Tuesday 30 April 2013

Rio

The bus station in Rio isn't in the nicest part of the city, so I took Lonely Planet's advice and got a taxi. The taxi fares are fixed and are displayed on the wall. I was going to Botafogo which cost R$40. This didn't stop the taxi driver from somewhat half heartedly trying to charge me R$45.

Botafogo is a relatively safe, up market area. There is a beach, but it's in the bay and the water's polluted, so swimming isn't recommended there. However, there is a metro station and it's an easy journey to Ipanema Beach and the more famous Copacabana Beach.

I also got the metro into the centre and checked out some of the historic buildings and parks.

In Botafogo itself, there were plenty of restaurants and bars. Having not liked most of the Brazilian cities, I quite liked Rio. The main reason being that the worst neighbourhoods are nowhere near the centre. Everywhere I went to felt reasonably safe.

It was also a short walk to the cable car that goes to the top of Sugarloaf mountain. It was relatively quiet on a Thursday, but going on the size of the barriers outside, I think there are probably huge queues at the weekend.

Friday 25 January 2013

Paraty and Ihla Grande

Paraty was originally a very rich town as it was at the end of the trail into the gold fields. So it was kind of ironic that I had to go via Rio to get there from the gold fields. Rio bus station is quite big and of course there's no central information point, so you have to walk along about 50 booths looking for the company that goes to where you want. One of the problems with travelling on your own is that you don't have someone to sit and mind your bags whilst you do this. Well, really the big problem is that you can't get someone else to do it whilst you sit minding the bags. So whilst hunting for the Costa Verde bus company booth, which is on the ground floor unlike just about every other company, I managed to leave my hoody on a chair. And someone handed it in. And I got it back.

It's 5 hours to Paraty on the bus. The scenery is all hills covered in rainforest. It looks just like northern Queensland if you've been there. The town itself had a historic centre with cobbled streets and it's actually pedestrianised. There's no beach though, just a quay side and a load of mangroves, so mozzie repellent is definitely called for.

The most exciting thing about the whole place was the laundrette. I took my clothes in at 10am and got them back at 4pm. So I was ready to go out on the town that night. The only lively place I found was Paraty 33 which wasn't cheap, though the service was very good. After 4 nights in town, they more or less placed my draught beer on the table as I walked in.

I did a jeep tour and met loads of tourists. Paraty was the first place I met other European backpackers in any numbers whatsoever. The tour visited a couple of waterfalls including one you could slide down like a giant waterslide. The big bump at the bottom looked like it might hurt but it didn't. There was a guy there who was obviously there every day for the tips and he went down standing up, having to take a large jump just before the bump and landing a couple of feet away from some big rocks. Still, I'm sure he's done it thousands of times. I went down sitting down. It was still fun. The littler fat kid who was bullied into going down and landed up at bottom crying his eyes out may not have agreed, but still, I'm sure it was character forming.

We also visited a couple of cachaca distilleries and sampled the product. They gave you tiny thimbles but when you've had about 10 different types, you start to notice it so it was probably just as well we went for lunch.

On the other day, I went diving. It was OK. The viz was about 8m, there was coral down to about 5m and the fish life wasn't bad. Diving seems to be a big thing there despite the fact it really isn't that great.

The other thing it did in Paraty was rain a lot. January is the wet season. It's also the peak season. Yeah, I don't understand it either.

Ihla Grande, the world's least imaginatively named island, is just up the coast. I got the bus back if Angra Dos Reis then the ferry which leaves at 1.30pm on a Saturday. It takes about and hour and a half, most of which is going up the coast as Angra isn't exactly opposite the island, but it only cost R$4.50 and it was sunny. And there was a man with cans of beer and packets of crisps on board.

There's one main village on the island and cars are banned. There's a few emergency vehicles and the dust cart, but that's it. It was one of the best places I've been in Brazil. The weather was obviously still rubbish, but there are restaurants along the beach and there's a good range of different prices when looking for something to eat. There are campsites, which was obviously no good for me, but it did mean there were more budget places than Paraty.

There are also lots of walking trails. I walked over to Dois Rios, a beach named after the two rivers that enter the sea at either end. The walk is actually along a stoney road as there used to be a prison there. It's two hours each way and is half uphill, half downhill. The woman in the pousada gave me dire warnings about not having a dry shirt and catching influenza but there were Brazilians walking there in beachwear and flip flops, which I have to say, I don't recommend. On the walk back, there were some very noisy insects all around me and I could hear the howler monkeys in the hills.

