Whether you’re a meticulous itinerary planner or a “Where are we staying tomorrow night?” kind of guy, I think when it comes to backpacking it’s very difficult to get the pace right all of the time.
Before we set out on this trip, I naïvely imagined we would be always be travelling slowly, spending plenty of time in each place and making decisions on the road, taking each step as it comes. Even the smaller towns or Latin America’s answer to Milton Keynes would be interesting to see, I reasoned, and anyway we had a whole year to play with – so there was no point passing through anywhere too fast.
Surprise surprise, this trip has not been a gentle plod through a middle-England park. I didn’t take into account the sheer scale of countries like Argentina, where we spent almost three months in total, but I still feel like I didn’t get to see everything we should have. And there have been other people’s schedules to work around: friends and family who have been, or who are coming to visit us, and had to book their flights in advance based on an estimation of where we might end up.
As a result, some weeks have felt leisurely and beach-based and others are more of a military mission to get from A to B. This week has fallen rather more into the latter category, for reasons that can’t be helped, and I am writing this newsletter on the 9.30am bus from Curitiba to São Paulo after a whirlwind tour of the Brazilian south.
For once we had a strict deadline to get to somewhere – São Paulo by this weekend – because tomorrow morning (Sunday), my pal Anthony will arrive to join us on a two-week trip from SP to Rio de Janeiro. I’m excited to see him! And excited for the supplies he’s bringing us (a new travel adaptor plug; headphones for Dave, contact lenses for me). It’s one of the longest times we’ve gone without seeing each other, but in some ways it feels like only last week that Dave and I were leaving Europe.
I’ve come to realise that there will never be enough time to go everywhere and see everything – and also that a year really isn’t a long time, it just feels that way when you’re stuck in a 9-5 job. We’re travelling at the pace we’re able to for now, and getting better at remembering to pause for longer when possible – and take those naps after a hellish night bus.
Things I’m enjoying about Brazil so far include: the supermarkets and service stations (so many fruits! Such insane buffet selections!); the beaches (even if visited only briefly) and fantastic scenery… tropical green everywhere you look, magnificent jungly trees covered in mysterious spikes and nobbles and flowers, poking out of every bus stop and pavement like nature cannot be held back by concrete. The accommodation is also cheap and plentiful, although I can’t understand why everyone has this exact shower and only cold water faucets in the bathrooms and kitchen. Every country has its quirks.
From Porto Alegre we went to Lagoa in Florianópolis and spent an afternoon at Mole Beach, listed as one of the most beautiful in Brazil for very good reason. We sat drinking beer and watching surfers, surrounded by lush green forest that really felt like an artist’s impression of paradise. Dinner at Layback Park food court (Mexican-ish burritos and Japanese cocktails) hit the spot, as did the burgers (lentil for me, big slab of meat for Dave) and beer at Rufus Bar around the corner the previous night.
I’d hoped to make it out to Ilha do Melo off the coast of Paranaguá for a night or two on the way to São Paulo, but the bus timetables didn’t look to be in our favour and the island would be difficult to access without another day’s leeway. Poking at the map for alternatives, Dave fixated on Blumenau, a German town (strange how many German towns you come across in South America…) with not much information about it online, however our waiter backed us in going there (“many beautiful German buildings and good beer”) and so the matter was settled.
Having spent a whole 27 hours in Blumenau, I won’t be adding it to the return circuit. I’m sure it holds a certain charm during Oktoberfest, and tyrolean hats off to the city planners for cannily repurposing all those German beer gardens for Easter (and presumably for Halloween, Christmas, St Patrick’s and all the saints’ days). But if you’ve been to Germany before, or even if you haven’t, you can rest assured that you’re not missing out on this strange Brazilian Disneyland.
We’ve not had much luck with buses this week. I’ve spent a fair amount of time before singing the praises of Latin America’s long-haul buses – and the night buses in particular – for their efficiency and value. Argentinian companies run an especially tight operation: for around £13 you can get a comfortable, non-stop–20-hour ride which will arrive pretty much always bang on time at your next destination. Chilean buses were also very affordable, with huge, plush, reclining seats and, once, iPads on the back of each chair. Friends tell me they used to offer a steak and a bottle of wine as part of the bus ticket, too, but sadly I think those heady days are over. Still, we can all agree they’re quite the contrast to National Express.
Brazilian buses are not quite such good value and have a much more lackadaisical approach to punctuality. Annoyingly, Brazil is also one of those places where, if you’re a tourist, you have to buy your tickets in person at the terminal from the bus company window. (Online purchases require a Brazilian ID number as well as all your great-grandparents’ middle names and favourite colours*. It’s maddening that it doesn’t seem to have occurred to many bus companies that tourists might also want to travel that way, but there we go.)
On arriving in Blumenau, we were running late and rushed to get to our hotel (yes, a hotel! £25 including breakfast and worth almost every penny.) It was only later that we looked online at timetables and realised we were faced with very few options for the next leg on to Curitiba… the impending Easter weekend meant most of the next day’s journeys were already booked up. I categorically did not want to get stuck in Blumenau for another night, And so we took a cab back to the bus station to buy a ticket for the following day.
