge (it spans more than a full metro stop) and deathly (Ha!) quiet Ceméterio do Araçá.

We did get to pop back in later near the main entrance, which was good as it was an amazing place. It wasn't quite as labyrinthine as Buenos Aires'Recoleta, but the family mausoleums were just as ornate, and the sheer length of the avenues of tombs made it feel like a real city of the dead.

We walked all the way back to our hostel (passing a number of really impressive self supporting steel lattice broadcast towers on the way... Sao Paulo has some great ones).

As dark fell we found time for one final outing to the beer van. Each evening, a local craft brewery parks their tap-laden van just off Av. Pompeia and sells brown ale, APA and other beers to Sao Paulo's hipster crowd. I'm pleased to say that it was a lot of fun and that the beers were  once again, good ones.

Sarah stayed up at the hostel for one or two more beers but for me it was straight to bed. We had an EARLY start the next day.

How early? Early enough that we took almost full advantage of the fact that the SP metro starts running at 04:40.

We caught an 06:00 bus from Tiete to Viracopos airport (it's one of those airports that are in an entirely different city from the one they claim to primarily serve), so it was a 90 minute trip there. But we arrived in plenty of time for our  08:50 flight north.

Thus concludes our love letter to Sao Paulo. The contrasts of wealth and poverty in various areas were so pronounced that it was sometimes hard to believe they were the same city.  And there were some truly dodgy neighbourhoods (not even favelas, just in the city centre).  And there weren't many obvious tourist attractions.  But like many of my favourite cities (Toronto, Busan, Istanbul) it was truly a city for living.