I also went diving because there was a 45 year old wreck that sounded interesting but we didn't get to do it as the weather was too bad to see the transits to find it. You'd think GPS would be ubiquitous  by now, but apparently not. We did a couple of reefs which were similar to Paraty though slightly better.

The only thing I didn't like about Ihla Grande was that there were no ATMs, but what do you expect in a major holiday resort just two hours south of Rio? Most places take credit cards except the pousada, i.e. my main expenditure.

Tuesday 15 January 2013

Minas Gerais

The bus from Belo Horizonte airport into town was extremely swish. It even had on board wifi that actually worked. It was 10 before I'd checked into the hotel, so I didn't see much. I just had time to grab a snack at the lanchonete opposite and have a couple of beers in a bar. I should have eaten in the bar. It was very cheap and the food looked good. It's not a touristy place and the prices reflected that.

The next morning, it was pouring with rain, so I hung around hoping it would clear up but it didn't really, so I got the bus to Ouro Preto. It was still raining a bit when I got there and it persisted for most of the afternoon. Ouro Preto is very touristy. It has lots of preserved, colonial era buildings, a lot of them churches. It's up in the mountains and has extremely steep, cobbled streets. It's also a university town, so the night life was a bit livelier than normal. That said, there really were only 3 lively bars, all next to each other.

School of mines



Lonely Planet waxes lyrically about Mariana, another town nearby. It's a short bus ride, so I went for a look. It's flatter than Ouro Preto but much smaller and there isn't as much to see. Still I had a walk around and a nice lunch.




The next day I got the bus to São João Del Rei. This took about 4 hours. For some reason, my ticket said I was going to São Paulo. The bus was and the guy at the ticket office had some long explanation about why this was right which I obviously didn't understand, and it did only cost R$48, so went along with it.

I'm not sure exactly what the rules are, but you often need to provide a CPF number to buy a long distance bus ticket in Brazil. If you're a foreigner, obviously you don't have one, so you give your passport number. This is one reason why you can't use a lot of Brazilian travel websites, assuming of course that your credit card would actually work.

The checking of this seems somewhat erratic, but the bus driver was being very officious about it this time. He made me get my passport out and made a big show of checking it. But my ticket said this:



That's right, the guy who'd sold it to me had just put "foreigner" in as my name, so quite what Mr Jobsworth was checking, I don't know.

The bus station in SJDR is conveniently located over a mile from the town centre. It was fairly flat until the last bit to my pousada though.

On Friday-Sunday, there's a steam train to nearby Tiradentes and I just managed to make the 1pm departure, more by good luck than judgement. It's R$40, which is a little expensive, but it was fun. If you're expecting dramatic bridges over mountain scenery, you're going to be disappointed. The mountains are mostly in the distance, but it's pretty enough. A lot of the trees looked suspiciously Australian. They've planted gums everywhere. When we got to Tirandentes, they turn the train around on a manual turntable.




Tiradentes is another well preserved colonial place. It's incredibly touristy. Almost every building is either a pousada or a gift shop. I got the bus back to SJDR which was much cheaper and dropped me back at the incredibly conveniently located bus station.

Back in SJDR and there are a couple of bars on the corner of one street which were open and had people in. I tried the first one but the waitress didn't understand when I asked for the menu. I only used one word, the same word I'd been using successfully for the previous 5 weeks, but to no avail.

I decided I really couldn't be bothered so I went to the other one and helped myself to the menu, an act of resourcefulness which was rewarded by being completely ignored for 10 minutes by all the staff. There is a reason why I like the self service restaurants here so much. I was wearing my last clean t-shirt, my Lamb of God one. Maybe the waiters had a thing against Christian music. When the food finally came, it was nice though there was far too much of it, which is another reason why the self service places are good.

Later I found some more bars and restaurants further up the road, where the people were considerably more friendly and helpful. There's also a nice square in front of the church. It's all lit up at night and makes a nice backdrop if you can stand the disapproving looks of the scary statues on the front:



The next morning, I needed to do my washing. Despite having walked from the bus station twice, I hadn't seen a lavanderia anywhere. Normally they're everywhere. So I asked at reception and was given directions. I went in and they told me they couldn't do it until Friday. It was 10am on a Monday morning. Still there's bound to be another one, right? Over an hour of wandering around proved fruitless. I did find a pool supplies shop, a couple of places that develop film and even two shops that sell ribbons and thread, but lavanderia? Não. The tourist information guy looked at me like I was mad when I asked him.

So I went to the supermarket, bought some washing liquid and did it in the sink. Then I bought a bus ticket to Rio. I don't really want to go to Rio yet. I want to go to Paraty, but I can't find a way of getting there any other way, even though it looks like there ought to be.