But my real beef with Brazil’s buses comes from our horrendous journey into the country last weekend. Leaving Fede’s farm, Dave and I got a lift to the nearby town of Castillos (highest suicide rate in Uruguay; impressive dedication to afternoon siesta hours), from there we took a bus to Chuy on the Brazilian border.
Chuy is a curious place: half Uruguayan and half Brazilian, the town is split down the middle without an immediate border. Which means you can literally just walk across a road and find yourself in Brazil, surrounded by people talking Portuguese and enjoying cheaper empanadas. With eight hours to kill before our bus that night, Dave and I settled in at a nondescript cantina. I ordered pasta. I chatted to the waiter. I even called my friend to gossip about the royals and watched her children pretend to be cats. So much time to kill, so little to do in this strange and industrial looking town!
Or perhaps not. When we got to the bus terminal, I had a confusing conversation in Sportuguese (Spanguguese?) with the impatient ticket vendor about border crossings. We were technically in Brazil already, but hadn’t been through passport control. Would the bus take us through customs? No, she told us, we would need to go to the checkpoint ourselves, back in Uruguay 2km south of town, before heading to the Brazilian customs office another 4km north in the opposite direction. Oh and the only two seats left on the bus were apart from each other, so tough luck.
Undeterred, we bought the tickets, dumped out bags and hiked out to the Uruguayan border checkpoint – no drama. Then we walked back into Brazil, pausing for a tourist photo, obviously, and a jaunt around some of the duty free shops. Passports successfully stamped in both countries, we failed to hail a cab back into town and began a much heavier walk back to the bus terminal, my energy levels and cheer waning steadily with the rapidly diminishing light. At least I would sleep on the bus, I reasoned, my Fitbit celebrating 30,000 steps.
Except no, because Brazilian bus drivers take a whole different attitude towards passenger comfort. I’m fairly sure ours was smoking weed out the window, and I woke up approximately every 40 minutes when we stopped to pick up passengers and all the lights came on, driver shouting each destination’s name for clarity. The first stop of the night? The Brazilian border, where naturally everyone else got off the bus to get their passports stamped. Dave and I waved from opposite ends of the empty lower deck, convinced that soon our neighbouring seats would be occupied as the woman had so strictly informed us. They weren’t.
I’ve never been very good at being tired, and by the time we arrived in our Airbnb in Porto Alegre I was ready to have a good cry for no real reason other than feeling exhausted. Dave remains completely untouched by sleep deprivation, a skill no doubt honed by his years of drinking late and getting up for work at 5.30am. I, on the other hand, cried three more times this week: once because I was still tired, once because I momentarily forgot to wish a friend happy birthday, and once… something about how “I just want to live somewhere nice one day with lots of animals” (the kitten withdrawal is real). The point is, I’m a mess without sleep. Which is a bad predisposition for backpacking.
Spirits were suitably restored in Curitiba, another enormous city that nobody has heard of in southern Brazil, where we spent two nights before the final leg to São Paulo. We stumbled upon an excellent food market in a square, where locals found us amusing, then walked out to Parque Barigui to see a family of Capybara living wild and chewing happily on grass around us. A sudden rainstorm forced us into Bar do Lago where I called a good friend and enjoyed some delightfully fresh passion fruit juice.
Generally speaking, not many people we’ve encountered in Brazil have spoken any English, but there have been a couple of hilarious exceptions. Once, inside the military museum in Porto Alegre (we were fresh off the night bus and Dave took advantage of my delirium) where a group of girl scouts asked to take a photo with us. “Because we look strange?” I joked. “Yes,” they replied, deadpan. And then last night at the park bar in Curitiba, two lads in their early twenties heard me on the phone and turned to talk to us, shy and first, then getting more confident and asking questions about the royal family (What are they for? Do we like them?) Peaky Blinders (they watch it with subtitles) and Brazilians’ perceptions of Portuguese people (old fashioned, fusty).
They were fascinated to know what we were doing in Curitiba and what we thought of their city. The conversation leader, Victor, had never had any English classes and had never even left his own city, but his older brother had been to the US and taught Victor English by speaking it to him at home. It was truly impressive and absolutely shames me for not being as fluent in Spanish even after months of travelling and a few spurts of lessons here and at home. They were just starting their night and were off to find some girls as we left for dinner and bed.
Stories from the (not so ancient) archives
In case you hadn’t guessed it, I fall into the second category of travellers – ie, not the meticulous itinerary planning type… but one of the few things I did plan ahead of time was a visit to Bahía Blanca (“white bay”) on Argentina’s east coast.
What was I expecting? White, sandy beaches. What did we get? A tour of the British railway museum in a deserted industrial port and a reminder of just how bad our Spanish skills were. Read all about it here.
As the port came into view, a sudden queasiness washed over me and with it the fear that if we got off the bus now, we wouldn’t make it back into town ever again. It was completely deserted, a tangle of smoke and disused buildings and forgotten bits of machinery. But we’d come all this way to see Bahía Blanca’s biggest tourist attraction… and so we stepped off the bus and watched it drive away, wondering what to do next. The museum, presumably.