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.