Back on the Road, Brazilian Style

January 6, 2024 - view of Sugarloaf hill and Rio de Janeiro from Mirante Dona Marta.

After a chill New Year's Eve spent with friends in Virginia, it was back into travel mode, spending the first couple days of 2024 getting ready to resume our trip after our 6-week stint in the US. Some tattered-looking clothes were swapped out, and some old faithfuls got repacked. Honestly, I thought I would've spent more time rethinking all the packing lessons I learned from the past year, but with everything going on, it just didn't happen, so I essentially left with the same suitcase innards from the year prior. The exception being, having cast the winter of Europe behind us, I threw in a few more beachwear items knowing they would get put to good use in our next destination, Brazil!

With nothing but an airline ticket and a hotel booked for the first couple of nights, we jumped back into winging-it mode. I still had a bit of nerves the night before, surprising because we had been doing this for the past year, but once we hit that airport, it was like we never stopped. The first 3 nights were spent in Copacabana, with an easy walk to Ipanema to experience arguably some of the most famous beaches in the world, and for a reason I may add. Set to the backdrop of the dramatic green hills, combined with the finest, powder white sand, it was pretty dreamy.   

               

After spending most of the prior trip in the golden "shoulder season", it became quickly apparent that we were hitting our first peak tourist season location...and the prices that come with it. I think we both had a bit of sticker shock with hotel rates, and staying in one of the pricier neighborhoods didn't help. With a few days in "touristlandia", we made sure to hit all the cliche (but totally necessary) things like Christ the Redeemer and Sugarloaf Hill. It was a bit of a bummer when we were completely clouded in at the famous Christ statue, but sitting at 2,310 feet above the city of Rio, it can stay cloudy even when the rest of the city is clear. Our one-day tour made a few other notable stops, like the Selaron Staircase, and the Catedral Metropolitana de Sao Sebastiao, which looks like an ugly cement pyramid from the outside but has shockingly massive, floor-to-ceiling stained glass inside.

We needed a few more days in Rio to sort out where the heck we were headed next but decided to move to the Lapa neighborhood to save some money and see another side of the city. Definitely a neighborhood where you watch your belongings a bit closer, but it was also nice to experience a Rio that many of the Copacabana crowds probably miss, including a lively food market with loads of Caipirinha stands and bars with live samba music and dancing. Never a big fan of Caipirinhas before, they definitly hit different here with the local liquor, Cachaça, and it's become my drink of choice in country. 

As we researched our next move, we were reminded of just how big of a country Brazil is. Several people had advised to pick a region and explore around there rather than trying to hit everything all over the country, so it was basically up to a flip of a coin if we would head North or South the following day. Ultimately we went North, deciding literally the night before our next destination of Arraial do Cabo, a relaxed beach town with some epic sunsets about 3 hours outside of Rio. I visited "The Small Beaches" on my own one afternoon (beaches being more my thing) and took a water taxi around the bay at Sunset. The beautiful beaches in Brazil are in no short supply. 

The plan from there was to beach-hop our way up North toward the city of Salvador using long-distance buses. Because we didn't have anything planned in advance, it wasn't realistic to fly as last-minute tickets were just too expensive, which meant we had some of the longest travel days of the whole trip so far. The first was 26+ hours of travel to go from Arraial do Cabo to Arraial d'Ajuda. The first leg left at 11am, a 5-hour bus to Campos dos Goytacazes where we had a few hour "layover" spent eating churrascaria (or meat sticks as we call them) at the bus station before getting on a 10pm overnight bus that would bring us to Porto Seguro around 1pm the next day, a 15-hour bus ride. From there it was easy...just a taxi, then a ferry, then a mini-bus, to finally arrive at our hotel in Arraial d'Ajuda around 2pm the day after we started the trek North. 

Arraial d'Ajuda had a much livelier and touristy vibe, with a pedestrian street full of shops leading to a town square bordered by bars, restaurants, live music, and a church with a view to the sea. There was a small night market that reminded us fondly of our time in SE Asia, and where we were able to try some more local dishes, like Acarajé and tapioca. The night market also served as an impromptu dance party when the DJ got the crowd going. We were quickly learning how much Brazilians love music and dancing. After a few days enjoying the beach and nightlife, it was a (relatively) quick mini-bus ride to our next stop, the remote seaside village of Caraiva. 

After the 132-ish different stops we've made in the past year, Caraiva managed to stand out as something unique and special. From where the bus drops you at the end of the road, you have to be paddled across by a canoe for about $1.50 a person. You then disembark on the beach to find no paved roads or sidewalks, just very, very soft sand that can only be managed by horse-drawn carriages or dune buggies. It was something to watch the tourists trying to pull their roller suitcases through the sand if they didn't want to pony up the dough for a horse cart to take it. Pun intended. 

