BootsnAll Travel Network
Add this blog to: MyYahoo, Google, Bloglines, RSS


Archive for the 'Brazil' Category

« Previous Page
Next Entries »
« Home

The ultimate Brazilian family vacation – Part I

Tuesday, February 7th, 2006

Quite satisfied with our awesome candomblé experience, we shoved off the next day, on a 24-hour, freezing cold bus, way to the north, to a town called Teresina, famed for being Brazil’s hottest city; we’re talking purely temperature here. The bus ride started out fairly empty, but a few hours later we stopped and piled the bus with hippies. (There are a lot of hippies in Brazil. Noticeably. And not just your normal, sort of laid back people, but either your trust-fund, well-dressed hippie or your dirtier, smellier type who think they’re saving the world by selling jewelry. You can find them in all your main tourist locations and any main plaza, square, or park in most major cities.) [read on]

Posted in Brazil | 1 Comment »

The magic of Candomblé

Tuesday, February 7th, 2006

This post will be dedicated entirely to describing our experience at the Candomblé ceremony, as well as I can do. Unfortunately, cameras are not allowed, so as not to make a tourist spectacle out of a religious ceremony, which I can totally respect, so there aren’t any corresponding photos. I may have mentioned this before, but we waited specifically for this woman to take us to a ceremony, as there is word of a lot of tourist operators putting on phoney ceremonies, and I really wanted to witness the real thing. When the woman showed up, we piled into the van as she introduced us to the others inside, all by places of origin. I, therefore, became Chicago and Vanessa became Australia. With us we had Couple from France and Pair from Finland, and were soon joined by New York Lady and Group from Greece. As the lady shut the van door, going around to the drivers side, I noted, “I thought she would be black”, to which those who were not shy about it agreed. This was, afterall an Afro-Brazilian tradition, and this woman was very white with a hint of Latina blood. [read on]

Posted in Brazil | No Comments »

Cactuses in Brazil?!

Tuesday, January 24th, 2006

We spent a few more days in Salvador after New Years, mostly awaiting the famed Tuesday night parties the city puts on every week. Every week, can you imagine, they set up stages and tear them back down, showcasing local musical acts. It was really great, and worth the wait of a few days of doing nothing in Salvador. Well, not exactly nothing…we did search out and buy some local music, tried to meet up with the 11-year old Lais from the ferry (but were stood up), took a crowded boat back and forth to some crap beach, and spent the nights watching “Stick Man” walk with his stick up and down the street below the hostel patio selling drugs and pimping prostitutes, at least that’s what we gathered he was doing… [read on]

Posted in Brazil | 1 Comment »

New Years Eve in Salvador

Monday, January 23rd, 2006

The buses into Camamu (port entry town to Barra Grande) were packed, loaded with people and all their crap on their way to spend their holidays in Barra Grande. The buses out of Camamu were empty, and we liked it that way. We were now in the state of Bahia, which is where the majority of the Afro-Brazilians live (something like 80%), with Salvador the capitol. The bus dropped us off at the ferry port in Bom Despacio, where we got our tickets and boarded. While explaining to Vanessa how to say “I’m thirsty” in Portuguese, it seemed that we attracted a lot of attention on the boat, and soon were friends with nearly half of the starboard side of the upper deck. We met a mother and her two daughters (all who speak English) from São Paulo, an 11 year-old girl named Lais and her mother, and another man, his wife, and son (whose name was Sued, deus (god) backwards). The man thought I was a hippie (must have been the bandana on my head)…something about how he used to be a truck driver and drive up and down the coast, picking up hitchhiking hippies. The girl, Lais, was really shy at first, because she heard us talking English and wanted to talk, but was shy to use her English. She got some words out, and we taught her some more, while she taught Vanessa some Portuguese, and I thanked her for that (Vanessa is good at saying, I don’t speak Portuguese, but she does, and points at me; I have to admit that I’m getting pretty good at it now…never thought I could speak Portuguese, but I get along alright); she was so excited to be talking to us…we took photos and got her phone number so we could see her again while we were in Salvador. All this while, I thought we were still in the port, waiting to leave, and yet we were almost to Salvador…the smoothest ferry ride ever. [read on]

Posted in Brazil | 1 Comment »

After Christmas rush in (and out) of Barra Grande

Thursday, January 19th, 2006

The day after Christmas (which was just the same as Christmas and every other day), Vanessa and I had planned to take a boat to some nearby islands, which were highly recommended. Well, that never happened that day, or any other day…we had missed the boat after a slow morning, just like every other morning. We really were doing nothing. We decided, though, that we should do something, so we rented some kayaks from our pousada to go cruising around a bit. This kayak was the fanciest kayak I’ve ever been in – it had a steering rudder contraption thing. Well, after 15 minutes of going in circles and feeling like idiots as the owner of the pousada swam out to us to align the rudder (not our fault), we were off to explore whatever there was out there. We were recommended to go down the ‘river’, so we went to search it out. [read on]

