While traveling around, it's hard not to get on something called the "backpacker trail." You meet people, ask them where they've been, what they thought of it, where they stayed, what there is to do, and that's how you plan what to do next. Then you meet someone and tell them the same stuff about the same places. A network gets developed - pretty soon you start seeing the same faces pop up. You're on the backpacker (aka gringo) trail.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing - a lot of the places are great and the advice is good. However, it is a little limiting and does have its flaws. There's places that aren't that great that get on the trail, and there's places that are great that never make it.

An example of the first is Isla Grande. Isla Grande's an island off the coast of Brazil about 2 hours from Rio. The general word was that it's supposed to be this hidden island paradise with beautiful beaches that you go to relax and get away from it all for a bit. My impression - eh. First of all, as soon as you get off the Ferry you're swamped with people trying to get you to stay at their hostel. Tourism is the only industry, and the place is pretty much 90% Euro backpackers trying to get laid - even in the off season. And it's fairly pricey to boot. It's got beaches, sure, but not anything really different from anywhere in Brazil - or anywhere else in the world by the ocean I suppose. The only mildly interesting thing that I ran into was an old abandoned Prison on the other side of the Island that was fun to go poke through and climb around in. Someone had also painted a pretty cool mural in one of the old buildings.

Then, in the contrapositive, there's Sao Paulo. I love big cities, and Sao Paulo certainly fits that bill - it's the third biggest city in the world after Mexico City and Tokyo. I was determined to head there for at least a little while - but it's well off the backpacker trail for some reason. The general concensus was "why do you want to go there? It's supposed to be good for nightlife, but other than that it's just a big dangerous city." In fact, when I went from Isla Grande to Sao Paulo with two other groups of travelers, one group got on another bus right away, and the other group headed straight for the airport. I stayed. They missed out.

I only spent about a day and a half in Sao Paulo, but I loved every minute of it - maybe because it's the closest town to New York that I've been in - think New York in Portuguese, 20 years ago. In fact, they've even got a mini version of the Empire State Building, the BANESPA building - officially known as Altino Arantes. Interestingly, the flag flying from the top of this building is not the Brazilian flag, but the flag of the Province of Sao Paulo.

Ususally the BANESPA building's observation deck is open to the public, but it was closed for cleaning the day I was there. There's two other places to catch a view in Sao Paulo - the best known is from the top of the Edeficio Italia which has a restaraunt and bar on top. The problem is that it's 15 Reals (the Brazilian currency), or about 6 bucks, just to sit down. So instead we headed over to the Edeficio Martinelli, just a few minutes walk from the BANESPA building. I had read somewhere that its roof is open to the public, and indeed we were in luck - from 1-3 it was. There were only a handful of tourists up there and the roof was huge. The Penthouse on the rooftop used to be the mayor's residence. Today it houses a couple of offices but is mostly abandoned. And unlike New York, which is notoriously uptight with this kind of stuff nowdays, the folks at this building didn't seem to care if you went climbing around and poking through the Penthouse.

From up high, there's a couple of interesting things you notice about Sao Paulo. First, every other building seems to have a Helipad on top of it - check out the building in the lower right hand corner of the above photo, for an example. Second, it's a city of layers - pedestrian bridges above a park that's above the street grid, trains running in a cut under an elevated highway that's beneath another viaduct. It makes for a really interesting 3-dimensional kind of town on a level I haven't really seen anywhere else - at least when it comes to it's public space.