bcgreene

Bonito Bonito wins the award for most clever tourism slogan - "Bonito é bonito" ("bonito" means "pretty" in Portuguese). Slightly more clever is the slogan "Bonito é lindo," which always means "Bonito is pretty." Anyways, Bonito is a very very beautiful place so I guess they have the right to say so. Somewhere in the middle of the state of Matto Grosso do Sul, Bonito is a town where tourism is thriving because of a series of fresh water rivers with exotic fish and water so clear that you can actually snorkel. We arrived in Bonito Sunday morning, after an exhausting night bus trip with three stopovers. Our first day we went to a park close to the city where there was a natural pool with fish, as well as some volleyball and soccer courts. Relaxing ... read more

This entry is a little different then many of my others. I have tended to keep my feelings out of most of the entries and instead offered general descriptions and observations. When I have had to, I have described my feelings in very general terms: "I like," "I don´t like," "it was fun," "there was no one there." But, something happened back home - the death of a friend - which really marked my time in Rio, and I felt like I needed to write about it. Arriving in Rio and Meeting the Group My first day in Rio started off normal. On Saturday I took a morning flight from Salvador and went straight to the meeting point for our tour, a somewhat shady hotel 4 blocks from the Copcabana beach. The only other person who ... read more

Six days of staying in a hostel finally caught up with me. I got sick and spent half my time here in Recife recovering. Thank God it wasn´t the food poisoning sick that happened to me several times in Chile, just a really bad cold. Olinda On my way out of Natal, I picked up two brochures for hostels in the Recife area. One was for a hostel in Olinda, the other for a hostel in Boa Viagem. Olinda is a historical city a couple kilometers north of the city center, and Boa Viagam is the nice beach area south of the city center. In part going on Luis Fernando´s schedule, which had me doing a tour of Olinda the first day, I decided to go to the hostel in Olinda. I dropped my bags off, ... read more

Earlier in the week I wrote my grandma that I had a "big surprise," but that she would have to wait until Friday to read the travel blog. I shouldn´t have added the superlative. My grandma emailed me back - "You are staying in South America?" "You are bringing back a girl?" Even my parents, who knew of the "surprise" emailed me to say they were all waiting. My dad asked if I was bringing back a love child. Sorry to disappoint. The surprise is, I decided to ditch the last week of my language classes and go to Minas Gerais. All last week I was thinking that I wished I had only made a reservation for three weeks in the language class. Minas Gerais was the one place in Brazil that I had left out ... read more

This week is all about deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeceleration. I packed a lot into the first 10 days of my trip in Chile and Argentina. For this week and the next three, I am in Florianopolis, taking Portuguese lessons. Florianopolis is an island in the south of Brazil, and capital of the Santa Catarina province. The island is big - about 42 km north to south, and maybe 20 km east to west at its widest. There are about 370,000 people who lived on the island, but the population doubles in the summer. The island has 43 beaches, and mountains. It is beautiful. My life here is very, very difficult. I am living with a host family in the Santa Monica neighborhood. The house is large and impeccable - everything is white and spotless, granite stairs, walk-in showers. I´ll ... read more