As a side note, something unique we were realizing at this point of the trip was, although we were in clearly very touristy spots, it was almost exclusively Brazilian tourists from other parts of the country, and maybe a few Argentinians sprinkled here and there. This meant that there were essentially no English-speaking tourists and, vis-a-vis, no English spoken by locals. I did not expect Brazil to be the country that would give us the most difficulties language-wise, but even the vendors of SE Asia had figured out their own system of pointing and gesturing through trying to communicate with tourists. Here, we learned the useful phrase "I don't speak Portuguese", thinking it might slow people down or cause them to switch to other means of explaining, but that has not been the case. The standard reaction to "não falo português" has been for the person to just keep talking in Portuguese at the same speed without skipping a beat. My Spanish has helped with understanding some basics, but it is very much a one-way street as it does not work in the other direction and I cannot make myself understood, despite my best efforts at Portuñol. Good ol' Google translate to save the day. I should also note that I never expect someone to speak english, I am in their country after all, I just hadn't realized how spoiled we'd been up until this part of the trip.

Much of our time in Caraiva was spent, you guessed it, on the beach, but it was also dreamy walking the sandy "streets" in the evening to see the trees lit up along the river where it met the sea. After Caraiva, it would be another marathon travel day, this one topping off at over 35 hours. Our next destination would take us away from the beaches and into the center of the country to one of the many National Parks. There were multiple parks to choose from and it was tough to narrow it down to just one. Based on some recommendations from friends, as well as Johnny's skillful internet research, we picked a park about 7 hours West of Salvador in the state of Bahia, Chapada Diamantina, or the Diamond Plateau. So it was a canoe, to a bus, to a taxi to get us to our overnight bus from Porto Seguro, then an easy 14-hour overnight to Salvador where we got to wait in the bus terminal a few hours before the final 8-hour bus into the town of Lençóis, the main jumping off point for the park. 

There are lots of tour options for group tours and the like, but given our budget and how expensive Brazil has been for hotels, we decided to just pick out a few highlights and after a couple days on own exploring the town of Lençóis, hire a local guide for 3 days to take us around so Johnny didn't have to drive the unknown roads. That ended up being a fantastic decision because the guide that Johnny found was amazing (link here if you ever need a Brazilian guide). There is so much to see, you could easily spend 10 days in the park and not get to all the main stops, but our itinerary over the 3-day tour was based around the sites of Cachoeira da Fumaça, Poço Azul, and Cachoeira do Buracão, with an overnight in the village of Igatu to break up the driving and a few other stops thrown in in-between. 

The first day was a hot, steep hike to the top of one of the plateaus to see the waterfall Fumaça. A stunning drop, it was a bit nerve-racking trying to get close to the edge, but the views were spectacular. Unfortunately, due to an unseasonably dry rainy season, the free-falling waterfall was a little more than a trickle. We did luck out with cloud cover on the hike down to save us from the heat. We also stopped at the Morro do Pai Inacio viewpoint to get a view over the valley and plateaus. It was easy to just sit on the edge and look out over the landscape, it was so beautiful, and we even had a rainbow to top it off. 

Day-2 started with a relaxed dip at the Cachoeira do Mosquito, but the main activity of the day brought us to Poço Azul, a cave where you are allowed to swim and one of the more popular stops in the park. We had been warned the wait time and the crowds could be a lot (up to 7 hours), but I guess the universe decided to make up for the dry waterfall by giving us the cave completely to ourselves. The water was crystal clear with an blue glow from the sunlight coming in above. A pretty surreal moment. Later that day we also got to swim in another natural spring, above ground this time, which was some of the coolest freshwater snorkeling I've ever done. That night, we stayed in Igatu, a mostly abandoned diamond mining town where we learned more about the history of the diamond rush in this part of Brazil. We visited the "rock houses" where some of the 9,000 diamond prospectors had to live in the 1940s because space was so limited. The town now hosts less than 400 residents. 

The final day will stand out as one of the coolest things we've got to experience so far on this trip; a canyon swim to the waterfall Buracão. An easy trek along the river held no clues as to what we were about to do. Johnny had an idea, having done the research, but for me it was a complete surprise when I was told to don a life jacket, jump into the canyon, and swim against the current. Because we had rain the day before, the flow was strong and we had to resort to pulling ourselves along the rocks, but we were soon rewarded when the canyon suddenly opened up to reveal a massive waterfall, completely isolated from view by the surrounding rocks. There were a few other waterfalls along the same river that we hit on the walk back and it was a great way to end the tour before the long drive back to the town of Lençóis.

After the go, go, go of our 3 days in the national park, we took a down day in Lençóis before our last long haul bus 8 hours back to Salvador. We had a solid 11 days there and split our time between 2 locations, the historic Pelourinho neighborhood with its colorful colonial-style houses, and the beach near Rio Vermelho to be near the Dia de Iemanjá festival on February 2. The whole city was buzzing preparing for Carnival and the festival, so I think this is where I end our Brazilian blog for now and write a Brazil part II to try to capture some of the Carnival magic from our time in Salvador, Recife, and Olinda (where I am writing this post from now). We are right in the thick of it as we speak, building to the main events this weekend, which I feel like I'm going to have a lot to say about as so far the carnival experience has exceeded my expectations. We also know our next stop after the main festivities will take us all the way to the South to visit Iguza Falls on February 13 and from there, off to country #19, whatever that may be, so standby for Brasil part dois. 

January 21, 2024 - View from Morro do Pai Inacio in Chapada Diamantina National Park, Bahia.