The tourist map I was given by the posada had about 20 historic buildings of interest, about half of them churches. It takes about an hour and a half to walk around them all, maybe an hour and 45 minutes if you've got a sack of dirty washing under your arm.



Saturday 12 January 2013

The joy of Brazilian airlines and their IT skills

All my previous internal flights were with TAM and had gone smoothly. My ticket was with TAM, but the flight was operated by Trip, or as my taxi driver called it, "Trippy". "Trippy Airlines", what could go wrong?

So I arrived at Recife airport. There was no indication where to check in though there were some screens with Trip written on them, but the people queuing in front of them appeared to be being handled by Azul staff. So I joined the queue. I later found that Azul and Trip are connected. How you're supposed to work this out before, I don't know.

There were 3 queues and no indication on the screens what the difference was. There was a man who wandered past occasionally with a high tech piece of paper. He told me I should be in the long queue.  The "system" seemed to be that the long queue was served by one person. The two other, shorter queues had two members of staff on them. When your flight became imminent, you were told to move from the long queue to one of the short ones. So basically, there is absolutely no point in turning up early. You won't check in any quicker.

After an hour and a half of waiting, I finally got to the front of the long queue. I gave them my booking code, passport etc and she couldn't find my booking. I'd checked the TAM website that morning. It had even told me my seat number, but she couldn't find it. So phone calls later and I'm told to stand to one side while she checks someone else in while they fix my booking. The rest of the queue is all glaring at me by now as if it's my fault they've also booked with a useless airline. They were all  Brazilian. They should know better. Another 10 minutes and I finally have a boarding card, so I make my way to the lounge.

The screens say gate 9. They also say it's delayed. So I sit down and after a while a queue forms at gate 9. And then someone starts checking people through the gate. The main screen still says "delayed". The screens above the gate say nothing and onto the plane I get. It was probably still saying that when we took off. I was right at the back. There was nowhere in the overhead bins to put hand luggage. The back two were full of emergency equipment and the next one was full of the inflight food. Since this consisted of packets of biscuits and sweets, I don't know how they managed to take up quite so much room with them. The actual flight was uneventful.

I'd like to say I was surprised, but it wasn't the first time I experienced Brazilian airlines mastery of IT. Right at the beginning of my trip, I'd tried to book a flight online with a company called Vol. Their website is complete crap. It took longer to fill in my details than the flight was supposed to take. My favourite part was entering your country of residence. The drop down list included that well know country "Ayers Rock". It was also in a random order, so you had to scroll through 200+ entries to find your country.

When this was all done, it sent me an email with what looked like a booking confirmation but which actually had the small print on it that it was subject to credit card approval. And naturally this failed, probably because it was a non-Brazilian credit card. And do they send you an email saying it's failed? Of course they don't. I only found out because I'd created an account on there and later checking said it had been cancelled.

I met someone who was stranded in Santarém a couple of weeks later. She'd tried to book with Azul. They did exactly the same to her only she turned up at the airport to find she had no ticket and there were no more flights available for a week because it was Christmas. So it sounds like they've shared the same web code and with quality code like that, it's too good not to share.

Apparently, and I've not tried it myself, there is an option to print out a receipt. You then take this to the bank, presumably stand in a long queue, and pay over the counter. How very 1980s. Not much use if you've got no printer or you're not in Brazil.

Again apparently, the TAM website works as well with foreign cards as domestic. I say apparently because my experience of trying to use it involved entering all my details, then clicking buy, only to be told that there were no seats available at that price any more and being kicked right back out to the beginning again. Repeating the process revealed the price had gone up a couple of dollars and then that failed too. After I'd done this 3 times, I gave up with homicide in my heart.

So my advice is to use a travel agent.

The World Cup is going to be so much fun when thousands of people are all trying to book flights at the last minute when they know where their team's next match is going to be, isn't it?

Friday 11 January 2013

Recife


I'd read on the web that Recife had some wreck diving. One of them even sank after it was rammed by another boat because the captain was having an affair with the other captain's wife. So I found a company called Aquatico and they agreed to take me out Saturday, Sunday and Monday. The only accommodation I could find in central Recife was the Plaza Hotel at R$200 a night, which is twice as much as I've paid everywhere else. Still, I thought I could live it up for a bit.