Posted in Brazil | 1 Comment »

Christmas on the beach

Monday, January 9th, 2006

For a 24 hour bus ride, it really was not all that bad. The bus stopped every few hours, where we could buy food (I’ve become addicted to salgados mistos, which just means mixed snacks…really, they’re just ham and cheese sandwiches, croissants, or the like…) The bathrooms along the way were also quite impressive – surprisingly clean, and always with toilet paper. Yay! Despite that, though, I did witness one little girl squat down and pee on the ground while no one did anything about it as people proceeded to walk in it. Lovely. [read on]

Posted in Brazil | No Comments »

Sydney Vicious does Rio de Janeiro

Sunday, January 8th, 2006

After a good tour of Christ, we headed down to the beautiful beach of Ipanema, which just looks like a regular beach, though it is kept pretty clean; the views of these rock formations jutting out in the distance aren´t too bad, either. There are about 5 venders for every beachgoer, and they stroll the beach, offering you all of their goods quite insistently. If you don´t want one thing (agua), perhaps you´ll want another (cerveja – beer). No? Then, it must be a refrigerante (soda). No. As soon as the refreshment guy leaves, then the ice cream man comes, and then you get the sarong dude, and then the jewelry chick. And, how about a bikini? Because everyone really needs a bikini once they´re already at the beach. To eat, various people offer sanduiches natural (cold sandwiches), camarão (a very suspect shish kabob of shrimp, that’s been carried up and down the beach), or my favorite, grilled cheese on a stick. This man walks around with some sort of salty cheese on a stick and a hot oven contraption, which he uses to grill the cheese. I might have seen him adding some sort of spices to the cheese, but I can´t be too sure…it just isn´t what I would call beach food. [read on]

Posted in Brazil | 1 Comment »

Copa, Copacabana (what else did you expect?)

Friday, December 30th, 2005

After an interesting standoff with the hotel people in São Paulo over their insistence that we did not pay for one of our nights (which we totally had done), we hopped in our getaway cab, who took us to the Metro, São Paulo´s subway that is amazingly clean and efficient. Our timing was almost too impeccable, as the next bus to Rio de Janiero was leaving within minutes of our arrival, causing a bit of a rush in emptying the bladders and buying water to refill them. Due to Brazil´s lack of punctuality with bus departures, we actually had more time than we thought, and were off to Rio without a problem. [read on]

Posted in Brazil | 1 Comment »

Cali and the Seppo meet again

Friday, December 16th, 2005

Seppo. That´s me. It´s a nickname I acquired back in London living with a whole house and a half of Aussies. It´s actually a rather common nickname for Americans and comes from classic Cockney rhyme, or whatever you might want to call their form of speak. The Americans are called Yankees, or Yanks, which rhymes with septic tanks…from this they call Americans septics, a beautiful little moniker, isn´t it? So Sep, or Seppo comes from septic…not sure how proud of this I am, but it ain´t as bad as a few of the names we had floating around; at this point, it´s a term of endearment. Cali is Vanessa Cali (hers being one of the more benign tags), and we just happened to be traveling in South America at the same time, on the same schedule and all that after 5 years of not seeing each other, so it´s all pretty cool. [read on]

Posted in Brazil | No Comments »

Fun with Portuguese

Saturday, December 10th, 2005

Spending my last few Costa Rican colónes, I bought two small packages of dark chocolate covered coffee beans, which I had only seen in much larger packages and did not indulge. These small packages, though were perfect, and I quickly devoured one before getting on the plane, more interested in the taste than the caffeinated effects this would cause. Needless to say, I was wired. I ususally have no problems falling asleep on planes. In fact, on the contrary, I often can´t keep myself awake, such that I fall asleep before the plane even takes off. I blame it on the lower amounts of oxgen in the air (as for falling asleep on buses, I got nothin´). I tried to counter the effects of the caffeine with a healthy dose of free rum, but even that combined with the free inflight movie “Snow Day” still was not enough to put me to sleep. Arriving in Lima, Peru with less than an hour layover, excited about my first time in the southern hemisphere, I ran to the bathroom to relieve myself of the free rum, but more importantly to check if the toilets did indeed flush the opposite way. They did! How fabulous! I even flushed it twice for reassurance. Finally, a childhood curiousity realized, and not just from that faked-out coin donation demo at the Museum of Science and Industry! [read on]

Posted in Brazil | 1 Comment »

« Previous Page
Next Entries »