So what did I get for my money. Well, it was 17 floors. Only one of the elevators was working. The other was being renovated although I never saw any signs of anyone working on it. Breakfast was on the 13th. Still it helped burn of the calories as the breakfast was pretty good. There was a very small swimming pool on the roof which was a welcome respite from the heat and I did have cable in my room. The view from the rooftop was nice:



It also had a lovely 1970s look decor:




But the best bit is this. Here's a picture of outside:



See the floors at the back? It looks like they're renovating them? They're not. They obviously never finished building them. There were 2-3 floors that had never been built.



Still it was a 10 minute walk from the dive shop and the diving was good. I did 4 wrecks, all sunk deliberately, sadly not rammed. Viz was 20+m, with lots of fish, sting rays, morays and nurse sharks.

Central Recife doesn't have a lot going for it. I didn't find anywhere you could sit outside and have a drink that wasn't a bit skanky.

The dive shop cancelled Monday's diving without a lot of notice. I presume they didn't get many takers. After the diving was over, I moved to Boa Viagem which is on the beach. It's a bit better than central Recife, but it's not exactly somewhere I'd choose to stay again.

There's a long beach, several miles long. Then there's a 3 lane road with everyone vastly exceeding the speed limit and then there are loads of apartment blocks. The trouble with it is that there appears to have been no planning. So there's no central area, nowhere with a few bars around a square, just bars and restaurants dotted around the place in random isolation. So there's no real atmosphere anywhere. If you need a farmacy, it's the place to go. They're everywhere. I have no idea why there are so many. It's also expensive. R$37 for a take away medium pizza is an outrageous price.

There's one place called the UK Pub. I had a look, obviously. It didn't look like any sort of pub I've ever been to. They also wanted R$12 entry, so I didn't go in as I only wanted a couple of beers. I just contented myself with looking at the frankly slightly weird outside.

On the last day there, I caught the bus to Olinda, another town which is now really a suburb of Recife. It has lots of colonial buildings which they've maintained and is a good day out. It's quite hilly though and it was stinking hot on the day I was there.



Monday 7 January 2013

Natal and Pipa


I stayed in the Punta Negra area of Natal. It was nothing special, just another beach resort town. The beach was long and good. There was a promenade running the length of it, but half of it had fallen into the sea at some point and, this being Brazil, they'd made no attempt whatsover to repair any of it. If it was Western Europe, it would have been shut as there were several big holes.




The suburb itself has quite a few high rise buildings. There was a mall and several restaurants, though they all seemed to be either pizzarias or churrasco. There wasn't a lot of variety on the food front there. I stayed at Hostel Republika and they were every helpful and friendly. There was a NYE party at the hostel. Most of the people who were staying there were Brazilian or Argentinian.

I did find a dive school to take me diving. We went south a couple of beaches to Piringi Do Sul and did a couple of dives. The sea bed was rocky, with not much in the way of coral, but plenty of fish and sponge life. Highlights were a couple of nurse sharks and a turtle. At R$180, it was cheap too.

Also in Piringi is the world's largest cashew tree. It's even in Lonely Planet. Cashews are one of those plants where the branches go back into the ground, so it just looks like a sprawling set of bushes. Obviously it didn't warrant getting out of the car as we drove past.

After Natal, came Pipa, another beach resort. This one is more low rise with windy cobbled streets. They really should do something about restricting the cars that drive down them though as it's crawling traffic most of the time. I liked Pipa, probably more than any of the other beach places. There were bars, some with live music and a few more varied food options.

The beach right in the town is quite busy but you don't have to walk far to get away from the crowds. There's a lagoon right at the front of the beach and the beach bars punt your food and drink across to you if you're sitting on the other side whilst dodging the kids swimming in it. It looked very green. I wouldn't be in a hurry to get my eyes or ears wet in there.

Leaving Pipa sounded like a mission as it's not on the main bus route, but it was actually quite easy. There are minibuses which go through town. They all go to the same place and they're on a circular route so any will do. I hailed one and took it right to the last stop in Goianinha, which I was told should take about 40 mins. It took an hour. Once there, you have to walk to the main high way, which is obviously in the opposite direction to the way you've just come. Then cross the 6 lane road using the foot bridge and there's a restaurant with a big sign saying "Mirante Do Vale".

Inside the restaurant in the corner is a little desk where they do bus tickets and, somewhat bizarrely, sell perfume. I got there about 11am. There was a bus at 12.10. Obviously it was full, so the next one was at 14.10. The restaurant staff didn't seem to mind 3 of us sitting in there and there was free, if somewhat erratic, wifi. Mind you, we all had lunch there. It was self service but at R$4 per 100g, a bit more expensive than average. Fortunately so was the quality.

Then at 14.11, the bus arrived. I almost fell off my chair in shock. Next stop, Recife.